He repeated the question, realising I had once again got lost in the deluge of thoughts in my mind.
‘Ruth, do you think you have enough to bring him in?’
‘I think I can do it,’ I said. ‘I have a plan.’
I had absolutely no plan. Not even the tiniest remnants of a plan. Pretty much since the start of this, I had been winging it.
Ben glanced at Bill, clearly bracing for whatever insane reaction was about to come his way.
‘Ruth, if you think you can do it,’ Ben said, steady and serious, ‘then I’m behind you all the way. You just let us know how we can help.’
Before Bill could even open his mouth to scream in protest, my phone buzzed on the table. I reached for it instinctively, but Ben got there first, probably trying to spare me from anotherphoto of Greta. It was a phone call, and I tried to make out what the tiny voice was saying as I watched Ben’s face drain to a deathly hue, his features becoming even more pallid than they already were.
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly into the phone. ‘I’ll let Ruth know.’
Then Ben turned to me, his throat looking like it was pulsating with a set of repeated nervous swallows.
‘That was the police. Detective Carlota’s gone missing. They said she’s been in contact with you and wanted to know if you knew anything about where she may be?’
In that moment, in a strange, dark way, it seemed my problems had solved themselves; Jago wasn’t coming to kill me, and Carlota wasn’t coming to arrest me. But, of course, that small gift only left room for a far bigger crisis to be dealt with.
THIRTY-THREE
‘Has he messaged?’ I asked. A question I’d once posed twenty years ago about the boy on the bus I liked, was now about the serial killer lurking in my phone. Ben shook his head, eyes glued to the phone screen before glancing back up at the crime wall. The three of us had relocated to the shed, hoping that the crime wall I had created over the years would give us some kind of clarity about the situation. It didn’t.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘He hasn’t. Some guy called CerealKillerCornflakes is messaging you, though.’
I groaned, pressing my hands tight to my face before flopping my body back onto my bed.Go away, Nico, leave your incredible nose out of this.
‘He wants me,’ I whispered, in this regard about the TellTale Killer, but it probably also applied to Nico. ‘And if he can’t get me, he’s going to kill Carlota.’
‘What if we just leak it to the press right now?’ Bill asked, trying for once to be helpful, bless him. ‘Tell the whole world who the TellTale Killer really is?’
‘Then he’ll just kill Carlota for the sake of it,’ I half repeated, a little incensed at Bill not thinking his question through. ‘I won’t lether die, I can’t. Even if I have to go to him myself as some kind of sacrificial lamb.’
‘And are you considering that?’ Ben asked gravely. ‘He could just end up killing both of you at this rate. I mean, that’s kind of his whole thing, you know, killing.’
‘Well, you live, you die, and that’s it, isn’t it?’ I said with my best attempt at a nonchalant shrug. ‘This is my fault, anyway. I dragged him back into the spotlight. I could have just left well enough alone and that might have been the end of it. This is pretty much entirely my fault, actually.’
No one in the room – not Bill, Ben, not even Toast – challenged me on that statement, so I guess they knew it was at least partially true. I watched Bill scrutinise the crime wall, taking in every pinned photograph and hastily scrawled note I had made, his upper lip twitching slightly as he registered just how much territory of the wall I’d claimed with my various reams of paper. I could practically hear his teeth grinding at the small factory’s worth of Sellotape I’d used. I appreciated he was trying to keep that repressed right now.
I glanced at Toast, hoping for some kind of idea. Her eyes seemed to shoot off in two different directions before she violently sneezed and, at the same time, smacked her head against the glass, probably annihilating her one last remaining brain cell.
‘So, Jago Jones actually visited all the victims?’ Ben asked as he took a glimpse at one corner of the crime wall. ‘Before they died?’
‘Yes, some a few months before, others a few years,’ I replied despondently. ‘I think so, I imagine that’s how he picked them. He probably had their obituaries written out before he even yanked their hearts out of their corpses.’
Ben fell silent, then leaned forward to stroke his chest as if coaxing out a thought. I wanted to tell him he was wasting his time: a team of police detectives and an army of online sleuths and I had been poring over this case for two years without so much as a breakthrough. I couldn’t see how he was going to make this allfit together.
Ben leaned back, brow furrowed as he picked up the tablet he had brought with him to the shed, as if it would be of any use.
‘Suppose there is a narrative,’ he posited as he typed something in and began scrolling down the screen. ‘He never filed a story based on any of the visits to the victims, did he? Or the connection would have been caught. Maybe he was refused, denied the chance to report on something. Perhaps that’s what drove him: his own weird, warped sense of justice.’
I sat up from my bed and straightened my back; maybe Ben had a point, it did make a disturbing kind of sense. Every time Jago had spoken to me, or the TellTale Killer had left a note about his ‘story’, he’d been talking about enforcing his version of the world, a self-appointed, self-justified crusade. There were very few things that made a journalist more angry than being denied a good story by an unhelpful source.
‘I don’t know about the others,’ Ben murmured as he swigged what was left of Bill’s wine. ‘But I know Lewis Khan was working at Cobra Electrical and they were right in the midst of this pretty massive scandal. I imagine being told you can’t get a story you want is going to be pretty frustrating for a psychopath. Say he made his list for years, all the people who refused to let the truth come to light, and this is how he enacts his version of it, by, you know…’
Ben rather gratuitously mimed a stabbing motion towards Toast, who just looked up at him from her tank as if to say,Hey, what the fuck, bro?
