Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
When they made the Panorama documentary on the TellTale Killer, Aleks warned Chlo and me not to talk to any of the interviewers. He said he didn’t want Greta’s story twisted and mangled by some twenty-year-old in an editing suite.
When it finally came out, we all watched it privately – trepidatiously, nervously, bracing for the impact – only to find it was less an exposé on the victims and more a glossy puff piece for the Telltale Killer.
Now I couldn’t help but wonder if there’d be a part two, and if so, whether this would all circle back to me.
What would a viewer think at this point in the story, me finally breaking down to a trusted adult?
Would they see it as my undoing? The step too far?
Turns out, the daughter of the British Ambassador to the Maldives is actually completely unhinged.
I dreaded to think if this would absolutely obliterate Mum’s diplomatic career.
Detective Carlota had told me that, as long as she knew I hadn’t actually killed someone, it was better not to know whose heart it was; ignorance, she said, gave her the smallest sliver of deniability for whatever else I might eventually confess to.
I agreed. Because if she knew it was Greta’s heart, even the faintest scrap of sympathy she still had for me would have swiftly evaporated.
Detective Carlota and I stayed on the lounge sofa for the best part of an hour, figuring out our next move, and theorising on the killer’s.
‘I can’t believe he kills at random,’ she said. ‘There must be some connective tissue between the victims.’
I entertained the thought, just for a moment, that it would be crazy if Detective Carlota was actually CerealKillerCornflakes. Though the fact she had never told me ‘I told you so’ made me think she didn’t have the arrogance of my e-friend.
‘I’ve gone over the victim list again and again, there’s nothing that links them to Greta. Their jobs differ; they’re scattered across several West London boroughs; but other than that connection, it’s as though he chooses them completely randomly,’ I insisted.
‘I don’t buy it,’ Carlota murmured. ‘Even the two poor souls he’s killed now must connect to the others somehow.’
I inched forward a little on my chair, ready to posit my theory. ‘Have you thought about how gimmicky it’s all been, since the start?’
I saw Detective Carlota staring, frankly astonished at herself that she’d gone this long without noticing I was a complete and utter lunatic.
‘Why would a serial killer have their own personal branding right from the get-go?’ I explained like I was Uncle Phil telling me about yet another death ritual.
‘The hearts, the cryptography, the Poe. Sure, some serial killers have developed a “thing”, but that usually came from the press. The TellTale Killer’s whole persona seemed ready-made from victim one.
Don’t you think that’s weird, how meretricious it is? ’
Detective Carlota gave me a look that said she almost understood what I was saying but also that she didn’t think any of it had the slightest shred of merit.
Still, I couldn’t shake the thought. There was something…
tacky about the TellTale Killer, something that was hard to completely articulate, almost as if he was inauthentic as a serial killer despite still ticking all the requirements.
We turned to the conundrum of delivering the heart. In the end, I persuaded Carlota that I should make the drop: I knew the newspaper office, its routines and its staff.
‘But let’s think like the Telltale Killer,’ she said, beginning to pace determinedly around the lounge.
I knew not even Bill would be brave enough to warn her about knocking over any of his well-presented décor.
‘He sees you’ve murdered at least two people and is pretty sure that he’s the inspiration behind it.
Now if I’m a serial killer, that’s exactly the kind of attention I crave. I want to be admired.’
‘Agreed,’ I replied, realising we’d never meaningfully discussed our shared interest; perhaps she had a good true crime podcast or book recommendation. I wonder if she’d be my next only friend on Goodreads?
‘We need to provoke him and force a mistake. Stroke his ego and he’ll just preen; but if we wound it, he might lash out. He makes a mistake, we get one step further to catching him. We need him to be sloppy,’ Detective Carlota reasoned aloud.
‘So how do we get him to make a mistake? Get him so angry, he drink-drives and we catch him with a body in his car?’ It wasn’t a ridiculous idea; believe it or not, it was a couple of cold ones that led to Randy Kraft AKA the Scorecard Killer finally being caught by the police after all.
