Any One of Us, page 2
“How are the kids?” she asked.
“Loud.” Elizabeth sighed. “Are you coming back this way any time soon?”
No. That was the honest answer. But Ruby said, “Maybe next year.”
“It’s great to hear your voice. Sad that it took this to reconnect us.”
Ruby smiled. Is that how far she had strayed from her hometown? People literally had to die before she had a conversation with her friend. Her best friend. Ruby still thought of Elizabeth as that, despite all the callous things distance and time had done to their relationship.
“Want me to keep you posted on how it all pans out?” Elizabeth asked.
Ruby stopped pacing. Did she? There was conflict here. It was no coincidence that she was this far from Missbrook Bay. Her escape, though at the time subconscious, was by design. A huge part of her did not care about things back home. About the gossip, the pedestrian lives of people still stuck in that strange little town. But she definitely cared about Elizabeth. In fact, now she thought about it, Elizabeth was the only person there she would genuinely love to see.
“Sure,” Ruby said. “Tell me everything.”
And so that’s what Elizabeth did. For the next three days, she and Ruby exchanged messages – only a small proportion of which were discussing the murders.
Eduardo kept asking questions but Ruby was unable to provide any answers. Though, judging from the sparse updates online, she suspected the police were not making much progress either.
Most of their communication was reminiscing about old jokes, retold stories embellished again and again. That day, that party, that trip and, oh, haha, remember when . . .
Elizabeth explained who’s doing what, where and how. Auditing marriages, successes, failures, pregnancies. There were countless moments where Ruby was too busy smiling into her phone to concentrate on work. As Eduardo said, this was way more interesting.
Ruby even suggested Elizabeth and her family should come out here and visit.
You’d love it, she wrote. And she wasn’t just being polite.
But that was yesterday and Elizabeth still hadn’t replied. Perhaps she was thinking of a nice way to say that a thirty-hour flight with three kids might not be worth even the most overdue reunion with an old friend from school.
It was Tuesday now. She and Eduardo had just finished packing up the tent for the final time. Ruby opened the back of his van, slid a bag inside. She looked right, down the long stretch of straight road and left at their journey ahead, looking forward to getting back to civilisation. Routine. Sharp, controlled. Reinstating all of her rules.
“Ready?” Eduardo said.
“Sure—”
But, once more, voices from home found their way to her. This time, words arrived with the stern, official tones of professionality.
Calling from London, from the NCA headquarters, Deputy Director Don Larson.
He opened as he usually did, with questions about how she’s getting on. Small talk on the international pilot role she’d been so keen to accept.
Then he got onto the topic of the day.
“Don’t know if you’ve heard what’s going on in Missbrook Bay?” he said.
This was unnerving. These two disparate circles – work, personal. Two sets of a Venn diagram she’d always kept apart. Coming together. Colliding. How had this gossip – premium or otherwise – found its way into his mind? This had nothing to do with her.
“I have.”
“Local team has put in a request for assistance as it’s all a bit, well, strange,” Don said. “I can’t think of anyone better suited.”
“Than me?” Ruby laughed, holding her phone with her shoulder as she crouched down to pick up her final bag. “I can’t think of anyone worse.” She stood, dropped it into the back of the van. “You do know where I am, right?” She slammed the door shut, all packed up.
“Contract’s due for renewal.”
Ruby had been out here for more than a decade now. While it had technically been an interim position, it was on a rolling extension. In practice, it felt permanent. Especially given the new training programme she was putting together with Eduardo. She had roots here. Of course, she could be posted back to the UK. But it usually went without saying that she wouldn’t be.
“And I understand that it will be renewed?” She stepped onto the empty road.
“You know the place. And all that’s connecting them is the fact they went to Missbrook Heights School. All from the class of ’99. That’s your year, isn’t it?”
“It is. I just . . .” This was an unusual feeling – a slight insecurity. The idea of going back home, working there, it made Ruby uncomfortable. She was here. Safe here, far away. “Are you asking me or . . . ?”
