The Killer You Know

by S. R. Masters

  I pulled him closer, then let him go, ready to leave. As if he wanted to balance the emotions in the room, he then said, “Of course, I remember how things were with your mum, Adeline, so don’t feel you have to use it.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Well, I remember how it is with the two of you. I know it’s been difficult.”

  “Of course,” I said, no idea where this was leading.

  “What I’m saying is that I know relationships with parents are complicated. So I won’t judge, or be offended, if you don’t take up the offer. I mean, in medicine we have to make life and death decisions routinely—”

  I twigged what he was saying and heat surged into my face. “Rupesh, I don’t want Mum to die,” I said, sounding more defensive than I’d intended.

  “No, well obviously. What I mean to say is it’s a quality of life issue, and these things aren’t clear. But it happens a lot in medicine, so don’t feel bad… Just do with that what you will, that’s all I’m saying.”

  A silence fell between us, as I rifled through all the things I’d said about Mum to the others that might give them the impression I wanted her dead.

  My eye was once more drawn to the green Nessie model up on the dresser, and my thoughts took a different direction.

  Rupesh sounded glad for the change of subject when he asked: “What’s caught your eye?”

  “Just admiring your Nessie,” I said and laughed. It was good to laugh. Made things more comfortable.

  “It was Dad’s,” he said. “I think he actually thought the monster might be real, if you can believe that. A man of science, yet he thought you couldn’t dismiss all those eye-witness sightings.”

  “It just looks a bit out of place.”

  “Oh right, yeah, well most of that stuff was Mum’s. But yeah, Dad loved Loch Ness. He even bought a cabin in Inverness.”

  With that, Rupesh looked at his watch again and hurried out of the door.

  Something was different about the lounge when I got home, but it wasn’t obvious what it was until I saw Dad sitting at the top of the stairs, having a “little rest.” He’d packed away the plastic Christmas tree and put it in the attic. On his own.

  “It wasn’t a problem. You know your mum can’t tolerate Christmas outstaying its welcome.”

  “Dad, I know you think you’re thirty, but you can ask for help. That tree is really heavy.”

  He dismissed me with a pffft.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Your mum?” he said. “In bed, love.”

  I went up and let myself into her room. Shutting the door behind me, I went to her bedside. She said nothing but watched me with some apprehension. She was sitting up, the page of a glossy magazine open on an article about the royal baby.

  “Mum,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Mum, I need to ask you about something. This is really important, so can you look at me please? Thank you. I want to ask you about Mr. Strachan. I need you to tell me what happened to him after he was arrested.”

  She tutted and turned to look out of the window. “Why would I know anything about that?” Her voice was only just louder than a whisper.

  I took a deep breath, waited for her to make eye contact with me again, then said, “You know why.”

  Rupesh, 1998

  The others are all waiting for Rupesh outside the front gate of his house.

  “Okay,” he says, closing the gate behind him before taking a deep breath. His chest is so tight. “The first clue is, ‘Look near the grave from 1974.’”

  No one responds at first. Then at last Will makes a sound like he’s intrigued.

  Steve says nothing but does that face, the one where he squints with his mouth open like you’ve just said the most disgusting thing in the world. Like he’s saying, That’s not a proper clue.

  It’s not a proper clue, though; Steve’s right. He only made it up on the walk back from the graveyard ten minutes ago. He barely slept last night, and spent so long in bed this morning he only really had time to come up with one clue before needing to hide the thing somewhere. The graveyard isn’t far from the house, just opposite The Nag’s Head on Blythe Lane.

  “So are we all meant to leave together, from here?” Steve says.

  “No, of course not,” Rupesh says, realising that if they did, they’d all reach the clue at the same time. “Go back home, and then leave at exactly eleven.”

  “I live further from the graveyard than Will,” Steve says.

  “Not really,” Rupesh says. “From here it’s about the same.”

  “And we’ll all see each other?”

