Chapter 35 #3
‘And let me guess, because some people denied you a good story in the past, one that you think would have given you a big break, you decided to off them?’ I remarked as I tried to wipe away some sweat from my neck that I hoped he wouldn’t notice.
Jago cocked his head as if he was a little impressed. I had figured that out as he lifted the pot and poured tea into the two mismatched cups, perfectly in keeping with the quaint, quirky charm of the establishment.
‘They denied the truth to the world, I think there’s no greater sin than that. They denied me a story, so I made them one. Their deaths right wrongs.’
‘Keep telling yourself that, Jago, but we both know you did it for the likes,’ I remarked, unimpressed. ‘You did it because you enjoyed it and gave yourself a motive to make yourself feel better. Those people died for press coverage.’
‘Specifically, my press coverage – that’s important,’ Jago replied, placing his index finger to his chest in a way I think I’d seen a toddler do when claiming ownership of a train set as he took a sip of his tea.
I simply watched the steam dance and drift off the surface of mine, I fear my hand would quiver uncontrollably if I tried to pick it up.
‘I mean, come on, hearts in boxes, it doesn’t get more gruesome than that.
Urgh, I mean, you know what I can’t stand? The smell. The smell of…’
‘That sickly, sweet rotting smell?’ I responded, while he still hunted for the right description. I’d known that scent all too well for the past year or so. He extended a finger towards me, as if I’d just scored a point.
‘And look, I’d love to say I was wrong, but with every person that ended up dead, the more views, the more reads we got. People loved that shit. Do you know how much ad revenue we made, Ruth? It basically paid for the new office in New York.’
‘And yet, no one remembers the victims?’ I said quietly. ‘No one can remember their names. Can you even remember?’
‘Oh, let me guess, you’re a killer with values?
Well, la-dee-dah,’ Jago said, his voice dripping with disgusting mockery before blowing a frustrated rasp forcefully through his lips.
‘I saw your messages. You were killing because you wanted to be like me. Because you knew you were like me. So don’t even try.
I mean, Ruth, this is what you need to understand.
I killed people and I wrote the stories.
But it was still every single tabloid, every news channel.
Good Morning Britain even had a whole segment on it every single morning with a risk factor depending on what borough you were in.
People were entertained by it. People enjoyed it.
And you’re really going to deny me that?
If people didn’t lap up the first one as much as they did, I would never have killed any more than that. ’
I fought to keep the wrath and ferocity I was feeling from showing on my face.
My gut was searing with a supernova kind of rage.
For a brief moment, I wondered if I could take the knife from his pocket and kill him right then and there, but I knew he’d see me coming a mile away.
There was no way I’d survive the ordeal.
‘You know we spoke, right?’ I said, my voice more fragile than I wanted it to sound. ‘Do you remember that night? The night you killed Greta.’
Jago’s eyes narrowed, a painfully slow, very deliberate squint, as though rifling yet again through a thick rolodex of memories he didn’t care enough to keep at the forefront of his mind. He tilted his head, almost recalling, but didn’t answer.
I saw the barista start cleaning her various tools, which was not a good sign.
‘Sorry, guys,’ the waiter said as he came over to the table. ‘Don’t want to rush you, but we’re closing a bit earlier tonight because of the TellTale Killer and the police guidelines. We’re sending people home in pairs. Sorry.’
Shit.
The panic was coiling tight in my throat. I needed to keep Jago talking to me, I needed time, needed… something. Anything.
‘You don’t remember at all, do you?’ I asked him, recapturing my previous train of thought.
Jago just laughed callously.
‘I’m sorry, Ruth, I can’t say I do. I don’t know about you, but it’s all very murky when I kill someone.
Do you not feel like that? You don’t get that rush of emotion, that hit of adrenaline?
That feeling is just…’ He faltered, and even as a journalist he knew he didn’t have a good enough command of the English language to articulate it. ‘What, you don’t get that?’
‘Oh, I really do, gives me a massive lady boner,’ I replied, hoping he wouldn’t start to see the cracks in my lie. ‘If the feeling was so amazing then why did you even stop two years ago?’ I asked.
‘Because,’ Jago said, elongating the vowels, as he savoured another sip of tea on his tongue. ‘Because when old Greta found out about my endeavours, I couldn’t keep going until I knew for certain that no one else knew. So, I had to tone down the whole TellTale shtick.’
I narrowed my eyes, not quite understanding what he was implying.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘after your whole, frankly hilarious, meltdown when Greta died, I couldn’t risk anything. I had this feeling she might have left you a note or something you hadn’t found yet, that’s why you were let go, actually.’
It took everything I had to stay composed, to keep from visibly showing that his words had just gutted me. He was the reason they’d fired me, not my breakdown?
‘But it was you, Ruth, you, tempting me back into the limelight,’ he continued, not realising any change of expression on my face.
‘I mean, sure, I’ve picked off the odd person here and there these past two years, I sent you the photos, but it felt too indie, too underground.
I’d forgotten how much I loved the front page. That’s what I want to keep doing.’
While he was talking, I turned my head subtlety and saw Ben being loaded into the back of the ambulance by a frantic team of paramedics, and let out as small a belch of relief as I could.
You know, it’s funny, whatever self-hatred I had for what I’d done over the past week or so was ebbing away as I looked at the excuse of a human being before me.
I hadn’t realised evil could be this arrogant, this self-absorbed, this basic.
His code was all based on him being an annoying, snivelly little brat that craved attention.
‘See, with Greta, there was nothing special about her. Not like you, Ruth, you’re like me because I…’
‘You’re wrong,’ I interjected before he could even finish his sentence. ‘Greta was special and I’m nothing like you.’
My Greta was not a nothing.
If only Jago knew how my grief for her tore me apart every single day.
