Maybe that was another reason I dreaded setting foot in Greta’s dad’s house: it somehow crystallised the grief for me. Most days it hovered over me like a private rain cloud, heavy and unseen by anyone else, yet here it turned into a steam locomotive, thundering straight at me while I lay hogtied to the tracks.
We asked how Aleks had been. He said that all in all, he was okay, mentioning that Greta’s brother had just got engaged and moved in across the street with his fiancée, though hemurmured he suspected they had only done so somewhat begrudgingly just to keep an eye on him.
‘When we heard the TellTale Killer was back, we knew it would bring up some horrible feelings for you. I’m so sorry,’ Chlo said, with an impressive amount of grace and decorum mustered.
‘It’s okay,’ Aleks said, offering another frail and feeble smile, one that made it painfully clear he was certainly not okay. ‘It was nasty seeing the news talking about it again. You know, I think that was one of the worst parts about losing Greta… the way they wouldn’t stop talking about her for days on end, like they suddenly knew every little detail about my Greta, like they were almost trying to find some way to blame her, and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, they just stopped caring about her. It was like she vanished from the world the moment people lost interest in their televisions. Everyone remembers the TellTale Killer but no one can even remember my Greta’s name.’
I remembered feeling such rage when I saw what they’d done. They’d used a lovely, natural photo of Greta on the beach to announce her death… and then they’d photoshopped it: carved her a stronger jawline, sharpened her eyes, puffed up her hair. I couldn’t even find the words. Why had they done that? If they made her more aesthetically pleasing to the public, then it would make her loss feel like more of a tragedy?
‘But I think it could be a good thing that he’s back,’ I said with a half mumble, half stutter, not totally sure how I was going to articulate the chaotic collection of thoughts in my brain. ‘Now he’s resurfaced the police might finally throw everything they’ve got at him, that’s what I’m banking on. Maybe this time we’ll see him behind bars.’
Aleks gave a faint, indulgent smile and shrugged.
‘But none of this will ever bring Greta back.’
After a little while of talking, Chlo took Aleks off to lay some fresh flowers at Greta’s empty grave. I was told she had a lovely spot at St Michael’s. It was a small cemetery, tacked onto the edge of a beautiful park, perched just on the hill above it. I didn’t believein all that afterlife nonsense as you know, but Chlo had told me she liked the idea that Greta could look out over the park at sunset from there.
I stayed behind, obviously. I didn’t have the nerve to go to her pseudo-grave at the best of times, let alone today.
As soon as they left, I found myself mulling over what Aleks had said. He was right, none of what I was doing would bring Greta back. Maybe, in some strange way, that’s what I had been hoping for all along; that catching the killer would make my grief and guilt magically disappear or maybe even more deludedly, it would miraculously bring Greta back just as suddenly as she disappeared from my life.
I knew Aleks wouldn’t mind if I took a small peek in Greta’s room. Gently, I pushed open the door covered with old crayon still etched onto it. It was impeccably tidy, her clothes neatly folded away in drawers, her concert ticket stubs still lined up on one of the shelves.
I’d heard that when parents lose a child, they often don’t change their room at all – as if clinging desperately to the delusion that their kid was just out for the moment and would come scooting back through the door, demanding to know what was for dinner any second now. But Greta had moved out of Aleks’s place a long time ago, so her room sat in that awkward, transitory state: not quite a guest bedroom, not quite Greta’s anymore either – a space caught between being kept for her and quietly moving on without her.
She’d be proud of Chlo for keeping such a close eye on her dad. He still had his son, but he’d lost his wife and then his daughter, no one deserved to be dealt cards that cruel. I doubted Greta would be as proud of me.
I smiled faintly when I saw her rather vast array of stuffed toys, looking like they had been painstakingly kept clean and dustless. I remembered playing with them when we were at primary school, making up long, melodramatic soap opera storylines where Arthur the Pig cheated on Edmund the Orangutan in a scandalousaffair with Millicent the Ladybird who was in a poly relationship, of course, with a brick we found in the garden. Most kids could be possessive about their toys, but I remember Greta always had no real problem with sharing them with me. Even as we grew up, she was never possessive of anything, she had always just treated me as one of the family.
I remembered how we’d spoken about reincarnation that night at Sabroso, how she’d mentioned ladybirds; what were they called in Dutch again? ‘The Lord’s most beautiful creature’, or something like that?
I remembered, too, helping Ben with some of the general maintenance of the garden around the shed, when he told me that ladybirds really punch above their weight in the ecosystem. They don’t live long comparatively, but they do a lot of good for the environment as a form of natural pest control in a short amount of time.
I looked over the other belongings in Greta’s room. I glanced at the globe where we had dreamt about travelling the world together, the posters of One Direction we had fawned over, but nevertheless found myself drawn to her bookcase. And there he was, sitting on the top row: Obama.
I picked up her copy ofA Promised Landand smirked to myself, remembering all the times I’d teased her about her crazed obsession for the slightly self-indulgent autobiography. I took the hardback from its place on the shelf and smoothed my hand over it. I’d never fully understood the love for Obama, if I’m honest, but for whatever reason, he had always been one of Greta’s favourites. Maybe she crushed on him but just couldn’t ever admit it to me.
I tucked it under my arm, wondering if I could ask Aleks if I could take it home. It was then that my eyes began to drift to, of all things in Greta’s room, the orangutan, and I couldn’t help but think of that terrible tattoo from the photos that were still traumatically seared into the hardwire of my brain. There’s an old Poe story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ – not one of his best, in my opinion – where the witty detective, C. Auguste Dupin, investigates a grisly double homicide in Paris, only to discover that themurderer – of all things – is an escaped orangutan. A ridiculously stupid plot device for a crime story, but the critics and scholars seemed to lap that up like it was genius. What they were smoking almost two hundred years ago I have no idea. Could you imagine if it turned out the TellTale Killer was actually a baboon? Give me a break.
Then it all began to click: perhaps the ‘tattoo’ wasn’t permanent at all but a slapdash sketch, an ink-marker clue the killer had left, his very own Banksy. It would explain the wonky and horrendous artistry of the drawing. Of course, he wouldn’t just fling random numbers my way; there’d be some kind of logic, some twisted clue to make it look like a fair game. The numbers couldn’t be page references, the story was too short, but word counts? That might just be it.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and began typing a message to CerealKillerCornflakes.
It’s an alphanumeric cipher, I’m sure of it. Can you cross-reference it with the word placement in The Murders in the Rue Morgue?
He replied a few moments later:One step ahead of you. I was literally going through the text now.
Of course he wasn’t. He’d probably been just as stumped as I was, at least until I’d spotted Greta’s stuffed toy, but I just know he loved to tell me ‘I told you so’.
I bet you were, I typed back. He didn’t respond, which told me everything. He was far too excited.
A few moments later, his next message came through:
Word 12: I
Word 31: to
Word 112: me
