The Killer You Know

by S. R. Masters

  He topped up his whisky, then leaned forward so that his elbows rested on his knees—a storyteller’s pose.

  “That first night we met I found Will’s parents’ address in our surgery’s system but I didn’t find any more records for Will. Nothing locally, nothing on the national spine. I mean, you can opt out of the national spine, but it was curious that nothing about his mental history came up at all anywhere. Curious but not impossible. Especially if he was going around under a different name.”

  I already knew what he was going to say. “You looked up Will Geppetto?”

  Nodding, Rupesh said, “I couldn’t look it up on the spine as we don’t have access at the hospital. The company that run the out-of-hours in Marlstone, though, use their own bespoke database. It’s not as useful as the spine, but the security is piss-poor, and as I was sitting there between patients, I put in Will Geppetto after you sent your message. Your Manchester friend said he’d considered moving back to Birmingham, well hey presto, a single entry, from this summer. Obviously I can’t tell you the diagnosis, only that it wasn’t relevant to what we’re interested in, a typical out-of-hours, coughs and colds sort of thing. But there was an address. In Sparkbrook.”

  There was a silence while this information sunk in, then Steve said, “Will lives in Sparkbrook. After all this.”

  “We have Will’s address,” I said.

  “Presuming he didn’t lie,” Rupesh said, “but we’ve got nothing to lose just showing up and finding out.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Show up?” After that afternoon I was pretty much done with doorstepping.

  “Well, what choice do we have if the police aren’t interested, other than doing nothing? And I presume, given that you’ve all convinced me into taking this seriously, that isn’t an option.” He waited for a response but neither of us spoke. “I don’t want to confront him necessarily, but I do want to look him in the eye now. And okay, so suppose he is really a murderer. Perhaps us lot showing up at his house might be enough to throw him off doing this hypothetical third one. Put a doubt in his mind about the fact we’re on to him.”

  “We could maybe casually mention his killing spree the way we all brought it up,” I said. That would be the most non-confrontational and obvious way to do it. “You know, ha ha, remember when you said this, what a laugh. Just unsettle him.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “I don’t want to be the killjoy here,” Steve said, “but might showing up shift the focus onto us? Isn’t there every chance he’s set this up and is expecting us, even?”

  “Yes, there are risks,” Rupesh said. “I’ve thought this through and if we’re not walking away then our choices are limited. Maybe we send him an anonymous note telling him we know his plans. Well, he knows we all met up, doesn’t he, and he knows that we are the only ones who could know about his murders? Therefore we’re implicated directly, which is high risk if he is actually a killer.

  “Or suppose maybe we watch him and wait to catch him in the act, maybe try and film him doing something. Again, very high risk, time consuming, and actually might lead to nothing at all. None of us are trained in surveillance. I can’t even imagine how we’d go about doing that in a serious way. And suppose the only act left to catch him in is the murder itself. Then we’re implicated at a murder scene, and we’ve saved precisely nobody, putting our own lives in jeopardy in the process.

  “No, turning up, telling him we were thinking about him and wanted to see him, having a drink then subtly bringing up the murders is low risk, it allows us to see his reaction, and it allows us to feel like we actually tried to intervene should this all turn out to be more than a collective fantasy.”

  “I thought you said morality wasn’t black and white,” Steve said. He was squinting, like he was going over some complex equation in his head.

  “I think doing things this way is relatively low risk where our safety is concerned and might change things,” he said. “It’s a calculation. But whatever we do I don’t want Jen coming. Between us, I’m worried how she might react.”

  No one argued with this, although Steve said, “She’ll be pissed off we cut her out. She’s already texted the chat saying she wants to meet up as she’s got more ideas.”

  “We’ll tell her we tried to call but couldn’t get through or something,” Rupesh said. “I don’t know. That we wanted to act straight away.”

  “And what do we tell Will when we show up?” Steve said. “How did we get his address given he’s obviously gone to a lot of effort to keep off the radar?”

