Carlota barely reacted, offering nothing more than a slight, noncommittal, ‘hmmph’.
‘So, I want you to tell me, Ruth,’ she said, tilting her head from side to side as if to make sure we were truly alone in the cramped office kitchen. ‘If someone was going to steal a heart from this place, which of your colleagues would it be?’
How the hell was I meant to answer that question and not throw someone – and I include myself here – under the bus with my answer?
‘Umm, I’m not sure, really. It’s kind of a bizarre question to try and answer,’ I replied.
‘Not Claudia? Sophie? Eddie? Just give me a name, any name. I trust your instincts here, Ruth.’
I felt my eyes widen as she closed in, annexing what little personal space remained between us; her disregard for boundaries felt as palpable as her presence.
The temptation to throw out a name, any name, just to get her off my back, was almost overwhelming. If I were innocent, I probably would have blurted one out randomly already. But that’s the thing: an interview is so much harder when you have to think about what an innocent person would even say in this situation.
‘Detective, I wish I could help you, I really do, but that’s not something I’ve even thought about,’ I said entreatingly. ‘I don’t think any of us would do something like this. My only thought is that, somehow, the TellTale Killer came back to take his memento from the victimafterhe’d killed him, I don’t even know how, but that’s the only theory I can think of right now.’
It was the theory I’d come up with on Saturday night, straight after Chestgate. Serial killers, as we all know, are a big-headed bunch, surely going back to take the heart, even at risk of incrimination, was a plausible story that a police detective could believe?
To say Detective Carlota looked unconvinced was somewhat an understatement. She rolled her eyes and begrudgingly gestured for me to follow her, and together we began a slow, inspecting lap around the funeral home. Her questions were insistent, comingthick and fast as I did my best to answer them as coherently as I could.
‘Who has access to the equipment used for embalming? Sutures, scalpels, things like that?’ she asked as we stepped into the chilly sterility of the morgue, now practically empty of coffins and equipment.
‘Well,’ I began, ‘it’s stored in the locked cupboard here, but the keys are kept in a safe box, though. I think it’s just Uncle Phil, Sophie and I who know the combination to access it.’
‘Youthink?’ she asked cuttingly.
‘Know, sorry, I know,’ I said, correcting myself.
‘Interesting,’ she murmured. I’m not sure if that was to herself or not.
Her phone buzzed and she plucked it from her pocket and practically crushed it to her ear to answer it. As she briskly walked out of the morgue, I discreetly pulled my own phone out for a moment. I’d barely had time to check my messages in the havoc since Sunday morning.
My parents had texted me from wherever they were in Colombo, saying the news had even reached them there, and asking me to give them a call whenever I had a chance. But beyond that there wasn’t much correspondence from anyone. Still nothing from Chlo, either. I would have thought she might have reached out by now.
What I did notice, though, was a new message on DarkCell, but not from CerealKillerCornflakes. Weird. I opened the email notification on my phone, making sure I could still hear Detective Carlota on her call in the other room, sounding like she was obediently taking a telling-off from someone superior even though I was fairly sure she didn’t deserve it. How could I, so contradictorily, root for her career as a detective while simultaneously hoping she’d fail spectacularly at investigating me?
As the link to the website loaded, I saw it was a private reply to the post I had made the night before on DarkCell where I had imitated the TellTale Killer. Naturally, I’d used a differentthrowaway username for my imitation post, I had to be somewhat sensible in my stupidity.
There were two photos that this user had sent me: the first showed some seemingly random letters that were scribbled on a piece of parchment. I knew better than to verbally decrypt it in the morgue where I could be easily ambushed by an officer of the law so I subsequently darted out of the room, gave a quick wave to Detective Carlota and dashed straight into the loo that was rather peculiarly, yet conveniently, positioned only a few paces down the hallway from the morgue.
I didn’t recognise the username at all. It wasn’t someone I had spoken to on DarkCell in the two years I had been lurking around in that corner of the dark web. I turned the lock on the toilet door, reopened my phone, and took a proper look at the first image: the letters set out on parchment.
Gs qmcutp e tvzek yoe mf xci iqoumrwo ark we aumxl r xwkxyi hee ooe lvqnicr okxnmi kiqokrrwn.
It unnerved me slightly that, like a psychological mechanism wired deep into the hardware my brain, the letters seemed to rearrange themselves until I could easily read what they were really saying.
‘To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.’
Now, that was from Poe himself. I remembered the quote clearly from when I had read through his entire collection cover to cover. But it wasn’t the message in isolation that frightened me. It was the second photo that was attached.
A naked body lay splayed across scuffed wooden floorboards, its limbs shattered, bent and twisted grotesquely into impossible angles. Where the ribcage should have been, there was only a vast, gaping hollow, the chest cleaved open into a cold, empty void.
I didn’t know how to react. My hand shot to my mouth but itwas like a scream had already started somewhere in my chest and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
This was him. It had to be him. The actual TellTale Killer had just messaged me. I had consumed so much serial killer content over the past two years and I’d never seen anything like this before. The TellTale Killer had been lurking on DarkCell all this time, silently watching, soaking up and delightfully savouring every word we’d spoken about him. And now, the voice I’d heard the night that Greta died was back.
I grabbed the hand towel, needing something, anything, to shove into my mouth to stifle the sound rising out of me. It didn’t work. What came out instead was a slightly muffled, guttural cry, a pained bellow echoing from the toilet stall.
‘God help whoever’s in there,’ I heard Eddie murmur from outside.
