“We probably knew a few of the same crowd,” I said. “It’s funny, we were talking about all the old times. All the stupid things we did. Do you remember much of it?”
“I remember watching a lot of films.” We all laughed at this. “And that game,” he said, gesturing towards Steve with his pint.
“The Dedication,” Rupesh said.
“You did one with balloons,” Steve said. “It was brilliant.”
We moved on to his absence at the reunion. Will’s reply was to shrug. “I don’t think I got an email from anyone.”
“You replied,” Steve said. “We saw it.”
He shrugged. “Don’t think so. To be fair, I’ve not been on the internet a lot lately.” He looked at Steve. “I decided to go a bit AWOL from life.”
“Everyone wanted to know how you were doing,” I said. “No one could stalk you on Facebook.”
Steve laughed at this. Will didn’t. He nodded earnestly. “Got rid of that. I decided all that stuff’s bad for people. What is it even? Just adverts, all of it.”
He turned things on us, asking about us and our lives, and we obliged as much as we could.
“You still doing therapy?” he said to Steve.
“My degree, you mean?” he said. “Been a while since then. No, I’m in health management now. Sell-out.”
No smile at all from Will. Then he asked about Jen, at which point Rupesh promptly swung the spotlight back around.
“What about you?” His tone almost patronising. “What occupies your days?”
“Not much at the mo,” Will said. “I suppose I’m unemployed.”
Already a picture of Will was developing that contrasted with what I would have expected from a man committing a complex series of murders. His appearance, where he lived, everything he was and wasn’t saying. He barely looked able to feed himself. But then perhaps this explained his actions partly. Poverty, status anxiety—I’d read The Spirit Level. Were the killings an expression of his need to reassert power over the world? It was hard not to feel both sorry for him and guilty about rocking up here to harass him.
When I reached the end of my drink, I went to the bar to get the next round, aware now of that corset of anxiety clutching my core. Rupesh came with me.
“I don’t know what I was expecting,” Rupesh said, “but I haven’t a bloody clue. Do you?”
I shook my head.
“We need to move the conversation on somehow,” he said. “Just get something out of him.”
The barman needed to change one of the barrels, and when we turned back to the table in the corner Will and Steve were talking. Hopefully Steve was drawing something from Will, charming him. But by the time the pints were poured, and we were back at the table, their conversation had petered out and Steve looked glum.
Rupesh was right, it was time to go for it now.
“Hey, do you remember the big campfire we had before we went off to sixth form?” I said.
“Vaguely,” Will said.
“What about your murder spree?”
“What?”
Shit. Too much. I sensed the others’ tension. Ignoring them, I kept my attention on Will and focused on maintaining a jolly expression. He looked blankly at me. No smile, no frown.
“I remember that,” Rupesh said from somewhere on Mars. “That was hilarious.”
“You know,” I said. “You said you wanted to be a serial killer, bump off three people.” I forced myself to laugh.
It was so transparent, so obvious now it was out in the open. But he didn’t see that. Hopefully.
“Oh yeah,” he said. He gulped from his pint, then gave a long ahhhhh. “That’s what I’ve been doing this last year, actually.”
A correct reaction was crucial now; we needed to respond in a way fitting to the various versions of what might be reality: laugh without restraint in case Will was just joking, not overdo it such that a Will that did actually commit those crimes would now become suspicious of our real intent.
I couldn’t see Steve or Rupesh to rate their acting, but it sounded like their combined laughter managed to hit the sweet spot. A line I’d heard somewhere floated by, not entirely right for the situation, but I grabbed it gratefully: “Good for you, it’s a growth industry.”
“I probably said a lot of random shit,” Will said. “People are always saying that about me.”
“But this was your magnum opus of random,” Steve said.
“You don’t remember that at all?” Rupesh said.
Steady now, we needed to be careful.
“Nah,” Will said.
“Nothing about a drowning at Loch Ness?” Rupesh said. “Or hanging someone at a festival?”