“I am asking you,” he said, in a sincere tone. “Honestly, I’d get it. Conflicting interest – I can see how it’s not appropriate. You might be rusty; it’s been a while. Plus, it could all be over before you even landed.”
“Then, I’m afraid, the answer is no.”
“Ah, well, I’m sorry to hear that, but I appreciate you being straight with me. We’ll figure something out. They’ve got themselves all tied in knots. The core force there, it’s not exactly geared up for this kind of thing.” She heard a smile in his voice. “Serial killer is quite a diversion from damaged flowerpots and graffiti on cobblestone walls, you know.”
“Serial killer? Stop reading the news, Don.”
“Call it what you want.”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Ruby said, pacing across the tarmac, back onto the dusty roadside. “I’m out of the loop, I’ve only spoken to a friend, but it’s possible they’re not even connected.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“I knew them. I can tell you, aside from school year, the victims . . . you couldn’t find two people with less in common.”
“Two people?”
And then a silence, which Ruby broke with a sigh. “There’s been a third,” she stated. Not a question. This was a fact.
“Yeah, late yesterday afternoon.” Don cleared his throat. “Similar to the others. It’s rough and, well, they have no idea.”
She took a breath and heard herself say, “Who was it?”
But as Ruby asked, she felt like she already knew the answer. Hope whispered in her ear, there are at least a hundred and sixty people in her year, so it couldn’t be. But fear replied. And her heart began to hurt, the empty anticipation of inescapable pain. Eyes stinging, she blinked. Tingling their way to the surface, tears she would not allow to fall.
“Elizabeth Gregory,” he said.
Ruby nodded.
And again, she found herself staring out across that flat horizon – shimmering now in the heat, the belt of land and sky blurring, inviting. Every route from here leads back home. Back to the UK, all the way to Missbrook Bay. She could spin and spin but it was inevitable. On a straight heading, like those crows, it did not matter which path she chose. Actually, no. Ruby looked down at the ground, at the dusty red earth beneath her feet. It was that direction. That was the straight line. And the entire world was standing in her way.
Chapter Two
Eyes open, precisely one minute before the alarm was due to go off. The incredible reliability of her internal clock strikes again. Though, from late-wake experience, she’d discovered it paradoxically needed the fear of sound to work – the alarm must be set – which rendered the skill largely useless. A lazy chauffeur, dutifully following the bus schedule.
She turned it off, then reached for the bottle of pills on her bedside cabinet. Every day started this way. Substances to keep her sharp – 20mg of dextroamphetamine combined with amphetamine, more commonly known by its trade name, Adderall, followed by coffee and filtered water from the fridge. Ruby was irretrievably addicted to all three and not in the order one might suspect. But never mind. This was a problem for another day.
First, she sat at her small kitchen table, opened her laptop and made sure she had all the case notes downloaded, anticipating the upcoming stretches of being offline.
And then, here it comes, the morning begins to spark. Grand thoughts fall away as focus takes the wheel. Each and every obstacle, all of today’s problems, lined up, waiting in an orderly queue. Let’s go.
Breakfast. Orange juice. Cold. Scrambled eggs. Warm. Shower. Hot. The roar of the hair drier. Clothes. To the bed. Suitcase bouncing on the springs. Packing. Items placed in zip-lock bags, arranged inside. Small stacks. Neat. Pleasing. Phone. Charger. Headphones. Stop for a moment, consider the window. No clouds. Pure blue. Take this image, keep it safe for later. Shoes. Sunglasses. Baseball cap. Door.
Outside into the clean, glaring light. The taxi waiting on the road. She put her suitcase in the boot herself, despite the driver swooping back to help. He held the passenger door for her. Ruby looked at her watch and climbed in. Thud.
Airport. Looped tarmac, a strip of grass, tall glass at the drop-off point. Planes lifting off and banking above, others falling slowly in from the other side of the sky – reflected in the glossy windows. Bright enough to sting her wide-open eyes. Pupils no doubt the size of pound coins, black holes hoovering up the sunlight.
