Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
PRESENT DAY
Ruth
I was coming to the abrupt realisation that I would quite like to visit Australia if I ever got the chance.
I had first considered it when I was a postgrad for a little while, blissfully wondering if I could swap the UK’s consistently wet, rainy climate for something that felt at least a little bit more exotic.
But then I remembered: the trade-off would likely include spiders the size of dinner plates and snakes that would lurk in the pipes of your toilet, and that was a bit of a dealbreaker for me.
I didn’t want to be subjected to a surprise nibble in the middle of the night while trying to have a wee.
It was probably in poor taste that staring at Justin’s collapsing cadaver is what brought the idea of a visit to Oz back to the forefront of mind.
But it wasn’t my fault that if you squinted hard enough; his sagging, misshapen chest now almost resembled the Sydney Opera House.
The jagged contours of his defined ribcage reassembling the iconic white sails of the landmark, their sharp points jutting upwards into the thin flesh.
I know that’s an utterly revolting thing to think – I’m sure you’re scrunching your nose up right now or your facial muscles have shifted into something reassembling disgust – but I was just trying to find some semblance of a silver lining in a situation where I was, quite clearly, well and truly fucked.
Operation: Hearts and Crafts had now hit a small speed bump, an unfolding crisis I would now refer to as ‘Chestgate’.
I must have made an absolute hash of extracting the heart.
Rigor mortis hadn’t exactly made things more stable internally nor had his little joy ride in the back of the hearse, but still, how incompetent could I have been for the man’s chest to literally collapse in on itself during his own funeral?
Perhaps the fact I was rushing during the extraction and then distracted by Uncle Phil’s phone call had meant that I had made some critical mistake while I was rummaging around in there.
Maybe I had damaged his ribcage or accidentally shuffled around some organs that led to the implosion of his chest cavity.
Whatever had happened, I was really hoping that they wouldn’t be able to trace it back to me.
It’s not like the mass of kitchen towel in him was printed with tiny idents of my name on it or anything.
Uncle Phil was outside the hall, pacing up and down the street with his head in his hands, guzzling every Capri-Sun he could get his hands on.
Every so often, he would solemnly mutter, ‘I’m finished,’ to himself under his breath.
Meanwhile, Clive couldn’t stop throwing up on the foot of an old oak tree, and Eddie was rubbing his pal’s back affectionately.
Meanwhile, I sat on one of those dreadful, cheap plastic chairs you’d find in a primary school classroom, which made sense as I heard the hall functioned as a hub for the guides and brownies on a Thursday.
I watched the chaos unfolding before my eyes; a small squadron of police officers and forensic scientists were darting in and out of the hall while trying to keep the increasing number of bystanders at bay.
I’d been trying to eavesdrop on their whispered theories about what had happened, but I hadn’t had much luck picking up on what they were saying.
I was feeling strangely calm about everything, which shouldn’t have surprised me, from what I’d read there was an odd sense of relief from criminals when they finally realised they were about to be caught, knowing they wouldn’t have to deal with the unrelenting anxiety anymore somehow outweighed the idea of life imprisonment.
I saw Uncle Phil stumble wearily into the venue, his face as pale as Justin’s flesh.
He clutched yet another Capri-Sun in his hand, the plastic packaging crinkling in his grip as he squeezed the last remnants of orange-flavoured liquid straight down his gullet.
He always kept a stash of them in the boot of his car for dire emergencies, bought in bulk as the only real hedonistic pleasure he had for himself.
All men have their vices in times of struggle; for some it came with a straw.
As he made his way over to me gradually, part of me was worried he might go into cardiac arrest right there and then, but then I remembered the copious amounts of artificial sugars and preservatives he had just consumed would keep his heart beating for the next two hundred years.
‘How are you doing, Uncle Phil?’ I asked, struggling to hide a smirk at the image of him tossing the empty pouch aside as if it were a four-shot glass of whisky he had just downed.
‘I’ve been better, Ruth. I’ve been better,’ he replied, his frail voice trembling. ‘How did this happen? How did we miss this?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, feigning ignorance for the umpteenth time and silently hoping I was getting better at it.
‘We should have checked. I don’t know how we could have, but we should have checked,’ Uncle Phil intoned as if he was giving himself a firm telling-off, wondering how much his TrustPilot rating would suffer for this.
‘Checked what, exactly?’ I asked, a little confuddled as to how, unless you were me and had certain insider knowledge, anyone could have foreseen this happening.
‘His heart, Ruth! That he still had a heart!’ Uncle Phil burst out with a sudden intensity that made me reel, nearly toppling from the tiny chair I was perched on.
Until that moment, I hadn’t thought him capable of frustration.
Worry, yes, but any kind of anger had never really seemed in his nature.
‘I’m sorry,’ he added almost immediately, his tone softening and mellowing quickly. ‘I’m a bit stressed.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said, leaning forward to place a hand on his remarkably hairy arm, hoping it would feel somewhat reassuring to him. ‘It is a very stressful situation.’
‘This Justin fella… he died in a not-so-nice way,’ Uncle Phil muttered, running a hand over his silver stubbled chin and then across both of his cheeks. ‘Maybe that’s something to do with it. They found his body in the Thames a few weeks ago. Drowned, they think.’
‘Oh?’ I said, keeping my eyes firmly on the corpse in the centre of the room. Not making eye contact with Uncle Phil, or, for that matter, with the guest of honour we were so rudely discussing.
I watched one of the policemen, donning one of their standard high-vis jackets, interviewing someone wearing a very elegant black dress.