I couldn’t imagine this insubstantial man having the strength to string up a drugged body.
“I remember burying your dog,” Will said to Steve. “What was she called?”
“He,” Steve said. “Obi.”
“Obi, yeah.”
“And I remember that other dog.”
Steve didn’t appear to know how to react. Something about Will’s manner interested me. He was jousting with Steve, just as Rupesh had the first time we had all been at The George. It was a polite joust, but the lances were still sharp.
“Which dog?” Rupesh said.
“The dog we thought we were rescuing,” he said. “Mr. Strachan’s.”
“That was a bad time,” Steve said.
“Yeah, it was,” Will said, and it fell quiet again. Before I could ask him what he meant by thought we were rescuing, he finished off his drink, then said to Steve, “You getting the next one in?”
“Sure.” He looked at me, then Rupesh. “What you having?”
“Lager if you’re heading to the bar.”
“I am.” He paused to finish his own drink before getting to his feet.
Once Steve was gone, Will pulled out his beanie from his pocket and put it back onto his head. He stood up.
“You’re not going?” Rupesh said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Think I’ll go to the pub round the corner. Nothing against you two. I just don’t think a reunion with him in is for me.”
“Steve?” I said.
“I’m happy you’re all doing well,” he said, glancing over at the bar.
I had to stop him, slow him down, so that Steve could get back and fix it.
“I’m just trying to move on, if you get me,” he said.
“What did you mean about the dog?” I said, trying to stall.
“We just got him wrong,” Will said. “Strachan. Ask him.” He gestured to the bar where Steve was looking over, puzzled.
“What did we get wrong?” Rupesh said.
“Sorry, it was nice seeing you.” He holstered his hands in the cagoule’s pockets, turned and walked towards the exit.
This was it, our last chance to do something. I panicked.
“Will.” I tried injecting as much joviality into my delivery as I could. He turned back, halfway between the door and the table. “Don’t kill anyone, okay?”
He stared at me, his face stony. Heat coursed to my cheeks: it sounded so absurd. Yet there was something else underneath his expression again—recognition of the call back to his earlier joke maybe. Or more than that?
With a half-smile, Will nodded and said, “Okay,” then left the pub.
“Tell me he’s gone outside for a cigarette?” Steve said, returning from the bar. That he hadn’t bought a round again suggested he already knew better.
“He left us,” I said, still watching the space where he’d last been. I told him what Will had said, and Steve seemed to wilt.
“What did I do?”
“Dunno,” Rupesh said. “He asked us to ask you about Strachan’s dog.”
“That’s crazy,” Steve said. “It’s nearly twenty years ago, for fuck’s sake. If anyone should—” He cut himself off and shook his head once. “I don’t know what he means. That’s just… crazy.”
“It is crazy,” Rupesh sai
d, and got up. “Come on, if we hurry we can get back before him.”
“What do you mean?” Steve said.
“He said he was going to another pub,” Rupesh said. “Let’s go look through his windows at least, see if we can’t see something incriminating. I told you, we’ve done the hard part. I want this over tonight.”
We didn’t see Will on the drive back to his house and parked around the corner. The rain had stopped but there was a cold wind blasting through the street. Steve knocked on the door and got no reply. All the lights were off.
Ratty net curtains obscured the front window, so Rupesh tried the gate to the right of the house and it opened.
“I’ll just be a few seconds,” he said.
What the fuck was he doing? “Rupesh,” I said.
“I need to see something,” Rupesh said, and left us standing at the front of the house. No one else was around, which was fortunate given that our frequent nervous scanning made us look suspicious as hell.
“I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to find,” Steve said. “I think we should go. Reassess.”
“Something’s got into him,” I said.
“Jen?” Steve said. I shivered and folded my arms. “Do you want my coat?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Steve stepped forward and pulled me to him, rubbing my back with his hands.
We leapt apart when the front door rattled, then opened. Rupesh’s face appeared in the gap.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“Back door was open,” he said and shrugged. “Come on.”
