Chapter 27 #2
Unfortunately for me back then, but fortuitously for me today, speed had never been his forte.
I watched him carefully as he left the platform in the bay to grab more parcels from the back of the lorry, which was when I easily slipped into the bay and tossed my package seamlessly onto the huge trolley that would be hauled by the latest tortured intern to the post room.
It would be on Jago’s desk before anyone picked up my meddling on the CCTV.
I then quickly wound my way through the various back streets and alleyways of Hammersmith, trying to lose the gaze of any rogue cameras I could be picked up on if they tried to trace me on playback.
Gradually, I could feel my heart rate begin to slow and my palms got ever so slightly less clammy as I walked along the cobbled lower mall, thankful that yet again no police teams had suddenly jumped out of the bushes to tackle me to the ground the minute I threw my package onto the trolley.
I paused for a moment to take in the rusty teal green of Hammersmith Bridge. I checked once more that I wasn’t being followed, nor that anyone else was around my immediate vicinity, then let out an enormous belch you could have used to signal a ship coming into harbour. God, I hated this quirk.
I looked back at the bridge. I hadn’t seen this particular view in some time.
I’d always liked this part of Hammersmith, overlooking the river, though I could never quite put my finger on why.
Perhaps it was because this part of London always felt just that little more serene to me than the rest of the city.
You could watch the rowers glide beneath the bridge in the early misty morning, and the dog walkers making their way across the path above.
Luckily, the little side street I was now on held one of the few London cafés without CCTV covering every square inch.
I slipped inside and ordered a latte before I went in search of the loo.
There, I pulled my spare clothes from my rucksack and quickly changed out of my clandestine roadman-gear and into something a little more Ruth.
I know this makes me sound like I’m twenty-nine going on a hundred, but the past seventy-two hours had drained me so completely that I just needed one small moment to sit down.
To breathe, properly, instead of frantically pant.
At the bottom of the bag lay my copy of Greta’s Obama I had taken from Aleks’s house.
I tucked the book under my arm, collected my latte, and went to try to enjoy the crisp January morning in their outside seating.
I had done what I could. Now, it was the Telltale Killer’s move in our deranged game of pass-the-parcel.
The café was barely a mile from the spot where Greta and I had had our final argument at Sabroso two years ago.
I realised I had spent the days since then avoiding nearly every place that reminded me of Greta.
I guess it was some kind of crude form of self-preservation, sparing myself the pain and guilt of remembering what I’d done.
I think if I paused to reflect, I might think twice and emotionally implode.
The truth of the matter was that, however precarious my situation, I was now closer to catching the Telltale Killer than anyone else had ever been.
As I took another sip of my latte, I opened Obama and leafed through its pages on the scratched and stained coffee table that had clearly seen better days, wondering how many times Greta must have read it, turning each page from cover to cover.
I remembered how she’d queued outside Waterstones the day it was released – the only person in line, of course, no one else cared that much about an American president.
She really was his biggest fan. There had been a few times when I’d tried to dissuade her from her love of Obama, but she always waved it off.
She hated politicians as a rule, often saying that maybe Guy Fawkes had a point, but somehow, Obama always escaped the full force of Greta’s wrath.
I was just drifting through the pages when, like some sort of conjuring trick, a creased white note slipped from the book and drifted to the cobbled pavement below me. I snatched it up before the wind would have a chance to whisk it out of my reach.
Expecting a lacklustre doodle or a harmless reminder pressed to work as some form of bookmark on her eighty-seventh read-through, I stretched out the paper against the hardback cover of the book to inspect.
It was not a doodle. The paper was enormously dense with fading scribbles in, undoubtedly, Greta’s handwriting that hadn’t changed since Year 7.
A few words remained legible: ironically ‘handwriting’, a hurried ‘headlines’, and, more unsettlingly, the names of all five Telltale Killer victims up to that point.
Beside each name stood a date, ranging from 2019 to 2023, and what appeared to be a different vehicle registration number beside each one.
Wait a second, had Greta been investigating the case?
The dates on the piece of paper didn’t match the victims’ dates of death in the slightest, so they must mean something else. What was their relevance?
For the love of God, why hadn’t I listened to Greta that night in Sabroso? What had she been trying to tell me?
At the bottom, scrawled in capitals and circled again and again, were the words:
MUST BE THE KILLER.
God, I always knew Greta was clever; two years gone and she was still reminding me of that fact. She’d solved the case of the TellTale Killer and surely, she was now handing the baton to me to finish the job.