Tell Me Your Secret

by Dorothy Koomson

  In someone’s eyes you can see everything, you can see their perfections, their flaws; their joys, their pain; their truths, their lies.

  And they can see yours.

  That was why he had taken away my sight for the weekend – he didn’t want me to see him for who he really was.

  She could see it all. This policewoman, in that moment, could see everything from the weekend. But she couldn’t decipher it. Who could decipher that without being there?

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied when she finally let the card go. ‘I don’t need it, but thank you for caring. It’s not often you get a stranger taking an interest in you to this degree. I wish my magazine did more of the human interest pieces I like to write, you’d be a great subject.’

  ‘Even if you’ve got nothing to talk about, it’d be good to hear from you, Miss Rawlings,’ she said, determined not to be swayed from what she was trying to say to me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I repeated. Thank you, but I don’t have the words. Thank you, but I don’t know that you’re not in on it. Thank you, but I want to pretend none of this happened.

  The male police officer was standing outside my door, facing the other way, as though he’d been tasked with guarding the place, preventing anyone from coming in. Thankfully the corridor outside my flat was empty, and there were no direct windows in from the street so no one outside would see.

  ‘Oh, you should arrange to come and collect your mobile phone,’ she said. ‘The screen is cracked from where it was dropped, but it still works.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, I’ll do that. Thank you. Bye.’

  My legs wanted to collapse after they’d gone. They wobbled, they struggled, but I resisted. I had phone calls to make. I had to stop this happening again by calling people, proving I was alive, lying that I was well. If I did that, maybe they would leave me alone for a little while longer.

  I turned away from the door, heading for the telephone. I needed to listen to messages, return calls, answer emails, see if I still had a job, integrate myself back into the world. My legs shuddered again, shook, staggered, collapsed.

  It was Thursday.

  Thursday was all about sitting behind the front door, trying to pull myself together.

  Monday, 10 June

  ‘Pieta, do you have a minute?’

  Reggie, the art director, is waiting for me outside the office. I’ve got three full coffee mugs and my cup balanced between my hands in a precarious way and I’m going to have to do a gymnastic lift of my hip to hit my pass against the flat white security panel to allow me into the office.

  ‘Not really, Reggie.’

  ‘Oh. I just really need to talk to you.’

  ‘And I’d really like to listen to you, but I’ve got a delicate balance of cups with hot liquid going on here and I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to keep hold of them.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, I’ll wait here for you to go put them down,’ he says and stands to one side.

  ‘Or, you could, possibly, take a couple off me and we can talk now? Just a thought.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, sorry,’ he says, relieving me of two of the cups. ‘See? This is how much she’s got into my head, that didn’t even occur to me.’

  Reggie asked me out once. Three years ago, not long after he started, we’d got talking and discovered not only were our parents from the same country in Africa, but they actually lived near each other in London. Whenever a group of us would go out for drinks or for Christmas meals or leaving dos, Reggie and I would end up chatting alone. We talked and laughed and discovered we had a lot of the same interests – particularly sci-fi movies and pottery. One day, out of the blue, or maybe not if you thought about it, he asked me if I wanted to go to dinner with him. Just him. We’d been in the queue at the coffee shop around the corner and he’d just asked.

  He’d stared at me as he waited for an answer. I’d stared into the mid-distance, completely blindsided. What did someone funny and entertaining and good-looking want with me? Me! I wasn’t in any position to go out one-on-one with a man. I wasn’t in any situation to even think about kissing a man, and the idea of being naked with anyone, when my body was so damaged . . . I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. He’d obviously seen the panic on my face and had asked if he’d read the signals wrong, was I seeing someone? ‘Kind of,’ I’d said because I didn’t know how to explain that I’d love to go out with him but there was no way I could. ‘OK, sorry,’ he’d replied. I stopped going out for drinks as much, and a few months later he clearly got over me by dating Susie in the syndication department, who was extremely pretty and had a reputation for being just the nicest woman.

  Since then, it’s been a little awkward between us (mainly because I was monumentally jealous) and we’ve kept it professional.

  ‘It’s Lillian.’ His voice sounds like it has been sharpened on flint and I can tell he’s nearly at the precipice of no return. I’d seen so many people on this ledge over the years. When things got too much and work was near intolerable, people would find themselves at this point. Right now, Reggie was standing near the edge, glancing behind him at Lillian and the things she did and then gazing ahead at the hundred-foot drop that is walking out of a job with nothing to go to. We all know it’s hard out there, magazine jobs outside of London are extremely rare, and even the London ones, at his level particularly, come up very infrequently. But did that mean staying? Being treated like dirt?

  ‘What’s happened?’ I ask gently.

  ‘She’s just called me in for another “chat” about how the design is so bland and uninspiring it’s not only not increasing sales figures or advertising but it’s actively harming them.’

  Oh Lillian, I sigh internally.

  Reggie is good. Actually, he’s fantastic. He’s talented and has a real eye for design (and I’m not just saying that because I fancied him once upon a time ago). He can read a story, find the pictures and put them together in a way that always makes you stop and read the article. He has brought the magazine right up to date and made it fresh, exciting and innovative. Lillian knows this, but she’s Lillian so she has to find someone to blame for anything that is going wrong.

