“He needs to shit or get off the pot,” Robyn whispers to Hannah when she comes back from the staff room to find him still there, and Hannah laughs.
“I’ll go and see what he wants.”
She coughs as she enters the nonfiction section, not wanting to be seen to sneak up on customers. The man straightens and turns around and Hannah sees that he’s not as young as she thought. From the other side of the shop there was something about his sandy hair and flushed cheeks that made him look like a teenager with a schoolbag, but up close she can see he’s quite a long way past that, and as he stands, she catches a pink flash of scalp through the thinning hair at the back of his head. He’s probably in his mid-twenties, a little younger than her. Not a student, then. And probably not a shoplifter either.
“Can I help with anything?” she asks.
“Oh, h-hi,” he says. “Yes, actually.” His voice is tentative, and there’s a slight lilt in his accent. Not Scottish. Welsh, maybe? “I’m looking for a biography of Ted Bundy.”
Ted Bundy.
Hannah feels her lips thin. She tries not to be judgmental about reading—No such thing as a guilty pleasure is Cathy’s motto, and it’s one Hannah largely subscribes to. Jeffrey Archer to Geoffrey Chaucer, Outlander to The Outsider—they all keep the wheels of publishing turning and money coming into the tills, and if they give someone a happy few hours, that’s good enough for her. But still, she doesn’t really understand why anyone wants to buy true crime. Why would they voluntarily soak themselves in the misery of people like her?
“I’m not sure,” she says, trying to keep the tightness out of her voice. “You’re in the right place—it’ll be in this section if we have one. If not, I could order one in for you.”
They stand, side by side with their heads tipped, looking down the stack of true-crime biography, and at last Hannah shakes her head.
“No, sorry, it doesn’t look like we do. Was it specifically Bundy you were after, or can I recommend something else? I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is supposedly very good.” She taps the spine. “I haven’t actually read it, but my colleague Robyn liked it a lot, and it had great reviews. It’s about the hunt for the Golden State Killer. It’s not exactly a biography—more about the investigative side of things, I think.”
“Okay,” he says, somewhat to her surprise. He pulls it out of the bookshelf—a hefty hardback retailing at north of twenty pounds. “Thanks, I’ll take it.”
“Great, was there anything else?” Hannah asks.
She’s turning away for the till, expecting him to say no, but something in his face catches at her. He’s looking oddly… nervous. Expectant.
“Actually, yes,” he says. His voice flutes up half an octave, like a teenage boy’s. “Are you Hannah J-Jones?”
She stops in her tracks.
Her whole body goes instantly stiff, and then her cheeks flame with heat. For a long moment she just stares at him, frozen, trying to figure out what to say. Should she lie? Walk away? Refuse to answer?
It doesn’t matter what she says. Her stricken silence is an answer in itself, and she can see from the man’s face that he knows it, in spite of the subtle ways she’s changed her appearance since the trial—the glasses she started wearing full-time instead of just for watching TV; the long hair she sacrificed to anonymity. The difference is enough to fool the casual observer. But this guy is clearly far from that. He’s trying not to look pleased, but he is. He has hit the bullseye.
“Who are you?” she manages at last, and her voice surprises her. It is a hiss of anger. “Who are you?”
The young man’s pink-and-white face falls a little, and he looks slightly hurt.
“I’m a writer. My name’s Geraint.”
Of course.
“I’m sorry,” he’s saying. “I emailed asking if it would be okay if I p-popped past to introduce myself, but I didn’t hear back so I thought—”
Fuck.
Fuck.
The man is still speaking, something about an article, a podcast, an interview, but the words make no sense above the ringing in her head.
“I can’t do this,” she says, interrupting him. Her voice is still harsh and strange in her own ears. “Not here. You can’t come here again, do you understand?”
“I’m really sorry,” he says, and now he looks it. His face is crestfallen. “I should have thought. It never occurred—”