Inside, Ruby queued for boarding, showed the attendant her pass, passport, passing her second carry-on bag to another shoulder. And then, up metal stairs, the runway’s hiss lost to the wind, she was on the first of three planes. The rest of the journey was a blur. An old flicker strip of stop-motion clouds rushing past endless stretches in no man’s land, eating shop-bought sandwiches, reading case notes, enduring bench naps with half an elbow or the corner of a rucksack for a pillow, waking and waiting in the unique and lonely company of a hundred fellow travellers. All their dreary-eyed solidarity, chins propped up with nothing but hope that the numbers on those screens will change any, minute, now.
Finally, she was coming down through a thick layer of grey, into the rain-dappled murk over London. Droplets shaking, crying down the side of the window as the plane landed with a bounce and a shudder. Lights came on, things were beeping and everyone was up and reaching for their bags.
A broken version of Ruby climbed into a taxi on the road outside Heathrow. She pulled back her sleeve to check her watch. Door to door, forty hours.
Leaving the airport, the taxi came off the roundabout and joined the motorway traffic. Swaying with the corners, Ruby held her phone and looked at the recent messages she and Giles had exchanged. I’ll let you know when I land, she’d written. Sent two days ago. But it didn’t feel like it. The biggest issue with all this travelling was the total shake-up of time. That dutiful ticking clock inside her was truly lost, even the threat of an air-raid siren wouldn’t see a pre-emptive strike. She was on her own now. Ruby had slept briefly on the last plane – pure survival mode, short, confusing dreams. But the next stop was surely a real bed. It had to be. So, she held off on the stimulants.
And there it was, simmering away. Some feeling. Worry? Something else. Something blue. Seemed insufficient, simplistic. But it was true. Ruby felt sad. Elizabeth was dead. She chewed her thumbnail. Three people from her school year had been murdered. This was a problem. Her job was solving problems. That one’s big, though, overwhelming. She breathed.
Ruby reached down, rummaged inside her bag, found the bottle. Popped the lid. She stared at the orange pill in her palm, hesitating as a voice inside asked her, quite politely, not to take it. We need sleep. Optimal performance needs rest. Come on. Exhaustion is the most pressing problem. The others can wait.
Can they, though? Every minute counts, right? Today is already a write-off.
But then why ruin tomorrow too?
Any addict will recognise this back and forth, this lingering sense of being on borrowed time. In her more reflective moments, she did suspect she was hurtling towards some terrible judgement day. Because she was.
That’s the thing with catastrophising. That’s the therapist’s dirty little secret. It is not an irrational pursuit, no matter what they claim. The sense in your heart that something awful is going to happen can, should, must be disregarded to function. It’s true – that thing you fear almost certainly won’t happen. But something equally bad, or worse, absolutely will. Your body will stop working. Everyone you love will die. It is going to hurt.
Stupid, tired thoughts. Always death. Ruby always ended up thinking about death. Like Elizabeth, her friend, who was, there it is again . . . On these drugs, though, she was simply too busy for rumination. The rambling fog of sobriety has a cure. And, with a gulp, Ruby swallowed another 20mgs of it.
She looked out the window. They were sandwiched between two lorries – thundering wheels just a few feet away. And then the taxi changed lanes, slowing down for the slip road. The first sign for Missbrook Bay passing by on the left.
“Lovely part of the world,” the driver said, looking back at her in the rear-view mirror.
The landscape was already changing. Trees holding strong above them, bus-shaped tunnels carved out. But every now and then, the flickering foliage opened up long enough to catch a glimpse of the sea. There was, despite the fact Ruby hated this place, an objective beauty that defied her baseless disdain.
So, she nodded. “Yeah.”
“Is this a holiday, or?”
She’d already told the driver where she’d come from. But not why. “Um, business.”
“You feeling it? Jetlag?”
So bad. “Not too bad,” she said.
The driver fiddled with his phone, propped up on the dashboard near the wheel. “Seems the Beachside Hotel road is closed. Market day. So you might have a short walk, I’m afraid.”
