Carlota nodded vigorously, as though surprised I even had to ask the question, and I believed her. Perhaps the police were purposefully keeping her out of the investigation, maybe she was just as much in the dark as I was.
‘Look, Ruth, I just really don’t want you to do anything reckless. I’ve found in my career that sometimes, when people lose someone they love, and the case doesn’t get resolved in the way they’d like, they have a tendency to…’ She paused as she gesticulated, as if that would help her articulate. ‘They try and take the law into their own hands, and trust me, it never ends well.’
Uh-oh, too late.
We didn’t talk much after that. I asked her how her kitchen redesign was going, as she’d often referred to the domestic chaos it had caused in her home. She told me she had decided on a bespoke kitchen island with a granite top, and I said that was a great idea. She mentioned this Albaperson again, who I presume was someone she was seeing but not yetofficialofficial at this period of time. Then she said she had to get going as the clock struck 11.15, I guess there were other crimes that needed her attention. The TellTale Killer was now just a simple cold case, after all.
That afternoon, I was looped in to funeral duty which was a pain in the arse. I hated doing the actual funerals – not because they were sad or morose, but mostly because theywere just so flipping boring and an absolute, utter waste of time. No shade to funeral fans, but what’s the point of a ‘celebration of life’ when the guest star has already peaced out and left the party? Plus, none ever got points for originality. I felt like I had heard ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Angels’ at least a hundred times by now, and if I had to listen to Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ one more time, I might throw myself into the grave too. No matter the faith, no matter the person, there were always these absolutely ridiculous customs, superstitions, really, that supposedly made people feel better about someone dying, to give them false hope that they may see their loved ones again.
I did keep my opinions to myself, of course. It wouldn’t go down well for our Trustpilot reviews if I told a four-year-old that her teddy would be maggot-infested within a week if she placed Blue Bear next to Nana in her coffin.
Nothing lasts forever right? So what’s the point?
Today’s funeral was being held at St Michael’s Crematorium near Chiswick, which Uncle Phil knew I didn’t like for obvious reasons. Not that Greta was actually in her plot in the cemetery next door, of course. Her heart had been taken for forensic testing by the police, and then her dad, desperately hoping they’d one day recover her full body, kept it in his freezer after the police returned it to him, or at least, that was the last I heard about it from Chlo, the last friend standing of all the pals I’d thought I had. So, when they held Greta’s funeral (why exactly? I have no idea), the coffin they lowered into the ground was entirely, rather hauntingly, void of anything that belonged to her. The headstone they planted at her grave was purely decorative for a patch of land that remained empty.
For the first six months after her death, all anyone tried to do was get me to visit her grave. Every day they told me it would give me closure, whatever the hell that meant. But I never saw the point. Greta wasn’t there. And even if she was, what was she meant to do, talk to me? Was a grave supposed to somehow connect me to her in the afterlife like two cups and a piece of string? Imean, I wish she could hear me, then she’d be able to hear every single last apology that I could say. But I knew I’d never get a chance to rectify the mistake I made the night that I lost her.
The best I could do now was to catch the monster who’d killed her. I could still hear his voice lingering in my head, every timbre of his vocal cord, every inflection, every pause of the words I had heard him utter that night.
‘You know, you really should be nicer to your friends, Ruth; you never know when it’s going to be the last time you’ll speak to them.’
Those words never really left my mind; they were always there, like that stubborn tea stain etched on the rim of your favourite mug.
As we stood at the back of the church, listening to Rich the priest speak about the kingdom of heaven and God’s children for the millionth time, I felt my phone vibrate violently in my pocket. I quickly reached in to jam the button to silence the call. I didn’t need to check the caller ID to know who it was; the same person who called me every day to check up on me. Good old Chlo.
When the funeral was done, I decided to take a slight detour on my way home. Partly because I wanted to pick up ingredients from the Big Tesco to cook dinner for Ben and Bill – despite my position as the cheated party, I couldn’t help but always be conscious of overstaying my welcome in the shed – but also because I purposefully wanted to force my route to pass by Charing Cross Police Station on my way to said Big Tesco. I don’t know what compelled me to walk past the station and not just go a different route, maybe I wanted to see if the box had gone, or maybe some messed-up part of my brain fancied tempting fate. As I drifted by the main entrance, I could see that the same lamppost was still flickering across the road, yes, even in the daylight, and I kept bracing for a police officer to suddenly clock me as Saturday night’s secret postwoman.
I tried to appear as casual as possible as I strolled past the station, but I couldn’t stop my neck muscles from pulling my headtowards the direction of the entrance. I attempted to smother and suppress the burp rising through me like a geyser. It escaped through my mouth anyway.
‘Pardon you,’ the precocious voice behind me chirped while the mother of that particularly vocal toddler stared at me as though I’d just committed a horrendous crime against public decency.
