Tell Me Your Secret

by Dorothy Koomson

  I stare at their photos, their smiles, their eyes, their uniqueness that has been deliberately snuffed out. They weren’t just killed in one go, either – from what I knew of what The Blindfolder did, these were the ones who’d survived their first encounter with him; who’d managed to do what he’d demanded of them and had got out of there alive. And after the devastation, after what he did, they rebuilt their lives. They managed to get themselves as close to whole as they could get. They got their smiles back, their lives back, their themness back . . . and then this happened.

  I shouldn’t look too long. Every time my eyes linger on them as they were, and my mind pauses on their stories, I well up, my heart starts to skydive through space, my hands tremble and quake, as I slide into becoming too involved.

  I blink away the emotion that is clouding my mind. The irony, of course, is that most people think I don’t care. I’ve heard the whispers, listened to me being described as a bit of a cold fish, an unemotional puppet; more barren than the Serengeti. And here I am, practically weeping for the cut-short lives of some women I didn’t really know.

  Get a grip, Jody, I tell myself harshly. Get a grip on yourself. Falling apart, crying, showing any type of emotion to the rest of the relief won’t help these women. It won’t help to save all those others out there, either.

  I hear the muted, thick flumph of the door opening. And so it begins, I think as I blink faster, harder, trying to get rid of any residual vestige of my silliness.

  I’m doing it for them: the vibrant women who are pictured up there on the boards, not the bodies found face down, with blindfolds tied around their faces and their backs bare to highlight their markings. I’m doing it for the women they were before, the people with the smiles, the outwardly happy eyes, who grinned at a camera, never dreaming of what could go wrong.

  And I’m doing it for the others who are out there and need to be found and protected before the sixth Monday rolls around.

  I’m doing it for her, too, the one I let down. The one who I should have tried so much harder to rescue.

  Pieta

  Monday, 10 June

  The lift doors swish open on the tenth floor and I step out onto the floor of BN Sussex, the lifestyle magazine I work for, and I have to take a deep breath before I contemplate heading for the double glass doors into our office.

  This building, in the redeveloped area behind Brighton train station, is swish and shiny; glass and steel and architectural excellence combined. It houses, on its top four floors, the biggest local newspaper network on the south coast. There’ve been rumblings, though, over the last couple of years, as profits have fallen and people have been getting their news from the internet, that we’re going to have to move from this building. Probably to somewhere in the back of beyond where rents are cheaper.

  BN Sussex (an ‘interesting’ pun that plays on saying Be iN Sussex as well as playing on the BN that prefixes Brighton postcodes) is a weekly magazine that comes inside The New Sussex Times. We are always, according to Lillian, under threat of closure. We don’t pull in enough ad revenue, she tells us, we don’t have enough of the major stories that will put us back on the media map in a significant way, we don’t coast along enough (we do sometimes get the big stories) to be invisible to those in charge. At the Monday morning editorial meeting, we are all reminded how close to folding we are, how close to being ‘out there’ in the wilderness that is journalism with publications going under all around us as more and more people rely on social media and the web to keep up to date.

  I’ll have missed the Monday meeting now, which is not good for anyone. I take another deep breath, press my security card against the white security panel, wait for the beep and push open the doors.

  The meeting is always held at this end of the office, nearest to the exit and, as I expected, it’s over so everyone is on their feet, chairs in front of them, ready to wheel them back to their desks.

  Lillian looks pointedly at the clock and then back at me with her perfectly shaped right eyebrow hoiked up into an arch of disdain. ‘Nice of you to join us, Pi-eta,’ Lillian says. (She often says my name wrong, not ‘Peter’ like the boy’s name, when she’s especially annoyed.)

  ‘I had the launch for the new Sea Me, Sea You Beauties cosmetics line?’ I reply. ‘Over in Stanmer Park, remember?’

  ‘That was cancelled last week,’ Lillian snaps. ‘They emailed and said someone had been called away suddenly so they were going to reschedule . . .’ Lillian’s voice peters out as she realises that she didn’t pass on the message. And, not only that, she’s obliquely admitted she didn’t pass on the message – in front of others. In this situation, there’s only one thing she can do – make it my fault.

  ‘You should have called to let me know where you were going,’ she says. ‘I would have reminded you then it was cancelled.’

  I smile at Lillian, raise my sustainable bamboo ‘Mama Needs Coffee’ cup to my mouth, slot my lips over the little oval hole in the lid and take a sip in lieu of a deep, irritated breath. Kobi’s school fees, I think as I take another unwanted but necessary sip of coffee. Eating. Electricity. Living in the warm. Running water. Clothes. I think of these things and I sip my coffee.

  Because I have silenced myself, Lillian sweeps her gaze around at the others who are still standing there in the meeting area. What are you hanging around for? she asks silently. Don’t you have work to do?

  The other members of staff scuttle away, wheeling their chairs and carrying their pens, pads and their flatplans of the magazine with them.

  ‘My office, now,’ Lillian says to me.

  ‘Do you want me to come as well?’ Tiffany asks. She’s the senior features writer and columnist to my position as deputy editor.

