I would have made eye contact, but the shock of being told I had to leave still left me reeling. I wanted to glare at him; to tell him how audacious it was for him of all people to say that to me, maybe even to sock him in the jaw. I hadn’t punched anyone in my life but Bill was certainly the person I had wanted to hit the most. But I didn’t. I just nodded and repeated, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ in an unnaturally high tone yet again. There I was, yet again, being a coward.
Slowly, I turned and made my way to the shed, trying to retreat from probably the most awkward encounter I’d ever been in. ‘I’m just a bit tired, so I’m going to… head out,’ I said meekly.
I could still feel Bill’s eyes watching me, like a lion observing a felled antelope. I left through the living room door and carefully trotted along the garden path to reach the shed and once inside, I drew the curtains across the glass doors, dropped my rucksack witha thud, and collapsed onto the bed. Staring up at the ceiling, I let my thoughts churn. What the hell was I going to do now?
I needed some kind of therapy animal, so I walked over to Toast, picked her up, and held her gently, but firmly, against my bosom as I lay back on my bed, stroking her shell. I hadn’t tried this before and she didn’t seem to enjoy it; her limbs flailed slowly, like she was trying to swim through a pool of treacle. So, I put on an Enya mix on my phone, I knew she liked that and sure enough, it seemed to calm her down almost instantly. I just really hoped that she wouldn’t start thrusting the air while I held her close to me, that wasn’t what I needed just then.
I lay there for at least ten minutes, lost in a deep spiral of what-ifs, whys and maybes. Wondering what would have happened if Greta had never died. Maybe we could have lived together again, like we had before I married Ben. Her place had been lovely – a tiny but quaint two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment above a small independent DIY shop in Richmond. She could barely afford it, but I felt like we would have made it work between us; with me contributing to rent, batch cooking and throwing on blankets instead of turning on the central heating. She had been talking about how she wanted to zhuzh it up a bit and I’d have loved to make that a project we could have both worked on together.
Sitting up abruptly, I felt my anger at Bill – and subsequently myself – bubbling to the surface. Why did I just stand there, silent? Why didn’t I say something? Why didn’t I argue back? I had never even spoken to him about the fact that Bill knew Ben was married when they began their fling. Somehow, I had always felt it would have been way too awkward formeto bring up. Firstly, why would it have been awkwardfor me? Secondly, while I knew I wasn’t the best house guest in the world, I did keep to myself, gave them plenty of alone time, and paid £250 rent, despite having no hot water in the shed. From another perspective, I was a five-star Airbnb guest, a very reliable source of income for their expensive vino fund.
Vindicated by my rage, I placed Toast – who was now tryingincessantly to bite my finger; she had a taste for human flesh after all – on the bed, snapped on a pair of disposable gloves, yanked Bill’s container out of my bag, and carefully twisted the lid open. The stench hit me like some kind of poisonous cloud, and I gagged, retching loudly as the dead-cum-embalming smell overwhelmed the small space. This was so much worse than Mrs Lambert. But after a moment, I steadied myself, steeling my resolve yet again as I continued the procedure.
So, my life was spiralling deeper into disaster by the second. No matter. Maybe there was one part of it I could still control. If I could be the one to find the TellTale Killer, to tearhisheart from his chest, then maybe – just maybe – all this pain, all this grief, all this guilt burning inside me would mean something. It would have some kind of purpose.
I carefully placed the heart in the wooden box I had grabbed from the garden centre on my way home. I then shifted into what I would callserial killer mode. I knew serial killers were antisocial, emotionally detached, and usually saw the world with a healthy dollop of nihilism, and right now, that wasn’t a million miles from where my own head was at.
I kept watch on the house through a narrow slit between the thin curtain and the glass, making sure Ben and Bill didn’t suddenly decide to make a surprise appearance at my humble abode.
If my plan was to succeed, the police needed to believe – truly believe – that the TellTale Killer had returned in all of his fury and was about to strike again and again. My goal was that they’d realise the case should never have been declared cold and deploy every single shred of resource that I wasn’t privy to into finally tracking him down with the important addendum that it wasn’t actually me they were trying to locate.
So, if I were a serial killer, craving attention from the police and having my offering of Mrs Lambert’s heart and a recording of my next victim ignored, how would I respond? I would retaliate. I would escalate, like a toddler throwing a tantrum because theirmother had the audacity to focus on another child for a brief moment. That’s how I felt right now, that’s howhewould feel too.
