Chapter 12
TWELVE
TWO YEARS AGO
Greta
I must tear
and shred
these feeble creatures to a desire of darker bliss
that lurks within these veins.
These ruptures I leave for you are my offerings,
perverse tokens to you tortured rats bound and imprisoned by your wasteful grief.
As flesh and stone alike shall crumble into dust
and rot,
so too will your vaunting convictions decay.
Yet I, remain.
As I read the passage again and again on my computer screen, it felt more and more like there was something strangely familiar in the writing, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on entirely. Why was the message giving me an uncanny feeling of déjà vu?
‘Greta?’ a voice called out, snapping me out of my concentrated glare of the article about the TellTale Killer’s most recent murder on my screen.
‘What?’ I asked, a little dazed, trying to track where the sound was coming from and who was disturbing me from the swathe of IT tickets that I really ought to be actioning at manager-mandated speed.
As the voice echoed through the circuitry of my brain, I registered its familiar tenor instinctively as a ‘green’ voice, friendly and amiable.
By contrast, the deeper, bass-heavy tones of a more dominant speaker, e.g.
my boss, would have registered as ‘red’ in the synaesthesia of my mind.
Maybe I had been working in IT for too long.
Ruth came up to my desk and placed a refreshed cup of tea in front of me, made exactly how I liked it. Dash of milk, no sugar, because I’m not a psychopath.
‘What up?’ she said with a sly, sarcastic grin. ‘We still on for my pre-birthday dinner tonight at Sabroso?’
‘Of course we are,’ I replied. ‘Now stop nagging me, I have a lot… of work to do.’
Crikey, I did love Ruth, but she had always had a tendency to be a bit intense.
Not in an ‘I need to move house and change my number’ kind of way, just a ‘full-on’ kind of vibe.
She was such an isolated soul, bless her, latching onto the few things that truly mattered to her: me, her work, and her husband.
And sometimes, I worried it was in that particular order.
Throughout their whole marriage, I had tried to make sure that Ruth and Ben had their space, but I sometimes felt that she kept dragging me in to be a reluctant third wheel.
I’d mentioned to Chlo a few times that I thought Ruth needed more friends than us, but Chlo never seemed as concerned as I was about Ruth’s rather limited social circle.
‘What work do you have to do in IT anyway? Wiping people’s search history? Telling people to turn it off and on again? I reckon you’re just reading Obama for the eighteenth time,’ Ruth teased lightly.
‘I’m not reading Obama,’ I said, exasperated.
Technically, I was listening to his smooth dulcet tones as he told me of ‘A Promised Land’, while the hardback lay nestled in my drawer at work, but I didn’t have time to get into the nuances of what exactly constituted reading right now.
Besides, I won’t be shamed for reading Obama, God forbid I like a stable, charismatic politician.
The fact he was rather handsome had nothing to do with it.
‘Don’t you have work to do?’ I replied. ‘I’ve heard it’s busy on your floor.’
‘I do,’ Ruth admitted, not missing a beat. ‘But it’s probably just me editing old golden boy’s articles again or Sam pestering me to go drinking with him this evening no matter how many times I tell him we’ve got my pre-birthday meal, hence why I have come to disturb the sanctity of IT.’
I laughed as Ruth started fiddling with the things on my desk, deliberately, because she knew it annoyed me.
‘What’s the word of the day?’ she asked.
‘Wabi-sabi,’ I replied, just about being able to recall reading it this morning when I flicked it over on the ‘word of the day’ calendar I kept in my bathroom while brushing my teeth with a toothbrush that was as flat as a dab.
What an absolutely horrendous Secret Santa gift.
As a journalist, however, Ruth always had an interest in expanding her vocabulary.
‘Wasabi?’ Ruth frowned, half convinced I’d mispronounced it.
‘No, no, wabi-sabi. It’s Japanese.’
‘Meaning?’ she asked, now pulling open my drawer and stealing one of the biscuits I kept for when my blood sugar crashed.
‘I can’t remember exactly,’ I admitted, twisting my hands around my head as if that might somehow coax the word’s meaning out of my skull.
‘But it’s the idea of accepting imperfections, accepting that nothing lasts forever, that things are impermanent and incomplete and finding some kind of beauty in that. ’
‘Weird,’ Ruth said, crunching noisily on my biscuit. ‘I don’t get it.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my superior eyeing Ruth with that look I knew all too well. So, with a widening of my eyes that clearly meant ‘take me seriously’, I began to shoo Ruth away.
‘I’ll see you downstairs later, okay?’ I said with a laugh. ‘Now get out of here.’
I couldn’t afford to get in trouble again for chatting with Ruth.
People already knew we were glued at the hip and not always, strictly speaking, professional with our interactions.
I loved Ruth, she was the kindest person I knew, but she could sometimes get too wrapped up in herself.
There was so much I tried to tell her, but it always felt as though she had a habit of drifting into her own daydreams, lost in her own head every time I tried to speak to her about something of significance.
Part of me wondered how Ben was with her; I’d noticed him acting strangely of late when I was round, cagier and more introverted, but I hadn’t dared bring it up just in case I was imagining things.
I think when it comes down to it, more than anything, I just wanted Ruth to be brave. She lived her life so cautiously, so carefully, she very rarely ever took a risk or stood up for herself. It was hard to be friends with someone who lived life so extraordinarily safely.
As I sorted through the various IT tickets being raised, I glanced over the TellTale Killer’s note that the paper had published on the website one more time.
That was when it struck me, how I recognised it.
As I read, I could almost feel the connections forming in my mind, like pieces of a jigsaw slotting into place. Was it really what I thought it was?
I quietly made a note, pulled Obama out of my draw and slipped it within his thick, well-articulated pages, and trying to avoid the watchful eyes of my superior, began a small little piece of investigative journalism of my own.