  He hasn’t planned this far ahead. He can be such a cockflap sometimes. Now he is just confirming all the worst things Steve must think about him.

  Adeline saves the day, suggesting they all leave at slightly different times, like she had done with her round. Even though this has its own problems, it seems to satisfy Steve. They walk off, leaving Rupesh standing on his own. He feels sick. The whole rest of his Dedication still has to be invented, and he’s only got fifteen minutes until they set off.

  The clue he’d spent all morning on—the one in the graveyard—is not that much better than the first.

  BARNey Rubble would like it here.

  More than likely it will be the best one, though, and only because it borrowed a trick from one of Adeline’s clues. Will they understand he means the old barn out in the fields behind Steve’s? They might equally focus in on the rubble part. What if they think he means all the bricks scattered around the lake, or the base?

  The trees from the gardens on either side of Dead Man’s Alley rise up and block out the light. Rupesh shivers in the shade on his way to the stile at the end. His nose fills with that horrible dark compost smell. His clue will have to do, it’s too late now. He’s so fed up he can’t give it any more thought. Fed up of being made to do things he doesn’t want to do. Fed up of that look on Steve’s face when they are supposed to be having fun. If it weren’t for Jen he’d just give up completely. He won’t jinx it by dwelling, but Jen’s been paying him a lot of attention since the summer holidays started. He still likes her a lot, too, and if, if, either of them are banned from Steve’s, they really would be in trouble given both their parents’ attitudes.

  Rupesh climbs the stile and with great relief steps into the field where he first met Adeline. He’s in the sun again, and he instantly feels happier. It would be so nice to lie down and go to sleep somewhere.

  This field is never used for crops, and other than it being home to the footpath it seems to serve no purpose. He walks through it to the next field, one filled with maize. He follows the footpath through the stalks. They tower over him, and the effect of the leaves rubbing together sends a familiar spike of fear through his belly. He quickens his pace. Why does it feel like someone is following him? Nothing to worry about really. It’s just because he can’t see or hear anything but the crops, that’s all.

  He reaches another stile and tries to jump over it to the safety of the next field, one with a much shorter crop, but in his haste he misplaces his footing. He stumbles, misses the wooden step on the other side, and tumbles onto his arse in a bed of what he thinks is barley.

  He looks back at the maize field, breathing hard and sweating. What a cockflap. No one is there. He grins. He laughs. This is because of that dumb film they watched last night, the one about a clown living in the sewer, that’s why he is being so pathetic. That clown had been in his head all night, its laugh and its big, yellow teeth. And all that stuff about that man, kidnapping kids. Now it’s the summer holidays he’ll know kids won’t be sticking to the roads. That they’ll be out in fields like this, vulnerable.

  He shakes off these notions. He’s too old to be this scared about kids’ stuff. It’s something about these friends, and being out of school for such a long time with them, it makes him feel much younger.

  On the stile behind him, a trembling cobweb links the spac
e between the ground and the wooden step. That bloody clown had been a spider at the end, and Steve had found that disappointing. Rupesh hadn’t. And looking at the stile he understands why it creeped him out like it did: what is a cobweb if not the physical manifestation of a brilliant predatory intelligence?

  He’s about to get up when something glints far back in the shadowy recess beneath the step. Rupesh crawls forward to get a closer look but the object is obscured by grass and weeds. Brambles and nettles prevent him from going around the side, too: he’ll have to put his hand under there if he wants to get the thing out. He’ll have to go through the cobweb.

  This is just the sort of thing the clown in that film would want him to do. Hadn’t its eyes glinted in the dark? Rupesh looks around and sees a stick, which he uses to try to retrieve the mystery object. It’s heavy, and it takes a few drags of the stick. Eventually a brown wallet emerges, its leather strap open revealing the silver snap fastener that glints once more in the sunlight.

  Rupesh picks it up. It’s heavy, heavier than his dad’s wallet, certainly. Inside are two twenty-pound notes, a fiver’s worth of coins, and a whole stack of credit cards. He takes out one of the cards and recognises the name embossed at the bottom in typewriter font: Mr. W. Strachan.