  She doesn’t realise that Reggie will walk, though. He isn’t like the others who put up with it for over a year before they get out; he will walk straight away and he will sue her. He’s said that before: ‘I won’t be putting up with that crap. She starts on me she will regret it right down to the constructive dismissal lawsuit.’

  Apart from anything, I don’t want that for Reggie. He doesn’t need a lawsuit on his record, and everyone else in the office doesn’t need to bear the brunt of her indignation at someone standing up to her.

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ I say to him. ‘I’ll get her to back off.’

  ‘What are you going to say?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, either, “Oi, Lillian, cut it out, now.” Or, “Oh, Lillian, Lillian, please pick on me instead of anyone else, I really enjoy being targeted by you.” I’ll decide which one I go for once I start talking to her,’ I reply. It has the desired effect and makes him laugh. I love the way his face creases up when he laughs, the way his smile lights up his eyes and face.

  ‘I can stand up to her,’ he explains.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I just know I’ll be painted as the aggressive black man if I say anything, and I’m not sure anyone in the office is ready for what would go down.’

  ‘I’ll sort it, don’t worry.’

  This is one of the reasons why leaving isn’t such an easy choice – I kind of feel responsible for the other people who work here. Being deputy editor means running interference between Lillian and the rest of the staff. I soothe their savaged feathers, remind her that she’s going too far, and try as hard as I can to make the place pleasant and fun. No one told me that the role of deputy editor was about this, but I realised a few days after taking the job that that was exactly what it was about – Deborah, who had the job before me, had done it for us, now I had
to do it for them.

  ‘Thanks, Pieta.’ Our eyes meet for a moment. I rarely make eye contact with people, hardly ever give them enough of me to do that. But it’s an accidental collision with Reggie and I don’t mind at all if he sees me, smiles at me exactly as he’s doing now. ‘We should grab that drink we talked about sometime, you know, just you and me.’

  ‘What about Susie? Can’t she come along?’

  He grimaces. ‘We split up a couple of months back,’ he explains. ‘She moved out last month. All good, no harm, no foul, so yes, she could technically come along as we’re still friends, but it might cramp our style a bit.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to try out that pottery café in Brighton where you can make your own stuff and bring your own wine for while you make it? Care to join me?’

  I’d love that: I love making pottery and I’d love to go out with Reggie.

  ‘I’d . . .’ I begin. ‘We are going to spend the weekend together, Pi-eta,’ cuts through my brain like a sharp knife through soft flesh. ‘For the next forty-eight hours, we are going to get to know each other very well.’

  I can’t date Reggie. I can’t date anyone. Why would I even consider it?

  ‘I’d, erm, I’d better get these coffees back to the features team before they go cold,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, right,’ Reggie says, surprised and disappointed at my sudden change of gear. I’d been about to say yes, and he could tell I’d been about to say yes, but now I’ve stopped and he’s confused.

  ‘I’ll sort out that thing we talked about,’ I reassure him while he settles two of the mugs on my desk.

  ‘Thanks,’ he mumbles and walks away without looking in my direction again.

  Jody

  Monday, 10 June

  Callie Beckman sits in the soft interview room and tells us her story again.

  I read the original statement she filed in London nine months ago and I watched her original video. It was another report I came across as part of my own investigation, because nothing had come of it when she’d originally come in. There was nothing to come of it: she had left it weeks to report, she’d got rid of the clothes she was wearing at the time and nothing new had come to her beyond what had happened that weekend.

  We listen to her story again with the camera running, but this isn’t the reason why she is sitting here today. She had called the original police station she reported it to and asked for help. They’d passed her on to my London station, who had passed her on to me here. When I spoke to her on the phone yesterday (Sunday) and said I was in Brighton but would come to see her, she’d said no, she would come to me.

  I’d been planning, once I had set up my incident room down here, to go back to London to speak to Callie. I wanted to hear her story first-hand and I’d wanted to gently warn her about personal safety. I didn’t want to terrify her with the fact that The Blindfolder’s past victims were being killed, but I did want to put her on alert. Maybe ask her to stay elsewhere for a few weeks, switch up her routine, stop being predictable to make it harder for him to track her.

  But she’d pre-empted this by getting in touch, and now she’s blown all my intentions of being gentle with her out of the water by telling me what she is planning.

  After telling us her story, she has repeated what her plan is: tell her story to the newspapers and the media.

  This would be a disaster.

  Laura, who I was right to ask to come with me, has tried to explain why she shouldn’t do it. I have tried to explain to her why she shouldn’t do it. And she will not listen.

  Callie doesn’t realise that she is different from the other women who we know of, the ones whose bodies we have found.

  She’s white and, so far, all the women we’ve encountered have been black. Coupled with our very sparse amount of forensic evidence, it means this has thrown off everything we’ve gleaned so far. We can draw up psychological profiles, we can plot dump sites and original disappearances on geographical maps, we can guess and speculate, but without forensic evidence, we are guessing into the void. And now Callie presents another direction, another way to look at this that we hadn’t considered.