Steve and I looked at each other, then around the street once more.
“Shit,” Steve said.
We left the lights off, but the incoming streetlight made it clear the place was long overdue a renovation: the wallpaper was coming away in places, stains marked the ceiling, and the stink of damp permeated every part of the house. Most of the rooms were not just sparse but empty. Investigating each room our footsteps echoed on the hard floors. Only a teabag on the kitchen draining board and a mostly used tube of toothpaste in the upstairs bathroom indicated anyone might live here. We reached the bedroom last, and inside were five cardboard boxes full of clothes, arranged around a mattress and some blankets in the room’s centre. The walls were bare, no cut-out models or band posters here.
Sounding frustrated, Rupesh said, “There’s nothing, is there?”
“What about that?” Steve said, pointing to a pair of women’s knickers on the floor by the mattress.
“So he has a girlfriend,” I said. “Good for him.”
“You don’t think him living like this is weird?” Steve said.
It wasn’t so much weird as incredibly sad. This was a man whose family owned a property, albeit an unkempt one, in a highly desirable suburb just fifteen miles away, and here he was on the floor of what was probably subsidised housing of some sort given he was unemployed.
Downstairs again, Rupesh went back to the kitchen. The seconds passed and I grew more and more anxious as the likelihood of Will getting home increased. We really needed to leave, this was voyeurism now.
“What are you doing?” I said. The thunk and chink of cupboards and drawers being studied reverberated through the house.
“Just one last check,” Rupesh said.
“I’m going outside,” I said to Steve. “I’ll meet you both by the car.”
I had no intention of being arrested tonight. There was being a team player, but now Rupesh was in the throes of some testosterone-fuelled madness, and was going to take us all down with him.
“I’ll drag him out,” Steve said, leaving me in the hallway.
I wasn’t going to wait. Not with the BBC thing and the rest of my life all about to happen. I opened the door and went to the car, relieved Will wasn’t out there waiting for us like a serial killer in a film.
The car was locked. Fuck. I stood by the bonnet, hoping the car in front would give me some cover should Will stroll by. Where were the others?
Wanting to be as far from this place as possible, I took out my phone and texted Jon. I’d shore up the future right now. Finally give Xan what he’d been badgering me to do since we last spoke.
My hands trembled. Had he had any more thoughts about the BBC? Please? Hurry because I think I’ve just fallen down the rabbit hole into—
“Adeline?”
A low voice spoke from the other side of the road. Will stared at me from the opposite pavement on my right like a stray dog. He crossed the road, moving towards me.
“What’re you doing here?” he said, passing through the gap in front of Steve’s car while I stepped up onto the pavement.
Nothing came, and now Will was in front of me. He grabbed my arm just below the shoulder, hard enough to bruise. “What are you doing here?”
I cried out in shock and pain, and tried pulling away from him. He tightened his surprisingly strong grip.
“Will, get off her,” Steve said. He and Rupesh had finally decided to come out of the fucking house, Steve’s knight-in-shining-armour act marred by the unsettling waver in his voice.
Will released my arm and darted towards Steve.
“Why are you here?” Will said.
Steve smiled weakly in the absence of a fast enough answer. It was a total giveaway. We were fucked.
“We came to talk to you,” Rupesh said.
It was too late. Will, a match for Steve in height and size, grabbed him by the collar of his coat, shoved him up against the wall and brought something out of his pocket with his left hand. It wasn’t obvious straight away what it was, not until he brought it to his mouth, drew out a blade from the Swiss Army knife with his teeth and pressed the point to Steve’s throat—all in one fluid movement.
“Shit, Will,” I said in what was close to a scream. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Steve said nothing. His neck muscles were taut as he strained to get away from the blade.
“I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear last time,” Will said, “but I don’t want anything to do with you, okay?”
Last time? He meant the pub, didn’t he? Because that level of grudge didn’t bode well for our situation.
