The Killer You Know

by S. R. Masters

  “You think he controlled your mind?” My laugh is more of a yap, but I’ve heard everything now.

  “I think he played my weaknesses, my competitiveness with him, my concern for Jen, all at the exact right moments, yeah.”

  I shake my head in the absence of knowing what to do next. It must look to them like I’m broken it lasts so long. “You know I was with him on some of these nights and mornings he’s in your mind running around pushing people down stairs and executing them at pylons. I mean, how do you explain all of that?”

  “We’ve got lots of questions too,” Jen says. “But every time we come up with a doubt we can think of a way around it. And that’s the thing really, in a way you’re his only real alibi. And the police tell us an alibi is pretty strong in court. Which is why we wanted to ask if you’re absolutely sure he didn’t, you know, go out the room for a bit, or leave you sleeping, maybe drugged.”

  “This is fucking stupid,” I say.

  “Why? We know drugs are involved in this, because of Rupesh,” Jen says. “And the police told me that Will probably took some sort of overdose and then suffocated in the bag. It was tied to his neck by an elastic band. But maybe Steve drugged him first? To get him out there.”

  “They can tell that on an autopsy, surely?”

  Rupesh shrugged. “Perhaps. Depends on a range of factors, though. It’s taking a long time for the police to release the body. Might be Christmas backlog, might be something more.”

  “So tell me how all this happens, in your mind?” I say. “Steve was with us all on the night before New Year’s Eve.”

  “But he wasn’t, though,” Jen says.

  “I think he drugged you and me that night,” Rupesh said. “Then took me to his car, or the stolen one they found, once you were asleep, drove out to Will, drugged him, then either left us at Will’s or in the massive boot of that Octavia he drives. If he stayed with us until near-morning, he could have topped up the drug long enough to incapacitate us until you all split up the next morning.”

  “And getting you out to the pylon? And all the things we saw and heard that night?”

  “Again, implausible but not impossible. It’s Steve, remember? King of planning. I think he dosed me up again and left Will to die. Whatever you think you heard or saw out there was what Steve was trying to make you see and hear.”

  Nothing left, I ask the most important question of all: “Why would he do all this?”

  “To bring us back together,” Jen says.

  “He certainly did that then, didn’t he?” I say. “Even Will’s here, down the local morgue.”

  I stand up, ready to leave now; I’ve heard enough. This is how it happened before, how we’d turned up at the police station thinking they had a case when they clearly didn’t. How Jen had turned up at the poor Kuzmenski brother’s house to crack the fucking case. They were being convinced by their own conviction. They’d learned nothing at all about themselves from anything that had happened.

  “What if I turned around and said I thought it was you, Rupesh?” I say.

  “Okay,” he says. “Why would you think that?” He gives Jen an askance glance, but appears apprehensive.

  “You could equally have done any of these crazy things you’re accusing Steve of. Maybe you pretended to be kidnapped, maybe you played head games with all of us. You just said you knew Will the best. And you were alone the night you were kidnapped. And Jen couldn’t vouch for you the night my mum was attacked. And I’m sure if Steve has access to drugs, you certainly do, Rupesh. And what about when you suggested, rather weirdly, that I kill my mum?”

  “That isn’t what happened, Adeline,” he says.

  I know that, and I despise the sensation of myself spiralling. But I can’t stop. I’m stuck in my own momentum. “But isn’t it fun that I can make it all sound like it did if I want to? His cabin near Loch Ness,” I say to Jen. “Do you know about that?”

  “Fine,” he says. “What’s my motivation?”

  “What’s Steve’s fucking motivation?”

  “He wanted to be king again.”

  “Well, I think you wanted to dethrone him. That’s your motivation. You never got over Steve being hard on you when we were kids so you decided to set him up.”

  “He told us he couldn’t wait for this reunion,” Rupesh says. “He was in an odd place, he said, and was over-investing in the reunion or something. And he knew the likelihood was we’d all meet up, have a nice polite evening, then go back to our lives. But that’s not what he wanted. He wanted everything as it was, the ones that survived The Dedication, his three disciples. That bag on my head had holes in, Adeline. And what better way to get revenge on the one person who spurned him, who wasn’t dedicated, and even humiliated him by punching him in the face.”

  “No.” I take a giant breath and my composure returns. “I think you two need to talk, and think, and then think even more about what it is you’re saying here.”

  “And I think you do too,” Rupesh says.

  “No, I’m not sure I do,” I say. “You know, I’m actually done thinking about the past.”

  The car is packed up and waiting on my parents’ drive. I get behind the wheel, hands trembling so much I can’t hold the steering wheel.

  So I go for a walk, one last time, to pay my respects to the childhood I won’t be able to visit again. I walk by Mr. Strachan’s old place and down Dead Man’s Alley. And childhood has come to meet me here, because while there are dark clouds far away on the horizon, the sun hangs over me uncovered once I am out in the open and my hair soaks up the heat just like it always did in those summers.

