The Killer You Know Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by S. R. Masters

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover image © Arcangel

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Redhook Books/Orbit

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  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Sphere and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2018

  First Ebook Edition: August 2018

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  ISBN 978-0-316-48944-7

  E3-20180629-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Winter, 2015

  Adeline, 1997

  Winter, 2015

  Adeline, 1997

  Winter, 2015

  Rupesh, 1997

  Winter, 2015

  Jen, 1997

  Winter, 2015

  Steve, 1998

  Winter, 2015

  Will, 1998

  Winter, 2015

  Part II

  Winter, 2015

  Adeline, 1998

  Winter, 2015

  Rupesh, 1998

  Winter, 2015

  Jen, 1998

  Winter, 2015

  Part III

  Will, 1998

  Winter, 2015

  Steve, 1998

  Winter, 2015

  Part IV

  Adeline, 1998

  New Year, 2016

  Steve, 1998

  New Year, 2016

  Will, 1998

  New Year, 2016

  Steve, 1998

  New Year, 2016

  Adeline, 1998

  Later

  Acknowledgements

  Meet the Author

  Newsletters

  For Helen, for everything.

  All of this started the night Will told us he was going to be a serial killer.

  He said, “Okay, I’ve decided what I want to do when I’m older.” We looked over at him.

  He was the last to answer the question, which meant soon we’d start the long hike home from the electricity pylon deep in the forgotten overgrowth between our village and the next.

  What will you be doing in another sixteen years’ time?

  It was all coming to an end: the night, the summer, the campfire burning on the concrete around which the five of us sat. Most of us secretly wanted everything to go on like this, perhaps for ever, despite saying out loud that we were excited by the mysteries of adulthood. None of us could believe things would ever be as good as this again, whatever problems we had with our parents or each other.

  Except maybe Will, sitting there smoking his brother’s drugs while the rest of us only wanted to get drunk. Will, milking the moment of reveal for dramatic effect behind a cloud of breath mist and cigarette smoke. Who knew what was going on in his head? Maybe he did think that there would be something better after this.

  “You need to kill at least three people to be a serial killer, right?” Will said, his rich voice filling the dome of light the flames had created around us. “So that’s what I’ll do.”

  In the past this sort of thing would have been funny—classic Will, what a weirdo. To the others it still was. But to me everything about him was sinister, from what he was saying to the way the shadows cast on his face hid his true expression. I’d always known he was in a different world to the rest of us, but that world had never been frightening before. After what I’d seen in the last few weeks of that summer, I couldn’t even fake a laugh.

  “Maybe it won’t be exactly sixteen years,” Will said, “but at some point in the future. I’ll kill three people, all totally unrelated to each other. I’ll make them look like suicides so I won’t get caught. In different ways, and in different places—ones you wouldn’t expect.”

  He was sniggering now, but I shivered—and not just because the fire was on the way out.

  “I’ll vanish from January to January one year, no one will hear from me. I’ll be off the radar.”

  The others started asking questions, grinning, eager for more.

  “Where will you kill them?”

  “Won’t that be difficult to get away with?”

  “How will you fool people?”

  They all chimed in, and Will relayed the grim details to drunk laughter and applause—for the most part making it sound like he was improvising the whole thing.

  From beyond our circle soft noises drew my attention, cracks and rustling. And looking up, I swore I saw the silhouette of a person standing about ten feet behind Will, at the place where the concrete met the high grass and the weeds. But then it was gone. A trick of the starlight, maybe. Or perhaps too much alcohol mixed up with that sense of foreboding I couldn’t shake.

  “Then when I’m done,” he said, “I’ll go back to whatever job I was doing—working in an office or some place. Go out clubbing and get smashed like everyone else. No one would ever know when they’re asking me to write a report, or when they’re dancing next to me. But I would. That’d be enough. I’ll know, and you lot will too, if you remember this—and I reckon you will.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that.

  Part I

  I’m convinced nostalgia’s an illness.

  Winter, 2015

  … if you took off your rose-tints, I think you’d both see this film for what it is.

  I turned off the engine but let the podcast continue, only half-listening to the sound of my own voice coming through the car speakers. Over the road from where I’d parked, my parents’ galley kitchen was lit up like a set awaiting actors. They’d hung strange paintings on the far wall and completely changed the colour scheme. The mustard paint was gone. Instead, some interior designer had detonated a magnolia bomb in there.

  My dashboard clock read 21.12. Was it too late to go in? Possibly. Hopefully. They were still up for sure—Dad never left the lights on.

  Okay, Xan, Jon, I think the time’s come to decide whether Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s orientalist classic Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom goes into the crusher.

  Orientalist classic? Nice.

