The Killer You Know

by S. R. Masters

  “So fine, our lives or someone else’s are on the line.” She raised her shoulders to make a what’s-the-difference gesture. “Forgive me if someone breaking into my house is clouding my judgement.”

  “If it’s someone else’s life at stake then I don’t think our moral responsibility is as black and white as you’re making out. People die, I see it a lot. Want to save lots of lives, give all your money to schistosomiasis, thousands saved in—”

  “Death or not death,” Jen said. “Seems pretty clear to me. Rupesh, I could die.”

  “For the sake of your reputation, Rup—” I said.

  “Hear him out,” Steve said, holding up his hand in a patronising halting gesture.

  “No, it’s not that. Look, I can’t stop you,” Rupesh said. “I’m not the police police. But that badge… It was at a festival. People at festivals wear badges.”

  “So who did the two Nirvana logos?” Jen said. She sat down on the sofa set at a right angle to Rupesh.

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Do you think I did it?” Jen said.

  “I didn’t say that. Look, it’s not like it was the logo of some obscure band like… Academy Morticians or something. Who hasn’t heard of Nirvana?”

  “Did Adeline do it then?”

  “Because you didn’t seem that convinced it was Mr. Strachan,” I added.

  “Maybe what Rupesh is trying to say,” Steve said, “is that we need to get our evidence straight before we go to the police.”

  “I was saying what I was trying to say, thanks, Steve.”

  Steve held up both of his hands. We were all edgy, pushed to this place of certainty where there was no room for scepticism about the fact something was going on. Only the exact nature of the fuckery was still up for debate.

  “Another thing,” Rupesh said, “if we all just show up at a police station with this wild tale I think it’s unlikely they will take us seriously.”

  Jen sighed. “Why do you come on so hard with the sceptical stuff? I don’t think we all want to go anyway. I was thinking just a few of us go and put it to them, you know? Steve, you’ll be able to put it best.”

  “Me?” Steve said. “You’re the one with all the information.”

  “If they start questioning me the way he is,” she pointed at Rupesh with her head, “I can’t guarantee I won’t lose it.”

  “I mean, I could,” Steve said, “I don’t mind, but will you at least come with me?” He gave me a barely perceptible glance midway through speaking.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “We can do it tomorrow. I’d suggest we go now, but I think we stand a better chance of them taking us seriously tomorrow.” I raised my empty tumbler.

  “So you are going to go?” Rupesh said.

  “And what if they don’t believe us, like Rupesh says?” Steve said. “What then? Especially if lives are at stake.”

  “Then we have another conversation,” Jen said.

  We drank more. It seemed like an appropriate response.

  When Steve and I went outside to wait for his taxi it was close to 11 p.m. I was drunk, and not wanting to make the short walk home in the dark I had an idea his taxi might drop me around the corner. From inside, we thought we heard Jen yelling at Rupesh. Before we’d left the house Jen told me quietly that she was going to stay to talk to Rupesh before going home, which I hadn’t questioned. She’d clearly been angry with him, which combined with her general edginess had now come to a head. I couldn’t blame her for losing it with Rupesh.

  I made a show of being fine walking home alone, even though we both knew this was pantomime. I didn’t really want to be alone at all. Not with what we now knew.

  “You know I’ve got some old John Cusack films on my laptop back at the hotel,” Steve said at the end of the drive.

  “Really? I’m a big fan.”

  “I know. Maybe you want to go home, though, we’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Thing is, I’m not tired yet.”

  We got through ten minutes of Say Anything—by which point I’d consumed another small bottle of tart red wine—before I took off Steve’s jeans and climbed on his lap, loving his look of surprise. That was where I stayed for a while, this time insisting on bliss.

  At around five in the morning I once more abandoned trying to sleep and called a taxi to pick me up from Steve’s hotel. A combination of having slept most of the previous afternoon, the alcohol and my aversion to new beds had meant I’d been wide awake all night.

  I left him a note, trying much harder this time not to wake him up. My head hurt from the booze, and I didn’t have it in me to be charming during the lift back that Steve would indubitably try to give me if he came around. At home I checked the house, and even under the bed, before downing two paracetamols and slipping beneath the duvet.

  Steve picked me up from my parents’ later that morning. It was the twenty-eighth now, and New Year was edging closer.

  “You seen my message yet?” he said once I’d taken my place in the passenger seat of his Octavia.

  “No?”

  He handed over his mobile phone.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Our mate Gaz’s friend just rang me back,” he said. “Think it’s safe to say Will isn’t dead. Or if he is then it’s unrelated to what Gaz heard on the grapevine.”

  The page on the screen was a social media site for posting music, one I’d never heard of. Two tracks had been posted under an image of a donkey. The EP title was Last Will. The artist was Will Geppetto RIP. To the left of the main image was a biography.

  Will Geppetto passed away peacefully in a contented deep sleep state. A number of cassette tapes were discovered beneath his bed containing his final dreams. They will be posted here in his honour. RIP old friend.

