Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
I walked to the Tube station from the hospital thinking about the numbers.
I stood on the train still thinking about the numbers, even when I got back home and squatted down on the loo, I couldn’t stop thinking about the numbers.
Unfortunately, whether it was the nerves or the adrenaline, my digestive system remained on strike.
I felt like a tube of toothpaste with the cap superglued on.
So while I sat there, I scribbled them out on the notepad resting on my thigh again and again, hoping for some kind of miraculous epiphany where I would see how it all made sense and fit together, but nada.
It wasn’t like they referenced any kind of significant date I knew of, and they weren’t in the right format to be coordinates.
I’d tried working out whether there was some mathematical significance to them, adding, subtracting and dividing them, but still no real meaning came from my thorough analysis.
Desperation led me to yank my doorstop Poe collection off the shelf and flick through each page.
I had hoped the code might be some obscure connection to his writings or even a hint to page numbers or something like that.
But that was a dead end too. Besides, how would the TellTale Killer know which collection of Poe I owned?
I wondered if even old Edgar himself would be stumped by this one.
When I got really, really desperate, I asked a handful of AI models, but none of them churned up anything useful.
As a last-ditch effort, I tossed the notepad in with Toast, hoping – rather absurdly – that she was actually some kind of genius tortoise who’d decrypt it like one of those dogs that ‘talk’ by pressing buttons.
But no. You know what she did to it. I don’t even need to tell you what she did.
The killer’s behaviour was textbook serial-killer psychology: an insatiable need for control, intellectual superiority and attention in the form of power-play.
He couldn’t simply instruct me; he had the emotional maturity of a petulant fourteen year old running his first Dungeons it was a classic trait of serial killers that I had read about again and again in my research.
I zoomed in and studied the images as much as my phone allowed, but I didn’t dare upload them to any third-party software for further enhancement.
The amount I zoomed and examined was enough anyway.
The more I could see the sickening traces of the TellTale Killer’s handiwork, the more I wanted to sob and crawl up in a ball thinking he had done something like this to Greta.
You know when ladybirds feel threatened, they crawl into a ball, play dead and bleed from their knees to ward off predators. I kind of wished I could do that about now.
The only thing I had managed to pick up on from the photo was that the victim was male, probably early twenties and had a poorly drawn orangutan tattoo on his leg, splotchy and rugged, and an attempt at minimalism.
I did hope that whoever this was had managed to get some kind of discount on that one when he’d seen the finished result.
It was such an awful drawing that any attempt to track down the original artist would be futile; who would admit to producing that visual monstrosity?
I spent the next few hours thinking obsessively about the puzzle the TellTale Killer had sent me. The harder I thought, the stronger my urge grew to tear the shed apart in sheer panic and frustration. I couldn’t let someone else die.
After a while, I somehow finally slipped into a deep, fugue-like sleep, my notebook acting as my pillow, when my phone rang and jolted me awake. I blinked at the caller ID: Chlo. Chlo?
I answered, confused and half expecting her to now officially verbalise the end of our friendship there and then, listing my failings and what an awful friend I’d been. After the double-date debacle, I hadn’t expected to hear from her again, so the call itself made me feel even more disorientated.
‘Hi, Chlo?’
‘Hello Ruthie, I’m back,’ Chlo replied in her usual upbeat tone, no trace of resentment or underlying anger. ‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes. So, get ready to go and we can catch up then, okay?’
I was confused. Completely baffled, actually.
I had no idea what I was meant to be getting ready for – that was until I checked the calendar on my phone and realised we had booked ourselves in to see Aleks months ago.
It was an excruciating sinking feeling I could sense in my stomach at realising this was quite possibly the worst possible timing, maybe only matched by your manager asking you if you were free for a ‘quick chat’.
‘Okay, great. See you soon,’ I chirruped, matching her helium-high pitch. Why on earth hadn’t I cancelled this? I didn’t have time for social calls, I needed to work out what these numbers meant.
Chlo’s breezy ‘everything’s fine’ vibe had scrambled my wits; a sudden bout of flu, food-poisoning from a bucket of mussels, Toast needing a haircut would be a better excuse than agreeing to go and see Aleks on a Thursday morning.
