Chapter 24 #3
She’d be proud of Chlo for keeping such a close eye on her dad. He still had his son, but he’d lost his wife and then his daughter, no one deserved to be dealt cards that cruel. I doubted Greta would be as proud of me.
I smiled faintly when I saw her rather vast array of stuffed toys, looking like they had been painstakingly kept clean and dustless.
I remembered playing with them when we were at primary school, making up long, melodramatic soap opera storylines where Arthur the Pig cheated on Edmund the Orangutan in a scandalous affair with Millicent the Ladybird who was in a poly relationship, of course, with a brick we found in the garden.
Most kids could be possessive about their toys, but I remember Greta always had no real problem with sharing them with me.
Even as we grew up, she was never possessive of anything, she had always just treated me as one of the family.
I remembered how we’d spoken about reincarnation that night at Sabroso, how she’d mentioned ladybirds; what were they called in Dutch again? ‘The Lord’s most beautiful creature’, or something like that?
I remembered, too, helping Ben with some of the general maintenance of the garden around the shed, when he told me that ladybirds really punch above their weight in the ecosystem.
They don’t live long comparatively, but they do a lot of good for the environment as a form of natural pest control in a short amount of time.
I looked over the other belongings in Greta’s room. I glanced at the globe where we had dreamt about travelling the world together, the posters of One Direction we had fawned over, but nevertheless found myself drawn to her bookcase. And there he was, sitting on the top row: Obama.
I picked up her copy of A Promised Land and smirked to myself, remembering all the times I’d teased her about her crazed obsession for the slightly self-indulgent autobiography.
I took the hardback from its place on the shelf and smoothed my hand over it.
I’d never fully understood the love for Obama, if I’m honest, but for whatever reason, he had always been one of Greta’s favourites.
Maybe she crushed on him but just couldn’t ever admit it to me.
I tucked it under my arm, wondering if I could ask Aleks if I could take it home.
It was then that my eyes began to drift to, of all things in Greta’s room, the orangutan, and I couldn’t help but think of that terrible tattoo from the photos that were still traumatically seared into the hardwire of my brain.
There’s an old Poe story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ – not one of his best, in my opinion – where the witty detective, C.
Auguste Dupin, investigates a grisly double homicide in Paris, only to discover that the murderer – of all things – is an escaped orangutan.
A ridiculously stupid plot device for a crime story, but the critics and scholars seemed to lap that up like it was genius.
What they were smoking almost two hundred years ago I have no idea.
Could you imagine if it turned out the TellTale Killer was actually a baboon? Give me a break.
Then it all began to click: perhaps the ‘tattoo’ wasn’t permanent at all but a slapdash sketch, an ink-marker clue the killer had left, his very own Banksy.
It would explain the wonky and horrendous artistry of the drawing.
Of course, he wouldn’t just fling random numbers my way; there’d be some kind of logic, some twisted clue to make it look like a fair game.
The numbers couldn’t be page references, the story was too short, but word counts? That might just be it.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and began typing a message to CerealKillerCornflakes.
It’s an alphanumeric cipher, I’m sure of it. Can you cross-reference it with the word placement in The Murders in the Rue Morgue?
He replied a few moments later: One step ahead of you. I was literally going through the text now.
Of course he wasn’t. He’d probably been just as stumped as I was, at least until I’d spotted Greta’s stuffed toy, but I just know he loved to tell me ‘I told you so’.
I bet you were, I typed back. He didn’t respond, which told me everything. He was far too excited.
A few moments later, his next message came through:
Word 12: I
Word 31: to
Word 112: me
Each number matched its position in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Strung together, the decrypted message read:
I want you to kill for me.
Look, I know, I know, all of this, this whole ridiculous, shambolic mess, was my fault. I can admit that. But still, somehow, I felt responsible for solving it. For bringing the TellTale Killer to justice, as if exposing a serial murderer was my one sole purpose.
I had spent a good ten minutes sitting on the foot of Aleks’s staircase, trying to process the killer’s message and figure out what on earth to do next, ignoring the incessant pinging from my phone as CerealKillerCornflakes continued to message me with a subsequent barrage of questions.
So, the TellTale Killer wanted me to kill for him. How the hell was I supposed to do that? But at the same time, I couldn’t exactly ghost him, I couldn’t let him kill someone else, the ball was very much in my court. While he was waiting on me, maybe no one would need to die.
In his mind, I was probably his eager little acolyte, chomping at the bit to do his bidding. He was trying to enact some control. But in reality, I was there thinking how on earth was I going to fool him into thinking I was a budding serial killer, all the while evading life imprisonment?
Ultimately, I only needed him to believe I had killed for him.
And if I did that, then I could get close enough to catch him.
But how the hell was I even going to manage it?
Could I steal another heart from the morgue at Camborne and Sons?
No, that was completely impossible now. The bodies were no longer there for one, and even if they were, I’m sure Uncle Phil had fitted at least a dozen more security cameras around the whole vicinity over the past few days.
Could I maybe fake a heart of some kind?
I knew I wouldn’t be able to craft something that would reassemble an actual organ.
Pig hearts were supposed to be similar to human ones, could I maybe do something with that?
No, even if I pulled that off, if the police got involved, they would realise it wasn’t human pretty quickly and I’d lose the TellTale Killer forever.
It wouldn’t take long to be outed as a fraud.
No. This was my chance to finally get him. I decided I would commit now and figure out the how later. The prize hovered tantalisingly close, just beyond reach, but if I could win his trust, I’d edge one step nearer to bringing him down.
I cudgelled every thought in my brain to try and think of some kind of solution to my problem.
Grave robbing? Not likely. Even if I had the stomach for it, any heart I dug up would be halfway to mulch, and cemeteries are far too exposed for a covert midnight dig.
Perhaps I could lurk around a hospital morgue, pose as an organ-donation courier and swipe a spare one while the staff were distracted.
That sounded even more far-fetched. The whole thing was crazy; spare human hearts are not exactly lying around waiting to be borrowed.
And then, it hit me.
There was, in fact, a spare human heart lying about twenty-five feet away from me. A human heart I could get hold of without the need to actually kill anyone.
And look, I know this is pretty horrendous, on top of a succession of horrendous things I had already done.
I’m not trying to excuse myself morally at all.
But if I could just do this final act, would it make everything I’d done so far worthwhile?
For the past week and a half, I’d been pretending to be a serial killer for the police and the media.
Now I just had to pretend to be a serial killer to an actual serial killer. How hard could that be?
And in a weird, strange, hereafter kind of way, I sort of felt that Greta would want me to, she did love to share after all.