Any One of Us, page 17
“Look, look,” she said. And he was. He was looking.
That expression – Ruby drank it in, felt it fill her, like some vital life force nourishing the marrow inside her hollow bones. There was no clapping, Giles had barely even smiled. It was just the slightest of nods. Less than approval, far less than praise. It was acknowledgement. Giles had seen her and all was in order. She was riding her bike, just like she’d been told to do, as though success was the status quo and harmony had been restored.
From then on, that feeling was all she ever wanted and, luckily for her, Giles explained in a clear and concise way exactly how she could get it. Simple, Ruby just had to be the best. Be the smartest person, the fastest, the strongest. The safety found in superiority is unparalleled because, as he told her, if you’re the best in any given situation there really is nothing to fear.
This comfort blanket of excellence that Ruby always wore had been sown here, on this grass, three decades ago. And she didn’t need to psychoanalyse herself to appreciate the nuances of the memory, of the moment she finally started riding and her mind was at peace. It was just her, the bike, Giles’s face and she realised, as with so many other things, the faster she went the more stable her balance became. That was the first moment of many more that followed where, for just a fleeting period of time, the kind that passes faster than you can ever appreciate, Ruby wasn’t thinking about any buried thing that might crawl out from the ground to capture her attention and ruin her day.
So, with a sigh, she turned around and faced the crime scene. Ruby looked exactly where she was going. Eyes forward, a dead-straight line from here, firm and on the goal. Because, as Giles taught her when she was small, if you look down, you fall.
Ruby sat in Jay’s car, still parked against the kerb, the tarmac path leading along the recreation ground grass and to the pavilion over on her right. He’d already forwarded her an email with the nineteen-minute sound file attached. Once it had downloaded, she put her earbuds in and listened.
The 999 call began with the normal formalities – Little Adam’s panicked voice asking for the police. Even before he said a single word, it was obvious that this was very much an emergency. Close, heavy breath on the receiver as he relayed his location.
“I need— Oh, shit.” Adam’s voice rising now. “Police, please. Someone— They . . . they hit me and—”
A banging sound. Bang, bang.
“OK, sir, are you able to get to a secure—”
Bang.
“Oh, they’re here,” he said, with unnerving composure. Resignation. “Someone’s breaking the door.”
The microphone strained, muffled, something brushing against the phone.
“Sir, units have been dispatched, what I need you to do now is—”
A noise loud enough to make Ruby flinch. She turned the volume down two bars, worried about her eardrums. There was movement, but – she squinted – it sounded distant. Ruby guessed he’d dropped his phone on the floor. That was the sound, glass and metal colliding with tiles.
And then, the door now broken through, face to face with the intruder, Adam uttered his final words. “Oh my God,” he said, undeniable recognition in his voice. “It’s you.”
The rest was confusing. It was hard to paint a picture of exactly what was happening – noise, chaos, violence. No talking. Just a few primal grunts. Perhaps both knew they were engaged in a fight to the death. A fight that Adam was destined to lose.
And once he had, there were footsteps. It was done. But the controller left the line open, listening in to the whir from the vacuum cleaner in the next room, which ran through the entire recording. The next sounds, an uncomfortable sixteen minutes later, were sirens and the deep, bellowing voices of men declaring, again and again, that they had arrived.
“Police, police.”
This was followed by one officer describing what they’d found. Professional solemnity keeping his voice stable, human shock adding sighs, stutters and all the requisite shame. The catastrophe on the tiles. Now they needed extra support to search the area. The suspect can’t have gone far. But, judging by the reports on the radio, their response time had been ample for a successful escape.
Ruby scrolled back along the zigzag lines, her phone presenting the audio as a heart-rate monitor and the encounter itself, spiking and wild, as a cardiac arrest. She looked up, looked right, a shadow approaching the car door. Jay leant down, opened it and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“You listened?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, removing her earbuds.
