Chapter 4 #2
Maybe, in time, it would all feel a bit easier.
Maybe day-to-day life wouldn’t feel quite so heavy.
But I’d come to terms with the fact that this feeling was never really going to go away, except for one brief moment each morning when I woke up, just before everything came back as this murky, cold deluge flooding every conscious part of me.
By now my grief had a life of its own: odd habits, different moods each day, I almost felt like we knew each other on a first-name basis.
I had realised, during Bill’s outburst, that my other hand had been firmly gripping my shopping bag.
As I rummaged through it, I found the packet of biscuits I had impulse bought and of course the voice recorder I’d gone back into the shop for.
I was mildly surprised they still sold them – when your phone has a built-in voice recorder, who needs a separate device for it?
Well, maybe serial killers do. I just hoped voice recorders weren’t so rare that buying one would set off internal alarm bells at Tesco.
Nah, anyway, I’d been a reporter and used one all the time despite being called old fashioned by half the office; surely that counted as a decent alibi if anyone ever asked.
‘I’m going freelance’ I could say, if anyone decided to pull me up on it.
Damn it, I really should have held onto that old voice recorder I had used for work.
Instead, when my journalism career came to its dramatic, cataclysmic halt, I think I remember it correctly that I had ground the recorder’s plastic body under my heel as they told me it was time to leave the building.
What I was about to do didn’t feel particularly smart, and part of me wondered if I was falling foul of the sunk cost fallacy.
Maybe the police would immediately recognise this as the work of a copycat and disregard it with an exasperated scoff.
But I knew I had to try; if I could get Detective Carlota back on the case, she might have a better chance of actually solving it.
Of course, just because there was no obvious sign the police had reopened the investigation didn’t mean they hadn’t, but I was still rather sceptical of their proactiveness.
Everything told me they’d probably had their fair share of copycats dumping hearts before, and I was just another one in the pile they casually disregarded as some kind of animal heart that some teenagers had sent in as a prank.
I needed to stand out, I needed to shine so that it would set me apart from any other copycat.
They needed to think a life was on the line.
After charging the voice recorder for an hour while I read the instructions, I sat in the corner of the shed and did my best impression of pained, torturous whimpering and crying.
I kept at it for a solid half an hour, sometimes pinching my arm as hard as I could to try and make it as authentic as possible.
Admittedly, my performance was made a touch more difficult when Toast began her daily ritual of humping her rock and I hoped that the recorder wouldn’t pick that up in the background.
Occasionally, I whispered a quick ‘help me, please help me’ in between.
Once I was done, I plugged the recorder into my laptop and did what most millennials did, went to find a YouTube tutorial.
I was tempted to search for ‘hide identity with free audio tools, no crime’ but thought that could be a bit suspect if anyone found a way to glance at my laptop hard drive.
But I found some lovely geeky-looking fella who instructed me on what to do.
So, following the YouTube tutorial closely, I adjusted the pitch until my faint, indistinguishable whimpers sounded even less like me. Why thank you, BitrateBoffin.
Then I cleaned the recorder thoroughly with alcohol solution and placed it in a crisp brown envelope.
The hard part was the letter. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of a good serial-killer-who-gets-a-stiffy-for-Poe line to essentially say, ‘Catch me, or I’ll kill again.
’ In ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, the narrator taunts the police officers by inviting them to sit in the very room where he has hidden his victim.
He brags about his cleverness, all but daring fate by seating them in the very room where the body lies beneath the floorboards.
But I was trying to strike a balance between them investigating the killer and not me, the daring copycat.
It was quickly becoming something of a tightrope to master.
I had turned myself into such a reluctant Poe fanatic over the past two years that I felt like I could probably go on Mastermind with this as my specialist subject, but I needed something more direct to jolt the police out of their complacency.
How could this make them think I was the real TellTale Killer who had just abducted a victim?
The key, I believed, was the note. If I got that right, made it sound as close to a serial killer as possible, maybe that would bring this investigation roaring back to life.
So, rather slovenly crunching on my custard creams, I began to write in his code:
I feel this warming affliction swell within me,
it sears,
it breathes.
Is this death not another gift I have bestowed upon those who must, in time, kneel on cold wretched bones to kiss her lips regardless.
Did you truly not think my shadow would return?
Hey, I think that was pretty good. I mean, it sounds pretty menacing, right?
But I felt like Poe may have given it a solid B if he was alive today.
The truly frightening thing about the TellTale Killer, and his little autobiographical musings, was coming to the understanding over the past two years that once you’ve read his writings enough times, studied them, analysed them, you realised he killed these people most of all because he enjoyed it.
There was no mission, no delusion, no psychosis he was experiencing.
He knew exactly what he was doing; and all of it came from a place of hedonistic pleasure.
The note left with Lewis Khan’s heart described how he took satisfaction in the fact Lewis’s family would never be able to bury him, and how absurd and childish he found their grief and traditions.
In his note, the killer gloated that Lewis’s family too would, one day, just be non-sentient dirt that worms and maggots would lie and wriggle around in.
‘The dead have no ear for your drum’ he had written.
It worried me sometimes, that I might feel the same about death and the superfluousness of funerals as a prolific serial killer, but I chose not to think too hard about that.
With gloved hands, I carefully placed the note inside, pulled the tape across, and sealed the envelope firmly.
I had considered addressing the package directly to Detective Carlota, but I couldn’t be certain the killer knew she was the lead detective on the case two years ago and so, not wanting to make myself suspect number one, I opted to send it to the police station general post box instead.
Besides, if what she was telling me was true, Detective Carlota didn’t even supervise the case anymore.
This is the thing no one tells you about committing crimes: the sheer, gargantuan amount of anxiety I was feeling.
With a quiet, Custard Cream-y burp, the kind with a bit of a vanilla aftertaste, I opened the Royal Mail app on my phone and randomly picked a post box I would deposit the parcel in at least two miles away.
Truth be told, I hadn’t used Royal Mail in years, but it turns out they were just traditional enough to make this whole pretending-to-be-a-serial-killer thing work.
I couldn’t rely on any postal service that involved walking into a shop with cameras; I had no doubt that could be easily traced back to me in no time.
But I’d read somewhere that as long as there were enough stamps, the address was correct, and the contents weren’t obviously and outwardly dangerous, Royal Mail was obligated to deliver any parcel that slipped through their post boxes.
Had to give them credit even if they did lose the Build-A-Bear voucher my great aunt had sent me in the post when I was nine.
I mean, I know I was doing this all for Greta, to make sure her life mattered, but God, I’m glad I didn’t believe in an afterlife of any kind.
I can’t think of how much shame and embarrassment Greta would feel for all of my actions with St Peter as they too ate biscuits on some kind of stratocumulus cloud directly above me.