“Be an astronaut?” Steve said.
“That. And I don’t want to be just married with kids living out in the middle of fucking nowhere doing some boring thing I hate. Something conventional. I don’t ever want to be doing anything that didn’t feel like a choice.”
“You’ll do something cool,” Jen said. Adeline can’t read her tone. “I just know it.”
Against her better judgement she smiled at this, unexpectedly touched.
For a while they all sat in silence, for so long a crack from the dying fire made them jump. Then they all laughed together.
“Okay, I’ve decided what I want to do when I’m older,” Will said. He was wasted. “You need to kill at least three people to be a serial killer, right? So that’s what I’ll do. There you go, good plan right?” He paused, thinking. “Maybe it won’t be exactly sixteen years, but at some point in the future…”
They all listened while Will outlined his plan in disturbing detail.
When he was done, there were such fits of hysterics that Adeline assumed all of them were in on the joke. Only when she wiped her eyes, neither Will nor Steve were laughing. They just stared across the fire at one another.
And when it was quiet once more, Will said: “Or maybe I’ll be a DJ.”
A little while later, as the laughter died down, Adeline had the unsettling feeling that they were being watched. All of them did—a passive high from Will’s drugs perhaps. Steve even got up at one point and ran after someone he thought he’d seen in the bushes. He was gone for a while, nearly five minutes. Probably taking a piss. Adeline hadn’t seen anything, but they were all convinced they’d heard something out there that wasn’t just the wind in the weeds.
When he returned he was shaking his head. He looked straight at Will.
“It was Strachan,” he said. “I swear it was him. I saw his hair and his moustache.”
Although how he’d seen anything in the dark she had no idea. All of them were sufficiently spooked, though, and when they walked home they did so close together.
“What the hell is he up to?” Adeline said.
When they arrived back at Elm Close she went back to Steve’s. He’d given her a CD on her actual birthday the day before, the new Bad Religion she’d wanted. But he said he had one more present for her. Perhaps tonight would be the night they took things further. She hoped so.
Instead, he told her to wait downstairs and vanished up to his room, coming down after a short while with one of those gold envelopes he always used. It wasn’t sealed, whatever was inside wouldn’t fit. He’d probably shoved it in just now as an afterthought.
She reached in and took out a brown wallet, Strachan’s wallet, and had no idea how to respond.
“When you told me about your mum and him I changed my vote,” he said. “Happy birthday.”
“You never took it back?”
“No.”
She stared at it, and given he was so into birthdays, she thanked him.
“You don’t sound convinced,” he said.
“I just… don’t know what to do with it?”
“Oh right,” he said. “Well, shall I just ditch it for you? It’s a symbolic gift really.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Would you do that?”
“With pleasure,” he said. “I hate that guy, you know. Hate him.”
They kissed on the sofa, but without much commitment. Earlier than she usually would, she went home.
New Year, 2016
The first days of the New Year are a blur of questions, travelling and endless searching for places to charge a phone. The police take my preliminary statement on New Year’s Day, as they do with the others, including Rupesh, who spends just a few hours recovering at the hospital before discharging himself despite frostbite and hypothermia. I return every day to answer further questions. Massey, Clarke and the more senior officers I speak to are unreadable: possibly angry at us for going out there alone, possibly wanting to make amends for not taking us seriously.
To me, having lived through the whole thing, I’m in no doubt about what happened. It is so obvious that Will committed the crimes I don’t understand some of the lines of questioning they take with me. Sure, they need to do their job, but their repeated unsubtle questions about my relationships with the others begins to grate. They’re more interested in when I last saw Rupesh and Steve than when I last saw Will. Twice they ask about the person we’d seen running away from us, and whether that could have been a different person to Will. Which, of course, it could have been. It could have been Lord Lucan. But of course, it wasn’t, was it? The third time they ask I respond with a question of my own: “Do I need a lawyer, do you think?”