  For the first time Rupesh had no answer. Twice he looked like he might respond and twice he said nothing.

  “Aren’t you worried he’ll assume that, as a GP, you looked him up on your records system?” Steve said.

  “We could blag it,” I said. “Just say we found him on the internet. Or that the Geppetto guys gave it to us. I mean, if all the stories we’ve heard about him are true then I doubt his memory is one hundred per cent.”

  “If he really did it, then he’ll have been actively keeping himself off public records,” Steve said. “He’ll want to know how we found him.”

  “Steve’s right,” Rupesh said.

  “This is something we need to think about a lot more,” Steve said. “It’s great we have the address but I think there are too many things that could go wrong. I’m actually a bit scared if I’m—”

  “What about if we just say I saw him walking on the street on my way past,” Rupesh said. “We’ll tell him I’ve been doing locum work in Sparkbrook and I saw him walking into his house. So our story is that three of us are all going out for a curry, and when I tell you about how I once saw a Will lookalike walking into his house, you two say it’ll be a laugh to go and see if it really was him.”

  The thoughtful silence that followed grew longer, and the window for objecting gradually closed. It was a good plan, and it sounded exactly like the sort of thing we would have done. Sparkbrook was right in the Balti triangle, of course we’d go there. And any locum work Rupesh did wouldn’t be easy to verify should Will have doubts. It was good.

  “What if he’s not been around?” Steve said. “And you say you saw him on a day he was away?”

  “I’ll say it was a few months ago,” Rupesh said, “keep it vague. I mean, we know he’s been there since the summer, so presumably he must have been there at some point during that time.”

  “I think it’ll work,” I said, my energy renewed at the prospect of it all being over soon. Wishful thinking, yeah maybe, but everything would be so much easier if we found him.

  “It will,” Rupesh said. He downed his remaining drink, put the glass on the table, then stood up. “Let’s do it then, before I change my mind.”

  “Now?” Steve said. “You don’t want to think about this more, perhaps without the whisky?”

  “He could kill someone tonight,” I said. “Of all the evidence we have the New Year thing is the flimsiest part of everything we’ve gathered.”

  “No, I remember it,” Steve said. “It was definitely New Year.”

  “Well, I want this over,” Rupesh said. “With or without you two.”

  Five minutes later Steve was behind the wheel of his car, rain lashing on the windscreen as he headed out of Blythe towards Birmingham city centre.

  Jen, 1998

  She does all her best work in the dark. Under the quilt, in the hot blackness. It’s where she’s always gone when she needs to think, where she writes her diary by torch light. It’s also where she came up with her Dedication, and where she is now. In her hand is the cordless phone.

  Through a series of patient steps she manages to get all of the gang on the same phone call and when they are all on the line finally, Steve says she’s a genius. It’s called conference calling, and she heard about it from Gilly Ellis at school. She found instructions on the computer using the web—her family are the only ones in the road with access. It was great for things like that, as
well as looking up song lyrics, like Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” Now she knows what go down on you in a theatre means.

  What the web didn’t say is that conference calling is hard work. Without seeing people’s faces you can’t tell whose turn it is to speak. There are a lot of pauses, so Jen takes control.

  “I’m going to be quick,” she says. “Follow the river from the bridge down to the big bend that always floods at ten a.m. tomorrow. Your first clue will be waiting there.”

  Wanting to be dramatic, she hangs up straight away.

  She lies in the dark, excited. Rupesh played along so well; he’s not a bad actor himself. The next part of her plan, the one to save him, is even better than the conference call. It’s been a week since Rupesh’s round and she’s had lots of time to think it all through. She still hasn’t quite figured out how to make sure Adeline doesn’t overtake her while she can’t earn any points. But in the dark, nothing is impossible, and as she runs through her Dedication in her mind once more things begin to fall into place.