Without any prompt, Jay fiddled with the radio, changed a wire and turned Bluetooth on. Ruby connected her phone so they could hear it all unfold together.
Parked here, not far from the scene, immersed in what happened there little more than an hour ago, she tried again to draw pictures in her mind. The tall order of asking one sense to do the job of another. But an image had begun to form, fading into existence like a slowly developing photograph.
The actual murder itself seemed quick, a hateful act, maybe, but not one fuelled by fury or passion. There was no shouting. No signs of sadism. And no attempt from either party to engage in conversation. If Ruby had to describe the image she’d made, it would be an execution. It seemed, and this was a cold word to use, efficient. They’d just barged in through that kitchen door and got the job done.
A few groans, a tussle maybe, a glass that smashed and a pan that clattered across the tiles. The bin fell over at some point. And a series of thuds. Then the footsteps and—
She tilted her head, frowning. Jay had clearly heard it too.
“What was that?” she thought aloud.
Ruby scrolled back. Played the killer’s casual retreat again. Turning, walking and . . . she leant towards the speaker. It sounded like whistling? Not wind, an actual tune.
Wincing, Jay shook his head and turned the volume up full on his car’s radio. A constant static from the speakers, hissing with the potential for sound loud enough to shake the cavities in your chest, tremble hairs on skin too small to see.
Phone on her thigh, Ruby used two fingers to isolate the segment in question. Just after the violence, three seconds into the relative silence that followed. She played it again, on a loop. A humming sound that became, yes, it was, it was a whistle. The melody grew more and more distant with every one of the last few seconds, tracking the killer as they left the pavilion and strolled back into the shadows of anonymity.
“You recognise that?” Jay asked.
“Almost.”
But when Ruby slid the treble up and the bass down, it sang around them, the car alive with music. Jay sat, eyes closed, head gently swaying, almost like he was meditating, orchestrating.
Ruby closed her own eyes to listen. Footsteps. Humming, humming, whistling. She left it playing, the familiarity of the tune just beyond her reach. A song. It was there, skirting around the edge of recollection.
“Dah . . . dah,” she whispered, getting two notes.
And then, gradually, she began humming along to it. Louder and louder until she was able to pause the recording and continue with her own rendition. She rolled her hands, nodding at Jay and, eyes wide, he nodded back.
“Dah, dah-dah . . .” he joined in, “dah-dah, dah-daaaah, dah . . .”
Now they were both singing together, abstract sounds replacing the lyrics they still hadn’t grasped. Ruby gestured for him to carry on.
“A hymn . . .” she said, “a carol, a Christmas carol . . . Fall . . .”
“Fall,” he grabbed her shoulder, “on your knees.”
“Oh, hear the angel voices,” she added. “Yes.”
“A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices . . .” He patted the steering wheel. “Yeah, yeah, that’s it . . .”
And they stopped. Sat for a few moments in total silence.
“‘O Holy Night’,” she said, abandoning the song to state its title. “The stars are brightly shining.”
This felt momentous, her first glimpse into this person’s life, their mind, the idle tunes they whistle when they find themselves alone. Joining those blue threads of clothing fibre in the extremely sparse collection of evidence. One more thing Ruby knew about them.
“Does it mean anything to you?” Jay asked.
Ruby stared at the scene, her mind busy with options. Trying to remember where she’d heard this carol, whether it had any significance at all. Films maybe. TV. Primary school trips to church. Other than that, she drew blanks, shook her head.
“But,” she said, “he’d dropped his phone. They didn’t know he’d called. They didn’t know we were listening.”
“And what do you think he meant? ‘Oh my God,’” Jay echoed Adam’s final words. “‘It’s you.’”
This meant only one thing and it wasn’t a surprise. “They knew each other,” she said. Then she turned to look at Jay. “Maybe from school.”