  I reach the little wooden bridge over the stream down in the trough between two fields. I run my hand on the wooden rail to the right-hand side and my fingertips brush scratches that might be letters. Beyond this bridge is where the fruit farm had been. Then it was fields all the way to Hampton. From here, the feeling of being trapped used to slip away, replaced by the promise of Birmingham and trains beyond.

  If it hadn’t been for the friends I’d made, God.

  Steve’s face, somehow both the teenage version and the adult version at once, projects in my mind.

  Capability, Opportunity and Motivation—COM-B, that’s what Steve said it came down to. And yes, his motive is so clear now, clearer than anything we could ever come up with for Will. I can hear him in the hotel that night. I just always wanted a gang, you know? Like the kids in all those films we watched.

  Or what about when he’d said, All the other friendship groups had been stand-ins for you guys.

  I laugh. I clap. I even shiver at how delightfully it all comes together. I’m Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery. I’m nuts to think this. Nuts.

  Oh, but he had the capability too. He has the cash and the car to get up to Loch Ness and back. Didn’t he say his job was incredibly flexible? And the opportunity! Yes, if the others were right about Wallgrove and his connections to the health service. Because it had been weird the way Will reacted to him that night. Like he’d seen him before somewhere. And if he knew Wallgrove, maybe he knew those two women? Had them confide in him. All off the record, all completely untraceable. Made a note of them, and their connection to Will, for later use.

  Charmed them, drugged them, killed them.

  I take out my phone, and after bringing up his name and hesitating, I call Steve. I need to speak to him, because I’m frightening myself. On some level the things they’d said about him chime with something I’ve been feeling about Steve. Something I’ve been trying to ignore. Like how nothing had yet quite clicked between us. How he is still sort of distant, in that way he always used to be and that I’d forgotten. How the sex hasn’t really—

  He answers. The reception is crackly.

  “I can’t hear you brilliantly,” he says. “Are you okay?”

  His immediate concern eases my anxiety and makes me want to throttle the other two. Who else in my life cared that much about me that it’s the first
thing they ask?

  “Sorry if this is weird,” I say. “I need to ask you something.”

  “Where are you?” he says.

  “I’m actually out in the fields. In Blythe. I needed some air, and I’m down on that wooden footbridge before the beehives. Steve, that night we met Will, he said something really odd that’s been bothering me, and what with everything that’s been happening I’m having all sorts of stupid thoughts about—”

  “God, Adeline, you don’t have to tell me. I’ve had all sort of—”

  “Will acted oddly that night,” I say. “The knife night. Like he’d seen you more recently than just when we were kids, you know?”

  “Uh huh.” The line goes quiet.

  “I thought he’d been talking about the pub, but, what did Will mean when he said, if I didn’t make myself clear last time? Which last time?”

  His silence is much longer this time. Then he sighs. “I told you I’d seen him around over the years.” He pauses. It’s not a pause I like. I recall him saying that, on the first night, but he’d made the encounters sound brief. Positive. Not the sort of thing that might end with Will having to make himself clear about something. “He probably meant that.”

  “Right.” What else can I say now?

  He needs to tell me more, and he must realise this because he says, “This is a bit awkward, isn’t it? I can explain, though.”

  My abdomen prickles with unease. “Okay, that sounds important. What makes what awkward?”

  “I briefly studied in York. I mentioned that to you.”

  “Right. I don’t remember that, but—”

  “I did. I told you that everyone had connections to York, back when we found out the victims and Will were all from York.”

  Someone had said that, but had it been Steve? I can’t recall. Hadn’t it been Rupesh?

  “I did an MSc. there for a year,” he says, “about a year after Emily left me. And one of the modules was based on a mental health facility, not Wallgrove, but in York.”

  “You met Will?”

  He sighs. “Yes.”

  “Jesus, Steve.” The pace of my heartbeat quickens and now I’m aware of how alone I am out here in the fields.

  “Bear with me, Adeline. Please. He was an inpatient, which I didn’t realise until I asked him where he worked and he kind of said he didn’t. And so we started talking about stuff, you know? Both of us a bit embarrassed at first. I told him what I was doing and he seemed interested. I gave him my number and I thought that it was nice to see an old friend, but you know, I never expected to hear from him again.”

  “So wait,” I say, “when was this?”

  “When I saw him it must have all been around the time of his band kicking him out, but he never mentioned that to me. Basically he called me up months later, he wasn’t a patient at this point, and we went for a few drinks. And we talked about old times, and I mean, he was just like he was that night, said he couldn’t remember stuff. But as we talked he recalled some bits and pieces, increasingly so. Without me really realising they became actual therapy sessions for him, that’s how I think he viewed them. But the more we talked, and the more he found out about where I was in my life, the more I think he got jealous and a bit resentful. He got angry with me and started to say things like he thought the reason he got into drugs and couldn’t trust people went back to things that happened that summer. That some of it I was personally responsible for. And I don’t know, maybe I was? And maybe that’s why I kept insisting we meet to talk about it because then I felt guilty, even though looking back there were other things going on in his head that had nothing to do with me or us or The Dedication.