  How many other white women has he taken? How many Asian women? How many mixed-race women? How many other types of women? Has he just decided to start with killing the black ones? Will he then go after the white ones? The Asian ones? The mixed-race ones? Or do they happen to be the ones he’s found first?

  Callie has opened up a whole new avenue of investigation. That is why she is so important. And why I do not want her to mess this up by doing something like talking to the press.

  ‘Callie . . . can I call you Callie?’ I have to try again to get through to her.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies. In her hands she holds a tissue that she twists and twists into an ever-tighter spiral. It’s one of the outward showings of her anxiety.

  ‘Callie, this is for your own protection as well, you know? Dealing with the press can be brutal. They take no prisoners and will get into every detail of your life.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ she replies.

  Yeah, course not. If I had a penny for every person who has said that . . . ‘We all think that, until the people who spend their time searching things out turn their attention on us.’

  ‘Detective, I’m trying to help other women. Do you really think I care about them finding out I once shagged a boy under a pile of coats at Jimmy Crawford’s seventeenth birthday party? That I used to sometimes go out without wearing knickers? That I sometimes don’t recycle? I don’t care, not when people are dying!’

  Everything stops.

  I sit up straight, lower the notepad and pen in my hands.

  ‘How do you know people are dying?’ Laura and I ask at the same time. We look at each other, a little delighted that we’ve done that when we’ve only just met, then we both turn back to Callie with grim looks on our faces.

  She stares at us both. Her navy-green eyes dart from me to Laura, back to me. She twists the tissue so hard it snaps. Laura and I wait for an answer; she sits and trembles.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ she eventually whispers. ‘It’s not at all what you think.’

  ‘We’re not sure what to think,’ I eventually say.

  Her eyes suddenly, unexpectedly, fill with tears. ‘He . . . told me.’

  ‘He what?’ Laura and I say at the same time.

  She brings her hands up to her face and cringes back against the sofa to protect herself from our promised onslaught.

  ‘You know who he is?’ I ask, bracing myself for the answer.

  She shakes her head quickly, vigorously. This is the first time she’s shown real emotion beyond the anger and bravado, the first time she’s displayed anything that isn’t a blatant attempt to avoid accepting what happened to her. ‘No. No! If I knew him, I would tell you. He . . . he sent me a letter, telling me what he had done. With a picture of . . . With a picture of the woman he’d . . . It was hideous.’ She clutches herself tighter and shudders.

  I look over Callie Beckman again. She is thirty-eight. She has mousy-blonde hair that she wears scraped back into a ponytail, her face is well-proportioned, dainty, uncomplicatedly beautiful. She is also fierce. That is what has come through in all of this: she is fierce and single-minded and determined. And, I thought, helpful. She wanted this man caught as much as we did. But maybe not. Because why would you not tell us about this before now?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us this?’ I ask as gently as my shock will allow.

  ‘I was scared!’ she wails. ‘Really scared! I thought it was a warning. I thought he was going to come after me because I’d been to the police. He said he would come for me if I go to the police. And then there was this picture of . . . I couldn’t tell you that.’

  ‘Do you still have it?’ Laura asks. Her voice is exactly like mine – incredulous and angry at the same time.

  Another vigorous head shake. ‘No, no. I couldn’t keep
it. I couldn’t have that around me. I shredded it then I burnt it.’ She wrings the two pieces of tissue together. ‘I just wanted to get rid of it completely. Putting it in the bin wasn’t enough. I had to completely destroy it. You don’t understand, it was so horrible, seeing her like that. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t sleep while it was around me. I could hardly breathe. So I had to get rid of it. Totally. Completely.’ She’s trembling, her voice an erratic symphony of fear and her eyes lose focus for a few moments as she relives the letter, the photo.

  ‘You say he sent it to you. When and where?’ I ask.

  ‘He sent it to my home address in London. I didn’t understand how he knew where I was at first, then I remembered, he took my driving licence. Remember, I told you that? So he had my address. I don’t know, I didn’t think he’d use it. But he sent it to me. Which is why I left my house and came to Brighton. You do understand, don’t you?’

  I don’t understand keeping that kind of information back, no. I honestly don’t. And this is the sort of thing people with ‘nothing to hide’ always have lurking in the corners of their lives, just waiting there to be discovered and exposed. I’ve never met a person yet who truly has nothing to hide. We all have something we’d rather keep hidden, it’s what makes us human.

  Something else has occurred to me, though. And it allows me to avoid telling her I understand. ‘When did you move to Brighton?’ I ask.

  Laura is stupefied; horrified that this woman would do something so counterproductive. I can see she’s itching to shout at her. But that’s not going to help any of us, especially not with persuading Callie not to go to the papers.

  ‘A few months ago. I was too scared to stay in my flat in London, so I moved down here because I grew up near here. Got an Airbnb then found a room in a shared flat.’

  ‘When exactly is a few months ago?’

  ‘February.’

  February. Also known as three murders ago. Well, four murders now. This is what we couldn’t understand: why he killed these women (all of whom are from London) in London and moved them down here. Now it’s clear he’s chasing Callie.