I tapped the pen against my desk in some kind of restless thought, racking my brain for some line that would spur them into action. What would push them over the edge, make them sit up suddenly and realise they were dealing with more than an elaborate hoax?
I let the killer’s stream of consciousness play out in my mind. The TellTale Killer craved fame, reputation and most importantly: immortality. The lack of attention would lead his frustration to boil over, driving him to lash out in a way he knew they couldn’t ignore. My hand moved faster than my thoughts, scribbling words in code, each stroke flowing with a rather unsettling ease. I didn’t even need to glance at the cipher to know what I was writing.
I shall see a thousand rivers of blood spilled,
To raise a mountain of bones
beneath these vacant heavens,
I will cut,
I will carve,
I will tear a thousand lives into pieces,
in defiance of this rotten, hymnless void.
Was this a bit much? I feel like it was a bit much. I might have gone a bit too far in some places, but I was no poet and frankly, all I needed was some kind of reaction from the police. Go big or go home, right?
I slipped the coded message into the wooden container holding the heart, then pushed the box into a padded package. I scrawled on the front, in bold letters:
For the Attention of Detective Cecilia Carlota.
ELEVEN
In the dead of the cold January night, I crept out of the shed, carrying Justin’s heart in a box tucked within my tote bag. The streets were expectedly busy for 11 p.m. on a Friday, but I moved through London with purpose, keeping my head low and my grip tight around the straps. When I reached the Lidl a few miles in the other direction of where I had deposited heart one, there was only a group of youths loitering outside, smoking cheap joints and lounging back on their BMX bikes. For a moment, I wondered about the possibility of them mugging me before promptly realising that my only possessions were a phone about eight models too old for them to make a profit on, and a human organ. Probably not something they had on their mugging wish list. Luckily, however, they seemed far too stoned to even realise I was there.
It was only when I overheard them debating their preferred type of quinoa that I realised they weren’t just stoners. They were the worst kind: middle-class stoners.
Keeping the brim of my cap low to obscure as much of my face as possible, I approached the obnoxiously bright yellow locker. I presented my phone, showing the QR code to the sensor and after a loud shrill beep, one of the metal hatches swung open with a clang. Without hesitation, I tossed the package inside, slammed thedoor shut, and quickly made my exit into the night. forwarding the successful deposit email from my burner account using a VPN (you can never be too safe) to Detective Carlota as I did so.
And here’s the thing: I felt bad. I really, really did feel bad about it. Like, horrendously bad, like I had an even worse churning and rolling in my gut from knowing I had intentionally done something truly ghastly. It wasn’t just because I had yanked yet another poor person’s heart out of their body, but because I couldn’t help wondering how devastated Detective Carlota would feel when she inevitably came to pick up the package. Would she think this was all her fault? Would she somehow blame herself for all of this? Of course, she wasn’t at fault, not even slightly. None of this was at all on her shoulders. Yet, Carlota was the only detective I’d spoken to throughout the whole investigation who genuinely seemed to care about the people affected by the killer’s death toll, and because of that, she was the only one who, I believed, could actually do something about reopening the case. It all felt terribly manipulative, and part of me wondered if it was too late to turn back, to somehow change the recipient to one of the other random police detectives who had worked on the case. But I knew it was too late. Eventually, the ends would justify the means. I had to keep telling myself that. None of what I was doing was physically hurting anyone living, at least, right? This was all for the greater good.
I tried not to let the previous night’s guilt catch up with me as I walked to work early Saturday morning, keeping pace with the small creek murmuring beside the road up to the office. As a comparatively pleasant distraction, I pondered what the TellTale Killer was doing this very instant. What was he up to, what was he thinking? Was he in fact on one of those ‘cooling-off periods’ like CerealKillerCornflakes seemed to believe? Simply going about his mundane day job, quietly reliving his so-called glory days when no one was looking, blissfully unaware that I was still coming for him? Part of me wondered if maybe the Telltale Killer was already dead. I didn’t believe he’d taken his own life in a fit of remorse, of course, but maybe some freak accident or an unexpected bout ofillness had abruptly claimed him and he’d popped his clogs with no one knowing who had been behind the most famous man in the UK for the past two years. Deep in my gut, I didn’t feel that was true. Some unshakable part of me was certain he was still out there somewhere, just waiting for the opportunity to finally come back.
