Delete-Man: A Psychological Thriller (15 page)

“No, Joseph. There really
isn’t.”

We sat and watched detectives
argue hotly amongst the desks of a police bureau. More minutes
passed, and I tried to concentrate on the film.

I had never credited Monika with
anything more than being some simple, irrelevant girl who happened
to share an apartment with Josie, but at that moment I felt like
she had opened up some part of herself that she had never shown
anyone. A stupid, nonsensical part, but a private part
nonetheless.

After a few more minutes of the
cops cruising through wide American roads, she spoke again; words
that had obviously circled in her mind a few times.

“Anything someone says, people
see differently depending on how they look. No matter how smart or
stupid the words are themselves. Whenever Josie met someone, it
took them a while before they began to realise she was smart, and
then when they realised that, they began to see her as beautiful
too—in a profound way, sort of. I’ve never had that. I know you
won’t understand, but being given everything just because of how I
look sucks. I’m twenty-five, and I feel like I’ve never earned
anything, just been given it because of how I was born.”

“Yeah.”

“And I’ve never found love
because of that. Because I’ve never had someone get past how I
look. They just go for me, and then eventually it wears off and
they just think I’m a dumb Romanian girl. I don’t even know who I
am, cause even when I’m a bitch people treat me like I’m
great.”

“It’s alright. I
understand.”

“I’m twenty-six soon. Every day
I can see my looks fading. I feel old, and I’m so fucking scared of
the future. I feel like time is running out for me. I just want
something real.”

Her voice was trembling, and she
wiped her eyes. I reached into my jeans pocket and handed her a
pack of tissues.

“Thanks.”

“Keep them.”

“I know you think I’m spoilt,
and ‘oh poor me, crying cause I’m beautiful’ and you especially,
with your arm and all, but I just want to know what it’s like, to
be loved truly for who I am. I was so jealous of you two. Josie and
you. And Vicky, bless her. I just wanted to feel it, just a
little.”

“Yeah, it’s alright.”

“I’m sorry Joseph. I’m such an
idiot, crying like this. Ugh.”

The detective was talking to a
woman in sunglasses. Monika blew her nose into a tissue. The
thought entered my mind, and I wondered if she had been insinuating
it all this time, planting it in my mind. I wondered if I was the
strange one for thinking it. She carried on sobbing, uttering
things that I didn’t understand from beneath the sobs and tissue.
She looked up and caught my eye, seeing something that held her
gaze on mine.

We looked at each other, not
talking. Her sobs fading. Whether she understood or not what was
racing through my head I don’t know, but it seemed inevitable. I
reached out and brushed the back of my hand against her cheek.

“Do you still have her
clothes?”

I woke up a little after 6, and
when I realised the weight on my chest was Monika I was grateful to
my internal clock. I shook her awake and squeezed out from beneath
her. The TV was still on. I turned it up to hear the weather as I
snatched up my clothes from the floor and dressed hurriedly. Heavy
rain was forecast.

“Hey, wake up. Hey.”

“Mmm.”

“Wake up.”

“In a while.”

“No. Now. Get this stuff out of
here, get changed. Vicky could come down any second.”

I shoved Monika harder and
harder until she lashed out and hit my hand away.

“Alright! I’m up! Jesus!”

Once I was dressed I took a long
drink of water and went upstairs to check on Vicky. She was, as
Monika had said, sound asleep in her bed. Her clothes neatly folded
on a chair beside her. I crept back downstairs and spent another
minute trying to wake Monika up again.

When she finally got up she was
a little cranky, yet her face showed the glow of a comfortable
warmth. I fixed some coffee and put some bread in the toaster while
she tidied up the clothes and got dressed. We drank in silence at
the kitchen table.

“It’s nearly half-seven, I’ll go
wake Vicky. Might take us a while to get to school. Rush hour and
all.”

“Sure.”

“By the way, do you have plans
for Saturday?”

“Depends. Why?”

“I’m taking Vicky to the zoo.
She asked me to ask you.”