  “Anyway, one day he didn’t show up to meet me and when I finally spoke to him he said he was starting afresh and wanted a clean break from everything. He’d already told me he’d fallen out with his family, now he just needed to walk away from it all. I tried talking him out of it, because I thought it was probably good he’d actually been facing his past for the first time. But, well, you heard what he was like. He told me to get out of his head, that I was a snake. All that.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “Wait. Please. That’s why I was so convinced it was personally about me. You know, this is the thing, I’ve known this all along. All this time we’ve been doing this I had all this additional information, and you know, I’m relieved I get to tell you now because it perhaps explains why I’ve pushed for certain things at times. What he told me made it a lot easier for me to believe he might have committed these crimes. Some of his views on women, and mortality. And looking back I worry that perhaps I even triggered all this by making him think about the past.”

  “But why the actual…? Why have you lied about it?” I’m trying to be calm, trying to remember that Steve had almost put his life on the line up at the train tracks, and is meant to be the hero of this story. There must be a reason.

  “I didn’t lie, I just didn’t mention it because of patient confidentiality,” he says. “You know, I felt I’d be betraying his confidence. I knew you could all find out about his drug abuse and his mental health problems without me having to betray his trust. Especially at the start when we were all just toying with the idea of him being a murderer still.”

  I laugh. That is fucking delightful. “Confidentiality? After the argument we had with Rupesh?”

  “Well, maybe you can see it like that, yeah.” He sounds pissed off. “But there’s a difference between looking on a system for an address that any old person who pulls on an admin badge can access and actually divulging clinical information.”

  “Well, okay, but Will wasn’t actually your patient, was he?”

  “No, but that’s how he viewed it. I wanted to respect that, given we’d met in a clinical setting. He thought I was a therapist, and I probably didn’t bother to explain my actual research interests.”

  “So you knew about York and all about what Gaz told us before we went? All his mental health issues, too?”

  “No. It had been two years or whatever so I didn’t know where he was in that time. I didn’t know about any of the stuff Gaz told us either, just Will’s side. Like I said, more and more Will wanted to talk about the past not the present. He never mentioned a band. When we went to his parents’ on Christmas Day we were all in the same boat in most ways. His old mobile didn’t work when I tried it and he hadn’t been in touch on the emails.”

  I find that I want to believe him, because it could be true, couldn’t it? Everything he said follows logically, and sounds reasonable when he says it. I can even imagine once he’d committed to protecting Will’s confidentiality, how strange it would have seemed just to suddenly betray it—and how bad it might have appeared to us.

  “You there?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” he says. “I’ve told the police all this, and I asked if it would have made a difference to how seriously they’d have taken us if I’d told them before and they said no.”

  There were so many things I wanted to ask, the train track story for one, but without betraying Rupesh and Jen how could I? I opt for: “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Hello?” he says. He can’t hear me, the line’s dreadful again apparently. All of a sudden. “Reception at my flat is awful.”

  Is he going to fake hang up now? I look at the bars on my phone: it flits from one to two. Maybe it’s me? I give him the benefit of the doubt again.

  “What did you say before?” he asks.

  “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Honesty,” he says. “I don’t want Will coming between us going forward.”

  Even now, even though my heart is slamming against my chest wall, the words “us going forward” give me some base thrill.

  “Well, it’s great you can be so honest when someone catches you out.”

  “Adeline, I could have bullshitted you. Said I didn’t know what he was talking about,” he says. “Li
sten, I think you need to get up and see me soon. I miss you and want us to spend time trying to get back to where we were before all this. I feel like I want to talk to you in person to make sense of this. I know how you must feel, because all the police questions have made me think some really weird things lately.”

  “Are you serious?” I ask.

  “Of course I am,” he says. “I can’t imagine what you must be thinking. I need you to see my face. I need to see yours. Tomorrow. The day after. As soon as fucking possible, Adeline,” he says, then laughs.

  I don’t know what to say. He is doing exactly what Rupesh says he does, yet I want to see his face. Because that will be the only way I can tell for sure. Although, even then, we’d seen Will’s face, and that hadn’t helped alter our convictions about him one bit. When it comes down to it, can you ever really tell if there’s a killer standing in front of you? Is it their eyes, their manner, their voice? Their past?

  “Steve,” I say, “I don’t know how to feel about this. Can you understand that?”

  “Are you still at the bridge?” Steve says.

  “Yes?”

  “Good, will you just check something? Maybe it will help with how you feel. Underneath the step at the end. I think I left something there a long time ago and it occurred to me it might still be there. I left it as a sort of present. For you, from past-me. I imagined one day we’d go out there and find it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Hello. I’m struggling to hear you, Adeline. Let’s talk when the line’s better, but look under the bridge, okay?”

  When he’s gone I stare at the screen. I feel out of touch with myself and out of control. But my critical faculties are so instinctive that when they’re absent like this it usually means there’s nothing to criticise. Only thought and time would allow me to process what he’d just told me.

  Begrudgingly, I step off the Hampton end of the bridge and kneel down. The crevice is no doubt filled with spiders and woodlice, but I want to put my hand inside because it does look like something is back there, deep in the shadows.