  ‘No, I need to talk to Pieta alone.’

  In her glass-walled office, Lillian sits behind her desk, kicks off her spaghetti-thin heels and leans back in her chair. I sit on the edge of the seat of the left-hand chair on the other side of the desk. She doesn’t speak for long seconds, instead she looks down her nose at me, appraising me, it seems, with her green-hazel eyes. It feels like she is trying to peel back the layers of who I appear to be in an attempt to find out who I truly am. Five years we’ve worked together and she has only recently started doing this. And it almost always precedes her saying one of two things. Either it’s: ‘We need a win, Pieta’ coupled with a templing of her hands; or it’s: ‘What on Earth are you wearing?’ Which is today’s opening gambit.

  I resist the – very strong – temptation to say ‘clothes’ and instead look down at myself. I’ve still got my red jacket on, and peeping out from its sleeves are the edges of my rainbow-striped armwarmers, the holes of which are hooked over my thumbs to keep them in place. I’ve also gone for a white top, navy-blue denim skirt and rainbow-striped leggings. I’m quite tame today.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask her.

  ‘You look like you’re auditioning to be on children’s television! Do you really expect anyone to take you seriously dressed like that?’

  I say nothing because Lillian will never comprehend how colour helps me get through the day. I may seem ridiculous, I may not dress my age, but without colour, everything would be a struggle. When I brought colour into my life in a significant way, everything became better. She won’t understand that. And anyway, if I stay silent long enough, she will get to the point, eventually.

  Predictably, she temples her hands and I notice her nails are manicured a dusky pink that matches her lipstick, just before she says: ‘We need a win, Pieta. You need a big win, Pieta.’

  I relax then. Now she’s said it, I edge myself back in the seat and almost collapse against the back.

  ‘I don’t mind telling you that things are looking bleak for you at the moment,’ she adds.

  There are shelves lining the walls behind Lillian’s desk, and these are the shelves where physical evidence of previous ‘wins’, past glories, are displayed. Gold statuettes, glass trophies, framed ce
rtificates. All of them denoting excellence and achievement, more than half of them displaying my name as the winner of said award, be it for beauty writing, political comment, or lifestyle insight. I am an award-winning journalist whose trophies reside in her editor’s office because they are, as she says, the result of a team effort. ‘Wins’ always are. Losses, yeah, well they’re all mine to carry alone.

  Deborah used to be Lillian’s deputy editor. And she used to be the person being treated like this. As the newspaper’s, and therefore BN Sussex’s, fortunes took a dive, Deborah’s life got worse and worse. She couldn’t do anything right; everything she commissioned, wrote and edited was ripped apart at an almost microscopic level to find something wrong with it. Every. Single. Thing. We all saw, we all cringed, we some of us even tried to intervene. But when Deborah left, we all knew it could be any of us next. The art director, Jacob, didn’t hang around to find out if he’d be next in the firing line: he decided to pursue his life-long dream of becoming a coffee shop owner and handed in his notice on Deborah’s last day.

  Lillian did well for almost nine months. The loss of two such senior people seemed to shock her back to her normal self. But then she decided someone in her office was to blame for the general state of the magazine industry. And that person turned out to be me, the idiot who’d accepted promotion to deputy editor.

  ‘Do you want me to resign?’ I ask Lillian.

  Yes, I have a son, bills, responsibilities but this dance has got to its death throes now. We’ve been circling each other for months, doing this dance where she becomes more and more intolerable. I need to kick-start this conversation and get it over with.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she replies with utter disgust on her face and in her tone.

  ‘You’ve been treating me as if I’m not good enough for months now, Lillian. I haven’t had a “win” as you keep reminding me, but I wrote most of the stories in the last three issues. You said yourself at last Monday’s editorial meeting that advertising around those stories went up significantly in those last six weeks, but you still act as if I’m not good enough, I’m not cutting it and I need to buck up my ideas. It’s fine, I get it, you want rid of me. I’m costing you money, you can’t really see the gains – despite me doing the best I can—’

  ‘You are being ridiculous,’ she says. Gaslighting. She is great at that. Gaslighting, rewriting history. ‘Stop being ridiculous.’ She sits forward in her seat. ‘A big news story is about to break,’ she continues as though I haven’t broached the unspoken standoff we’ve been having. ‘It’s a local woman – well, local as in she’s from Sussex, and she is willing to sell her story to whichever publication will give her the best deal.’

  ‘Won’t BN Sussex be up against the nationals?’

  ‘She’s from Sussex, so we have the home-field advantage. And she doesn’t want to talk to the papers, she wants to talk to a news magazine so they can do a bigger story on her. So, yes, she will also be meeting journalists from the national newspaper mags, but, like I just said, home-field advantage.’

  ‘She seems to have an unusual amount of say and control in this,’ I reply. ‘Doesn’t that mean she has a huge story that we can’t afford to pay the kind of cash the nationals will have?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Pieta, how many times do I have to say “home-field advantage”? She has set her fee at a level that everyone can afford. She says it’s not about the money, it’s more about the story getting out there as soon as possible and protecting other women from what she went through.’