  At 9 a.m. she sets off from the house in a cagoule and wellington boots. Andrea, back from university again, gives her a look like she’s mad when she passes the lounge.

  Outside the rain spatters on her head. In her right hand is a plastic bag. She doesn’t mind the rain really, and doesn’t even care about how she looks in the cagoule. Given she has to see Will today it feels safer covered up.

  Not wanting to be alone with Will if he finishes her round first is one of the reasons she sent Rupesh the location of the second clue before anyone else. Of course, the main reason is that she wants a chance to be alone with him. He’ll never make a move, though, and the thumb wars and playful punches are getting stupidly out of hand. If things don’t occur fast enough you have to take things into your own hands. That’s what Adeline did with Steve, and look how that worked out.

  And of course, Rupesh is losing and really needs to win this round. Both she and Rupesh need access to Steve’s place for the rest of the summer. There’s no way she wants her parents seeing her with him out in the street or the fields if they were going out. Dad’s a Conservative councillor, Mum an administrator for the local Tory MP, and both have loud views on immigration. They always say they aren’t racists, but they only ever refer to Rupesh and his family as the Indian lot, and she’s heard her dad mutter about mixed couples on the telly more than once. And while in a way she’d love to stick it to them by getting with Rupesh in full sight of the village, the likelihood is they’d find some non-racist way of stopping them hanging out full stop. She has to be practical.

  She’d love to see Rupesh win the whole game too, just to shock everyone into realising how great he is.

  At the end of Elm Close she turns left. She walks along Blythe Lane, past the pub and the cottages that look like they’re made out of melting marzipan. It’s a mile to the river, and there is no footpath beyond the pub. It’s a main road and the cars pelt past her, spraying her even more.

  Further down the lane beyond the pub, there is a mansion with a wall all around the garden. A net curtain up in one of the top windows twitches. Who lives there? One day, when she is a famous actress or singer, she’ll buy it. Everyone tells her she’ll go far, and that you have to follow your dreams. The teachers at school and her parents. Adeline, too, for whom she acted out a scene of Romeo and Juliet last year—although maybe she’d just been stringing her along. Who knew with her? That’s the difficult thing with Adeline. She can dish out the praise, give great advice. Jen can see why the others like her. But Adeline is playing tricks too, the sort boys don’t see happening because they’re a bit stupid. Short skirt tricks. Arm touch tricks. Laughing at bad joke tricks. There’s no room for Jen when she is around.

  But she’d said something sensible that day that stuck with her, about how Jen just had to make a promise to herself to not give up if she wanted to make it. Ignore any doubters, commit to it every day afresh, and don’t confuse growing up with giving up. Praise and advice from Adeline is the real thing.

  But if Adeline comes last in the game, it wouldn’t be a problem any more. She is the newest in the group so it would probably be the fairest way for things to go.

  The final stretch of road to the river has flat, empty fields either side. At the bridge she leaves the road. It takes ten minutes to reach a sharp U-bend where rubbish often catches causing the river to flood. Here she takes out the first of three plastic boxes from her bag and places it under a bush near the river’s edge. It’s yellow, bought from WH Smith in Marlstone by Mum the day before.

  Her clue is written in a bit of a Shakespearean style, Macbeth fresh in her mind from the Drama Club production at the end of term. It’s more romantic to think of The Dedication as being like a quest from the old days, rather than some stupid thing based on bloody Scooby Doo.

  She waits in the disused bus shelter. It’s hopefully where the others will all end up if her first clue is good enough.

  Will wanders past first, and for a moment he stands in the bus shelter’s mouth, looking around to make sure it’s safe to continue on. She can smell that dampness wafting from him, hear his breathing and his muttering. Shit, if he turns around she’d be trapped in here with him.

  Then he’s gone, running in the direction of the river.