They ask for my patience. Thank me for my cooperation.
Could I have been mistaken? they ask. Because the way in which Will died would not have been sudden, so it’s doubtful it could have been Will that we’d seen.
Things happened at a frantic pace that night, but yes, I think I am sure.
Yes, it could have been someone else. It gnaws at me, makes me want to discuss it with the others. I suppose it could have been Rupesh. Perhaps he ran off fast enough to then set up the scene they’d found. Yes, there are lots of things about him that have made me wonder if he had been behind it all, but what motive did he have? He liked Will, always had. Jen is the one in the group that hated him the most, but she was with Steve and me the whole time. It hadn’t even been her that ran after Will on the embankment—that had been Steve. But he had been with me both the night Mum had been attacked and the night Rupesh had been kidnapped.
Which only left one other possibility. Mr. Strachan, the option we had only dismissed because Will had turned out to be alive. I tell the police this, and they don’t seem interested, dismissing it as too tenuous given what they already have in front of them.
“This whole thing is a total mess,” PC Massey says to me in the corridor after another interview, sounding like she might go home that night and start looking for a new line of work.
Surely at this point they’re just tying up loose ends. Despite mentioning Strachan, I know now it was Will. It was always Will. I don’t know how long forensic stuff takes, but I suppose they have to establish whether he was alive or dead at the time we found him. It took the police a while to reach the location and the body had been outside of course, but it couldn’t have compounded things that much.
Both Xan and Jon try to call me repeatedly, and finally I text them both to let them know what has happened. I tell Dad everything too; the police also question him between his afternoon and evening stints at Mum’s bedside.
Nothing anyone says dissipates the paralysing confusion. No one can truly know what it is that we all just went through. That is why I text the others, hoping one of them will suggest meeting up, a debriefing, even a shared phone call of the sort Jen showed us all how to do once upon a time. Rupesh doesn’t reply. Jen sends a simple message to let me know she is okay, but suggests nothing more.
Steve is still solid, there for me every time I text with his gallows humour and his continued flirting. He has to commute back and forth to Oxford for work so I see him just a handful of times. He comes to the hospital to see me, brings me coffee one afternoon when I’m on the verge of losing it completely. Perhaps he’d been right when he said it had always been just the two of us back then. Still, after everything we went through it’s sad.
“They’re ignoring me, too, if it makes you feel any better,” he tells me on the phone. “You know, at sixth form I had this little group of skaters and wannabe-intellectuals, but after college we never saw each other again. At uni too, I had all these friends into films. We had all these plans to be film-makers, and all star in each other’s films, and talk each other’s films up in interviews.”
“Like the Bloomsbury Set.”
“Yeah, or the Actors’ Gang, or like Kevin Smith. I don’t know. After Emily and I split, I had a big go at contacting all my old friends, because I sort of
sensed it coming and wanted to feel like I hadn’t wasted my whole life with her. That I had other friends. I heard nothing from anyone… It was pretty lonely. Humiliating, actually. When Jen got in touch and it just… meant a lot. Like all the other friendship groups had been stand-ins for you guys. But maybe I imagined that.” He sighs. “Or maybe they need time.”
The following weekend Steve books a room in Marlstone again, so he can be closer to me, he says. We get drunk in the hotel bar. Afterwards we walk over to the hotel he’d stayed at before, wanting to retrace what happened. We hypothesise about how Will must have taken Rupesh that night. We find a fire exit near Rupesh’s room that leads down to a staff car park, and a road behind where he could have kept a car running. The teenage receptionist with earlobe tunnels is smoking up against the wall, and he shares an I-won’t-tell-if-you-don’t look with us. Over his work uniform he is wearing a black hoodie, the word Nirvana is emblazoned on the lapel. Seeing him down here by the cars, it’s entirely plausible it was him that left that first smiley-face logo on the back of Steve’s car. How strange. I’d probably smile at this under different circumstances, but just seeing anything to do with Nirvana now chills me.
