Chapter 24 #2
It seemed that thirty thousand feet up in the air, her class consciousness evaporated; I remember when Chlo had stuffed knickers into her coat pockets to dodge the baggage fee for our Ryanair flight.
‘I don’t even want to ask this, but… do you think the heart is still in the freezer?’ Chlo asked, a little way into our drive. The glance she shot me with the question was one that crackled with unease and apprehension.
‘Chlo, he hasn’t touched a single thing in Greta’s childhood bedroom for two years. What makes you think the heart would be anywhere other than the freezer?’
She flinched, clearly forcing the thought aside so she could keep her eyes on the road.
As you’ll remember, we never retrieved Greta’s body, it was only her heart that the TellTale Killer left behind.
Greta’s heart had been considered primary forensic evidence at the time, but the investigators had extracted every possible trace – DNA, fibres, residues – before finally releasing it to the family in an act of good faith.
Most of the other families had chosen to leave what was left of their loved ones in police custody, clinging to the hope that one day technology might unmask the TellTale Killer.
But Aleks had made such a relentless fuss that, in the end, they gave it back to him.
I pictured it in its cold resting place, unsettlingly close to the jacket potatoes.
I had given up finding the rest of Greta’s body a long time ago but I think Aleks lived in the liminal space between keeping Greta nearby and wanting to move on.
It wasn’t that Aleks wasn’t a nice man. He’d always been a quiet, but generally friendly enough chap ever since we had been kids.
Chlo had kept in touch with him over the years, stopping by whenever she could to check in on him, but I felt like I never had the strength or maybe the courage to.
Seeing Aleks seemed to physically hurt me in a way I’ve never quite been able to describe.
I had heard of grief physically and emotionally breaking people, forcing them into a shape that was unrecognisable, but I’d never witnessed it firsthand until Aleks.
At first, when Greta died, the man simply shut down.
He stopped working, stopped eating; the garden he had once doted on lovingly was abandoned to wither.
Even the cherry blossom trees that had bloomed and dazzled every single spring since Greta and I were young had shrivelled and wilted.
I can’t begin to fathom the agony of losing a child.
Whenever I saw him, my own sorrow felt almost inconsequential beside his.
Maybe that’s why I never wanted to see him, I didn’t want my grief to feel like it should be lesser than his.
We pulled up to his house, Chlo did an excellent job of parallel parking on the street which I complimented her on, and I begrudgingly got out of the car. As a somewhat united front, we tentatively approached the door.
‘You knock,’ Chlo muttered, nudging me with her elbow.
‘What? Why me?’ I cried.
‘Because I drove. So, you have to be the one to knock.’
Groaning, and feeling like we had regressed twenty years, I stepped forward and rapped three firm knocks on the door.
A moment later Aleks’s frail, but stronger than I remembered, silhouette shuffled into view.
I hadn’t seen him since the one-year anniversary memorial thirteen months ago, and he seemed marginally improved, slightly less gaunt, a hint more colour in his cheeks.
Even so, he remained chalk-pale, especially compared to Chlo’s Floridian terracotta glow.
Is it polite to say he looked far less ghostly?
‘Hello, Chloe. Hello, Ruth,’ he greeted us timidly as he fiddled with his glasses, performing what seemed to be the closest thing to a smile he could manage.
Chlo was instantly effusive, stepping forward and wrapping him in one of her suffocating signature hugs until I worried he might simply crack and shatter in her arms. Although, it looked like he almost needed that hug.
In fact, I think he probably liked it by the way that his hands hesitated at first, hovering in the air before they went to lay on her back.
I would hazard a guess that he didn’t get hugged much anymore.
He ushered us into the living room, which had been slightly redecorated since we were last here, and offered us tea or coffee, both already prepared in a pot and cafetière respectively, along with an array of quintessentially British biscuits laid out on a plate.
I politely nibbled on a custard cream while glancing angrily at some of the other biscuits that had the gall to be on the plate with such legends, particularly Garibaldis, or ‘squashed flies’ as Greta used to call them.
