Each number matched its position in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’.Strung together, the decrypted message read:
I want you to kill for me.
Look, I know, I know, all of this, this whole ridiculous, shambolic mess, was my fault. I can admit that. But still, somehow, I felt responsible for solving it. For bringing the TellTale Killer to justice, as if exposing a serial murderer was my one sole purpose.
I had spent a good ten minutes sitting on the foot of Aleks’s staircase, trying to process the killer’s message and figure out what on earth to do next, ignoring the incessant pinging from my phone as CerealKillerCornflakes continued to message me with a subsequent barrage of questions.
So, the TellTale Killer wanted me to kill for him. How the hell was I supposed to do that? But at the same time, I couldn’t exactly ghost him, I couldn’t let him kill someone else, the ball was very much in my court. While he was waiting on me, maybe no one would need to die.
In his mind, I was probably his eager little acolyte, chomping at the bit to do his bidding. He was trying to enact some control. But in reality, I was there thinking how on earth was I going to fool him into thinking I was a budding serial killer, all the while evading life imprisonment?
Ultimately, I only needed him tobelieveI had killed for him. And if I did that, then I could get close enough to catch him. But how the hell was I even going to manage it? Could I steal another heart from the morgue at Camborne and Sons? No, that was completely impossible now. The bodies were no longer there for one, and even if they were, I’m sure Uncle Phil had fitted at least a dozen more security cameras around the whole vicinity over the past few days. Could I maybe fake a heart of some kind? I knew I wouldn’t be able to craft something that would reassemble an actual organ. Pig hearts were supposed to be similar to human ones, could I maybe do something with that? No, even if I pulled that off, if the police got involved, they would realise it wasn’t human pretty quickly and I’d lose the TellTale Killer forever. It wouldn’t take long to be outed as a fraud.
No. This was my chance to finally get him. I decided I would commit now and figure out the how later. The prizehovered tantalisingly close, just beyond reach, but if I could win his trust, I’d edge one step nearer to bringing him down.
I cudgelled every thought in my brain to try and think of some kind of solution to my problem. Grave robbing? Not likely. Even if I had the stomach for it, any heart I dug up would be halfway to mulch, and cemeteries are far too exposed for a covert midnight dig. Perhaps I could lurk around a hospital morgue, pose as an organ-donation courier and swipe a spare one while the staff were distracted. That sounded even more far-fetched. The whole thing was crazy; spare human hearts are not exactly lying around waiting to be borrowed.
And then, it hit me.
There was, in fact, a spare human heart lying about twenty-five feet away from me. A human heart I could get hold of without the need to actually kill anyone.
And look, I know this is pretty horrendous, on top of a succession of horrendous things I had already done. I’m not trying to excuse myself morally at all. But if I could just do this final act, would it make everything I’d done so far worthwhile? For the past week and a half, I’d been pretending to be a serial killer for the police and the media. Now I just had to pretend to be a serial killer to an actual serial killer. How hard could that be?
And in a weird, strange, hereafter kind of way, I sort of felt that Greta would want me to, she did love to share after all.
TWENTY-FIVE
Chlo and Aleks returned about an hour later. Aleks’s face, pale and distant, showed how completely the visit to Greta’s grave had emotionally drained him, and Chlo, ever sensitive to people’s emotions, had clearly clocked it. She offered gentle goodbyes on our behalf, saying we would love to visit again soon but we really ought to be going.
I asked whether I could borrow Obama from Greta’s bookcase. Aleks looked hesitant at first, then nodded.
‘Actually, if it is all right,’ he said, his voice determined as if he was pushing through any nerves he had about what he was going to ask, ‘I would like to send you a few of Greta’s things.’
‘A few things?’ I echoed his words, pausing mid-step, not totally sure what he meant.
‘I have been sorting through her belongings,’ he explained, voice tinged with hesitation but also some drive to it, like he had prepared himself to speak. ‘I am trying to place everything where it needs to be so I can keep moving forward. Some items I just…’
He disguised his sob as a smallharrumph.
‘Some things I can’t bear to throw away, but I know that she would have wanted you to have them.’
I could tell he was repeating the words of a professional who had talked through this with him.
‘Of course,’ Chlo and I replied in unison.
As we left, I noticed one of the cherry trees in his garden had just begun to show the first fragile blush of blossom.
He wasn’t moving on, but maybe as he said, Aleks was moving forward.
We got in the car and started the drive back. Normally, we’d listen to the radio anytime Chlo and I were on a road trip, but she had clearly thought ahead, knowing the current media frenzy would only be talking about one thing, and she had already connected her playlist of atrociously awful pop songs as the background music before she had even picked me up.
‘Look, you might not want to talk about this, and that’s fine. Totally chill, we can just drop it,’ Chlo said after a few minutes of us attempting to decompress to the sounds of some teenage pop star crooning melodically about the obscene amount of vagina he’d been exposed to. ‘But… do you ever wonder who the TellTale Killer could be? Like, who is he to the people who actually know him?’
‘Oh, all the time,’ I responded casually. Chlo hadn’t seen my crime wall since I moved to the shed. ‘Because he has to be smart, like really smart to get away with what he does.’
‘Right?’ Chlo agreed effusively as we joined Chertsey Road. ‘See, that’s what freaks me out the most, it could literally be anyone. This isn’t just a common thug bludgeoning people to death. It’s scary when they’re so smart because you know how well they can blend in.’
‘It’s also scary when they’re not smart too,’ I replied.