Adam’s open eyes had seen. Photons of light had drifted into his pupils just minutes earlier. If only he’d had the presence of mind to say a name. Ruby wondered whether there was any trace left inside him, curious about when information dies. How long before an oxygen-starved brain is just another piece of earthly matter? Just dust from those brightly shining stars.
When she turned her phone’s Bluetooth off, the police radio in Jay’s car whispered away again with the normal chatter you learn to ignore. Odd words jump out. Units. Numbers. Roads.
But then one line of distant dialogue caught their ears. A name. A suspect. Frank Enfield. They both froze rigid, sitting perfectly still to listen again to something astonishing.
A warrant for the arrest of Frank Enfield. The controller was describing him now. His height. His clothes. And, be warned. He should be considered dangerous and possibly armed.
“—north-east. Suspect last seen in his room at, uh, 11am.”
His room. His hospital room. Some back and forth on the black radio. Thought to have exited through a window. Reports of his escape only just called in. An officer close to the hospital confirmed they were leaving a job and were now en route. Ruby pictured a car turning, blue lights flickering on a road somewhere.
Checking the clock, she looked at Jay, who was clearly thinking the same thing. Adam’s 999 call was placed at 1.46pm.
Frank was last seen at . . . “11am,” Ruby said.
“Plenty of time.”
“Why the— why wasn’t he restrained? Was no one keeping an eye on him?”
But Jay could only sigh as he removed his phone – his rolling eyes long worn to unprofessional blunders, to humans and their errors. Though this one seemed especially outrageous.
They’d taken Frank to Missbrook Hospital to run some tests, routine for the early stages of committing him, presumably, to a mental health institution. How could the collective will of every necessary legal, medical and law-enforcement body result in this? He should have been cuffed, sedated or an inescapable combination of the two.
Perhaps the severity of it all had been lost in translation. Something Jay put right as he made a call and explained that Frank Enfield was – without any shadow of a doubt – wanted on suspicion of murder. Injecting a whole new layer of urgency into the situation.
Ruby had been so ready to go back to Will’s spare room, walk up to that photograph and find Frank Enfield standing tall on the back row. His pale face, his dark hair. The stature that justified his nickname. She’d planned to cross him off, green ink to rule him out.
But then she thought again about all the things he said to her in that barn, right before she broke her hand on his jaw. He spoke about truth. The nature of reality, of belief. Certainty. What can she trust? What could she ever hope to know for sure? The footage of him sitting in that room at Scott’s house told many stories. Was Frank’s innocence truly the prevailing theme?
Adopting the open mind he’d insisted on, Ruby wondered how it could be possible. How could he have done it? They knew when the files themselves were created, but formally dating silent footage is not straightforward. And Scott’s record-keeping was admittedly erratic. The timestamps on the videos could be false, a trick. A way to deceive. But then why would Frank allow himself to be arrested?
Why. That was the biggest question of all. By the end of today, there might be irrefutable proof that he had killed Adam. And maybe the other three too. But, once again, why? Why would Frank do this? It was beyond infuriating not to have an answer. It caused her physical discomfort, far worse than the throb in her braced hand.
But alongside the discontent she’d feel if delusion or insanity was the explanation for all this, Ruby was once more looking down the barrel of fear. The violence was brazen and the aftermath blasé. Was it simply naïve to hope for motivation that made sense? Or did the opportunist mayhem of a madman suffice?
Because, if so, then every single person in that photograph was eligible for a little red cross well ahead of their time. And the idea that she might be waiting in line was just as plausible as any other unsatisfactory explanation. That empathy she’d tried to bury out there on the grass might not have been distraction after all, but premonition. Just a little taste of what’s in store.
Chapter Twelve
Despite the sense of momentum, what followed was a period of inertia. There was no meaningful CCTV, aside from four frames of a blurred shape passing the threshold of the car park and, as the pavilion had hosted a party the night before, the prints and DNA were close to useless. A single eyewitness reported seeing someone leave the scene around the time in question. Someone wearing a hooded coat of undetermined colour, “possibly dark”. They hadn’t seen their hair or skin and, only when pushed, described an individual of average height and average build. Jay remarked dryly that this meant they were on the hunt for “a human being”.