Monika rubbed her cheek, not yet
awake enough to think fully.

“I’ll check and get back to
you.”

I woke Vicky up and waited for
her to shower and dress. She seemed rather quiet, and when I
recalled the events of the previous night I decided to talk with
her properly when I had the chance. I joked around with her as we
left, raising a few giggles. I even brought up the Christmas play,
and with a slight sense of shyness she told me more about it. I
dropped her off at the gates and went home feeling a sensation of
calm.

As I approached my building I
saw the blue saloon. I studied it as inconspicuously as I could:
Buzzcut wasn’t inside. I looked around in case he was standing
nearby but the area seemed fairly empty. The dark, damp sky
promised rain ominously. After walking around the block, checking
in the shops and down the alleyways, I found Buzzcut in a nearby
fast food restaurant. He was ordering what looked like food for
four people. He shoved a handful of straws, napkins, and sachets
into two big, brown, paper bags and turned to leave. I pressed
myself up against a doorway beside the restaurant. He left
hurriedly and headed back to the car. I saw that he was even larger
than I had previously thought. He walked with the demeanour of
someone in the military, focused and stiff. I waited for a while,
and then walked back myself. As I passed through the car park I saw
him in the corner of my eye, shoving the bags down into the foot
well of the passenger side. I looked away just before he turned his
head towards me.

The second I got home I realised
how hungry I was and ate almost half a box of cereal with fruit. I
gathered up clothes from around the house and shoved them into the
washing machine. The light on the answering machine was on, and I
clicked to play the message as I took down the bedsheet I had hung
out on the balcony the day before. There was a long one from
Monika, explaining that she was going to pick up Vicky from school
and telling me not to worry and call her as soon as I heard it.
Still nothing from Bianca. I picked up the phone and dialled her
number again. It went through to the answering machine.

“Hey Bianca. It’s
Joseph—Josephine’s boyfriend. I don’t know why you haven’t got back
to me, maybe you forgot, but it’s very important you call me back.
I’ve found out a lot of stuff and I’m pretty sure now that there
was more to Josephine’s death. I really need your help to figure it
all out. I got your address from someone. I’ll come by soon if I
don’t hear from you. In case you’ve lost your phone or something.
Ok then, bye.”

I put the phone down and held it
there for a second, wondering why she hadn’t called me back. A wave
of doubt about calling her again and telling her I had her address
passed over me. I remembered the earnest way she spoke to me and
put it out of my mind.

After working out for nearly an
hour, showering, and then tidying up the house a little, I settled
at the computer. Karim had sent me an email with photos of his
brother. The resemblance was there, but Abdi looked a lot more
well-groomed. He had a flashy haircut and was subtly posing in most
of the pictures.

I began reading old emails from
Josie. At first I tried reading between the lines of those brief
exchanges—we had always preferred talking on the phone—but I soon
lost myself in them. Ages passed as I remembered the times and
circumstances of each, almost imagining that time had gone
backwards, and I was once again reading them for the first time
except I now knew how every conversation turned out. I knew that
every argument ended with us becoming closer, that every tentative
exploration into each other was rewarded. I began looking at old
photographs of her. I didn’t have many, I had never liked cameras,
but I flicked between my favourites, gazing at them for what seemed
like hours, and almost seeing them move.

When the phone rang it startled
me, piercing the trance-like state as if it were a hundred decibels
loud. I closed everything on the computer hurriedly, as if caught
and embarrassed.

“Hello?”

“Joseph. It’s me.”

“Hey Monika. What’s wrong?”

“We’ve got to talk.”

“About what?”

“About what happened.”

“What?”

“Last night.”

I could hear her breathing
heavily on the line. She sounded nervous.

“Forget about it.”

“I can’t. I didn’t even go into
work because I feel so bad. We shouldn’t have done that.”

Her breathing sharpened. She
tried starting another sentence but broke down.

“I told you, forget about it. Go
into work, and don’t think about it. It means nothing. It was
nothing.”

