Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
‘Has he messaged?’ I asked. A question I’d once posed twenty years ago about the boy on the bus I liked, was now about the serial killer lurking in my phone.
Ben shook his head, eyes glued to the phone screen before glancing back up at the crime wall.
The three of us had relocated to the shed, hoping that the crime wall I had created over the years would give us some kind of clarity about the situation. It didn’t.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘He hasn’t. Some guy called CerealKillerCornflakes is messaging you, though.’
I groaned, pressing my hands tight to my face before flopping my body back onto my bed. Go away, Nico, leave your incredible nose out of this.
‘He wants me,’ I whispered, in this regard about the TellTale Killer, but it probably also applied to Nico. ‘And if he can’t get me, he’s going to kill Carlota.’
‘What if we just leak it to the press right now?’ Bill asked, trying for once to be helpful, bless him. ‘Tell the whole world who the TellTale Killer really is?’
‘Then he’ll just kill Carlota for the sake of it,’ I half repeated, a little incensed at Bill not thinking his question through. ‘I won’t let her die, I can’t. Even if I have to go to him myself as some kind of sacrificial lamb.’
‘And are you considering that?’ Ben asked gravely. ‘He could just end up killing both of you at this rate. I mean, that’s kind of his whole thing, you know, killing.’
‘Well, you live, you die, and that’s it, isn’t it?’ I said with my best attempt at a nonchalant shrug. ‘This is my fault, anyway. I dragged him back into the spotlight. I could have just left well enough alone and that might have been the end of it. This is pretty much entirely my fault, actually.’
No one in the room – not Bill, Ben, not even Toast – challenged me on that statement, so I guess they knew it was at least partially true.
I watched Bill scrutinise the crime wall, taking in every pinned photograph and hastily scrawled note I had made, his upper lip twitching slightly as he registered just how much territory of the wall I’d claimed with my various reams of paper.
I could practically hear his teeth grinding at the small factory’s worth of Sellotape I’d used.
I appreciated he was trying to keep that repressed right now.
I glanced at Toast, hoping for some kind of idea. Her eyes seemed to shoot off in two different directions before she violently sneezed and, at the same time, smacked her head against the glass, probably annihilating her one last remaining brain cell.
‘So, Jago Jones actually visited all the victims?’ Ben asked as he took a glimpse at one corner of the crime wall. ‘Before they died?’
‘Yes, some a few months before, others a few years,’ I replied despondently. ‘I think so, I imagine that’s how he picked them. He probably had their obituaries written out before he even yanked their hearts out of their corpses.’
Ben fell silent, then leaned forward to stroke his chest as if coaxing out a thought.
I wanted to tell him he was wasting his time: a team of police detectives and an army of online sleuths and I had been poring over this case for two years without so much as a breakthrough.
I couldn’t see how he was going to make this all fit together.
Ben leaned back, brow furrowed as he picked up the tablet he had brought with him to the shed, as if it would be of any use.
‘Suppose there is a narrative,’ he posited as he typed something in and began scrolling down the screen.
‘He never filed a story based on any of the visits to the victims, did he? Or the connection would have been caught. Maybe he was refused, denied the chance to report on something. Perhaps that’s what drove him: his own weird, warped sense of justice. ’
I sat up from my bed and straightened my back; maybe Ben had a point, it did make a disturbing kind of sense.
Every time Jago had spoken to me, or the TellTale Killer had left a note about his ‘story’, he’d been talking about enforcing his version of the world, a self-appointed, self-justified crusade.
There were very few things that made a journalist more angry than being denied a good story by an unhelpful source.
‘I don’t know about the others,’ Ben murmured as he swigged what was left of Bill’s wine.
‘But I know Lewis Khan was working at Cobra Electrical and they were right in the midst of this pretty massive scandal. I imagine being told you can’t get a story you want is going to be pretty frustrating for a psychopath.
Say he made his list for years, all the people who refused to let the truth come to light, and this is how he enacts his version of it, by, you know… ’
Ben rather gratuitously mimed a stabbing motion towards Toast, who just looked up at him from her tank as if to say, Hey, what the fuck, bro?
As much as it irritated me and hurt my own ego to admit it, I had to concede that Ben was quite likely right. There always had to be some kind of reason for why Jago had picked his victims. Urgh, I was going to have to tell Nico he was right about this too.
