The Killer You Know

by S. R. Masters

  She’s not noticed before, but his finger is so long, like it would need extra knuckles to work. Her head is swimming with the vodka and everything he says and does is funnier and stranger than usual.

  “You’re not a squirrel,” she says. “You’d die.”

  “I’m not scared of dying. It’s like sleep. Or before you were born.”

  “For ever, though. Can you imagine that? For ever and ever and ever.”

  “We all have to do it.” He shrugs. He is always shrugging. Jen’s mum often says of her work colleagues that they are the personification of things: the personification of stupidity, the personification of thoughtlessness. Will is the personification of shrugs.

  “Some people live on, though, don’t they?” she says. “Shakespeare. Uh, Freddie Mercury. Marilyn Monroe.”

  “You sound like my mum.” Will plucks a bit of grass, rolls it in his root-like fingers, and throws it forward. “Galaxy of the stars.”

  “What are you on about?”

  “Don’t worry,” he says.

  Jen knows that Will’s mum is a member of the Knowle Players, and was once in an episode of Brookside, and even though she doesn’t exactly understand what that expression means, she thinks she understands it on some level. It conjures images of handprints in cement, and of Greek legends, Andromeda and Perseus, immortalised in the night sky. She is about to ask more when a high-speed train appears in the distance and soon screams by them, close enough for her to feel the rush of the displaced air.

  When it is gone she looks over and Will is staring at her. First at her chest, then briefly at her face. Then he looks at the tracks.

  “That was loud,” he says.

  Her bra is slightly visible at the armhole of her tank top so she adjusts herself. But why bother? Let Will look if that’s what he wants, did she really mind? He is the one here with her, drunk with her.

  She lies back on the grass and, unable to get comfortable, she says, “Will, can I lie down on your lap.”

  “If you want,” he says.

  She puts her head there and closes her eyes. There is a faint, wee-like smell coming from his trousers that she knows is just damp, like how the towels in the bathroom start to smell if they’re not put out to dry. It would be off-putting normally, but now she feels close to Will and doesn’t mind. Still, she flinches when his fingers touch her forehead. Eyes open, she sees them disappear above her sight line and feels them slowly press into her hair. She is tense at first, with him touching her that way, but actually the sensation is nice when she concentrates on that. Little tingles of pleasure scatter across her back when his nails score her scalp.

  Will’s mum is probably too busy acting to do all the cleaning and drying her mum does. She should maybe speak to her one day about how she ended up in Brookside, whether the Knowle Players have teenage members.

  The fingers stop moving through the rows of her hair. Something cold and dry presses on her mouth.

  He is kissing her. Will is kissing her.

  She tries not to react, holds her breath. He has managed to lean over and put his lips to hers upside down. Is this what she wants?

  His tongue squirms forward and she isn’t able to stop it going into her mouth. She can taste the vodka, and cigarettes, and something like peanuts. He is overeager, doing it wrong, or maybe it’s because he’s upside down. He is too deep and she thinks she might gag.

  She sits up, takes a deep breath.

  “You okay?” he says. His voice is low and calm.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting that,” she says. But she pours as much smile into her delivery as she can so as not to upset him.

  She reaches for the bottle and there is a quarter left. She swigs all but a tiny drop, then offers this to Will. Immediately she feels the sickness and resistance ebb.

  “Can we do that again?” he asks.

  She doesn’t say no. She smiles at him. Wanting to be kind, if only to reward him because he is the sole one that has recognised her, that has seen there is something special about her. And it’s not like he is ugly. And it is not like she didn’t enjoy it when he stroked her hair.

  “You don’t fancy Adeline then?”

  “Not thought about it,” he says.

  He moves beside her again and leans in.

  “Gently,” she can’t help but say. And he does go slower this time, but still his tongue feels like an invasion. She doesn’t want to be kissing him. It should be Rupesh, and this isn’t right. But there is a chance he’ll tell the others about this, and that she did something wrong in some way, and that will be awful. So it is only when his long fingers enclose her right breast that she breaks the kiss and forcibly takes his hand away.