  “Basically, this guy told me someone else he knew had seen a page dedicated to Will online somewhere,” Steve said. “He was a bit of a doofus by the sounds of it, a stoner maybe, so it took a while to get the story out of him. But actually the most useful bit of information I got was what he said right at the start of the conversation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His opening bit was that he didn’t know a Will Oswald, but knew who I meant because I’d mentioned The Geppettos in my message. Apparently, everyone in York knew him as Will Geppetto. So I just looked up that name. And turns out, after weeding out things like Will Geppetto reunite with Pinocchio at the end?, the only match was this page, which, unless I’m mistaken, looks like the name of a side-project. So the guy obviously found this somehow and thought Will had died, and because no one actually gave much of a toss about Will, everyone took his word for it.”

  I threw my head back on the seat with a sigh. “This is so odd,” I said. “I was convinced Mr. Strachan might be a genuine suspect.”

  “I suppose he still might be,” he said. “We don’t need to think about it. We just tell the police everything, leave it in their hands. I suppose Mr. Strachan wouldn’t even be on our minds if we hadn’t been distracted by this Will-is-dead stuff.”

  “Yeah,” I said. He was right, although that in itself bothered me. Why hadn’t we considered anyone else before that moment? Because Will was such an obvious candidate. Was that why? I thought about Rupesh, how dismissive he’d been yesterday, and ran that theory by Steve for good measure, throwing in all the details about Loch Ness I’d found.

  “Do you genuinely suspect him?” Steve said.

  “I can’t keep any of my thoughts straight. It’s as likely as any of this madness, isn’t it?”

  He considered this. “It might not actually be that much of a coincidence,” he said. “I remember Will and Rupesh’s dad actually used to bond over all that supernatural stuff. Will probably threw Loch Ness in as a murder site back then because of Rupesh’s dad.”

  “Yeah, perhaps.” Something about what he’d said had thrown me.

  He caught me staring at him. “What?”

&n
bsp; “It’s nothing,” I said. Where was I going with this? “Just, you sound like you’ve given this some thought. Will’s choice of locations.”

  “I’ve given all of this a lot of thought, haven’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I’ve been wondering if he chose those places back then not just because he liked music and the supernatural, but maybe because of his love of history as well. Manifest wasn’t far from Hadrian’s Wall, Loch Ness had Castle Urquhart. It also makes sense that his final one would be in Blythe, you know? As it’s our historical site. Am I overthinking it?”

  Maybe he was. And maybe I was. Because now I’d opened up the door to suspecting the others, I couldn’t close it. And if it could be Rupesh, why not bloody Steve? Why not Jen, who was luring me out alone later that afternoon?

  He was right about us not needing to think any more. Perhaps the time had come to let someone else do that for us.

  When we pulled into the car park at Marlstone police station that afternoon it was almost empty. Steve silenced the engine. He took my hand in his and squeezed.

  “We’re doing the right thing,” Steve said. “And if nothing comes of this it’s at least off our conscience.”

  He squeezed again.

  Like many of the older buildings in Marlstone, the police station was built in a time that valued function—and something of the 70s still haunted the inside. A smell of lemon detergent hung in the air, and noticeboard posters warning about sexting and cyber-crime mingled with those warning of seemingly eternal dangers like swimming in quarries and playing on train tracks.

  We were the only two in the waiting room, and a man greeted us with a smile from the front desk.

  “This is going to sound really strange,” I said.

  “Oh, my money’s on it not being as strange as you think,” the man said.

  Only while we explained, uttering phrases like, “this was over fifteen years ago,” and “really they might just be suicides,” it appeared from his changing expression that the money was ours.

  He took our names, and Will’s, then asked us to sit down, addressing us with wariness dressed as professionalism.

  “They’ll be looking us up,” Steve said. “They’ll look up Will, too, and hopefully he’ll have some old record, maybe connected with his stay at Wallgrove, and they’ll be more inclined to listen to us.”

  Twenty minutes later two uniformed officers, male and female, came out and introduced themselves as PC Massey and PC Clarke. An odd expression flashed across Steve’s face when they arrived. He eyed the male officer in particular with some puzzlement, then glanced at me to check how I was responding. A reaction to them just being PCs, more than likely. They weren’t bringing out the big guns yet—but that was fine.

  They invited us into a small office not far from the waiting room. It was so close I was glad no one else was present—the flimsy door didn’t seem enough to contain our revelations. Steve and I sat on one side of the table with the officers opposite. PC Massey, slender and severe-looking, asked the questions; PC Clarke, heavy-set, youthful yet balding, took notes, rarely looking up from the clipboard resting on his lap.

  We began with our drinks on Christmas Eve, our shock that such similar crimes could have played out in the same year, a year in which none of us had seen or heard from our old friend Will.

  “So you haven’t seen Will in how long?” PC Massey asked.

  “I’ve not seen him since we were kids,” I said. “Not in real life.”

  “I’ve seen him, both in real life and not,” Steve said. “In the flesh once or twice a few years back now.”

  “Could you give a physical description?”

  “He has blond hair and is about six three,” Steve said. “His parents live locally and might have a recent picture.”

  We explained what we knew about Will’s mental state, what Monks had told us, and about York, the independent connection between Will and the two suicides.

