PART ONE
ONE
‘Ruth,’ I quietly murmured to myself. ‘This is a really, really stupid idea.’
And the thing is, I’ve known this was a stupid idea since I first came up with it, months ago. I’d never truly planned to carry it out. And yet, here I was doing it anyway. Besides, was it really thestupidestthing a person could do? I wasn’t shaving my bikini line with a rusty razor from Nanny’s closet after five margaritas; going to the gym commando on cardio day in light grey trackie bottoms; overpacking a rucksack until the zip was barely holding on, with blatant disregard for the bag sizer and my bank account. Even so, I still couldn’t think of anything quite as gloriously, catastrophically preposterous as this.
I knew for a fact that a sane, normal person would never even consider passing themselves off as the most notorious serial killer of the past decade while their slightly frostbitten fingers gripped tightly to the rough splintery edges of a box containing a human heart they’d dissected from a dead body a few hours ago. But maybe that’s why the TellTale Killer hadn’t been caught yet; no one else had been crazy – or stupid enough – to even consider a plan like this.
The biting January wind seemed to careen and twirl itselfunder my clothes as I lingered rather awkwardly in the shadows opposite Charing Cross Police Station, keeping my eyes fixed on the dull, monotonous atmosphere of the lobby from across the road. It must have been a quiet night for the boys and girls in blue as various officers slowly trundled in and then gently trundled back out. Above me the dim streetlamp flickered. To try and calm my nerves, I counted the seconds between the sporadic bursts of its luminance as if it was lightning: sometimes eleven seconds, sometimes forty-five.
I waited for a few more minutes – or if you prefer, five flashes of streetlamp – making sure no police officers were lingering clandestinely outside the building, ready to tackle the suspicious-looking hoodlum leaving a rustic wooden box on their doorstep.
This was all definitely illegal, I was sure of that, but I had no idea what crimesexactlyI was committing, nor even how long my sentence would be if I was caught. I figured that, in this case, ignorance was probably bliss. And anyway, my actions were sort of justified. See, this was all in order to catch arealcriminal, the TellTale Killer, who, two years ago, carried out a string of murders from September to December 2023 and deposited the raggedly cut hearts of his victims in random locations across west London. They had been discovered by binmen, commuters and once a young, innocent child who had been curious to peer inside the plain, coarse wooden box left in their local play park. Safe to say, I imagine she probably didn’t bring it to school for show-and-tell day. This was the killer’s sick little homicidal trail of breadcrumbs, and yet no one, not the police, not the media, not the true-crime junkies, had been able to follow them, and even come close to catching him. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the choice of victims, but the pattern never changed: he’d kill, leave a heart, the press would erupt in madness, and just as the fervour began to fade, some stranger would find another heart somewhere seemingly random in west London. He killed six people in total and then, just like that, at the height of his infamy, he stopped.Everyone went into the new year skittishly expecting another victim, but nothing came.
See, I had been pondering on the killer’s obsession with hearts just earlier this afternoon as I’d meticulously placed my latex-wrapped finger on the top bridge of my knife and gently pushed it down onto the sternal notch of Mrs Lambert’s chest to break the skin. The ancient Egyptians, Uncle Phil had told me a few months ago, had believed the heart was the source of everything that made us human: memory, emotion, intelligence. After death, it was given a special preservation status above all the other organs, so that it could be weighed in the afterlife. The heavier the heart, the more sin you had committed and hence the more likely you were to be devoured by the monster Ammit (you know the one: head of a crocodile, forelegs of a lion, hind of a hippo and hours of entertainment considering the zoological orgy to result in that conception).
I couldn’t tell you whether Mrs Lambert would have been supper for an ancient Egyptian beast as I completed my Saturday afternoon high-stakes game of Operation in the Camborne and Sons funeral home morgue and tidied up the scene. I knew basically no details of her personal life. I didn’t like to think I was doing this to someone’s sweet old gran, so I told myself during the procedure that she was the kind of woman who would purposefully wear white to weddings and enjoyed firebombing rescue dog homes. That made me feel a bit better about what I was doing.
I manoeuvred the organ into the temporary container with a pair of tongs, filled halfway to the brim with my home-made chemical concoction: formaldehyde to try and preserve some of the tissues, with a splash of glycerol and a nice little pigment-restoring agent to make it look like it hadn’t been gradually decomposing inside a dead body for the past two and a half weeks; a little cosmetic touch-up, if you will. You may be wondering why a funeral directors, of all places, would have access to all of these long-named chemicals. It turns out that, for open caskets, there’s actually a lot of behind-the-scenes work from people such as myself to make sure that a corpse is ‘hot to trot’, as Uncle Phil, otherwiseknown as my boss, would be keen to say. Luckily, Mrs Lambert’s corpse, whose heart I had just taken from her coffin, was due to be cremated at some point next week, so no one would notice her body was heading to the afterlife sans heart. On a sadder note, that meant it was very likely I would be the last person on earth to admire the rather radiant skin she had for a sixty year old who had been dead for a few weeks. I would have asked her for details of her skin care routine if she wasn’t, you know, dead.
I had drained the heart from its container, removed the disposable medical drape to prevent any possible mess, and eased the organ into the wooden box I’d picked up at the garden centre on my lunch break. To me, it looked just like something the TellTale Killer would use, and I hoped no one would notice the difference. I also made sure Mrs Lambert’s coffin lid was tightly closed shut so no one would ever notice I’d disturbed her final resting place. Uncle Phil always insisted the funeral directors would be open on Saturdays to maximise footfall, and I always drew that shift, but today, for once, it worked in my favour.