‘Jago Jones will publish whatever we send the moment it lands on his desk,’ Carlota explained.
‘The killer is probably thinking that this will only embolden the myth he’s created, he needs the press and people like Jago to enhance the legend he wants.
So, let’s mock the killer, make him feel tiny, make him angry. ’
We agreed to brainstorm what the message should say while I fetched my pen and paper from the shed.
‘What about, “The student has become the master”?’ Detective Carlota suggested, both hands motioning as if she was some pretentious art fanatic crooning over a life painting trying to find some meaning in the strokes and squiggles.
You know, she really wasn’t good at this part.
‘He wouldn’t say that,’ I dismissed the idea, maybe a little too honestly. I grabbed a piece of paper and started to scribble some ideas, trying to get my brain back into serial killer mode. ‘How about something like…’
You were only a cold whisper
in the empty dark
that thought itself a mighty thunder.
And where your breath
stirred a faint shadow,
mine commands them.
Yet the final verse
is mine to write
And it shall be
terrible in its beauty
Translation: you ain’t shit.
I still didn’t love how easy it was for me to write as the Telltale Killer.
Maybe it’s always easy to write like Poe when you’ve read too much of him, though, or to think like a nihilistic crazy when, deep down, you feel like you might be one too.
But for now, I could be grateful for this very niche skill I possessed.
We both liked the message. We knew it would get under his skin, maybe even make him reckless – though, admittedly, we understood the danger: escalation could mean more victims.
‘We just have to catch him first. That’s the priority,’ Carlota said, trying to bury the concern she clearly felt. ‘If we wait, even more people are going to die. This is still our best option.’
I really wanted to believe her, but at this point I honestly wasn’t sure.
It’s funny how we attach feelings to places.
The Maldives will always mean my parents abandoning me for their cushy diplomacy gig.
Birmingham makes me nostalgic for my uni days.
And Hammersmith? That’s just memories of a dead best friend, broken dreams, stale coffee, and a printer that always seemed to hate me specifically.
I had tried to avoid Hammersmith as much as I could over the past couple of years, but going to my old workplace to deliver a heart to Jago Jones felt downright surreal.
I mean, the guy barely spoke two words to Tasha and me in the whole time I had worked there which weren’t either patronising or, failing that, condescending.
It was then I started to wonder, is there a word for nostalgia, but for when you actually detest the memories being stirred up? Is that just trauma?
I remembered from my time at the paper that deliveries normally arrived at around 6 a.m., so I figured that was the best time to try and deposit the package, early on Friday morning.
I was happy to discover that the broken button at the pedestrian crossing had finally been fixed, and that the one independent bakery at Hammersmith Station was somehow still in business.
Keeping my head down beneath the shadow of my baseball cap, I moved quickly through the streets as I approached the offices, trying to look inconspicuous and avoiding the multiple cameras glaring down from above.
Just as the delivery truck rumbled towards the back entrance of the building, I slipped across the road and watched as they backed a huge lorry into the bay also used to ship out the morning papers, a space they obviously used less and less now.
Print media is dying, kids, support your bookshops.
It occurred to me that I was now imitating the TellTale Killer’s methods more than ever.
Presumably this was how he had deposited the hearts: dressed as unassumingly as possible, moving at unsociable hours, leaving them in random corners of London to avoid detection.
That was the part I still hadn’t cracked: how on earth had he managed it?
Everywhere I looked, a camera seemed to be watching me. How had he managed to blend in?
From a distance I spotted the same bloke in the loading bay, the one I used to chat to every morning when I started at the paper as an intern.
My first job had been to sort all the various deliveries from the lorry and ensure they reached their intended destinations on various people’s desks.
I couldn’t remember the delivery chap’s name, but he always looked perpetually on the verge of a heart attack, his face permanently bright red and flushed, as if he were constantly struggling for breath and was one rogue beat away from cardiac arrest. I thought he’d be dead by now, honestly; good for him.