Chapter 3 #2
It’s funny I still called her Detective Carlota.
She’d told me, as soon as we began to correspond several times a week about the TellTale Killer after Greta, to call her ‘Cecilia’ or ‘Cis’, as her friends and colleagues did; but for some reason, perhaps out of awe or respect, I kept calling her Detective Carlota.
But even my awe of her couldn’t outweigh my stifling anxiety that she was here to arrest me.
In her classic ‘no nonsense’ manner, she almost immediately gestured for us to head into one of the office meeting rooms, ones we usually reserved for talking to the bereaved about whether they wanted Grandpops chucked in a hole or deep fried in the flames of a thousand suns.
I offered Detective Carlota tea or coffee, but she politely declined both as I sat down, mentally reminding myself not to tap my fingers or feet too much. She was a detective, after all; she’d know instantly something was up if my body made it too obvious.
‘So, something’s up,’ Detective Carlota said, rather matter-of-factly.
Oh dear.
‘Wha… Wha… what do you mean?’ I stammered, struggling to hurl the words out of my throat. ‘Nothing’s up,’ I reassured her.
‘Something is up,’ Carlota repeated more assertively, holding my gaze with no intention of breaking it.
‘For the last two years, you’ve texted, emailed, faxed me – who even uses fax?
– at least every other day. You sent me every bit of evidence, every time the case was mentioned in Metro, every time Jago Jones writes an article, every crazy conspiracy theory, and then, when I tell you it’s gone cold, I hear nothing from you for four days. So, something’s up.’
I quickly analysed her words in my head. Was this a trick? Some kind of detective mind game?
‘I mean, what do you want me to say, Detective Carlota?’ I replied with a nervous chortle. I felt she could sense my unease as she reached across the table and, to my relief, gently wrapped her hand around my own.
‘Ruth, it’s okay,’ she whispered, tenderly. ‘I’m here for you.’
I felt my heartbeat ease ever so slightly as my shoulders gradually unknotted and relaxed. Okay, maybe I wasn’t about to be arrested after all.
‘I wish I had an update for you, I really do,’ Carlota continued.
‘I hope you know how hard I fought to keep this case going, for Greta, but there was honestly nothing I could do. They took it out of my hands before I even had a chance to say my piece. I’m not even allowed to have any exposure to anything else that comes in regarding it. ’
I shrugged my shoulders airily as if to say, Well, what can you do?
‘I’m going to get this guy, I hope you know that, Ruth. Even if it’s the last thing I do in my career, I’ll catch him and make sure he spends the rest of his miserable existence locked up in a three metre by three metre cell.’
I nodded as if I understood her determination, but my heart rate hadn’t settled enough for me to respond in a coherent fashion quite yet.
In the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake the lingering thought: surely, they’d found the heart by now.
There’s no way they could have missed it, lying there right outside the station doors.
Or maybe Detective Carlota knew and wasn’t telling me, or maybe they’d given it to another detective and she had no knowledge of it at all.
I knew Detective Carlota had transferred from another station outside of London about five years or so ago after some sort of scandal.
Since I had known her, all I could infer from Detective Carlota was that she had cocked up in some catastrophic way which led to the relocation.
Furthermore, from the little she’d let slip, it was obvious her current employers were yet to fully recognise her talents, not helped by the fact she was the lead on the TellTale Killer case two years ago.
But I knew how hard she’d tried to catch him, none of this was on her.
I couldn’t tell by the way she spoke if she was blaming herself or itching to prove she could still nail the case, most likely a bit of both.
What I did know was that she was wrapped up in it far beyond professional duty; her throwaway remarks made it clear her career never really recovered after everyone at the station decided she was the one who’d let the Telltale Killer slip past them.
That can’t have been easy to bounce back from.
‘Are you with me, Ruth, or off daydreaming again?’ Detective Carlota asked warmly, snapping me abruptly back to the present.
‘I’m sorry, I was… whatever,’ I mumbled, still distracted.
‘I just really want to make sure you’re okay, Ruth,’ Carlota said. ‘You’ve been through so much, and I know how important this is to you. I know how much Greta meant to you.’
Most people didn’t mention her name. They only referred to Greta obliquely, as if even uttering it would feel like an iron-gloved fist to the gut.
But Detective Carlota never had that instinct.
I’m not sure why. People were remarkably peculiar about others’ grief, maybe because grief was remarkably peculiar.
I felt like most of the people I spoke to considered losing a friend not quite on a par with losing a parent, spouse or a child; that was real loss, I could almost hear them thinking as they tried to prevent their face shifting into a sneer.
Look, I’m not vying for a shiny gold medal in the Grief Olympics here, but I couldn’t recall a time where Greta wasn’t practically industrially superglued to my hip.
From nursery to university, and even when she pulled strings to get me my first lowly job at the paper, we were always inseparable, always making our life plans to ensure we’d never be too far away from one another.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but I had always imagined my final days (Ben was bound to ‘pop his clogs’ in one of his usual harebrained mishaps), unfolding with her; the two of us blind drunk and dosed up on pensioner-strength painkillers, swaddled in industrial-grade adult nappies, hopelessly senile, watching the sunset and spitting at any teenagers who dared make a racket in the park while Cash in the Attic was on.
It never felt like a fantasy, just the natural order of how things would go.
And without any kind of warning, she was ripped from my life.
I tried not to get myself too upset, I couldn’t let Detective Carlota see me cry again.
I could tell she wasn’t here on official police business; she had made this visit specially to make sure I was doing okay.
Maybe it was because Detective Carlota came into my life just as Greta left it and so without meaning to, she had become something of my friend, therapist, my confidante, and everything in between over the past two years in some attempt to fill the void.
Sometimes I forgot that, for the most part, she was only doing her job.
‘But if something changed, if something big happened, you would tell me, right?’ I asked, still not certain if Carlota was being ignorant or deceptive regarding the heart. She could be a hard woman to read.
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 Alba person again, who I presume was someone she was seeing but not yet official official 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 they were 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?