Page 3 of Go First
Jonathan was wearing the suit he’d worn at the reception last night: forest green, needle-corduroy, three-piece with covered buttons and a pink carnation. In all the years she’d known him, he’dneverworn the same suit two days running…
And he wasn’t writing his Sunday sermon.He wasn’t even sitting upright.He was pitched forward, slumped over the vast mahogany desk, cheek pressed against the blotter, arm dangling at an angle too stiff to be sleep.His suit was stained dark at the back and side, fabric clinging as if soaked.
Margaret froze in the doorway.Her mind threw up all the wrong explanations first.He’d fainted.He’d spilled coffee.He’d…what?
Her gaze shifted to the desk itself.For some reason, she remembered the day it had arrived, handmade, from Italy, all wrapped up in thick sheaves of Italian newspapers.They’d had lots of naked or barely dressed women in them.No Italian news story, it seemed, was complete without an accompanying image of someone in a Wonderbra.Jonathan had called them ‘devilment’ and gathered them all up to burn them.They belonged in the fire, he said.But he took a long time to get round to it.
Carved into the glossy wood were markings.Not scratches from a fall, not idle doodles.These were deliberate grooves, cut deep by a blade.Shapes.Lines.Something resembling letters—or symbols.They looked familiar, but she couldn’t take them in all at once.
“Jonathan?”The name came out thin, almost childish.She took one step, then another.
The smell reached her.Metallic, raw, under the faint, sweet oud he dabbed behind his ears each morning.
Her brain stuttered, refused to accept what it saw.No.No, no.
Then, like a lens snapping into focus, she knew what she was looking upon: the open eyes, the unnatural stillness of his chest.The tortured angle of his head, the open mouth and the peculiar, liquid blackness behind his teeth.What was there?
Her heart jumped as a new question hit her.Whatwasn’tthere?
And then her scream ripped the quiet to shreds.
She staggered back, hand groping for her purse.Her phone was somewhere inside, buried under tissues and her address book.She clawed for it, fingers trembling so hard she dropped it once, twice, before she managed to unlock the screen
Her thumb slipped, smearing the numbers into nonsense.She wiped it on her skirt, tried again.Her breath came in harsh sobs, vision streaked with tears.She couldn’t seem to make her hands obey.Finally, she dialled it right, but it rang, and rang without answering, and as she waited, she found her eyes drawn to the body on the desk, the sight she knew she would never forget until her own time on earth was over.
When at last the call connected, her voice broke in gasps.
“H-he’s—please—my brother-in-law, the Pastor, he’s—there’s blood, oh God, oh God—his tongue it’s his tongue it’s his tongue send someone, please, please—”
She sank against the doorframe, phone clamped to her ear, eyes locked still on the tongue as the dispatcher’s calm questions tried to pull her back into order.She felt light-headed, and the markings carved into the desk seemed to shimmer in the lamplight, clamouring for her gaze, like some message Jonathan had tried to leave, or some message leftfor her.
And she knew, she didn’t know how, but she knew it with a clarity colder than ice, that whatever devilment had happened here was just the beginning.
CHAPTER TWO
“You’re putting chipotle sauce on top of smoked salmon and cream cheese, and then you’re putting it in the air-fryer.”
“You should try it, mother.”
“For breakfast?Actually, I don’t know why I asked that.It wouldn’t matter what time of day it was eaten.It would still be a gastronomic monstrosity.Is that one of my good knives?”
It was only 7.11 in the morning, and already Kate had thought about moving back to her apartment three times. Of course, as soon as she had that thought, she was assailed by feelings of guilt and inadequacy. The last few months had been… bumpy to say the least.
It had become increasingly clear that, despite his incarceration in federal prison, serial killer Elijah Cox continued to inspire followers, who not only stalked and killed people in his name, but played mind-games with Kate, in the form of encrypted clues and cyphers, which she was obliged to solve and investigate in the hope of preventing any further deaths.
Put like that, it sounded almost ordinary; a struggle peculiar to Kate’s own, particular form of work, which was catching bad people.But the emotional undertow of it all was hard to quantify. When Cox had first entered her world, with his clues and puzzles and his warped concept of justice, Kate had already been struggling, due to her near-fatal encounter with serial killer Robert Denton, who would turn out to have been an early disciple of Elijah Cox. Her continuing ordeal at the hands of these men had made Kate wonder if it was possible to get PTSD twice. Could a person suffer from two cases of the condition at the same time, like a double dose of influenza? Kate felt she was well on the way towards finding out.
In the meantime, she was doggedly doing the head-work: twice-weekly psychotherapy with a trauma specialist, fortnightly sessions in a survivors’ group.Running – that was the best therapy in the world, in Kate’s view, because it made her feel instantly better, whereas a lot of her sessions on the couch had the absolute opposite effect. At some point in this long hard journey back to being okay, Kate’s mom had suggested that her daughter could come and stay with her in her townhouse near the university.It had been a short-term suggestion, extended a little further when Kate’s Mom, a linguistics professor, went over to the UK for a conference, leaving Kate to look after her mother’s vigorous, but thoroughly lovely pair of red setters, Sapir and Whorf.
Kate’s Mom had been back home for a month now, and it was becoming harder and harder to overlook one single, basic and simple truth.She and her Mom were getting on each other’s nerves.
It had been great at first.Long beach walks with the dogs.Baking together, like they’d done when Kate was small.Curling up on the sofa together with Spencer Tracy movies and a shipping-weight of popcorn.Home had been the perfect antidote to work.Not that Kate didn’t enjoy her work; she lived for it, she had a close, strong bond with her partner and considered a number of her other work-colleagues as friends.But that work was unrelentingly tough.It was demanding, mentally and physically, and often, being all about catching bad people, it was ugly.And it never stopped. And it never would.So it had been great to have this haven to come back to, great to stop struggling and let herself be looked after again. It wasn’t as if anyone else was going to do it…
It hadn’t just been a one-way street, either.She’d begun to realise that there were tasks that her Mom was no longer quite so confident about doing, like dredging the pond, going up the ladder to retrieve things from the attic space, or hauling a pair of seventy-pound doggos out of a slippery bath. So Kate had been able to help with things like that and they shared the cooking, so that no-one came home from a long work-day to packet noodles.
But Kate was 36.And there was a reason why most people aged 36 were not living with their parents.The main reason was that they’d moved in with a partner of some sort. And on that particular front, Kate felt that she had better odds of becoming the next director of the Bolshoi ballet.But that aside, she still needed to move back to her apartment. She’d still been paying rent on it, for a start. The question was: how to tell her Mom, without hurting her feelings, or seeming ungrateful for all the kindness she’d shown her in recent months? Her Mom wasn’t perfect; she could be prickly and over-precise, she had a habit of jumping to conclusions, or thinking she’d understood when she hadn’t.And she was a sulker: once, as a teenager, Kate had criticised her mother’s outfit and six days went by before she spoke another word to her daughter. Kate knew, that if she stayed much longer, it would end up coming out in the midst of an argument.And then there’d be the silence, followed by an achingly slow thaw, during all of which Kate would be feeling that she’d made the wrong decision, and wishing that she hadn’t said it, and probably trying to go back on it…
‘I think we need to have a chat, actually,’ said Professor Valentine. Kate turned round, startled. Was it possible that her Mom had been having all the same thoughts?Why should it be impossible?They were mother and daughter, after all.