Chapter 2
TWO
I’d often wondered why the killer chose hearts as his signature.
Perhaps because it’s the one organ we sense the most in our bodies: hammering against our chest when we lock eyes with a soulmate, settling and slowing when we lie beside them in bed, and seeming to split in two when their lover admits they’ve been sneaking late-night meet-ups with a bloke called Bill they met outside a Slug we all know it’s in bad taste, but we all look anyway, we can’t stop ourselves.
Serial killers, intentionally or not, understand our compulsions.
They may not all do it in the same way, but the Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam, the BTK Killer, even Jack the Ripper sent letters to the press and the police, they mocked and goaded the authorities, dared the papers to highlight their crimes and of course, despite the horror, we were all too happy to lap up everything they published.
We found the horror of it somewhat exciting.
I glanced once more at the photographs of the six handwritten notes from the TellTale Killer I had pinned to the wall.
Each one was left with the extracted heart of his victims; all written, of course, in his trademark cipher.
The TellTale Killer had a very obvious obsession of his own, with Edgar Allan Poe.
His rather egregious moniker was coined by one of the trashier tabloid media companies – unfortunately, one I used to work for – when they caught on to the MO of extracted hearts left at crime scenes and the only decipherable text on the notes: ‘Nevermore’.
It was reported that sales of Poe went up by an incredible 700 per cent when the ‘TellTale Killer’ began to be plastered across the headlines.
Look, serial killers aren’t exactly known for being creative pioneers but even by those standards, his whole routine was giving ‘plagiarised murder chic’.
For those who’ve never had the delights of studying Poe for A-level, allow me to be your helpful study guide.
He was an American writer of Gothic tales of death and dread and very rarely strayed outside that territory.
‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is one of his more famous short stories about a man who murders some old codger, hides the body under the floorboards, and then convinces himself he can hear the man’s heart thundering beneath his feet.
Hence, I assume, where the TellTale Killer got his inspiration for yanking the hearts out of his victims.
Furthermore, our friend Edgar had been quite the fan of cryptography back in the day, even penning a snoozefest essay titled ‘A Few Words on Secret Writing’ which I had now read cover to cover a few dozen times.
So, being a card-carrying member of the Poe-diphile fan club, it seemed the killer had continued on Edgar’s niche passion with leaving cryptic notes when he deposited his victims’ hearts.
Take Henry Morgan, victim number three, nothing left of him other than his heart and a jumbled mess of quill-penned letters:
V avmkqr siaivxy fvv lreqiee,
sotrgomes hyi ueihj at umimii iqhimoyomfz hf xrem qv mglrqim,
M cabxiq eih gdopiq jjv Yug wmrvt nlehzgr,
fpx eahymak.
Is ktiehrv mydnzvh,
as eyussdiax aicx,
bf vrgfseubx’w jvvxy.
Ivzgu pzh dq hf yahzvjfoeh,
Glzvv ug es qmqmeq zra rbxigf hyi brzw nq tfvpi ptfz clvfigzve.
How was anyone supposed to make sense of that?
But when you’ve spent months, immersed in the dreary works of a nineteenth-century author, becoming something of a reluctant aficionado of the chap, you begin to see the patterns start to slowly emerge.
It was almost six months to the day after Greta, around June 2024, when I finally dragged my festering self into the shower, that my brain began to connect the dots.
The word ‘Nevermore’ scrawled across the killer’s notes and also repeated again and again throughout ‘The Raven’, was quite literally the key.
Poe had written about using keywords in Vigenère ciphers, where a certain word or phrase shifts the letters in a message according to the recurring pattern.
So, with shampoo still frothing and bubbling in my hair, I threw myself onto a chair and frantically began to utilise the method, scrawling notes on any spare piece of paper I could snatch up, my hands still damp and smearing the ink.
Rapidly, the jumble soon began to unravel:
I waited beneath the heavens,
expecting the hands of divine retribution to tear me asunder,
I longed and prayed for His fiery justice,
but nothing.
No thunder rumbled,
no judgement fell,
no reckoning’s wrath.
Which led me to understand,
There is no divine law except the ones we force upon ourselves.