Thing was, no one could see any link between the victims. They were all different ages, half of them men, half women, different ethnicities, no shared causes. Even after deepinvestigation, nothing seemed to actually connect them. But I still doubted it was random, although CerealKillerCornflakes insisted it was.
There is no magical tether connecting them all, that’s what makes him impossible to track, it was purely who he could get his hands on at the time.
Okay, hun,I replied.
Stop saying that, you know I’m right,he subsequently responded.
Cool story, bro.
I actually hate you.
Cry about it
I often wondered if we were accidentally flirting with each other; I actually couldn’t tell anymore.
Eventually, I got bored of CerealKillerCornflakes telling me I was ‘wrong’ yet again and using his favourite line of ‘I told you so’, so I called him a little wet goat boy, which I knew would annoy him, and went to lie on my bed while Toast, having taken a break from non-copulatory mounting, stared neutral-faced at her own reflection in the glass of her vivarium. I once read an article about a tortoise that could smell different types of cancer in humans. Mine, however, had the libido of Casanova, the intelligence of a rock and a hankering for human flesh.
I wondered what Detective Carlota and the rest of the investigation team were doing at this moment – how close they were to realising I was behind Justin’s internal implosion earlier today. I knew that medical post-mortems were usually quite precise, performed by well-trained medical professionals, and chances were, unless NHS standards had really slipped, they would have probably noticed a missing heart when examining Justin. Regardless, I imagined the attention of the police would now be squarely on Camborne and Sons.
I quickly searched Justin’s full name online and found a few local news articles about his death while my playlist moved onto ‘Barbie Girl’. I’ll spare you the grim details, but the reports confirmed what Uncle Phil had given me sparse details of. Poor Justin had vanished a few months ago, only to be found washedup on some Thames riverbank several weeks later, hence why the heart had looked so decayed when I first nabbed it. The police swiftly ruled it a suicide – or perhaps an accident. With no obvious signs of trauma – no strangulation marks, no stab wounds – the conclusion seemed pretty straightforward from a police perspective. The body appeared mostly intact with decomposition being much slower in the cold winter saltwater of the Thames. But even so, his extended river tour had done quite a number on him, to say the least, softening the diaphragm, macerating the tissue, stripping away what little tension and structure was left. So, when the heart came out, there wasn’t any pressure or bulk remaining to hold the ribcage up. It just… gave in.
It seemed likely that Justin’s body looking like a crushed toilet roll probably had more to do with the cold water he was exposed to than it did with my own tampering, which meant, if you think about it, maybe my heart-extraction skills weren’t actually that bad after all.
In my mind, I tried to imagine the police’s thought process; how they would try to connect the dots. It wouldn’t take them long to realise that the heart I’d sent to Detective Carlota belonged to Justin’s body through the same DNA process they’d used to identify Greta. But would they assume it was the work of the TellTale Killer, a copycat, or someone else entirely? Was there any loose thread they could use to trace it back to me?
The TellTale Killer’s usual MO had been to take his victims at night and leave the heart somewhere in public the next morning. But I hoped the police might consider another, maybe ridiculous, possibility: that the TellTale Killer had returned after the killing to retrieve his trophy. I pitched the story to myself. Perhaps the TellTale Killer had chosen Justin as his next victim for whatever reason or particular criteria, managed to drown him in the Thames, but was spotted and had to flee – forced to abandon the body before he could finish what he’d started. But of course, being a completionist, he couldn’t let one of his killings go unnoticed. Peoplehadto knowit was him behind the murder and so he went back to fetch his heart at a later date.
But that raised a cascade of other questions, not least: how had the heart been removed between the medical examination and the funeral? Medical professionals would have conducted a post-mortem and signed off on the body. Shortly afterwards, it would have been transported by a private ambulance to us. At that point, perhaps five people in the office would have had access to the morgue where he was stored. Not exactly a wide pool of suspects for someone who might just be the most famous serial killer since Harold Shipman.
I wrapped my mouth around my collar again and bit down, as if the pressure on my jaw might summon some miraculous idea to fall into my lap and solve everything for me. How the hell was I supposed to get out of this one?
I had assumed at least some of the press would have picked up the story by now, but when I checked my Google alerts, there was still nothing, no mention of Justin’s missing heart or a possible TellTale Killer return. It was as if the police, fully aware of the chaos the TellTale Killer had stirred up two years ago, were deliberately trying to keep this quiet. You’d think that two hand-delivered hearts and a voice recording would be enough to nudge the police into at least pretending to care about the case again, yet somehow I still had the exasperating feeling that they were labelling this under ‘nothing to see here’. There was no way the TellTale Killer was ever going to get his just deserts at this rate, not unless I did another stupid thing. It reminded me of something old Double J at the paper used to say: ‘You need to control the narrative.’
I leaped out of my bed, snatched my pen out of my drawer and a fresh sheet of parchment, and I began to write in the killer’s code once again. Oh, I just knew CerealKillerCornflakes and the DarkCell community were going to go mad over this one.
At first, I just posted it on DarkCell to see how the rest of my basement-dweller friends would react. But within moments I realised the post was getting barely any engagement; even theusual serial-killer aficionados seemed lukewarm at best, disregarding it as some weird necrologist nut head fan fiction.
I figured, it was potentially also worth a punt to send it to my old workplace too, see if they’d pick it up and jolt the police out of their indefinite complacency. The main editorial inbox was bombarded with emails by every Tom, Dick and Sally looking for press, so I went straight to the not-so-secret second inbox the editors actually checked, the ones interns would forward the good stories to; I imagined someone would probably see it. It was the furthest I’d pushed my serial-killer scheme, but I didn’t trust the police to be quietly on top of this. Maybe a little press pressure was exactly what was needed.
Although as I pressed send, I couldn’t help but remember what Edgar Allan Poe himself had once said:
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
In other words, I was going completely fucking mad.
That was when I heard a faint, rhythmic thudding in the background. I froze. For a moment, it sounded like a dull heartbeat, the metaphorical hearts I’d stolen, still beating somewhere in the ether, thumping now as a reminder of my gnawing guilt.
And then I realised.
It was just Toast, enthusiastically humping her hide again.
SEVENTEEN
‘Ruth, Ruth, wake up,’ I vaguely heard someone shouting loudly, their voice pulling me out of a hazy slumber as my heart was repeatedly punching the inside of my chest. I stirred, disoriented, struggling to separate dream from reality. A tall, slim figure loomed over me, faintly illuminated by the tiny glow of a phone torch. The figure shook me again, more insistently now, but I still couldn’t make out who it was through my blurry vision and the tiny glow shining in my eyes. It was almost heavenly.
‘Jesus? Is that you?’
‘Ruth, be serious, come on and stop being stupid, you need to get up,’ the voice replied.