But different priorities now. She’d removed the option of sleep for a while. Checking her watch again, she made a new plan.
“Actually,” Ruby said, “can you drop me off at Missbrook Heights? The school?”
He started tapping into his sat-nav.
Today didn’t really count. The routine would start tomorrow. Clean.
They came round the final corner, at the top of the hill, the approach to Missbrook Bay she’d seen a thousand times. Misty, cold and bleak.
As the trees thin, the first thing you see is the ocean – dragging out all the way to the horizon where it joins forces with the overcast above. Sealed, like a giant room. And in this tiny, gloomy corner of it, below them now as the car came over the peak and down, the highest points of town come into view – the church spire, the square hospital on the left-hand side and then every conceivable angle of roof. Below, a warren of stone walls, narrow lanes, steep inclines, the whole place crammed in, seemingly designed to confuse. Like a claustrophobic fairground funhouse – without any of the colour, or any of the fun.
The taxi pulled up at the school just after 4pm. Ruby didn’t even attempt to work out what time her body thought it might be. The time, as it always was on these drugs, was irrefutably now. She just paid the driver, took her bags and stood at the side gates.
Here she was again, back at school and, right on cue, the marrow in her bones felt as heavy as lead.
Tall fences either side of a short road that led up into the staff car park. The sign was new, maroon like the uniforms. A few kids were still lingering around, some in PE kits, others carrying musical instruments or oversized art folders.
Ruby did as she’d promised and phoned Giles.
“Nice journey?” he asked.
“Pure hell. I’m ruined.”
He laughed. Speaking to her stepdad felt different now there was only a mile between them. She was no longer a world away.
“Kettle’s always on here.”
“I’ll settle in and recalibrate,” she said. “Probably in a couple of days – imagine I’m going to be pretty busy at the front end of all this.”
“Oh, I’m sure. Let me know when you have some down time. Whenever suits.”
“Will do. Speak soon.”
She went straight in, across the playground, her suitcase wheels vibrating on the concrete. Past a few afterschool clubs in session – the disjointed drums and strings of a big band rehearsing in the hall, shouts echoing from the sports field over on the other side of the science block.
As she stepped into the main building, Ruby realised she probably should have called ahead. Her ID was buried deep in her suitcase and she just knew they’d want to see it. She turned into the carpeted foyer and found the front office still open, but quiet. Ruby approached the counter, parked her suitcase, peering through the sliding window. There was no one here.
Thumbing her rucksack off her aching shoulder and setting it down, she placed her hand on the visitor book. OK. She flicked back a few pages. Random people, builders, someone giving a talk, external tutors, but then, there, two days ago. Police titles next to names she didn’t know. So, they’d definitely made a start here. She picked up the pen to sign herself in, tugging the string from under the book’s spine, but then decided, nah, this was a waste of time.
Instead, she just grabbed her luggage and headed off inside. Her suitcase wheels smooth on the shiny corridor floor – rolling past silver lockers on her left, dark red doors dented and peppered with half-peeled stickers. It was all a bit cleaner than she remembered. New fittings. Better lights.
She wrestled her way through a pair of heavy, swinging doors, using her back. Now, turning, she was at the English department. Looking through the internal windows, she saw mostly empty classrooms, though a detention was in silent session in one at the far end. Bored, tired kids slouched, doodling, one had his head on the table, arm stretched out – plausibly asleep.
A teacher came down the corridor and smiled at her. No one cared who she was, Ruby thought, watching her approach. Schools, like hospitals, are remarkably open places. You can just walk in. Have a snoop around. She could be anyone, she could have a gun in—
Oh, no, never mind, the teacher was slowing down.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked.
“Yeah, I’m looking for—”
“Ruby Eleanor Shaw,” a male voice said.
She turned to see Will, standing in the doorway behind her, wearing a pair of smart black trousers and a green shirt. Tucked in. He was holding a folder. Wow, she thought, he looked just like his dad. Staring into each other’s eyes in the school corridor again. But now they were old. Now they were working.