  So you’re on the fence, Adeline?

  I switched off the stereo.

  I ought to go in. I’d only come home to Blythe for tomorrow’s reunion, but it’d be impossible to relax without first finding out more about Mum’s diagnosis. Dad had been agitated on the phone last week; all he’d managed to tell me was that there was something wrong with her lungs. When h
e’d given the phone to her so she could elaborate, Mum hung up without saying a word once he’d left the room.

  It was something terminal, it had to be. And if so, morally speaking, I needed to open up a dialogue again—end the stupid cold war of silence we’d been fighting ever since my last visit. Even if it was just to make Dad’s life easier.

  Yet I stayed in the car, fingering the keys dangling from the ignition. I’d expected this to be difficult—had been dreading it, in fact—but what I’d not expected was the anger that welled up once the lights of the M6 were behind me, and the roads became snakier in direct proportion to just how arse-end-of-nowhere each passing village was.

  Blythe. Fucking Blythe. One lane of houses off a main road to somewhere better. A pub, an abandoned bus shelter, and nothing else for miles on either side. This was a place to hide from the world, not a real part of it. A dormitory, and every bare field or barn or dead badger that had been illuminated in the headlights was a reminder of just how isolated I’d been here. If it hadn’t been for the friends I’d made, God.

  I started the car. It wasn’t worth it; I was losing myself, regressing already, preparing comebacks for what Mum might potentially attack me for: blue streak in my black hair, dark eye make-up, nose stud. No, I needed to just go and focus on the reunion. I’d head straight to the hotel and make notes on the podcast—it needed re-editing anyway. This cut made me sound too snarky, too irritable—the friction between the three of us perhaps seeping into my performance. It lacked the genuine affection for the films that had served Nostalgia Crush so well over the years.

  Besides, I could always try again on my way back to London.

  I dropped the handbrake. With my last glance up at the house I noticed an actor wandering on to the illuminated set: Dad, shuffling across the kitchen. He was smaller than I remembered, and his hair, once the grey of pencil lead, was now white.

  It had been over a year, and all that time was visible at once. I tried to bite my nails but they’d been well gnawed already.

  Groaning, I pulled up the handbrake and turned off the engine. And when Dad saw me walking up the drive, I put on my warmest smile and waved.

  The place had all the charm of a retirement home, which I suppose was appropriate. Dad showed me to a lounge I no longer recognised, the chemical smell of renovation still in the air. Only a minimalist plastic Christmas tree in the corner honoured the season.

  “Wow, you really can’t come home again,” I said.

  “Your mum wanted to get the place right while we were still able to, you know?”

  Pronounced Mom rather than mum here in the West Midlands, of course: the lost United State. I’d been a southerner so long now it always caught me out.

  “Where is she?”

  “In bed, love. She had a funny turn this afternoon. I’ll check if she’s up to seeing you. You in a rush?”

  “No,” I said, and he limped away.

  Before I could ask about his leg he closed the stairwell door behind him.

  I sat on their pristine white leather sofa and listened to the murmur of conversation in the room above, trying to gauge her mood. Even though the words were inaudible, the Brummie accent’s seesaw melody was clear. I had no accent—Mum had made sure of that during childhood. She’d flattened down any sentences that tried to rise up at the end like a kid playing Whac-A-Mole.

  That’s why you got into Cambridge, she’d once said.

  Where was the graduation picture that used to be on the mantelpiece? Apparently not even that had survived, any personal touch sacrificed to the great, off-white God of Property Development.

  I sighed. All this poison wasn’t going to help should Mum desire an audience. I needed to stay positive. I took out my phone. An unread message had arrived sometime during my journey up from London.

  How you holding up? Is it tonight?

  Xan, our podcast’s enthusiast, the heart to my mouth and to Jon’s brain. The episodes were built upon Xan’s passion for some classic movie being gradually dampened by Jon and me, condemning it to the so-called “crusher” unless we found solid reasons for mercy.

  Before I could reply to him the stairs began to creak, and shortly after the stairwell door opened again. Dad nodded.

  Mother would see me now.

  “Do you want a drink, Jan?” Dad asked from behind me.

  Mum, sitting up in bed, declined. He left to go and fetch Mum’s pills, and I went to give her a kiss. She offered a cheek. Unlike Dad, she hadn’t aged at all. She looked well, if anything.

  “What did he do to his leg?” I said.

  She shook her head. “He tripped in the garden, on one of the branches growing over the path. I told him it wanted cutting.” She pronounced the last word like footing.