Ruby’s extensive research on the origin and cultural footprint of “O Holy Night” felt similarly futile and now she was infected with the tune playing on repeat in her head. Between thoughts she’d hear herself think, “Oh night divine” and, when she woke up to day ten’s sunrise glowing through the curtains of Will’s spare room, her mind whispered, “For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”
Back to the photograph, a snapshot in time. The whole school year, right here, lined up in front of her. Earlier, Ruby had ceremoniously taken the lid off her thick red marker pen, stepped to the wall and put an X over Adam Ward’s face, just like the others. Bottom row, third in from the right. Four victims now. Four little red crosses.
Maybe whoever was doing this had their own photograph. Perhaps they were using circles, targets, like upcoming appointments on a calendar. Who next? she wondered, twirling the pen. Which one of these people was living out their final few days? None of them, she decided. Ruby would not let another soul fall. She would figure this out. She was going to save them all, she thought, allowing herself a moment of unfounded optimism – glimpses into a hero’s journey, a fantasy that, despite everything, still felt possible.
Her gaze fell to the question mark hovering over Frank Enfield’s head at the top of the photograph. His escape from hospital was an unwelcome injection of chaos and, considering his far from average appearance, it was an ongoing surprise that he remained at large.
Lauren entered the spare room, came to the desk at Ruby’s side and set down a cup of tea. They’d been speaking about Frank and she picked up the conversation right where they’d left off.
“It kind of makes it worse that it wasn’t about sex,” Lauren said. “But I’m not sure exactly why.”
Clearly, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Scott’s questionable pastimes.
Ruby agreed. Even the most obscene and evil acts of sexual perversion are not, despite what your initial outrage tells you, incomprehensible. All living creatures are at the sharpest edge of evolution, billions of years, countless generations whose most potent commonality is that they successfully reproduced. Whether you’re discussing desirable bust-to-hip ratios, high-testosterone bone structures or even the indomitable pressure for social approval, evolutionary psychology has an explanation up its sleeve. And if you’re short on time, and can’t study it like Ruby had, the field can be summarised adequately with a single word. Sex.
Although distorted well beyond reason, and complicated by his apparent castration, Scott was surely equipped with some form of this fuel. But the fact it didn’t explain his actions made them much harder to swallow.
“Oscar Wilde said everything is about sex.” Ruby turned to Lauren. “Except sex. Sex is about power.”
Lauren, frayed from a sleepless nightshift, was still wearing her hospital ID card around her neck. Holding her own mug, she came over to the photo. They stood side by side.
“Scott just cut out the middleman,” Ruby added.
“Why wasn’t Frank put somewhere more secure?” Lauren asked, finding the question mark above his face.
“He was meant to be sedated.”
Doctor Wallace, who was technically responsible for Frank, had told Ruby he’d climbed out of a window, onto a low roof and down a fire exit ladder. Her theory was that he may have been one of the rare people with partial immunity to the sedative drugs he’d been administered. Or perhaps, she wondered, he simply needed a larger dose. A final possibility was that good, old-fashioned medical error saw him hooked up to someone else’s drip. Either way, it seemed ironic that a man who’d spent the last decade confined to a room was so resourceful when it came to escaping.
“It said on the news he’s wanted on suspicion of murder?” Lauren then looked to Ruby, trying to gauge her view.
But Ruby sighed, answering the question she hadn’t needed to ask. “No,” she said. “I don’t think he’s responsible.”
“Why?”
“We saw the culprit. He ran down the garden. Only a glimpse, but he was not six-foot five.”
Lauren agreed. None of them could be sure about age or race. And even gender wasn’t a hundred percent. But the person who stole her notebook was nowhere near Frank Enfield’s size.
Most of all, “It just doesn’t make sense.”