How I’d give anything to spend just one more afternoon with her, talking about Obama and the erotic smut books we had read, and to remind her just how special she truly was.
But no, I didn’t think Jago would ever understand that.
I glanced at the clock in the far corner of Sabroso. The café was essentially empty now, just Jago and me, and the two staff members tidying up so they could get home, before the Telltale Killer struck again.
Jago tried to smother his smile for the staff, but I caught the slight curl of it. Right, he’d wait for lock-up and then he would strike. I was still on my own, no Ben to protect me now, and no sign of Bill. Had he done it yet? I really needed my backup backup.
‘But I suppose I have to give you some credit. At the end of the day, I’ve found the real TellTale Killer now,’ Jago said, his intonation suggesting we were coming to the end of our conversation as he swigged the last of his tea.
‘I’ll write a corker of a book about you, Ruth, don’t you worry, and look, I’ve been thinking about setting up a charity, so I’ll make sure some of that money goes towards…
something you like. Horses, do you like horses? Or I don’t know, diabetes?’
I should have known he was still planning to kill me. But I’d gotten this far, and I had one last ace up my sleeve though I wasn’t sure it would guarantee my survival. Actually, I knew it wouldn’t, but what a way to go for old Ruth. What a way to finally have the last laugh.
‘Right, that makes sense,’ I said, somewhat resigned to my death. ‘Although… last request and all that. Would you mind glancing at your phone for a moment?’
‘What? Why?’ Jago scrunched up his nose, almost appalled I had asked him that, like a dad who really didn’t want to be involved with the local school fair magician.
‘Please, just humour me, Jago. I just want to see the news one last time before I…’ I jerked my head to one side and made my best attempt at a death rattle. ‘Just do this for me. Please.’
That seemed to intrigue him, wondering why I had such a bizarre request. Honestly, this part of my plan had not been discussed between the three of us, but I wasn’t going to die, with him thinking that he’d won.
Greta wouldn’t have gone easily and neither would I.
I just had to hope that, while I’d been talking to Jago, Bill had been doing what he was supposed to and that nothing had gone dramatically wrong in the process.
‘Owning the narrative, right?’ I said, watching him as he stared at his phone, his mind rapidly working to piece together what was happening before him.
Though my view of the video was upside down, I could see a news reporter sat at her desk, clearly just handed fresh information. I wouldn’t exactly call it serendipitous timing, given it was about to lead to my demise.
Do you want to know how they caught the BTK Killer?
He sent a floppy disk to the media, convinced he’d wiped all identifying data. The investigators recovered the disk’s metadata, traced it to a computer at his church, and even found his name embedded in the file properties. They had him arrested almost instantly.
And now ask yourself this: do you think someone with as big an ego as Jago Jones, who had evaded the police for two years and then just confessed that he had written most of his articles in advance, would store them on his work computer?
As I mentioned earlier, the thing about serial killers is their absolute, ridiculously sized ego. The longer they hunt, the more untouchable they truly believe they are, not noticing the more and more breadcrumbs they scatter with every single victim they think they claim.
Ego and stupidity often keep very close company.
‘… which is, of course, developing rapidly. For anyone just joining us, we can now report that an article has just been released by Tasha Duncan, citing several verified sources,’ the reporter announced, pausing for a quick breath.
‘We can confirm that Jago Jones, the award-winning journalist, has been identified as the man behind the TellTale Killer. We are told that a substantial body of digital data linking him to the murders has been handed over to the authorities. Police are responding immediately, and anyone with information on Mr Jones is urged to come forward straight away, as we continue to…’
So, it seemed Flowerpot Boy had done his job; it had worked.
I’d kept Jago away from the unit where he was keeping Carlota, drawn him out, and in that window of time, Bill slipped into the office across the road using Tasha’s ID, pulled what he needed from Jago’s computer using his software engineering prowess, and, together with Nico’s TFL hits, sent the lot to Tasha, whom I’d primed beforehand.
It was all there in tech babble I barely grasped when Bill was explaining it to me: terms like DOCX metadata and EXIF, whatever the hell that meant.
If everything else had gone to plan, the police were already on their way to the storage unit and hopefully here too.
‘Oh, you think I came here just to massage your ego? To tell you how amazing you are?’ I asked Jago, his face still dumbstruck as he tried to process what was happening.
I took a big swig of tea. ‘No, I came here to see that look on your face. You know, I spent the last two years thinking about you – thinking about how I could bring you down – and I never realised how utterly disappointing you’d turn out to be,’ I said, feeling a surge of catharsis in the words I was speaking.
It was everything I had ever wanted to say to him.
It was then that I saw it as he turned to face me, the monster Jago never truly believed himself to be, finally beginning to surface.
For a heartbeat, life or death hardly mattered. I, Ruth Watkins, had outmanoeuvred the TellTale Killer and was watching him receive, at last, a small, tiny sliver of his due; I was watching his downfall in real time.
‘See, Jago, I wonder if you could have got away with it. If you could have made it out the other side scot-free, and kept operating until you died at age ninety choking on a scone, but you made one critical mistake.’
He didn’t ask what it was, so I told him anyway.
‘You should have never touched my Greta.’
It would have been more impactful if I hadn’t belched just as I said Greta, but I felt like I still got my point across in the moment.
What I failed to realise, though, was that with his identity exposed, he had nothing left to lose anymore.
Whoops.
And that was when he pulled the knife from his sleeve, scrambled across the table, and drove for my heart. I threw up my arms in a desperate shield as my chair toppled beneath me as his weight crashed into mine. My fingers in my pocket still clenched tight around the scrap of Greta’s green dress.
Two things consumed my mind.
Firstly, I really hoped the police were on their way to rescue Detective Carlota.
Secondly, what animal would I be reincarnated as.
God, I really hoped it wasn’t a tortoise.