  Just thinking about Will makes her cringe. She had just tried being nice to him last year, and he’d taken it the wrong way. And she’d been drunk too. She doesn’t know what he’ll do when he finds out she likes Rupesh. Even now, despite what happened last year between them, he hasn’t learned anything. When he talks to her, Will acts like his chin is attached to the floor by an elastic band, his gaze always dropping from her eyes to her breasts. And as much as she wants to talk to his mum about acting, she doesn’t want to have to ask him. Or go to his house.

  Through a gap in the shelter wall Jen watches the others leave Elm Close one by one. Steve’s first, jogging. Then it’s Adeline. She looks over at the bus stop. Can she see her? After a moment she continues on.

  “So, what’s all this about?” Rupesh says, his voice behind her at the entrance.

  He is in a black coat that looks like it’s made of rubber. He looks so silly, except for his beautiful, raindrop-dappled face.

  “This is about you not getting kicked out of the group,” she says, reaching into the bag and taking out a pink box. She opens it and takes out the paper slip inside. “You’ll need to remember this clue in case anyone asks.”

  “Why are you doing this for me?” he says. He’s holding the little note she gave him the day before, slipped into his hand when the others weren’t looking.

  “You have one point, you need help,” Jen says, and once he’s read the clue, she puts it back in the pink box and leaves it hidden beneath the bench.

  By the lake, just off the muddy footpath in a patch of overgrown woods, a yellow salt bin has been abandoned. Jen’s plan is to hide the third clue inside—if it will open. Otherwise she’ll put it underneath.

  She thinks of this whole place, the lake and the muddy surrounds, as being Will’s—because this is where she once found him digging holes, searching for Roman ruins he’d said, based on some mad theory he had. She doesn’t like coming here really, but knows it’s a great place for the game, and she wants very much for her round to be one of, if not the, best.

  They stomp across the scrub to the salt bin. A train hoots in the distance. Jen looks over to Rupesh, who gives her a little nod just to let her know he’s fine. When they reach the bin, Rupesh steps to one side and pulls up the lid, only his feet slip and he loses his balance, ending up slightly behind the bin on the floor.

  “Oh, rank,” he says.

  “What?” Jen says.

  “Don’t come around.”

  Only she does. It’s not disgusting, not really. It is just sad. It looks like some animal, maybe a sheep or a fox, has died. Only its dirty bones remain. Lots of them, little bones and big bones.

  “That�
�s more than one animal,” Rupesh says. His face contorts in disgust.

  “How can you tell?” Jen says.

  “Skulls,” he says.

  No wonder Will likes it here, this graveyard for animals. The other week he said to her that animals didn’t have souls. What did that even mean? A shiver rattles her bones.

  “Could one of them be a cat?” Jen says. It’s silly; she knows Will has nothing to do with this really. More likely it was something to do with one of the creepy fishermen that lurked around the lake sometimes, perhaps one of their dogs died or they’d dumped some strange, unwanted bait here.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Rupesh says.

  She takes out a red gift box from the plastic bag. “I can’t leave it here now,” she says. They scramble through the foliage, back to the path from where the yellow bin is only partially visible.

  “Leave it here,” Rupesh says. “Just off the path. They’ll find it.”

  She bends down and tucks the box underneath the leaves of a shrub, one red corner just visible. She stands a moment longer, staring into the woodlands. Then she feels a tug, and realises Rupesh is holding her hand.

  “It’s fine there, come on,” he says, and when he squeezes, she squeezes back.

  It’s another half an hour to the fruit farm, located almost exactly halfway between Blythe and Hampton. On the way along the footpath they see Mr. Strachan approaching with his horrid dog and dash into the maize to hide from him. He snorts up what sounds like a giant wad of phlegm and spits it on his way past them. It lands somewhere near where they are standing and they both grimace at each other.

  “Do you think he’s really doing what Steve thinks?” Rupesh says when he’s gone.

  “I can believe it,” Jen says. “He’s pretty rancid. But who knows? Steve has too much imagination. To be honest, Will scares me more than him.”

  “Really?” he says. “Will’s okay.”