  “And what’s happening with you, Mum?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not good, Adeline. They said it was my lungs. All the coughing… They did a scan and then the doctor asked if I’d ever been near asbestos. Well, I haven’t, but your grandad used to work on the roofs, and I was always climbing on him when he got back from work. They said it’s all scratched up on the inside, and it’s going to gradually get wor—”

  She started coughing. It sounded painful and I put a hand on her shoulder, but her pointed glance at my chewed nails made me withdraw it into a fist.

  “Do you need anything?” I said.

  Mum shook her head, then pointed at my feet. “Those boots do nothing for you, love.” Leaving no time for me to react, she added: “Are you still with the teacher? Is he here?”

  “No,” I said, surprised she’d remembered Rich.

  “Oh,” she said, deflating into the bed and forcing another small cough through her throat.

  “Can I help while I’m back?”

  Mum thought about this. “Why have you come back, Adeline?” She paused. “I was really hoping it might be because you wanted to apologise.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. Last time I’d been here I’d endured a birthday meal of Mum’s drunken remarks about my advancing age, about how sad it was that she might never be a grandmother. Then she’d blamed my “problem” on the anti-authoritarian streak I’d inherited from Dad, and suggested that, while Dad had been something of a disappointment, he’d at least been a man. It might not be fashionable to say, she’d said, but women can’t get on in the world ruffling feathers all the time. That had been enough, and I’d kissed Dad goodbye and left for London without another word.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because if Mum really was dying, any encounters we shared should at least be neutral. There wasn’t enough time in the universe to fix what was broken between us, but a respectful truce wasn’t out of the question.

  “That’s the tone of voice you’re going to choose?” Mum said.

  Again, I bit my cheek. “I’m seeing some old friends, Mum, and I was worried about you. If you aren’t interested in getting on, and if you don’t need anything, I’ll just go. I don’t want a fight, honestly.”

  Mum straightened up. “Who do you still know here?”

  “You won’t remember them.”

  “Your college friends?”

  “No, some Blythe friends.”

  “I knew all your little Blythe friends. Steven. I remember him. His dad had that house at the bottom of the lane. Wealthy man, but he only rented it. It’s all done up now.”

  I nodded, had seen the now extended and updated farmhouse in my headlights at the end of Elm Close when parking up. “Steve’s coming,” I said.

  “See, I remember. And the diddy one, from India. What was his name?”

  Now I shook my head. “Rupesh was born in Birmingham, Mum.” In my mind I could see the footpath that ran to Hampton-in-Arden, the village next to Blythe. I’d passed the exit earlier, and Rupesh had been the person that came into my mind.

  “You know what I meant. And I remember Jessica, too. The red-haired girl.”

  “Jen,” I said. “She’s the one that’s organised it.”

&n
bsp; “Jennifer. Are you sure? Are they the ones then, the ones you’re seeing?”

  “It depends who shows up.”

  “Who else was there?” Mum stared at her fingers like they might hold the answer. “Who was the other tall boy?”

  “Will,” I said.

  “Will. I see his mum around. She still lives in the area.”

  Mum started to cough again. I returned my hand to her shoulder. Voice soft, I said, “Mum, is it… bad?” When she didn’t answer, I asked, “How long do we have left?”

  “Adeline, don’t be so morbid. You’ve always been so morbid.”

  “I’m not being morbid. I probably need to know.”

  “Shush. Well, yes, it is. But five years, they think, or maybe ten. Could be more. The doctor said I might die of something else before then.” She said this with a bit too much enthusiasm.

  “Oh.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “I’m not. I just… I was bracing myself for a last goodbye, you know?”

  “No, you’re not rid of me yet.”

  I frowned. “So you’re indefinitely dying.”

  “Yes, if you want.”

  “Sort of like before, then.” And sort of like the rest of humanity.

  “Are you going to say sorry properly before you go, Adeline?”

  “It was good seeing you, Mum,” I said. “I’m around for a few days if you need me.”

  What sounded like a slightly hammy cough followed me out of the bedroom and into the hallway.

  Leaning on the banister halfway up the stairs was Dad. He held a bottle of pills.

  “Just having a bit of rest,” he said, and gave me a smile that hurt to look at.

  I drove east out of Blythe, over the bridge with secret tunnels that in the height of summer you could crawl through if the river was low enough. It was only five miles to the Travel Inn in the next village, Balsall Common. Those five miles might as well have been an endless desert when we were kids.

  In my room, I treated myself to a red wine from the mini-bar, then another. I’d held it together tonight, and had made the right call seeing Mum.

  Typical of her to contract a terminal illness that didn’t kill you, though: maximum sympathy, minimum cost. Dad was seventy-five this year, and the chances were he’d be waiting on her into his nineties. He wouldn’t let Mum want for anything, even if it meant killing himself.