  What to say to him now? How to make this less terrible for both of them?

  “Can we just do what we were doing before?”

  Shrug. No emotion registering on his face. “Yep.”

  On her way to his lap she lets out a sigh that is disguised by the noise of them shifting positions. It takes a long time for the sensation to feel relaxing again. A long time before she is satisfied he doesn’t hate her, and allows herself to close her eyes.

  When she opens her eyes again two eyes are looking back. The light has changed, it is getting dark. There is drool on her cheek and Will’s fingers still move back and forth in her hair. Another thing—there is an insistent pressure on her neck that she only fully understands when it pulses against her.

  She sits bolt upright and wipes her mouth. Winces. The vodka; her head. A different pressure acting on her, like a fist is pushing against the back of her left eye.

  “What’s the time?”

  “Dunno,” he says.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “Dunno. A couple of hours.”

  Hours? A couple of hours? They had come here early afternoon. If it’s starting to get dark it must be… nearly teatime. He’s just been sitting there stroking her hair and staring at her all this time.

  On the walk home she can’t bring herself to say anything to him. He occasionally rambles, at one point about the fields having Roman things buried in them, about the Romans living for ever. She can’t listen to him, though. He should have woken her up.

  When they say goodbye she goes to her room and hides under her bedcovers. Her head thumps and crying makes it worse. Downstairs plates clank and doors bang: Mum and Andrea making dinner together, happy bloody families. Why had she let Will kiss her? Why had she even gone with him in the first place? Stupid, stupid girl.

  Winter, 2015

  Will’s brother delivered his answer to how he knew where I lived—Everyone knew where your house was—without any apparent clue as to how creepy it sounded. Still, his opening line was enough for me to want to hear what he had to say: “So what has Will done this time?”

  It wasn’t my house to invite him into, and as Dad was pottering around in the kitchen within earshot I suggested we walk and talk rather than conduct whatever business he imagined we had in the doorway.

  Outside it was chilly, coat weather really, although I didn’t appreciate my mistake in not bringing mine until it was too late—and I didn’t want to go back either in case he read it as a sign that I expected his stay to be long.

  At the end of the drive he gazed over at the house where Mr. Strachan once lived, shaking his head.

  “And I remember who lived there, too,” he said. “That wank stain has a lot to answer for. I don’t think he was quite the same after all that, Will.”

  “I know, awful,” was all I could think to say. “You reckon it changed him?”

  “Oh yeah. See, his whole attitude was different after that. He just withdrew. Hit the booze and the drugs big time.”

  “And did Strachan ever explain why—”

  “Never. Copped to it without ever explaining. I can only imagine Will said something to him that day that made him flip. Left him with a permanently damaged eye, you know.”

  “Jesus.”

  We turned
left, heading towards the mouth of Elm Close. At some point I planned to go and walk along the old footpaths, see how they’d updated Steve’s place, but something about Will’s brother, his resemblance to Will perhaps, made me want to stay visible and keep to the main road.

  “What made you ask if Will had done something?” I said.

  “Just worried about you, mainly,” he said. He had this tic of taking a sharp, noisy breath through his mouth before speaking. “Why did you show up at ours? On Christmas Day.”

  Doubtless he had come here with some agenda and I didn’t want to end up hoisted on a lie.

  “Well, we’d actually organised a reunion that Will didn’t show up to. We were sort of trying to find out what happened to him, actually.”

  “Right,” he said, appearing to mull over the implications. “So he’s not… done anything to you?”

  “No,” I said. Then to keep honest, I added: “Not that we know of.”

  “It’s just, I went to catch up with you yesterday and there were four of you in that car. Just, when people start coming asking about Will in big groups I worry. Especially when I saw it was you.”