“We shouldn’t have done it. Any
of it.”

“Monika?”

“Yes?”

“Go to work.”

I waited a few seconds for her
to reply, and when she didn’t I put the phone down.

The sound of a screeching woman
woke me up. It was a sound that had always made my skin crawl. I
opened my eyes to the TV showing an awful interior decoration show.
I fumbled around the couch for the remote and flicked it over to
something quieter. Around me were strewn sheets of paper that I had
written on. I glanced at a few, reminding myself of what I’d
written; they were notes, much like those I had taken the day
before, random sentences I had hoped to piece together on paper. I
realised that I hadn’t come up with any particular insight, and
instead just written what I knew already multiple times in various
ways.

It was raining heavily. I heard
it fall violently against the windows like pellets. I opened the
door to the balcony to take down the bedsheet I had hung there, and
looked out. Behind the grey showers I made out the blue saloon,
still in the same spot. The temperature was falling rapidly. I
turned the heater up a little, took the washing out of the machine
and draped it over a clothes rack in the living room, then put an
extra duvet in Vicky’s floral-patterned bedcover.

It was coming up to home time
when I was done, and I decided that I would stay at home with Vicky
after picking her up. I threw away the papers apart from one that
contained the numbers and addresses I had accumulated, which I
folded and placed in the pocket of my coat. I took out a whole
chicken from the freezer and put it in some warm water to
defrost.

Perhaps it was the nap, or the
night with Monika, but I felt in some way refreshed. My emotions
had been reset, and I felt I could think clearly. As I chopped up
some herbs and took some potatoes out for Vicky to peel, I laid
things out in my mind. I played back all the events from the past
few weeks in detail. Then I came up with a plan for what I would do
the next few days, and what gaps needed filling.

I dropped the knife with a
clatter. It fell to the floor just missing my foot, but I didn’t
care. It was such an obvious thing and I had completely ignored it
all this time. Josephine was writing a book; where was the book? I
smacked my hand against my head, forgetting about my bruise, but
not even the shock of pain deterred me from fully recognising my
own stupidity. The book had to contain everything. If not the book,
then the notes she must have taken. It might not name the killer,
but it would no doubt reveal the people Josie had been meeting, the
reason she had been doing the things she had. It would tell me
everything I needed to know in order to find him.

I paced around the apartment
briskly, rubbing my bruise and wracking my brain. The book had to
have been written on her laptop; Josie had handwriting so bad even
she couldn’t read it. She always wrote on that laptop, the white
one with a sticker on the back of the screen—some cute Japanese
cartoon character. There was nowhere else the book could be but on
that computer.

Monika was the only one who
could help me. I reached for the phone and stopped myself. She
would still be feeling emotional, and a phone call from me would
turn into an unnecessary conversation for sure. Perhaps the laptop
was in her house, in her room. I cursed myself, I had just spent
the night there and not even thought about asking her if she had
Josie’s stuff.

“What an idiot you are, Joseph.
Grade A idiot.”

I grabbed my coat, I had to go
and get that computer. I was putting on my shoes when I stopped
myself again. The herbs on the counter, the chicken defrosting, the
video rental shop card I had placed on the table as a reminder. I
checked the time—fifteen minutes before I was supposed to leave to
pick Vicky up.

“Patience, Joseph. Patience,
patience, patience.”

With a huge amount of reluctance
I kicked my shoes off and went back to the kitchen to wash the
knife and finish chopping the herbs.

The film was awful, but Vicky
seemed to love it. I feigned interest for as long as I could, but
eventually deferred to simple hums of agreement. Vicky was so
enthused she didn’t seem to notice, and I was so engrossed in my
own thoughts anyway that I didn’t mind trying sitting through
it.

“She was in another film.”

“Was she?”

“She played a wife.”

“Nice.”

I felt bloated from all the
food, not least the rich chocolate cake we had picked up on the way
home. I sipped a little coke and felt the sugar buzz around my
body.

“Can you buy me a dress like
that?”

“What dress? That one?”