Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
I’d never really imagined what it would feel like, experiencing the funeral directors from this particular perspective. Being there in the lobby, feeling slightly hemmed in by the display coffins, it felt oddly surreal.
I took one last look at the trinkets and traditions Uncle Phil kept on the shelves bordering the visitors’ desk in the lobby, a carefully chosen mix of death accessories and regalia, designed to appeal to the widest range of people who came into the office.
I suppose we all cling to our rituals around death, little distractions from the sobering thought that death is the end because we want their lives to have had meaning, to have had importance.
‘Hiya, Ruth,’ Uncle Phil said, the natural glow of his optimism having returned to his face.
I forgot how warm and inviting his whole presence was.
He trotted up to me and wrapped his arms around me as delicately as he could.
There was no trace of Capri-Sun on his breath this time which I took to mean he was doing pretty well, all things considered.
I was so thankful he had kicked the habit; Capri-Sun addiction can ruin lives, kids.
‘How are you doing? How’s everything?’ he asked, gesturing to my still broken body.
‘Okay, I think,’ I said with a short sigh, instinctively smoothing my hands over my ribs as I pulled the plastic Sainsbury’s bag from my side. I handed over my funeral directors’ clothes – my smarties. ‘As requested,’ I said.
He gave a small, knowing smile.
‘Oh, I really should have called, Ruth. They won’t need these, you know.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, feeling my face frown ever so slightly.
‘They’ll bring their own uniforms in apparently, these hideous purple things.’
‘Urgh,’ I groaned. ‘I should’ve known.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said lightly. ‘I’ll pop it in the charity van. They’ll find some use for it, I’m sure.’
I was glad things between Uncle Phil and me were…
well, not perfect, but certainly better.
I doubted they’d ever be great again, but since the sale to the mega funeral-director conglomerate had gone through, there was a fragile but significantly more cordial understanding between us.
He’d said it wasn’t ideal, but after everything came out, including the news that I’d been, shall we say, fiddling with bodies in my spare time, Camborne and Sons’ reputation was never going to recover.
Of course I felt bad; I’d be an arsehole not to.
Still, the fact Uncle Phil was retiring anyway eased my conscience.
Sophie, meanwhile, was still glaring the sharpest of daggers at me as she hauled boxes from one room of the office to another.
She hadn’t spoken to me since it all came out, still clinging to the belief that she’d been destined for the managing director role that I’d callously stolen from her. Oh well.
‘So, what day are you officially closing up?’ I asked Uncle Phil, as he couldn’t help himself from neatening up some of the pens on the visitors’ desk.
‘July eighteenth,’ he said with a few short nods, eyes roaming the room as if trying to memorise every last detail before he left. ‘And then we’ll be out of here and off to France to spend my pension on wine and cheese.’
The door creaked open behind me, and I turned to see Detective Carlota.
She was still recovering from her injuries but, even on sick leave, she looked immaculate, the sharpness on her face had faded a little, her muscular frame had shrunk a bit, but her fit was still excellent – cream blazer and trousers, a white top underneath. It was effortlessly cool.
‘You ready?’ she asked me bluntly, not even a hello.
‘Yeah,’ I replied, then turned back to Uncle Phil. ‘I guess I’ll see you at your retirement do?’
Uncle Phil smiled, though I saw his whole face ever so slightly tighten at the sight of Carlota.
‘Are you here to question me again?’ he asked, trying to be funny but not doing a great job at hiding some of the fear that she actually was.
‘You should be so lucky,’ Detective Carlota responded with a wry smile. Oh, she wasn’t completely gone.
I turned to face her as she left the funeral directors as quickly as she’d come in, barely holding the door for me as I followed behind her.
‘How’s the spine?’ I asked her as we pulled out the chairs in the small little coffee place a few shops down the street from the funeral directors.
‘It’s healing,’ she said brusquely. Her tone was curt, austere even, but I sensed she hadn’t meant to sound gruff or abrasive with how she spoke. ‘How’re the ribs?’ she asked back.
‘Healing,’ I repeated.
A silence settled between us. It was… undeniably awkward, I can’t pretend it wasn’t, but I mean of course it was – this was the first time we’d seen each other in almost six months.
I’d been interviewed about that January night multiple times at this point, but I still struggled to remember it with vivid detail.
I remembered Jago lunging at me, the knife gripped tight in his hand, and then I remembered he missed.
Well, sort of missed, he still managed to dig and drive the blade through my ribs, slipping it between the intercostal space, a lucky angle that missed my heart, lungs, and any major blood vessels.
A split second later, he had yanked the knife back out and went to bury the blade in my chest again, but something stopped him.
More specifically, someone stopped him.
Even more specifically than that, my ex-husband’s boyfriend had stopped him by punching him direct in the jaw.