  There was an opportunity here to learn more about Will that I could share with the others later. “If you don’t mind me asking, what worries you? We were still thinking of trying to track him down. Is that a bad idea?”

  “See, Will’s not good with boundaries. He gets these obsessions. Especially about… well, if you’re pretty.” I didn’t react to his compliment, didn’t like the flirtatious edge he’d tried to add again. “After his trouble at uni he lived with me for a while, signed on, smoked weed, looked for work. Remember him getting sick a lot because he never ate right. I’d been at York and he was at the poly, and I had this housemate, pretty like I say, and he latched on to her, because she was nice to him. Gemma moved out after six months. He didn’t know it was because of him—that she didn’t really appreciate his appearances in her room for late-night chats. She had this problem saying no, to be fair, thought she was helping him after what he’d been through. That’s just how he was with women, never understood the rules very well.”

  We reached the end of Elm Close and turned left down Blythe Lane. I folded my arms to keep warm.

  “Then he went through this stage of never being around, staying in his room all the time. I just thought it was Will being Will. Next thing I’m picking him up from a police station because of something that happened at Gem’s. When I asked him about it in the car, he told me that he’d argued with her at her house because he’d overheard a conversation she’d been having slagging him off. See, I didn’t even know he’d been in contact with her, which was weird anyway, given why she’d left. It didn’t make sense. So I pressed him, and he said he’d carried on being friends with her, going around to hers for chats, and that’s when he’d overheard her saying bad things to someone about him. Didn’t make sense. Told me he’d confronted her, and I’m like what did he hear? How did he hear it? How did he find out where she lived?

  “It only came together once Gem came to speak to me about it. See, he’d been going to hers all the time, and she’d been too polite as always, but eventually told him that her boyfriend wasn’t happy about him turning up and that he had to stop.

  “One night he comes over all agitated, and she says he definitely has to stop. And he starts yelling at her. Accuses her of thinking all these things about him, hysterical, crying. He broke a mug against the wall by her head, and her boyfriend, who was in the other room, had to restrain him after calling the police. Thing is, the stuff he said turned out to be things she and the boyfriend had actually talked about the last couple of nights. Really specific things, sentences and everything. She says the window had been open that night, and later she’d found mud on the floor of her wardrobe.”

  “Shit, that’s terrible,” I said. He might have been folded in there all night while they slept, stewing hatefully in the dark, waiting.

  Monks gulped air with another pharyngeal hiss. “He and I fell out over that. He moved out and to be honest we haven’t spoken since. I kept tabs on him for a while, but he wanted nothing to do with me. He fell out with Mum and Roger, too, and they lost track of him. He kept wanting money, and Roger always thought it was drugs because of the stuff that happened at uni.”

  We were approaching the pub we all used to know as The Nag’s Head. Outside a sole smoker sat on the stoop. I told Monks I was grateful for his concern about us, but once more reassured him that we wanted nothing more than to establish why Will hadn’t come to the reunion despite saying he would.

  “I’m surprised you got a response at all,” he said. “Hey, while we are here, do you want to get a drink? Talk a bit more. Catch up on the old neighbourhood.”

  Having not spoken to him before yesterday, I declined, telling him I wanted to get back because of the cold.

  “Pub’s got a fire,” he said, doing nothing to ease my doubts that the whole appearance had been a pantomime to get me to go for a drink with him.

  “No thanks.”

  The walk back was a little awkward. I tried to make small talk, asking about his real name.

  “It’s Michael,” he said. “Mike. Monks was… It’s a long story, but basically our sister, Liz, couldn’t say Michael, so she said Monks.”

  I don’t think I even knew there was a sister. Had she been at the house during our visit?

  “Can I have your number?” he said when we reached my parents’ drive. On seeing the reaction on my face, he quickly clarified. “I’ll let you know if Will gets in touch with us. You never know? And, Adeline, could you let us know if you do hear from him? I think Mum is going to be over the moon that you heard from him recently.”