Come on, love, I haven’t exactly streaked through Trafalgar Square. Get a grip.
The nasty part of me wanted to tell the kid, Santa won’t be coming next Christmas because he’s developed a taste for venison; but I wasn’t a complete monster, so I just let them pass.
I glanced at the police station for just a moment before moving on, as if any longer might cause the police to spot me. But, obviously, there was no wooden box sitting outside the entrance. Someone had taken it in. I just hoped it wasn’t an urban fox with a new taste for human heart.
My phone buzzed again just as I entered Tesco, but I let the call go to voicemail. Bless her, Chlo was good like that. I’d dodged 90 per cent of her calls over the past two years, and yet she hadn’t been perturbed in the slightest. She always made an effort with me, even when most people had given up on old basket case Ruth. She even had the common sense not to be one of the people to force me to visit Greta’s grave.
My only gripe with her: voice notes. Do not, ever, send me a voice note. If I wanted to listen to a podcast, I’d pick one that wasn’t her losing her chain of thought every ten seconds followed by a two-minute monologue about the state of her ingrowing toenail.
‘Well, hello, Ruthie my petal,’ I heard Chlo say as I played it back. ‘Couldn’t get through as per usual but just thought I’d let you know that I spoke to Ava, and she spoke to Oscar, and he said he and his friend, Nico, would be up for dinner with us tomorrow. Please, please, please come. You don’t have to sleep with his friend or anything, but it’s going to be awkward if it’s just me and Oscar at first, okay? Plus, I need to get you out of your ex-husband’shouse, all right? So just call me or text me back, let me know, okay?’
I wasn’t sure about how this Oscar guy that Chlo knew through a mutual friend she had would feel about me crashing his date, but if Chlo wanted me there, I’d be there. It was the least I could do for her. Urgh, I was going to have to be sociable, what a chore.
I grabbed all the ingredients for a lasagne, as well as a nice bottle of wine from Lisbon that I knew Ben and Bill liked. I must admit, I didn’t quite enjoy how quickly the attendant ID’d me as over twenty-five at checkout. I mean, I knew I was a few years past that mark, but the fact she didn’t even glance at me before waving it off on the screen didn’t do wonders for my self-esteem. Maybe my bad-backed, non-marathon-masochist frame gave me away as someone who had lost the gleam of being below the legal drinking age.
As I began to walk out the shop, all I could think about was what serial killers would do when they didn’t get the response they wanted. I know, I know, I’m an absolute lunatic, aren’t I? Yet the anxiety I felt only five days ago as I delivered them the heart, terrified they might trace my misdeeds back to me, had now turned to a sluggish, disheartening – poor choice of words, I know – disappointment. They had the heart. So why had nothing happened? No breaking news ticker proclaiming the killer’s return, no frantic warning from Detective Carlota, absolutely nothing. Had they just laughed it off as a mockery? Had I been too subtle?
After the BTK Killer received less media attention following his initial spree, he began to escalate, even writing a letter to the media, gloating about the murders and how easily he got away with them. I mean, he got his wish: the police did in fact pay him more attention. But I knew if I was going to escalate in my fake killing spree, I had to be careful, because that’s also how they caught him.
Just like that, I had another really stupid idea, maybe worse than the one before. When Detective Carlota told me about the case going cold, I’d half sketched a so-called plan B while cobbling together the scraps of an actual plan to get the police to get theirarse in gear. I spun on my heel and darted back into the supermarket, making a beeline for the tech section. The thought of the TellTale Killer’s voice echoing around the hollows of my skull gave me a jolt of adrenaline – and, admittedly, another healthy dollop of idiocy – enough to push forward with my poorly concocted plan.
I mean, it wasn’t like I was actually killing anyone. Honestly, what was the worst that could happen?
FOUR
I came home ready to start prepping the lasagne right away, hoping it would be a nice surprise for my semi-gracious hosts. I often imagined that there was a dial above people’s heads reflecting their opinion of me. I always tried to keep that dial in the green favourable direction with my hosts whenever I could. But as soon as I wandered through the front door of the house, shoes in my hand, I realised I had stumbled into one of their heated arguments. It was the way the air seemed to hang looming and heavy in the entryway. Maybe Ben had found Bill’s cigarettes, or maybe Bill had found a red sock amongst the white washing, or it could be the thing I often heard them argue about: me. I had noticed that Ben was far more diplomatic with Bill than he had ever been with me in their ‘discussions’, as they liked to downplay them as. Previously, I had always been the one trying to calm Ben down and de-escalate things, but now, with Bill being such an unstable, pedantic firecracker, it seemed Ben had taken on a different, more peacemaker role in arguments. Funny how we change in couples, isn’t it? I wondered, not for the first time, why Ben could never be that person for me?