“I don’t want you in my head,” Will said. “I don’t want to see your face. I don’t want you in my life.”
“That’s fine,” Rupesh said. “Just let Steve go, Will, and we’ll get in the car and go, okay? This is our mistake.”
Without looking away from Steve, Will said, “How do you know where I live? All that shit about going for a curry, like you’d be caught dead in a place like the Cent’. How did you find me?”
“It’s my fault,” Rupesh said. “I work as a locum round the corner, at the health centre, and I saw you a couple of months back as I was driving through here to the Stratford Road. Said to these guys it would be a laugh if we showed up and it was really you.”
“Then we saw you coming out when we got here,” Steve said, “and thought we’d follow you to see if it really was you before knocking on the door—”
“SSSSSSSsssssss,” Will said, thrusting his flushed face into Steve’s. “You talk and all I hear is sssssssssssss. I saw you. And her. In Manchester. Why are you following me?”
It had been Will in the audience. I scanned the street, the windows overlooking this scene. Where the fuck were the neighbours?
“We wanted to catch up with you. But if you don’t want to see us, we’ll go,” Steve said, trying to slide away, in the direction of Rupesh. “Sorry we even—”
“Sssssssssssss.”
“Will, put down the knife and we’ll just go,” I said. I had to do something. Steve sounded genuinely terrified.
“You should all know better,” Will said.
“We’ll go,” Rupesh said.
“We won’t come back,” Steve said. The knife had actually cut him now, and there was blood trickling down his neck.
“But you always do, don’t you?” Will said. “You’re always there. No matter whe
re I move, or how much I stay offline. I don’t want a fucking reunion. I don’t want to even think about you, any of you. None of it means anything to me any more.”
I noticed the gap between his spread legs just as the blood began to mark the collar of the white T-shirt under Steve’s cardigan. I stepped forward and kicked Will there as hard as I could. The knife fell to the floor and he folded over in near silence. Steve stepped away and shoved him over. He looked down at Will, now on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest, eyes and mouth tightly closed, withdrawing from his agony. Steve reached up to his neck and brought his bloody hand before his eyes. He was going to attack Will, that’s how it looked, anger possessing his face. Only Rupesh stepped forward then, ushering us to the car.
“Come on,” he said. “Now.”
Steve allowed himself to be led away, but he never took his eyes from Will.
“Anyone have any doubt about him now?” Steve said once we were back out on the main road.
No one said anything. The rain was falling once more. Outside, the outer suburbs of Birmingham flashed by in an orangey blur of streetlights.
I was still in shock ten minutes later. Beside me in the driver’s seat Steve kept reaching up to touch his neck with a shaky hand.
“Man,” he said, “that was so stupid.” He was angry with Rupesh, but trying to reign it in.
“Do you want to go to the police?” I said. “He attacked you. Even if it doesn’t stick it might keep him from—”
“We just hunted him down and broke into his house after telling the police we suspected him of a murder,” Rupesh said.
“Then we left him on the street after attacking him,” Steve said. “I think I know whose side I’d be on right now if I were them.”
I didn’t know what to say. Maybe that was right; maybe Will would even call the police about us. None of this included what Jen and I had done earlier that day. Who knew whether that kid had reported the two of us to the police?
It had been Will at the gig in the audience. What did that mean? That he’d not been hiding after all; that he had responded to Gaz’s invite then seen us and not shown himself?
Or had he only owned up to having seen us in Manchester to put us on the back foot, an invention to make it seem like we’d been stalking him rather than vice versa? We’d caught him by surprise at the pub tonight, interrupted his plan, so perhaps he’d lied his way out of it by acting upset with Steve. He’d obviously seen me at the gig as I’d seen him, and when we hadn’t mentioned that part, we’d shown him we were holding something back, that we had an agenda. So he’d used that to his advantage, inventing outrage about us being there when actually he was there following us. Watching us the whole time, perhaps from the start. Playing with us, like he’d been doing with the Nirvana logos.
The Killer You Know Page 24