My eyes lingered on a face that I could only describe as ‘sharp’ as she delicately dragged out the last tissue from a crumpled packet, to gently dab her eyes as the policeman continued to mutter something to her.
I noticed the mascara that had been impeccably applied was ever so slightly staining the tear trough.
I had the conversation at least once a month about people asking me what mascara they would recommend for a funeral, worried that it may run during the service.
I could tell by the way the mascara had blotched on her skin that this was one of the ones they had advertised as cry-proof.
However, unfortunately, they hadn’t ever really made a mascara that could cope with the very real impact of grief.
My conscience ached a little as I watched the woman take another glance at the coffin, her face quivered slightly as her eyes flicked away from it.
One of Uncle Phil’s favourite impromptu lectures, usually delivered whenever we were stuck in traffic, was that while most cultures believe the soul departs the body the instant death arrives, nearly all still treat the corpse with dignity.
I couldn’t quite share that instinct. I really shouldn’t care, there was no real meaning to a dead body other than the one society had prescribed onto it.
But I’d convinced myself that all of my efforts were something of a victimless crime, that no one was getting hurt.
But now I knew this was completely my fault: I had taken the last memory this woman would have of her loved one and warped and twisted it into a grotesque, mangled version of its former self.
I wish I could say that realisation stopped me in my tracks, made me pause and reconsider what I was doing, but it didn’t.
Greta would have told me to stop now, if she’d been here.
She’d have told me I’d gone too far, but Greta wasn’t here, was she?
From behind the woman, a familiar figure began to appear within my peripheral vision.
Dressed in one of her signature spectacular jumpers that seemed to hug her muscles, Detective Carlota was something of a pleasant sight for my sore eyes until I had the unfortunate realisation that this would probably be the woman who might very well be reading me my rights before escorting me to a police car in the not-too-distant future.
‘Detective,’ Uncle Phil said, running his hand through his floppy, dishevelled hair and stepping forward to greet her.
He knew her well from her various visits to see me at the office over the years.
She returned his greeting with a warm smile and a shake of his hand before he politely excused himself to fetch yet another Capri-Sun from the hearse glove compartment.
If there were a twelve-step programme for Capri-Sun addiction, Uncle Phil would’ve been the perfect candidate.
As my uncle slipped from her sight, I expected that warmth to linger when Detective Carlota turned to face me.
It didn’t. I could almost see her expression crystallise, her features sharpening, her eyes narrowing and lips tightening as though I’d just casually mentioned at a fancy dinner party that I liked mayo on my roast dinner.
‘Ruth,’ she said, pausing as if weighing each of her words carefully. ‘So how are you doing?’
Oh, I didn’t like her use of ‘so’. I could tell from the sibilant hiss of the word that she was beginning to see me through a different lens. If even I’d picked up on it, her change in tone must have been glaring.
‘Been better,’ I replied, eager to skip any chit-chat. ‘Not exactly the kind of thing you want to happen when working at a funeral. Not great for business.’
‘No, I can’t imagine it is,’ she said with a level of fake decorum that I could easily see through.
‘I’ve been chatting to some of the other officers – from a cursory glance, it looks like the man’s body has been tampered with in a way that the post-mortem didn’t pick up or, more likely, it happened afterwards. ’
She inhaled sharply, then slipped her hands deep into her pockets.
‘And again, from this cursory glance, his heart is obviously missing. Awfully peculiar, right?’ she asked. ‘Even more peculiar that you’re here.’
I stumbled over my words as I tried to answer her, caught off guard by her interrogatory tone as well as her frosty demeanour. Some awkward guttural gibberish slipped past my lips as I scrambled to reorient my thoughts.
‘Detective, we at Camborne and Sons are the largest and most popular funeral directors across three London boroughs. If someone dies, it’s very likely their paperwork will come across my desk.’
I thought that was some good reasoning to come up with in the moment and I hoped I sounded unperturbed. Her expression flickered for a moment, an ever so slight recoil at the eloquence and maybe my own frostiness in my response.
‘I suppose that’s true,’ she replied. ‘I’ll be interested to see what the examination reveals when they compare the body now with the original post-mortem.’
I couldn’t quite believe her words, I felt as if she was accusing me, as if she thought I was the one behind it.
I mean, I was the one behind it but still, I would have appreciated at least a modicum of trust. From her perspective, why would the person obsessed with catching the TellTale Killer be the one involved with this?
Were my plans to pretend to be a serial killer really that transparent to a police detective?
‘So will I,’ I said, keeping my tone as steady as I could. ‘I imagine the records will tell us what may have happened. Besides, we have 24-hour CCTV in the office, so it’ll be useful to see if anything was tampered with on our end.’
Why on earth did I say that? I was practically inviting an investigation onto myself.
‘So you…’ she began, her eyes contracting slightly as if she were about to ask the question of my involvement outright. But then she stopped herself, her expression softening into a smile that made me feel deeply disconcerted.
‘It was nice to see you, Ruth,’ was all she said as she walked backwards for a few steps before rotating and joining her small congregation of police officers to presumably discuss some kind of organisation around the crime scene.
I kept my eyes locked on her as she received instructions from whoever was in charge, rather begrudgingly.
We both knew she should’ve been the one giving the orders.
As the conversation between the officers seemed to drag on, she tilted her head barely perceptibly, eyes flicking towards me to pin me with a very particular kind of look. That was the moment I realised just how spectacularly I’d cocked this part of the plan up.
Yet each time the faintest pang of remorse or regret tugged at me, some small urge to turn back, I reminded myself: the killer was still out there, and I remembered what he’d said to me that night on the phone.
That was when I muttered to myself, almost as a little tiny vow, in for a penny, in for a pound.