I watched Nico’s face ever so slightly twitch and grimace. This was where Bea Powell vanished and the way his face dropped, and how the colour drained, told me that must have been his aunt. He nodded without a word and quickly began to summon the footage. I hesitated before finally committing to placing a hand on his shoulder. It felt right in the moment, okay? He didn’t react either way to the gesture anyway, so I kept myhand there with no real movement as he began to boot up the footage.
The highlighted mark of number plate recognition flared up on the monitor. I excitedly jammed my finger onto the screen – a gesture Nico clearly didn’t love – and tried my best to rub the smudge of fingerprint off the monitor. There it was again – the van with two scratches, again sporting a new numberplate.
It all began to fall into place. The perfect way for the TellTale Killer to hide in plain sight and yet leave no security footage trailing back to him. The most common vehicle in London, the generic delivery van; you’d melt into the background. No one ever looks twice at a white van, especially not if you have a rotating plethora of number plates. In addition to the fact that I bet it’s easier to throw a body in there than in a Mini Cooper.
Greta, you absolute genius.
‘The same van, different number plates,’ I exclaimed. Nico slowed down the footage as we both continued to watch the recording of the van pulling up on a street corner, stopping in a spot by an alleyway just slightly out of frame.
I realised Greta’s note only listed five victims because, though she hadn’t known it then, she’d been number six. I’d considered asking Nico for the footage from the night she died, but without knowing what number plate the van was using on that particular night, I could lose hours trying to trawl through it.
‘Is there anything else in the footage that tells us more?’ I asked after I recollected my thoughts. ‘Anything at all?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Nico said regretfully. I gave a little groan and moved beyond his desk to look more closely at a figure on the giant screen that dominated the room.Who could you be?
‘So, you don’t see who gets out?’ I asked, my eyes still fixed onto the figure behind the windshield to try and discern some kind of physical feature to ascertain what the TellTale Killer could vaguely look like.
‘Oh, it’s just some delivery driver shipping out these parcels. It tells us nothing about Aunt Bea,’ Nico remarkedindifferently. ‘Trust me, I’ve watched this footage hundreds of times, spent hours on forums, trying to work out what might have happened to her. But it’s just another one of these unbranded delivery driver clones. Feel like I’ve made myself go a bit crazy staring at the same sixty-second loop over and over again.’
God, I knew how that felt. It was strangely nice to hear of another bereaved’s obsession with message boards, although I doubted Nico went on ones quite as shady as mine.
I then requested the two other camera footages, and sure enough, the van appeared in each one. The timing didn’t always align exactly with the disappearances, but it was always there, defined by the scratches and each time sporting a different number plate, always lining up exactly with Greta’s notes.
I had no idea how the dates she’d pencilled beside them fit in. I’d asked Nico to check, but no van with those number plates showed up on any of the dates she’d written down. They must be signalling something else.
Now, I was stuck, though; the DVLA wouldn’t give out any private information about number plates. Unless, of course, you were a journalist with very good contacts and luckily, I knew exactly who may be able to help. Unfortunately, it meant going back, the second time in a day, to Hammersmith.
‘So, you think this is how the TellTale Killer’s been operating? With a van?’ Nico asked, swivelling his chair to face me again. He was more than a little interested; this was clearly a man invested in making sure the killer got justice. I did like a guy with a moral centre.
‘I do,’ I replied. ‘It makes more than a little sense, right? The perfect way to take his victims, and the perfect way to then deposit their hearts. Hiding in plain sight every time, swapping out number plates so no one catches on,’ I said, half explaining the revelation to myself as much as I was to Nico.
It reminded me of David Middleton, better known as the Cable Guy Killer, who used a company uniform as his way to slip past suspicion to kill his victims. Somehow, a brand makes us feelsafe; it seems almost unfathomable that someone delivering our parcels could be capable of killing. But that’s the trouble with serial killers – they could be anyone.
‘That’s very smart. You’re very smart,’ Nico said complimentarily with an ever so slight tilt of his head.
I almost smiled at that. For a moment, I was distracted, not by the recent discovery, but by the handsome man in front of me, lightly flirting with me. It was quite nice, you know. I realised I enjoyed being flirted with, even if I didn’t quite know how to flirt back.
‘I…’ He paused, massaging his throat like he was working through how to physically say something. ‘I was a little triggered the night you brought up serial killers. Only because I also spend so much time thinking about them, especially the TellTale Killer. I just want to find out what happened to Aunt Bea. I take it you’re not going to tell the police about this?’
‘No,’ I responded. ‘And I take it you’re not going to tell them?’
‘No,’ he remarked, almost like he was a little insulted by the question. ‘I mean, in all honesty, I was hoping I’d get to tell you “I told you so” but hey, you were right. I mean, this is frankly outstanding.’
I started to give a polite guffaw and a flick of my hand as a kind of fake modesty but then stopped abruptly. That turn of phrase was familiar, I had heard it… no, read it, in that exact same tone by another person who had a weird obsession with the TellTale Killer. ‘All curds, no cream?’ I knew that was a familiar expression too.
My finger shot out like a bullet leaving a gun, pointing directly at Nico sitting in the chair.
‘No,’ I murmured, eyes narrowing and back hunching. ‘CerealKillerCornflakes.’
‘StabithaChristie,’ he responded, rising to his feet, finger outstretched, matching my accusation.
TWENTY-NINE
I was already at the police station, waiting patiently for Detective Carlota to become available so I could tell her about my discovery. I figured she’d forgive me coming to her directly when she learned of how groundbreaking my discovery was. When the news broke about the heart I sent Jago, almost instinctively, I switched off notifications for DarkCell. I needed to protect what little was left of my sanity if I was going to make it through this, and to try and stop myself from completely unravelling into a messy human spool. It’s not as if the killer would leave any breadcrumbs for me now; he’d be done with that. I know serial killers, their egos are fragile things, poor souls.
Naturally, our old pal Jago Jones had been the first to report on the new heart, and, just as naturally, the media storm that followed was immediate. Every outlet was in a frenzy, clamouring over the latest instalment of the Telltale Killer saga. Urgh, talk about sensationalism.
You could almost feel the city pause; a collective intake of nervous breath, as Londoners stopped in their tracks as their phones pinged with the alert and launched into new conversations about the latest development with whoever was next to them. As I moved through the streets on my way to talk to Carlota, I caughtfragments of their voices: a mix of terror and disbelief, yes, but laced through with something else; a thrill, the kind you feel in the queue for the really frightening rollercoaster that someone died on only last week.