  Right in the spider’s lair.

  He must have dropped it when he was out walking that dog, the one that had started all the problems last year.

  This is so weird, and not just because he’d been thinking about the silver-van man.

  He would soon come into great wealth, that’s what his mum had said to him again last night. Okay, so she is always making that prediction, and it has never come true before. And a broken clock is still right twice a day. Still…

  He looks at the wallet. Yes, weird. And out here on his own a little bit frightening, too. If he turned now and saw someone standing watching over him, there would be no way to control it: he’d scream like a baby.

  The barn is a giant rust-red insect hiding in a dip between two fields. It houses only three bales, long past their best. Rupesh sits on one with the wallet on his lap. He needs a clue—in more ways than one. They will be here soon enough, time is ticking.

  He absently plays with one of the wallet’s zip pockets, there’s something squishy inside which he shouldn’t really investigate further. He glances around, then slowly pulls open the zip and peers inside. The bright red foil and the words Strawberry Flavour make him retreat immediately. He doesn’t want to think about Mr. Strachan doing that at all, no. How old is Mr. Strachan anyway? In his sixties at least. Jen somehow discovered his wife left him because he worked too much, so maybe he has a girlfriend now?

  Rupesh stands and begins to pace around the bale, forcing himself to focus. After running through a few possible clues and next destinations, he considers the wallet: is there any way to include it in The Dedication?

  The only problem is that then Steve will take charge. He’ll end up making Rupesh do something he doesn’t want to do with the wallet, like set it on fire, or throw it in the lake.

  What does Rupesh want to do with it, though?

  Whatever Steve doesn’t.

  Ha! Isn’t that just too true.

  He does delight in that tiny amount of power he still has over the cosmic force of Steve Litt: the power to disappoint him. It’s never deliberate, not really. But everyone else is too scared to go against him. It isn’t that he dislikes Steve. He finds him funny and clever, sees all the other good things that draw the others to him. It’s just all that intensity feels dangerous in one person, it reminds him of the times before his mum gets properly bad. When she spends all day experimenting with recipes she won’t let anyone eat, or starts bleaching the ceilings.

  He puts the wallet down on the hay bale. No, he won’t use it. Maybe he’ll mention it to Jen once the game is over. Or possibly Will. For now he just needs a clue, any clue, before time runs out.

  Off in the distance a high-speed train roars by. His pulse quickens and his legs weaken, but he quickly asserts control again, repeating no, no, no, no inside his head. He’s been trying to overcome his fear through willpower alone, and this particular mantra works well. In the last six months he’s managed to walk quite close to the tracks where they found Obi. Providing a train doesn’t pass as he’s approaching, he can get almost up to the footbridge at the lake’s far end before getting nauseous. But if his mum ever wandered beyond there he’d be stuck.

  Maybe he should try to leave the clue up at the train tracks today. That’ll be funny, a big fuck-you to old Steve. It’ll also be a big fuck-you to Adeline, though—even if there is a definite difference between going near the track and being on an actual train. She might not see it that way. Even if there is a small chance some of them might think he’s really brave, he just knows Steve will do that face. And he’ll say, I thought you were scared of trains. Not that the train track is an option anyway, even if he could use it to score some points against Ste—

  Voices drift over on the wind. How long has he been at the barn? They are coming.

  Cockflaps. Steve won’t like this at all. He should have got up earlier. Why didn’t he get up earlier?

  An idea strikes, and it’s too late to resist. He takes out from the pocket of his jeans the pen and pad of paper he brought along for writing clues. He scribbles something, tears it from the pad, then puts it beneath the wallet on the centre of the bale:

  TAKE ME HOME PLEASE!

  Steve having the wallet is better than Steve finding him here.

  He runs from the barn and crawls beneath a gap in the hedge, moving away from the voices and up out of the dip. When he reaches the highest point he sees three of them. The dark hair is Adeline’s. The dungarees are Jen’s. Will is lost in his own world behind them.