  ‘Right. So who was she having an affair with?’ I ask. This woman may not be charging the Earth for her story, but it will cost us thousands in solicitor fees getting it checked and checked and rechecked to remove any legally contentious material.

  ‘No one,’ Lillian states.

  And anyway . . . ‘Are you asking me to pitch for this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really? Are you sure you want me?’ I say. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer Tiffany to do it? You said it yourself that she’s got a wonderful fresh new voice and she really speaks to the readers with her writing style. Wouldn’t Tiffany be better for this story?’

  In response, my boss’s eyes bore into me like a drill pushing its determined way through concrete. Lillian doesn’t like being reminded of the time she came to the pub and told all of us how wonderful Tiffany was and how inadequate the rest of us were. You could learn a thing or two from her, a drunk Lillian had told me. She is so talented, the future of journalism, you just churn out stories.

  I return her gaze unabashed. It’s not often I can look people in the eye, I often avoid eye contact as much as I can, but not today, not at this point. She can’t have it both ways – either Tiffany is the second coming of journalism or I am good at my job.

  ‘We both know that Tiffany is not up to this,’ Lillian says quietly. ‘She wouldn’t even know where to begin with the interview, let alone with writing it up.’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘I know you don’t just edit her work before it comes to me, I know you completely rewrite it,’ Lillian hisses. ‘We both know that Tiffany is not experienced enough for this.’

  That cost her, admitting that. And that admission makes me sit up straighter in my seat. It wasn’t a resounding ‘you’re amazing’ but it wasn’t ‘get the girl half your age to teach you your job, you amateur’, which is as close as Lillian gets to compliments these days.

  ‘I’ll come to the budget in a minute, but when you go in there, go in hard. Chuck as much value added as you can get. Offer her a serial if you think that will appeal to her. Let her know teaser pieces will appear in The New Sussex Times in the week leading up to publication, and they’ll probably be picked up by the nationals, all the while keeping her exclusive with us. Look, suggest that if the story goes down well, you’re willing to work with her on writing a book about her experiences.’

  ‘Am I willing to do that?’

  ‘We need this story, Pieta. If she could write it herself she would, so if she thinks she’ll get someone to ghostwrite her life story and make money from a book, she might go for us over the nationals.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But we’ll have to box clever. She’ll be talking to lots of journalists, so even if we sign an exclusivity contract, we can’t stop them talking about the story. You’ll have to work fast. I’ve found the right photographer, who I said would go along to meet her with you. He seems to know what I’m looking for and so if she turns out to be large or ugly, he’ll be able to tell me how we can improve on her looks.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you say that, Lillian,’ I reply. In all my years of journalism, nothing has really changed. We still want the most hideous stories from the prettiest people – anyone else has to be camouflaged.

  ‘I want this story, Pieta,’ my boss says, ignoring me. ‘I really want this story.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m getting that,’ I say. ‘What is her story?’

  Lillian actually shudders in response. ‘It’s horrible. Really nasty and scary. But the basics she’s told anyone so far is that a few months ago, she was smoking outside a club when someone kidnapped her. She was taken somewhere and kept prisoner for two days – a weekend, it seems. That isn’t even the worst part. She says that the man who kept her said that she wasn’t allowed to open her eyes for the whole weekend. No matter what he did to her, she had to keep her eyes closed. And if she did open her eyes, he would kill her.’

  Lillian is a blur. Before my eyes the image of her has disintegrated into fuzz, everything around me is opaque, the light merging with colours and shadows, the edges blunting themselves until everything is out of focus.

  ‘She’s convinced he’s done it before, and had killed others. So basically, she’s the living victim of a serial killer. I’m pretty sure the police are actively hunting him if she wants to tell all. And we have the chance to be right in the middle of it. That’s why I want her story, Pieta.’

  I
have to keep my eyes open.

  I can’t let my eyes relax for even a second to blink.

  I must not shut my eyes.

  My eyes are open but he is here – creeping into the unexpected places.

  I feel the cold, sharp point of the knife tracing a pattern over my skin, I have the weight of silk being removed from my face, I have the smell of him crawling up my nose, I have the echo of his voice thrumming through my nerves.

  ‘If you want to survive this weekend, there is only one thing you must do – keep your eyes closed . . . If you do open your eyes, I will end you.’

  Jody

  Monday, 10 June

  ‘For those of you who don’t know, my name is Detective Inspector Jody Foster.’ I wait for the titters, the amused looks, the frowns from those who think I’m taking the mick.

  ‘As I say to everyone who hears my name, you’re going to have to get over it. She had it first and mine’s spelt with a y.’

  There are twenty people in this room, some of them from regular CID, others who will be working with me just on this. I managed to get five people, full-time, a miracle by anyone’s reckoning.

  I have to get every single person in this room onside – and quickly. They don’t know me, they don’t know what I can do, who I am, or why I’m here. They only know that I’m in charge of this side investigation that everyone should be working on and that I’m not one of them. I’m a Londoner and I may well have Londoner airs and graces.