I looked across the newly repainted living room wall, and my eyes instantly clocked the photos of Greta and me as children, then later as teenagers with Chlo, when she had joined the school in Year 9, and added to our duo.
I remember how Greta and I had practically yanked her away from the popular clique to join our small two-person motley crew.
I don’t know why, but remembering Greta as a child always seemed to break me the most.
There were new photos on the wall now, ones I hadn’t seen before, which I guessed he had added sometime over the past year.
I took a moment to stare at a new one of us at the beach, both caught mid-conversation as we daintily dipped our toes into the lapping ocean at Newquay.
I wondered what benign nonsense had we been talking about; from my reckoning, we must have only been about twelve.
Maybe that was another reason I dreaded setting foot in Greta’s dad’s house: it somehow crystallised the grief for me.
Most days it hovered over me like a private rain cloud, heavy and unseen by anyone else, yet here it turned into a steam locomotive, thundering straight at me while I lay hogtied to the tracks.
We asked how Aleks had been. He said that all in all, he was okay, mentioning that Greta’s brother had just got engaged and moved in across the street with his fiancée, though he murmured he suspected they had only done so somewhat begrudgingly just to keep an eye on him.
‘When we heard the TellTale Killer was back, we knew it would bring up some horrible feelings for you. I’m so sorry,’ Chlo said, with an impressive amount of grace and decorum mustered.
‘It’s okay,’ Aleks said, offering another frail and feeble smile, one that made it painfully clear he was certainly not okay.
‘It was nasty seeing the news talking about it again. You know, I think that was one of the worst parts about losing Greta… the way they wouldn’t stop talking about her for days on end, like they suddenly knew every little detail about my Greta, like they were almost trying to find some way to blame her, and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, they just stopped caring about her.
It was like she vanished from the world the moment people lost interest in their televisions.
Everyone remembers the TellTale Killer but no one can even remember my Greta’s name. ’
I remembered feeling such rage when I saw what they’d done.
They’d used a lovely, natural photo of Greta on the beach to announce her death…
and then they’d photoshopped it: carved her a stronger jawline, sharpened her eyes, puffed up her hair.
I couldn’t even find the words. Why had they done that?
If they made her more aesthetically pleasing to the public, then it would make her loss feel like more of a tragedy?
‘But I think it could be a good thing that he’s back,’ I said with a half mumble, half stutter, not totally sure how I was going to articulate the chaotic collection of thoughts in my brain.
‘Now he’s resurfaced the police might finally throw everything they’ve got at him, that’s what I’m banking on.
Maybe this time we’ll see him behind bars. ’
Aleks gave a faint, indulgent smile and shrugged.
‘But none of this will ever bring Greta back.’
After a little while of talking, Chlo took Aleks off to lay some fresh flowers at Greta’s empty grave.
I was told she had a lovely spot at St Michael’s.
It was a small cemetery, tacked onto the edge of a beautiful park, perched just on the hill above it.
I didn’t believe in all that afterlife nonsense as you know, but Chlo had told me she liked the idea that Greta could look out over the park at sunset from there.
I stayed behind, obviously. I didn’t have the nerve to go to her pseudo-grave at the best of times, let alone today.
As soon as they left, I found myself mulling over what Aleks had said.
He was right, none of what I was doing would bring Greta back.
Maybe, in some strange way, that’s what I had been hoping for all along; that catching the killer would make my grief and guilt magically disappear or maybe even more deludedly, it would miraculously bring Greta back just as suddenly as she disappeared from my life.
I knew Aleks wouldn’t mind if I took a small peek in Greta’s room. Gently, I pushed open the door covered with old crayon still etched onto it. It was impeccably tidy, her clothes neatly folded away in drawers, her concert ticket stubs still lined up on one of the shelves.
I’d heard that when parents lose a child, they often don’t change their room at all – as if clinging desperately to the delusion that their kid was just out for the moment and would come scooting back through the door, demanding to know what was for dinner any second now.
But Greta had moved out of Aleks’s place a long time ago, so her room sat in that awkward, transitory state: not quite a guest bedroom, not quite Greta’s anymore either – a space caught between being kept for her and quietly moving on without her.