We drink more in Steve’s room. We fall into bed and have sex of sorts, but I don’t even think he comes. Lying naked beneath the bedsheet afterwards, watching Steve take off the condom, I’m a little embarrassed. He’d been tense and unyielding, broken kisses before I’d been able to lose myself in them. His touch had been unassured, bordering on clumsy.
He gives me a soft smile, then walks over to the bin in the corner of the room. I let my gaze linger on the parts of him that I really enjoy on a man, his backside, the triangle of muscle where his torso joined his legs. It hadn’t been bad exactly, just, well, disappointing is the word—even if that sounds harsh. If I am honest, none of the sex so far has exactly clicked, but it is obvious why, and Steve nails it when he says: “Imagine when we can do this and all the other stuff is out the way.”
“Yeah?” I say, and put enough of a lilt on the word to imply it was myself I doubted, not him.
“You know I got something I probably shouldn’t out of this young PC,” he says, sitting down beside me. I practically flinch at the sudden shift in conversation. He pats my leg three times. “They apparently found a laptop in the house at Sparkbrook and managed to crack it. It’s pretty revealing, they say. Looks like he’d been planning this a long time, like years.”
“Oh right.” It’s not that I’m not interested in this, but timing is everything. Now I want him to just be quiet and hold me.
“And they found a burned-out car in a field behind the pylon. Turns out it had been reported stolen not far from Will’s place.”
I stay the night, but my insomnia returns. In a fug I drive to Elm Close around 5 a.m. I get into bed and fall asleep instantly, able to grab another few hours before taking Dad to the hospital, a comforting routine we’ve fallen into amidst the chaos.
At the hospital my phone is off, but when I turn it back on that afternoon the two messages on WhatsApp are like quick punches.
Jen has left this group.
Rupesh has left this group.
By the start of the following week Mum has been taken out of her induced coma but remains unresponsive. There is no telling what might happen, no timeline the hospital can give that might allow me to decide what to do next. It could be months before they know more, it could be days. We are waiting for some response, good or bad, but Mum is giving nothing away.
Dad insists I get on with life for now, that he’ll keep me posted by phone if anything changes and I can come back straight away. There’s nothing here for me to do, he’s right. I can’t bear to leave him, though.
Eventually, he says, “I think I need some time alone with her to talk her out of it; you know how stubborn she is.” And I get he’s not just giving me permission.
On the drive away, the evening becoming night outside, I’m relieved I won’t have to see the hospital, or any antiseptic-scented public building, for a while. The police haven’t been in touch for a few days, which hopefully means they won’t need any of us any more. Can they even bring a dead person to trial? And if they can’t, would they bother reopening up the old suicide cases?
Steve has heard from his source that they’re working on a theory that Will tricked the other two girls into a convoluted suicide pact while at Wallgrove. While it sounds unlikely, it accounts for the fact he seems to have been lying about having had a third victim already kidnapped. How Steve is getting this information is beyond me—no doubt flirting and charm are involved.
It feels strange just leaving for my old life without at least trying to say goodbye to the others. While packing things at my parents’, still nervous about every creak and shadow in the empty house, I text Rupesh and Jen with the same curt message:
I’m heading home now, I hope you’re okay. I’m fine. If you’re ever in my neck of the woods come have a cup of tea. x
It’s such an inane thing to write, but at least it’s normal, human behaviour. Not like how they—
My phone rings. It’s Rupesh.
“Hi, Adeline,” he says. “Before you go do you think we could speak? Face to face.”
“At yours?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you want to speak about?” Over a week later, and finally he wants a fucking debrief.
“Steve,” he says, rendering inert any irony or sarcasm that I might otherwise use to shield myself. “We should talk about Steve.”
Steve, 1998
There had been anger before, but not like this. Strachan assaulted him. In his own house, and was forcing him into a climb-down over Will that would make him look weak and useless in front of the people he thought the most of.