  “York’s a famous city,” PC Massey said, playing devil’s advocate for sure, just doing her job. “My brother was at uni there.”

  “Sure,” Steve said, “I’ve got connections to York. Everyone probably does. But that doesn’t matter, does it? This just establishes Will had the opportunity to do it. And that from what we’ve found out he was there around the same time as these girls.”

  Then we brought out Wallgrove and the badges. Yes, the badges, they seemed interested in those.

  “How do you know the bodies had badges on?” PC Clarke asked, interrupting, for clarification.

  “Well, we don’t,” Steve said, perhaps a little more irritated than he should have been. “We were hoping that was something you could look into on your system. All we know is one of the bodies definitely had a badge on it.”

  “Can you clarify how you know that?” PC Massey said.

  “Our friend is taking a sort of Scooby Doo approach—well, I suppose we’re all guilty of that to some extent—but I think she’s getting into the detective role a bit too much.” Steve sounded nervous. He was talking quickly, was all over the place. “Anyway, we heard there was a mobile phone video of the poor Manifest girl, and our friend managed to find and bring it up on a laptop, which was obviously a bit of a shock at the time.”

  “You viewed a video of one of the deceased?”

  “It wasn’t like we had much of a choice,” I said, not liking how that sounded in the police woman’s voice. “And I should add it wasn’t just any badge. It was a Nirvana badge just like one I saw on the shelf of Will’s old bedroom. Although admittedly he had a few different ones too.”

  It was going well enough, they were engaged at least, not laughing. Then PC Massey, a note of concern in her voice, asked: “Did you approach the victim’s family at all? I only ask because that might be something an amateur detective might think to do in a case like this.”

  “No,” I said. “None of us thought that was a particularly good idea.” Except Jen had, of course.

  PC Massey was now frowning at PC Clarke, who continued to keep his gaze down.

  “So you considered approaching the families?” PC Clarke said.

  “Well, maybe not considered it,” Steve said. “Discussed it. We discussed a lot of things before coming to you.”

  “You shouldn’t go anywhere near those families,” PC Massey said. She wasn’t on our side at all. She wasn’t even close.

  Of course, they would be convinced by the smiley faces. They were the proof that someone was messing with us. They were threats, surely.

  “Did your friend phone the police when she found the second smiley face?” PC Clarke said.

  “Well, no. She wanted to discuss it with us first,” Steve said, snapping at him once again.

  “I don’t know about you, but if I really thought someone had come into my shower and left a hidden message there I’d be straight on the phone,” PC Clarke said.

  PC Massey agreed: nod, nod, nod.

  “Well, she didn’t know for certain,” I said. “She didn’t see them do it. It’s strange, though, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” PC Massey said. “But the psychologists tell us people have a tendency to see patterns when they’re looking for them. And Nirvana are a pretty popular band, even these days, though I never got it.”

  “Is there anything else you think we need to know?” PC Clarke said.

  Rather timidly, Steve said, “Well, we think we know when and where the next murder is going to happen.”

  “That’s if it is a murder,” I said.

  “Okay,” PC Massey said.

  “Our friend’s diary said it would be somewhere in Blythe,” Steve said, then described the area for them.

  “I see,” PC Clarke said, for all the world looking like he was pretending to write things down. These two were going to have a really good laugh about this when we were gone.

  “And you said you knew when it was going to happen,” PC Clarke said.

  “New Year’s Eve, we thin
k,” Steve said.

  “Is this from the diary?”

  “No, actually. That’s something we just remember,” I said.

  “If we’re being totally honest it might be any time in the next three days, too. That is unless it’s already happened and we haven’t heard.”

  There was a movement in PC Massey’s head that might be a supressed shake. And I was right there with her. It was obvious now what was wrong. We’d misjudged the power of the evidence. Through the lens of knowing Will, it appeared so flawless initially. But there was no possible way of conveying Will to them. What he had been like and why this story made so much sense. There were things about Will that could only be learned through a childhood spent with him, a zoned-out, animal-undertaking, mad-comment colour to our friendship with him, which made all this other stuff plausible. We’d been sitting here filling in the cracks of a wall that hadn’t been built.

  “We’re actually worried he might’ve, you know, kidnapped someone already,” Steve said. “That is if he’s not coming for us. Is there anything you can do?”

  “Do you have any idea why it might be now?” PC Massey said. “Any insight into his motivation?”

  “His motivation is that he said he’d do it,” Steve said. “He’s a man of his insane word. Perhaps he’s snapped. Or maybe he was never sane to begin with, we don’t know. Maybe he always wanted to do it but it wasn’t until he met these suicidal people in hospital that he found a way to do it and get away with it. No one will even notice. He’ll be doing them a favour, that’s how he’ll see it. I don’t know.”

  “It might be the reunion that started it,” I said. “We all committed at the end of last year and that’s around the time he went AWOL.”

  “I think you ought to be careful speculating on your friend’s mental health,” PC Massey said, now making direct eye contact with me. “And Adeline, earlier you mentioned your profession was a podcaster.” Yes, I had said that, and often did these days, Xan having convinced me to be proud of my job while it lasted. Now I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “Mm hmm,” I said.