Then again, perhaps agreeing to the plans I made a few months ago wasn’t entirely foolish. I’d stared at those numbers so long they’d begun to waltz across my phone and onto the wall, and I hoped a brief diversion might carve out a tiny sliver of clarity.
CerealKillerCornflakes and I had shared some truly questionable content with one another over the last year or so, bonded by our mutual strange mix of obsession and revulsion when it came to serial killers.
I knew he wouldn’t think I was completely unhinged for messaging him this, and I was grateful for the anonymity we’d maintained over our conversations.
I just desperately hoped he’d be able to make some sense of what the TellTale Killer had sent me.
Did you do this? was the first thing he sent after I forwarded the images with plenty of warnings and asked if he could try and decode what they meant.
No, I replied, adding that the puzzle had come via the forum from an anonymous poster; technically true, if not the whole truth. I suspected CerealKillerCornflakes’ skull might detonate if he learned the sender was the genuine TellTale Killer.
He went silent for a few minutes; I pictured him weighing up how he could grass me up to the police. Then his reply pinged back:
What happens if I work it out?
I’ll tell you that you’re a very good boy.
Woof Woof.
NOO! I replied back.
It pained me to admit it, but perhaps through some subtle nuance in our messages, CerealKillerCornflakes had proved more perceptive than I gave him credit for, maybe correctly assuming that StabithaChristie was a woman.
I could feel the knots in my stomach writhing and tightening as I counted down the minutes until Chlo’s arrival.
My mind had become such a tangled circus of chaos over the past few days that I could no longer separate my mild anxieties from the major, world-ending ones.
When I saw her pull up to the house and get out of the car, I noticed right away that something about her looked different.
Her skin had a remarkable warm glow, though it took me a moment to figure out why.
There were a few spotty patches of bright red on her fair skin, but for the most part she looked like she’d been beautifully sun-kissed.
Clocking me from the open front door of the house, she charged across the pavement and wrapped me in her bronzed arms, squeezing all the oxygen out of my body.
‘Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie, Ruthie, I’m so sorry! I’m so, so sorry,’ she said affectionately and effusively as she held me extraordinarily tight.
‘It’s fine, Chlo, honestly,’ I replied, trying to pry myself free from her iron grip. ‘I understand you were mad at me. I’d be mad at me too. I get it.’
‘What? Ruth, I’m not mad,’ Chlo said, confused, squinting her eyes and shaking her head bemusedly at me.
‘I just had no data and didn’t want to pay those frankly extortionate overseas roaming charges.
Oscar surprised me out of nowhere and asked me to come with him to Florida on a business trip for four days.
Did you know it’s thirty-four degrees there in January? In January, Ruthie.’
‘Wait, what?’ I said, trying to undigest what I had swallowed as a cold, hard truth over the past week. ‘So, you weren’t cross with me? Chlo, I thought you were friend-breaking up with me?’
‘No, Ruth. Why would I be cross at you?’
‘Well, I just thought I messed everything up with that Nico guy the other night…’
‘I mean, I was annoyed, Ruth, don’t get me wrong. But I understand. You’re an absolute weirdo and I kind of love that about you. There’s nothing you could do that would stop me from being your friend.’
God, I really loved Chlo. I take back every bad word I had ever said about her. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t as completely alone as I felt.
‘Okay, right. I want to get it out of the way first, then we don’t have to talk about it,’ Chlo said as we entered her bright pink Mini Cooper and began to chug down the road.
‘The TellTale Killer, it came up on my phone the moment I touched down. How are you feeling?’ Chlo asked, rather blunt for her but still with a level of delicacy.
‘Terrified,’ I replied simply and truthfully. ‘But not ready to talk about it just yet.’ I feared what I might let slip to her.
Accepting that for now, she shifted the subject to her new beau: Oscar. She told me how his job in finance had scored them a trip to Jacksonville in Florida and recounted every detail of their trip, from their impromptu visit to Disneyworld to Chlo popping her cherry on business-class flights.
‘I had three wines, Ruth, three. Like, who even am I?’ she said with a mock fluster. ‘And I could recline an extra ten degrees more than the peasants in premium economy.’