It struck me suddenly that maybe Jago hadn’t abducted Detective Carlota to get to me at all, but because she too had refused his ‘story’ and he actually had no idea how closely our lives were actually tangled.
I remember that only last night, Carlota had told me she had tried to get Jago blacklisted from the station due to his sneaky journalistic endeavours.
Was this really what I was dealing with: an angry little boy who, when told ‘no’, decided to kill people? How could someone who’d evaded the best minds in the country have the emotional maturity of a toddler?
I was still the only person, other than maybe Carlota, who’d figured out he was the TellTale Killer. Was there still time? Could I still save her?
Bill exhaled a long, heavy, weary breath that could power an offshore wind farm.
‘I’m off to pour another glass of wine,’ he announced and dawdled out. Ben and I naturally turned to look at each other as Bill gently clanked the door of the shed shut behind him.
‘Can I have my phone back now, please?’ I asked Ben.
He hesitated, then sighed, like he was admitting I was bound to make a foolish choice with or without the device.
We sat in another long silence, our eyes fixed on the crime wall, trying to see if there would be anything there that could save Detective Carlota.
‘So, Greta knew,’ Ben said quietly, a note of sadness, almost wistful, in his voice. ‘She was the one who figured it out first, before anyone else.’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ was all I could manage to say at this point. My mind was a mess of various complex thoughts and feelings, so it was difficult to manufacture a coherent sentence.
‘She was always so smart, so clever. I still miss her a lot, you know.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I mean, I know you know it always bothered me how close you two were, but… I did really like her, Ruth.’
I tried my absolute hardest to muster a smile, something that might try and ease a bit of the guilt he was clearly carrying right now.
‘I know you did, love.’
I thought about correcting myself then, but at this point I realised I couldn’t remove that word for Ben from my vocabulary, like a juicy Bolognese stain on a crisp white linen shirt. No matter how hard I tried, it was here to stay.
‘I suppose it’s like what you said, right?’ I replied. ‘To love someone is to accept the absolute certainty of heartbreak.’ I tried to repeat what he’d said to me in the hospital two days ago. Ben smirked, slightly bemused that I’d remembered his bit of Poundland philosophy.
‘I think that’s only part of it, though, Ruth.’ He began, with a look in his eyes I couldn’t quite read. ‘I think it’s true, but also if you cling too closely to the dead, then you just end up becoming a ghost too.’
I knew what he was implying about me; I knew what he’d always thought about how I handled my grief for Greta but that had never once verbalised.
But now I was wondering if, by choosing this neat, tidy death by refusing any further treatment, he was trying to stop me mourning two people and becoming even more of a ghost.
‘So, you know, I kind of thought Bill was lying when he told me you weren’t sure about continuing treatment,’ I said. ‘It didn’t really sound like something you would do.’
‘We’re talking about this now?’ Ben asked with a laugh that was half sincere and half exasperated. ‘Is this really the best time? We’re meant to be working out how we can catch a serial killer while you’re on the run from the police.’
‘Well, I highly suspect that I may be either dead or arrested in twenty-four hours, so yeah, I’d say it’s a fine time to talk about it,’ I responded. ‘This may be our only chance.’
Ben scoffed before he replied.
‘I just don’t want to suffer, Ruth. I want a few good months of making memories with Bill, and then I just want to pop my clogs, and for that just to be the end of it.
I don’t want to drag it out any longer than I have to.
I’m over chemo, I’m over hospitals, I’m over all of it.
If I’m going to die, I’m going to die. I want some control in it though.
I don’t want to slowly grow into a cold dead body, I want you, Bill, my parents, I want you all to have a clean break.
No more pain and no more grief needed than necessary. ’
I didn’t know how to reply to that. Was there such a thing as a clean-break death? I didn’t know how to convince him that he was making the wrong choice. Was it even wrong, if it was his choice to make?
‘How long would you live without chemo?’ I asked quietly, making the cardinal sin of asking a question I didn’t really want to know the answer to.
‘They reckon about four months, max. For two months I should be all right with the medication, but after that… high risk of hospitalisation and then obviously I’ll…’ He didn’t finish his sentence.