The shed was small, larger than your average bedroom, mind you, roughly five metres by three, but it straddled an odd line between a chic modern style and a bizarre take on antiquity, refusing to fully commit to either style. Sleek recessed lighting illuminated the annexe, yet a lone porcelain sink and rusty-edged mirror sat awkwardly in the corner beside a walnut desk that was in desperate need of revarnishing. Ben told me once that he and Bill had bought the place hoping to run the shed as an Airbnb for some extra income, but – for now – I’d rather spoiled their side-hustle plans.
I closed my privacy curtain across the onyx grey bifold doors behind me. Every part of my legs still ached from the forty-five-plus seconds of running I had done this evening, as though someone had gripped each inch of my leg muscle and furiously twisted it back and forth in a vicious Chinese burn. There must be a more politically correct term for that now?
It was a throbbing reminder that I had just left an actual, real human heart on the steps of the police station. My guilty conscience seemed to flare in my aching calves. What on earth had I been thinking? Did I really just do that?
I took my customary daily glance at my crime wall. I wasn’t crazy, I didn’t truly believe that some clue would magically reveal itself to me, and I would miraculously come that little bit closer to catching the TellTale Killer. But it had become a habit, so today, like all days, no game-changing revelation occurred to me.
I had littered the plain cream wall with photos, Post-it notes, newspaper clippings and anything else that had been connected to the TellTale Killer. It had been far easier to display at my old flat, where I could spread everything out across the entire studio, dividing it sensibly: primary and secondary evidence, rumours and hearsay versus concrete verified facts. But in the shed I had to be at least a somewhat considerate guest and avoid plastering all four walls of my hosts’ annexe with my gruesome patchwork wallpaper.I had learned that lesson when I lost a sizeable chunk of my security deposit thanks to the copious amounts of Blu Tack I’d used in my last flat before I was unceremoniously booted out for multiple late rent payments. That was when I had my, you know, my little breakdown after Greta.
Ever since Greta’s death, it felt like I had spent nearly every waking moment trying to hunt down the TellTale Killer. Most of my weekends had been spent locked inside a room studying every known serial killer, trying to figure out how and why they operated and if I could use any tidbit of knowledge to get a little closer to understanding this one. I know what you’re thinking, saying I was obsessed was probably a bit of an understatement, but I am nothing if not self-aware. Somewhere along the way it became wired into me, this quiet conviction that I was the one who had to catch the TellTale Killer.
But if there was one thing that I had managed to ascertain above all else through my studies, it was this: serial killers really are a bunch of profoundly egotistical wankers.
See, they don’t see their killings as grotesque acts of violence – actually, quite the opposite. They view them as some kind of exquisite deeds worthy of some twisted admiration. And let’s be honest, don’t we all love a disgusting spectacle? We all slow down to gawk at horrendous car crashes on the motorway, unable to avert our eyes from something so terrible. We all try and peer into the white forensic tents with police tape wrapped around it. We all glare upwards, wondering if the guy threatening to jump off the rooftop is actually going to leap. We know we shouldn’t look; we all know it’s in bad taste, but we all look anyway, we can’t stop ourselves.
Serial killers, intentionally or not, understand our compulsions. They may not all do it in the same way, but the Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam, the BTK Killer, even Jack the Ripper sent letters to the press and the police, they mocked and goaded the authorities, dared the papers to highlight their crimes and of course, despite thehorror, we were all too happy to lap up everything they published. We found the horror of it somewhat exciting.
I glanced once more at the photographs of the six handwritten notes from the TellTale Killer I had pinned to the wall. Each one was left with the extracted heart of his victims; all written, of course, in his trademark cipher. The TellTale Killer had a very obvious obsession of his own, with Edgar Allan Poe. His rather egregious moniker was coined by one of the trashier tabloid media companies – unfortunately, one I used to work for – when they caught on to the MO of extracted hearts left at crime scenes and the only decipherable text on the notes: ‘Nevermore’. It was reported that sales of Poe went up by an incredible 700 per cent when the ‘TellTale Killer’ began to be plastered across the headlines. Look, serial killers aren’t exactly known for being creative pioneers but even by those standards, his whole routine was giving ‘plagiarised murder chic’.
For those who’ve never had the delights of studying Poe for A-level, allow me to be your helpful study guide. He was an American writer of Gothic tales of death and dread and very rarely strayed outside that territory. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is one of his more famous short stories about a man who murders some old codger, hides the body under the floorboards, and then convinces himself he can hear the man’s heart thundering beneath his feet. Hence, I assume, where the TellTale Killer got his inspiration for yanking the hearts out of his victims.
Furthermore, our friend Edgar had been quite the fan of cryptography back in the day, even penning a snoozefest essay titled ‘A Few Words on Secret Writing’ which I had now read cover to cover a few dozen times. So, being a card-carrying member of the Poe-diphile fan club, it seemed the killer had continued on Edgar’s niche passion with leaving cryptic notes when he deposited his victims’ hearts.
Take Henry Morgan, victim number three, nothing left of him other than his heart and a jumbled mess of quill-penned letters:
V avmkqr siaivxy fvv lreqiee,
sotrgomes hyi ueihj at umimii iqhimoyomfz hf xrem qv mglrqim,
M cabxiq eih gdopiq jjv Yug wmrvt nlehzgr,
fpx eahymak.
Is ktiehrv mydnzvh,
as eyussdiax aicx,
bf vrgfseubx’w jvvxy.
Ivzgu pzh dq hf yahzvjfoeh,
Glzvv ug es qmqmeq zra rbxigf hyi brzw nq tfvpi ptfz clvfigzve.
How was anyone supposed to make sense of that? But when you’ve spent months, immersed in the dreary works of a nineteenth-century author, becoming something of a reluctant aficionado of the chap, you begin to see the patterns start to slowly emerge. It was almost six months to the day after Greta, around June 2024, when I finally dragged my festering self into the shower, that my brain began to connect the dots.
The word ‘Nevermore’ scrawled across the killer’s notes and also repeated again and again throughout ‘The Raven’, was quite literally the key. Poe had written about using keywords in Vigenère ciphers, where a certain word or phrase shifts the letters in a message according to the recurring pattern. So, with shampoo still frothing and bubbling in my hair, I threw myself onto a chair and frantically began to utilise the method, scrawling notes on any spare piece of paper I could snatch up, my hands still damp and smearing the ink. Rapidly, the jumble soon began to unravel:
I waited beneath the heavens,
expecting the hands of divine retribution to tear me asunder,
I longed and prayed for His fiery justice,
but nothing.
No thunder rumbled,
no judgement fell,