  Once we’d swapped numbers, I said, “We noticed his band are still gigging. They have one tonight in Manchester.”

  “Really?” he said. “See, that’s good to hear. He kept going on about leaving them to do a solo project. They were quite serious at one point. Got played by John Kennedy once. You going to go?”

  I laughed like it was the maddest suggestion in the world. “Is he definitely playing with them still?”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t say.” Before going back to his car, he said, “I didn’t mean to scare you or anything.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “He’s harmless really, I just… I just never want what happened to Gemma to happen again.”

  “I understand,” I said, once more picturing Will crouched down inside that wardrobe listening to the intimate late-night sounds of two lovers who knew nothing of his presence.

  We all sat at the far end of Rupesh’s open-plan lounge around a large table, tea and coffee on the go. The cold from earlier that day had burrowed into my bones and I sat with my knees up to my chest on one of the dining chairs while filling in the group about what Mike told me.

  When I was done, Steve said: “I haven’t heard back from the web form yet. The number was a dead end…”

  He trailed off and no one spoke, each of us lost in thought.

  “What did you want to tell us, Jen?” Rupesh said.

  “So okay.” She sat up straight. “The loft is a complete state so I haven’t found my diaries yet, but on Christmas Day, well, it was just boring as hell, a lot of kids running around, and you know, everyone can’t take their eyes off the toddlers. So I started flicking through some of the articles about the supposed suicides again. The one at Manifest had more written about it because the press picked up on some comment the coroner made at the inquest about the girl taking Paroxetine. Apparently it can cause suicidal behaviour, and she wasn’t prescribed it—so he made a recommendation about online drug loopholes being closed. He actually linked it to her suicide. Anyway, the girl had a prior history of mental health problems: depression, suicide attempts, addiction; she was well known to mental health services. So on a whim I searched her name and mental health hospital, and, hey presto, turns out she was something called a Peer Support Of
ficer at this hospital, Wallgrove, in guess where? York.”

  Jen brought up the article on her phone and placed it on the table for the rest of us to see. I leaned forward. A photograph occupied most of the screen: five women standing in a line, grinning in front of a modern building. HOSPITAL STAFF RAISE £2000 FROM PEDOMETER CHALLENGE, read the article’s headline. Beneath the picture was a caption listing the women’s names.

  “It’s the same Ellie Kidd,” Jen said, “same face in the photo they used in the articles about her inquest.”

  “York’s a big enough place,” Steve said, but his expression was both impressed and concerned.

  “I mean,” Rupesh said, “I’ve worked and studied there.” He didn’t sound convinced either. The coincidence was too strange.

  “I’m sure everyone’s got connections to a uni town like that,” Steve said. “Still, it’s hardly evidence against Will.”

  “But hold on a minute,” Jen said. “So there wasn’t as much on the woman who died at Loch Ness. Her name was Sara Kuzmenski and the report on the inquest revealed a history of mental health problems too. Anxiety, depression. They love mentioning mental health issues, it’s in everything for both women. Her brother commented at the inquest that she’d tried killing herself before, although in the end the coroner said he couldn’t speculate on why she’d gone into the water so ruled it as found drowned, with drugs and alcohol a possible factor. Reading between the lines the family seemed to accept it was a suicide. They found weed, alcohol and anti-depressants in her body and in her car, and her mum said she loved nature so it made sense that she would travel to the Highlands. But here’s the thing: Sara was from Boston Spa.” No one spoke, and so she added: “Near York. The inquest was even done by the same coroner’s office. So not only are these two suicides linked by what we remember, but both are living in and around York and suffer from mental health issues severe enough that no family or coroner asks questions when they take their own lives in odd locations. Wouldn’t you say that having previous mental health issues might make them obvious candidates if you wanted to make a murder look like a suicide? Add to that Will’s connection to York…”