  Why are they all together, and more importantly, where’s Steve? Was he coming to the barn the way Rupesh was now trying to leave? Through the field where they’d played that game last year. The one behind Steve’s house that he would know better than anyone.

  This isn’t just cockflaps. This is megacockflaps. There has to be a third way back to Elm Close. There has to be. Without another thought, he climbs over a fence into a grassy field he doesn’t recognise.

  For a while it’s going well, the roofs of Elm Close are visible on the horizon. Then he ends up in another maize field, the wrong maize field, and he can’t find his way out. He walks between the rows where there is no footpath, destroying countless spider webs. Bits of long-dead insects stick to his shirt and his face. A fuzzy leaf slaps his cheek and another actually cuts his arm. Time ticking away, he begins to run. He imagines the clown stepping from behind the rows ahead, holding out a balloon. Or worse: Mr. Strachan, a grin on his face, about to share his secret life with Rupesh in the worst way possible.

  It feels like he might have an asthma attack, and he hasn’t had one since he was ten.

  Eventually the maize ends at the edge of some woodland. Despite the fence being covered by a thorny bush, he climbs over and falls to the floor beneath the trees. When he gets to his feet a bramble’s tentacle is attached to his arm below the shirt sleeve. He tries to yank his arm away, but the skin tents in multiple places—like in a horror film.

  Thorn by thorn he frees himself, then makes his way through the woods in the direction that feels right. How long has it been now? Ten minutes? Twenty?

  He emerges in the field behind Steve’s house. Once over the stile onto Elm Close, he looks up and doesn’t see any of them outside Mr. Strachan’s looking puzzled and annoyed. Maybe it will be okay. He walks towards Mr. Strachan’s, passing Steve’s house on his left. Now all he needs is a clue and a next destination, just something to buy more time that he can leave in the bushes in front of Strachan’s house.

  “Hey,” a voice says. Rupesh jumps, then turns. Jen is at the end of Steve’s drive. Heat floods his body. “Are you okay?” She is frowning at his arm.

  “Yeah, fine. I—I just got a bit lost.”

>   “Was there meant to be a clue for us at Mr. Strachan’s?”

  “There was supposed to be,” Rupesh says. “I sort of messed up, though.”

  “Shit,” Jen says.

  “Yeah,” Rupesh says. He looks to the farmhouse. The rest of them are all looking out at him through the lounge window.

  The shame of walking into the farmhouse is even worse than the time he was caught stealing sweets from a woman’s handbag at a school fête when he was ten. Then he had just been honest when his dad confronted him. Poured out a confession in the hope it would lessen his punishment. It had worked, and his dad remarked on how he admired his honesty. If he just holds up his hands now, tells them the truth, they’ll be nice to him. Especially now they know about his mum.

  “Why are you here?” Steve asks. He is in his chair, a cat away from being a Bond villain. The others are still standing at the window.

  “I messed up,” he says.

  Steve looks at the others, and they all look back at him.

  “I was trying to do this thing. I was. I just got lost.”

  “So, I don’t understand,” Steve says. “Where did you get the wallet from? And what if someone else had found it and taken it? Also, none of us would have known which of us was the last to find that clue. So what was your plan? It would have been left there all day with that cryptic note on it.”

  Steve is smiling, and he really does look amused not angry. Rupesh is cautious. He bites his lip, casts his gaze down. “I found it on the way to the barn and I thought maybe I could use it as a clue.”

  “Oh,” Jen says. It’s an encouraging tone she uses, and Rupesh is grateful for it.

  “Yeah, and then I couldn’t think of a way to do it, even though I thought about it for ages. Then suddenly I heard you all coming and I just panicked.” He tells them about running away, and about the maize field. He even throws in how scared he was about the clown jumping out at him.

  Steve says, “I thought you’d gone all master criminal on us and stolen it when you did Mr. Strachan’s windscreen in last year.”