Yet his mind was clear and composed when he stomped through the fields to find Will in the place Adeline said she’d left him. He knew exactly how he would balance things again. Like competing against an idiot chess player, his next move, the killer move, had simply opened up in front of him following his opponent’s. Strachan had unwittingly made things easy now.
Will sat on the stile before the footbridge looking weedier than the last time he’d seen him. Sickly. He watched Steve approach through the final section of maize with what looked to Steve like fear. That was good, because he could deal with fear. No one liked to be scared. In his hand was a spliff you could smell a mile away, accounting for the redness of his eyes and the dopiness of his expression.
“We need to sort this out,” Steve said. Of course he shrugged. Of course. “The others aren’t happy. I’m not happy. You don’t look great, mate.”
Another shrug.
“I’m sorry,” Steve said. The hardest bit really, because he wasn’t sorry for any of it. But the time for treating Will like an equal was over. “I don’t care about the photo. Or the ban. I was only holding it up because you said to make sure I did.”
“I know,” Will said.
“I want it to all go back to how it was before. I really do. And the others do too.”
“Can’t it, then?”
“Yeah,” Steve said, trying to burn his smile into Will, calming the pet before the painful injection. “There’s a reason they sent me. Honestly, they want you back, I want you back. But I suppose I still feel a bit pissed off. So while you’d be back in, it wouldn’t quite feel the same. I’d be resentful, I suppose. You’re one of my best mates, but I just don’t think it can really be the same unless I understand why you didn’t do our plan that night.”
“I just thought it was slack,” he said. “On Rupesh.” He knows he was wrong, can’t sustain eye contact for more than a few seconds.
“See, that’s it. I understand that, sort of. But Rupesh wasn’t taking it seriously, was he? I thought you agreed with that. And then you left me out there on my own for ages, a sitting duck for anyone lurking about.”
“Sorry.” He sounded about as enthusiastic as Steve had felt when deliverin
g his apology. Will’s trying hard to appear unaffected. His spine is straight despite it obviously causing him problems.
“I just don’t believe that, though, mate. I want to. But you never even tried to explain that to me after. And that just made me feel like you were all, Fuck Steve, I prefer Rupesh.”
He shrugged. “Sorry.” This time it sounded more like he meant it. “I didn’t think of that.”
Steve let that lie for a moment, watching his upper body wilt. His elbows take their rightful place on his knees.
Then: “Do you want the ban lifted then?”
“Yeah,” he said, without any hesitation. “If you’re okay about it.”
“I will be,” he said. “But if I’m going to be cool about this I need to know if you’re cool first. I want to feel like I did when we buried Obi together—that we understand things the same way.”
“Okay,” he said, cautious.
“I need you to show me you understand about Strachan.”
Will sighs. “He’s harmless.”
“You see…” Steve said. “Is he? You know he came over to my house this morning. He forced his way in and choked me. Up against the wall. Said I had to let you in the group again or he’d do worse.”
Will frowned. “Serious?”
“Yeah,” Steve said, enjoying this part. Enjoying Will beginning to comprehend. Beginning to see that Steve had once more been right. “Your mate. That’s also why I need to let you back in. Because otherwise he’ll batter me, Will. I don’t know what you said to—”
“Nothing, mate,” he said. “It’s him. He just assumed it was you and I didn’t say it wasn’t. I didn’t tell—”
“It’s fine,” Steve said. “I know it’s not your fault. He’s not right. I’ve always said that, haven’t I?”
Will nods.
“But I need to know you understand. And I need to make things right again. Balance things.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pair of white cotton knickers with a heart on the front, stolen from Adeline the last time they’d come close to doing it for real. He’d had to stop it again, the timing and the context for that milestone still not right. His mind had been too focused on obtaining what he needed for this moment, too. He holds them out to show Will.
The Killer You Know Page 33