For all their fear, people couldn’t help but revel in the spectacle. A dark, festering part of them was almost excited by it, even though they knew full well the horror of what was happening before them.
But I didn’t have time to dwell on social misgivings. The police would be on their way to the paper soon, racing to retrieve the heart and run their DNA tests, trying to identify who the latest victim might be. I imagined I didn’t have long before they discovered it belonged to Greta and fully clocked on to what I was doing.
I barely had time to register the other recent development though: CerealKillerCornflakes, my virtual frenemy, was actually Nico. The look on his face was a cocktail of delight and betrayal as we both clocked what had just happened, an accidental physical meet-up between two digital nutjobs. He’d said he wanted to come and help with my investigation as soon as we realised our true identities, but I shut that down quickly and told him not to go blabbing on DarkCell. There was no way I was dragging him into this, and, truthfully, I still wasn’t 100 per cent sure hewasn’tthe TellTale Killer. I still felt that I couldn’t really trust anyone at the moment, maybe apart from Detective Carlota.
I arched my back, shifting in the hard blue plastic chair, trying to find even a hint of comfort for my lumbar region. Why was a good chair so hard to come by nowadays? Each movement set off an awful, splintering creak, and above me the harsh fluorescent lights seemed to beat down on me like some kind of divine punishment from above. I knew Detective Carlota would make me feel better about the state of things, that she’d know exactly what to do. Mostly, I was just grateful she now knew about it, and was tangled up in this mess with me.
I gripped Greta’s crumpled pages of notes and scribbles, reading them over and over again in every orientation I could.
‘What are you trying to tell me, Greta?’ I whispered, suspending my disbelief in the afterlife, just for a moment, just long enough to hope she might somehow magically answer from the great beyond. Of course, she didn’t. Typical Greta, even dead, still terrible at communication.
Somehow, she’d managed to work out that each victim had been taken using a delivery van with a rotating roster of number plates. How? I had no idea, but she had, and these dates she’d frantically marked onto the paper… these dates had to mean something too. Something tied to each victim. Was this connected to how the killer was picking them, maybe?
I was halfway through debating whether to ask the woman at the front desk if I could bother her for a cup of tea – I was feeling quite parched – when a figure slipped out of the police doors and locked eyes with me.
Detective Carlota spotted me, gave the smallest of waves – arm barely above her waist – and tilted her head in a direction I presumed meant she wanted me to follow. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was an invitation or the world’s laziest arrest. Of course, I did follow, straight into one of the questioning rooms, or ‘interrogation rooms’, I supposed, depending on whether you were here by choice or not.
‘You’ve got five minutes,’ she said as she shut the door firmly behind her.
I smoothed out the piece of paper with Greta’s notes inscribed on the desk in the glorified broom cupboard and slid it across for her to examine, to see if her genius police detective brain could make any more sense of it than I could; see something I wasn’t able to.
‘Greta knew,’ I said, explaining what I’d found in her copy of Obama’s book and how her terrible handwriting was more than just random, insignificant doodles, it was a series of clues, hints at what she’d been able to uncover, how the number plates were all tied to the same delivery van. ‘She must have figured it out,’ I affirmed, ‘I think she died because she knew who wasbehind this.’
It took a moment for Carlota to process. I could practically see the loading bar slowly inching across the width of her forehead, this was huge for her too. She’d been working the case for years and only now had a breakthrough this big, handed to her by a dead girl from two years ago on a scrap of paper… one that, on the other side, held nothing more than a recipe for scones we had published on the website a week before she died.
‘And I think there’s more,’ I said, ignoring all the tinfoil-hat, keep-the-government-away conviction I knew I was pouring into my words. ‘She mentions handwriting a few times… and she makes a note about what I think is a double full stop or something. I don’t know what that means yet, but it’s the key. I’m sure of it.’
Detective Carlota looked puzzled at first, as if I had just ranted at her in frenzied gibberish about the mating habits of sock puppets, but then her expression shifted, excitement slowly dawning as she gently and carefully took the paper from me and began inspecting it herself with the same fervour I had just spoken with, realising just how valuable this piece of scrap was.
‘I think we’ve got something here, Ruth,’ she said, practically vibrating with discovery, her voice already halfway to telling me to pop open the Prosecco. ‘I think we can work with this, see where it leads. Find out what Greta knew.’
‘Right?’ I said, a little breathless. It was this weird, macabre kind of thrill, knowing we were finally this close. If only I had read Obama earlier, like Greta wanted me to, I could have saved so much time.
‘Has he messaged you again?’ Carlota asked, slightly indifferently as she held the note aloft to the light as if Greta was crafty enough to have written in a secret ink.
I let out a reluctant, almost confessional exhale. ‘I haven’t dared check. I know, I know, it’s cowardly of me…’
‘No, not at all, Ruth,’ Detective Carlota said reassuringly, interrupting me as she placed the note next to her and then held out her hand, stretching across the table. ‘Just hand me your phone and we’ll be able to take it from here.’
I inadvertently raised an eyebrow. Hand her my phone? I was a millennial, after all, we don’t justhand overour phones that easily.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, my body shifting instinctively, almost angling my limbs away from her. Carlota didn’t seem perturbed by my movements, she just kept her hand outstretched, clenching and unclenching her fist as though willing me to hurry up and slap the phone in her palm.
‘Ruth, you’ve done a great job. But this is dangerous territory now, okay?’ she said. I could feel her stare burning into my temples as I fixated on a small tuft in the carpet. ‘Look, I think it’s time you stepped back and let the professionals handle this. So, give me the phone and I promise you, you will get front-row seats to his arrest. But I can’t have a civilian involved, it’s too dangerous. All you need to do now is sit back and let me finally catch the bastard.’
Maybe I would have believed her, maybe I would have handed over my phone, my notes, everything, if she hadn’t saidfinally. There was something about the way she said it, the way her eyes narrowed ever so slightly and the emphasis she placed on enunciating every syllable of the word, that made my pulse thicken, my nerves tighten and my skin tingle with the erratic, electric kind of energy I had felt so much recently.Finallydidn’t sound like she was protecting me at all. It sounded like she just wanted the glory of catching him. That’s not at all why I was doing any of this, this was never about glory. This was and had always been about Greta.
‘What if I don’t?’ I murmured. It wasn’t bravery forcing me to say that, the words just slipped out with my brain forgetting to filter them, I was genuinely wondering what would happen if I didn’t.
Carlota chuckled softly, but there was nothing warm in it, nothing that was meant to feel soothing for me.
‘Ruth, you’ve done some pretty illegal things recently. Are you sure that’s a good idea?’
Well, now, that sounded sort of like a threat.
She shuffled closer, perhaps realising how her words cameacross, and laid a hand on my arm. For the first time in my life, I instinctively flinched at her touch.
‘Hey, hey, darling. I’m here to help you, okay? I don’t want you getting any deeper into this. It’s dangerous, and I think he’s very close to finding out who you are,’ Carlota said.