Hours later, as I watched another police car indicate left and rumble up to the sally port of the station, I tried to purposefully forget my foray into a pathologist’s life, and concentrate instead on depositing the box, which I was holding so close to me that its sharp wooden edges were rather painfully jabbing between my ribs. That, and the conversation I’d had this morning with Detective Carlota, the conversation that had led me to Mrs Lambert, and now this moment. I hated the term Detective Carlota had used: ‘cold case’. Like a whole investigation could be compared to a mouldy tuna sandwich. I clutched the box tighter. The TellTale Killer’s case wouldnotbe cold for long, not if I could help it.
There were three key elements to the TellTale Killer’s work. The heart, a wooden box (luckily for me never the exact same type), and a cryptic handwritten note. I’d written the note on the ridiculously bumpy bus ride to Charing Cross Police Station:
This unearthly urge has returned to me, unbidden and unholy. Iharbour the ravenous hunger to feel the warmth of a life wilt and wither in my hands. In their last tremble, I knew they realised I had claimed them as my own.
I meticulously penned the word ‘Nevermore’ at the bottom of the note, trying to keep it as close to the inconsistent, frantic style of the killer as I could. And I was pretty pleased with the results. Turns out, if you obsess over a serial killer’s notes, and said serial killer obsesses over the works of Edgar Allan Poe, after a while it’s really not that hard to replicate the house style. Naturally, I wrote the entire message in his cipher, of course, pausing every few lines to check I’d got it right. I had already told the police about this breakthrough with the code, but I doubted they’d truly listened. The actual meaning of the words in the note didn’t matter anyway, all that mattered was making them believe the TellTale Killer was finally back.
A ladybird landed on the flickering streetlamp above me and I took a deep breath. At last, I was carrying out the macabre plan I had been daydreaming about for months. I had often wondered, even when the investigation was still active, whether this might give the police some extra motivation. But now that they were actively shelving the case, it was clear theyneededa fresh spur to get the job done.
It’s strange, really, how I could feel such resentment toward an inanimate building. The people inside these walls were the ones meant to stop the TellTale Killer. But they hadn’t, they’d failed. The killer had taken six lives, vanished without a trace and now, his atrocities had been unceremoniously labelled as ‘unsolved’ and I imagined the police were moving on to new, easier cases like stolen parcels or missing wheelie bins.
It was unacceptable. That’s why I had to do something.
After a few moments, I realised that just loitering under the broken lamppost wasn’t ‘something’. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t already committed one crime today. I was now very much, in for a penny. I picked my spot, right at the top of the concrete steps, just outsidethe station’s automatic glass doors. When a lone, practically vintage, police car rumbled up to the station entrance, I fixed my eyes on the officer in the driver’s seat as he parked the car, stepped out and began casually walking toward the doors. This was my chance.
From where I stood, I could just about make out the man at the desk’s head start to turn from what I presumed was his game of Minesweeper to the weary-looking officer now walking through the automatic glass doors, his back to me. I darted across the quiet road, up the steps, and tossed the wooden box down in front of the entrance. Then, without glancing back, I sprinted away, my heart pounding as I dashed frantically back across the street.
I say sprint, but it turns out, I had been woefully optimistic about how fast I could run. My running could be better described as a sort of limb flailing, wheezy kind of speed-hop.
Nevertheless, I bolted as fast as my legs would carry me back across the road, ignoring the blare of a car horn that I just narrowly managed to dodge by flinging my body forwards. Just my luck: an empty street until the exact second I try and run across it. I tried to seamlessly leap over the kerb in the same movement, but the tip of my shoe caught on an edge, sending me tumbling and crashing onto the pavement, my chin scraping against the cobbled tarmac, my glasses springing off the bridge of my nose.
Shit.
It hurt like a bastard, but I pushed myself up, slapped my glasses back on my face and rapidly dashed into the dimly lit alleyway leading to the high-rise block of flats opposite the station. And I kept going until my legs gave out, which, embarrassingly, only took about forty-five seconds. I slumped down onto one of those dead people memorial benches: ‘In memory of Sandra’, I could picture the inscription reading, ‘she really did despise this shithole.’ I tried to get my breath back. Note to self: I really needed to get back into shape. Maybe those other people in their late twenties who trade in all remnants of their personality to becomemarathon masochists – or marathon dickheads, Greta and I used to call them – were actually onto something.
More important than the state of my own pounding heart, though, was the state of Mrs Lambert’s. I had done it. The box was deposited. The police would find it and reopen the case of the TellTale Killer and finally bring him to justice with renewed motivation. All I had to do now, was wait.
I couldn’t shake the thought, though. This was a stupid idea, a really, really preposterous level of stupid. But then again, when has pretending to be a serial killer ever exactly been a smart thing to do?
TWO
I’d often wondered why the killer chose hearts as his signature. Perhaps because it’s the one organ we sense the most in our bodies: hammering against our chest when we lock eyes with a soulmate, settling and slowing when we lie beside them in bed, and seeming to split in two when their lover admits they’ve been sneaking late-night meet-ups with a bloke called Bill they met outside a Slug & Lettuce in Croydon.
I dawdled home, occasionally glancing over my shoulder to make sure a police car wasn’t in pursuit of the ridiculously unfit lady who had just left a suspicious-looking package outside Charing Cross Police Station. Ben and Bill’s cars were fortuitously absent from the driveway and I thanked all of my lucky stars that they were clearly out of the house as I slid my key into the polished lock of the black fibreglass door. I had no desire to explain where I’d been or what I had done forty-five minutes ago, least of to all to Bill, who must have been the world’s most fastidious SS interrogator in a previous life. I slipped inside the house, brushed the dirt and mud from my shoes on the mat, untied the laces and carried the shoes as I ambled down the corridor. Only a few moments later, I begrudgingly put them on again, then exited through the door from the living room that led to outside, crossingthe garden to the small annexe, affectionately dubbed ‘the shed’ by my hosts, that was for the time being what I called home.