Bill had infiltrated the paper offices that night, sent the data to Tasha to break the story, and arrived just in time to find no sign of Ben and me in the café about to be made into a human kebab.
I’d often wondered where Bill disappeared to on all those mysterious late nights, why he had always been so aloof about it and came home smelling like Tiger Balm and taking copious amounts of ice cubes out of the freezer.
Turns out his secret life was something I could never have predicted:
Cage fighting.
And not just dabbling, either. Ninth-best in the country, man was really good.
Turns out that was his way of attempting to manage his anger.
I wondered how many of his fights had been fuelled by my use of Blu Tack on the shed walls, punching his opponent’s face, pretending it was the small scab that had been etched onto the wall.
Ben had massively disapproved of Bill’s pastime, seeing it as quite barbaric, hence why the subject had been somewhat frosty between the two of them.
I felt supremely glad that he’d found this particular release, as I watched him drive Jago into the floor again and again before he could stab me a second time, his fist hammering down as Jago’s skull repeatedly thudded against the wooden boards.
There were times, admittedly, I wished I’d never told Bill to stop, especially when he started smashing dirty crockery across Jago’s face.
The doctors said they didn’t know when exactly Jago would wake from the medically induced coma, but he’d probably just about pull through.
The lawyers, however, unanimously agreed that Bill was lucky to have been considered to have used reasonable force in the circumstances.
Everyone knew it wasn’t true, but he was doing it to the TellTale Killer so no one seemed to care much about how much exact force was exerted on the man who had killed at least eight innocent people.
At the time, everything had felt so intense, as if I was experiencing things in a heightened sense of reality. But now, it was more like all of that evening’s events had happened to someone else, or more like a weird fever dream I had experienced after too much blue cheese before bedtime.
‘And how many hours have you got left?’ Carlota asked. I could still feel the tension radiating from her, the Siberian winter of coldness that she continued to carry towards me.
‘Nine hundred and ninety,’ I replied with a slight guffaw. ‘But you know what? I’ll take it. I’d rather be picking up litter and doing gardening than, you know, being in prison.’
‘They’d eat you alive in prison,’ Detective Carlota said, glancing out the window while taking a small, gentle sip of her coffee. I could tell she was still angry with me by her tone, even if she didn’t realise it herself.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ I admitted, realising that my humour hadn’t been warmly received.
She drew a deep breath, resting her hands carefully across her torso. I could tell she was still in a lot of physical pain.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to say I’m sorry… but I am going to say thank you. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I know that what you did saved my life. So… thank you.’
‘Ah, it’s nothing,’ I said with a casual, relaxed smile.
She didn’t return it. I, personally, held no resentment towards her.
I’d heard she’d sent a remarkably persuasive letter to the judge during the trial, one that heavily influenced me getting community service rather than any prison time.
She didn’t owe me that, but she did it anyway, so there were no hard feelings on my part.
She’d changed since Jago had taken her, that much was obvious.
And I wondered what the real issue was. Was she still furious that I’d taken away her chance of catching the TellTale Killer herself, refusing her chance to redeem herself in the eyes of her superiors?
Or was being kidnapped by a serial killer simply something you never really could recover from?
I didn’t know. What I did know was that, despite everything, she’d still been sidelined by the station.
She told me the current case she was working on was a trail of graffiti on posh people’s houses.
Still, I felt a flicker of hope when she mentioned her kitchen remodel was finally finished and that Alba was coming over that evening.
Alba, she said, had been a huge help in her recovery so it was good to know she wasn’t going through it alone.
I sort of felt Carlota needed someone, she wasn’t one of those people who could be by themselves.
Funny she mentioned that, I was actually heading to Nico’s tonight.
Dinner in, a movie on Netflix, and, well…
you know what that implies: chill. I was just grateful it was at his place.
There was no way I was getting laid in the shed with Toast watching excitedly from the corner, her eyes bulging as she watched us potentially fornicate.
It was only a brief meeting; she’d mentioned when we arranged it that she had just fifteen minutes to spare.
So as punctual as ever, Detective Carlota rose to her feet and offered a hand when the clock struck 10.
15. I knew better than to attempt a hug, she wouldn’t have returned it, so I simply nodded and gave her hand a very formal shake.
‘You’re a really good detective, Cis,’ I said as she grabbed her blazer from the back of her chair. ‘I know it’s only a matter of time before they see that.’
‘Yeah,’ Detective Carlota replied quietly, in that way that told me she either didn’t believe it, didn’t think it meant much coming from me, or had simply given up on the dream altogether.
I watched her leave the café, cross the street and head towards the zebra crossing, lifting a small wave at the stopping cars.
It was strange, really. For two years, ever since Greta, I’d felt like Detective Carlota had been looking out for me.
And yet, six months on, I suddenly felt like a parent watching their child walk into school for the first time, wondering if they’d be okay.