Chapter 10 #2
I could still feel Bill’s eyes watching me, like a lion observing a felled antelope.
I left through the living room door and carefully trotted along the garden path to reach the shed and once inside, I drew the curtains across the glass doors, dropped my rucksack with a thud, and collapsed onto the bed.
Staring up at the ceiling, I let my thoughts churn. What the hell was I going to do now?
I needed some kind of therapy animal, so I walked over to Toast, picked her up, and held her gently, but firmly, against my bosom as I lay back on my bed, stroking her shell.
I hadn’t tried this before and she didn’t seem to enjoy it; her limbs flailed slowly, like she was trying to swim through a pool of treacle.
So, I put on an Enya mix on my phone, I knew she liked that and sure enough, it seemed to calm her down almost instantly.
I just really hoped that she wouldn’t start thrusting the air while I held her close to me, that wasn’t what I needed just then.
I lay there for at least ten minutes, lost in a deep spiral of what-ifs, whys and maybes.
Wondering what would have happened if Greta had never died.
Maybe we could have lived together again, like we had before I married Ben.
Her place had been lovely – a tiny but quaint two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment above a small independent DIY shop in Richmond.
She could barely afford it, but I felt like we would have made it work between us; with me contributing to rent, batch cooking and throwing on blankets instead of turning on the central heating.
She had been talking about how she wanted to zhuzh it up a bit and I’d have loved to make that a project we could have both worked on together.
Sitting up abruptly, I felt my anger at Bill – and subsequently myself – bubbling to the surface.
Why did I just stand there, silent? Why didn’t I say something?
Why didn’t I argue back? I had never even spoken to him about the fact that Bill knew Ben was married when they began their fling.
Somehow, I had always felt it would have been way too awkward for me to bring up.
Firstly, why would it have been awkward for me?
Secondly, while I knew I wasn’t the best house guest in the world, I did keep to myself, gave them plenty of alone time, and paid ￡250 rent, despite having no hot water in the shed.
From another perspective, I was a five-star Airbnb guest, a very reliable source of income for their expensive vino fund.
Vindicated by my rage, I placed Toast – who was now trying incessantly to bite my finger; she had a taste for human flesh after all – on the bed, snapped on a pair of disposable gloves, yanked Bill’s container out of my bag, and carefully twisted the lid open.
The stench hit me like some kind of poisonous cloud, and I gagged, retching loudly as the dead-cum-embalming smell overwhelmed the small space.
This was so much worse than Mrs Lambert.
But after a moment, I steadied myself, steeling my resolve yet again as I continued the procedure.
So, my life was spiralling deeper into disaster by the second.
No matter. Maybe there was one part of it I could still control.
If I could be the one to find the TellTale Killer, to tear his heart from his chest, then maybe – just maybe – all this pain, all this grief, all this guilt burning inside me would mean something. It would have some kind of purpose.
I carefully placed the heart in the wooden box I had grabbed from the garden centre on my way home.
I then shifted into what I would call serial killer mode.
I knew serial killers were antisocial, emotionally detached, and usually saw the world with a healthy dollop of nihilism, and right now, that wasn’t a million miles from where my own head was at.
I kept watch on the house through a narrow slit between the thin curtain and the glass, making sure Ben and Bill didn’t suddenly decide to make a surprise appearance at my humble abode.
If my plan was to succeed, the police needed to believe – truly believe – that the TellTale Killer had returned in all of his fury and was about to strike again and again.
My goal was that they’d realise the case should never have been declared cold and deploy every single shred of resource that I wasn’t privy to into finally tracking him down with the important addendum that it wasn’t actually me they were trying to locate.
So, if I were a serial killer, craving attention from the police and having my offering of Mrs Lambert’s heart and a recording of my next victim ignored, how would I respond?
I would retaliate. I would escalate, like a toddler throwing a tantrum because their mother had the audacity to focus on another child for a brief moment.
That’s how I felt right now, that’s how he would feel too.
I tapped the pen against my desk in some kind of restless thought, racking my brain for some line that would spur them into action. What would push them over the edge, make them sit up suddenly and realise they were dealing with more than an elaborate hoax?
I let the killer’s stream of consciousness play out in my mind.
The TellTale Killer craved fame, reputation and most importantly: immortality.
The lack of attention would lead his frustration to boil over, driving him to lash out in a way he knew they couldn’t ignore.
My hand moved faster than my thoughts, scribbling words in code, each stroke flowing with a rather unsettling ease.
I didn’t even need to glance at the cipher to know what I was writing.
I shall see a thousand rivers of blood spilled,
To raise a mountain of bones
beneath these vacant heavens,
I will cut,
I will carve,
I will tear a thousand lives into pieces,
in defiance of this rotten, hymnless void.
Was this a bit much? I feel like it was a bit much. I might have gone a bit too far in some places, but I was no poet and frankly, all I needed was some kind of reaction from the police. Go big or go home, right?
I slipped the coded message into the wooden container holding the heart, then pushed the box into a padded package. I scrawled on the front, in bold letters:
For the Attention of Detective Cecilia Carlota.