Chapter Three: The Journalist's Eyes
"The city does not sleep, yet it pretends to, so it won't see what happens in its streets."
— From Eliza Morgan's notebook
It was nine o'clock in the evening when Eliza stepped out of the Crown Tribune building.
The fog was thicker than usual, resembling the smoke of an ancient pyre that would never extinguish.
In her left hand, a worn black notebook; in her right, a gray umbrella, its edges glistening with raindrops.
The night was no different from the others,
yet something in the air made her feel that London was hiding a new secret.
In her small office, where the walls were covered with old investigation papers, Eliza sat staring at a carefully cut newspaper clipping from the literature section.
The headline was simple:
"True flowers are not sold, they are plucked from the heart of darkness."
The author's name was written clearly beneath it: Edgar Wilmore.
To most readers, the sentence seemed ordinary, but to her, it was a note of confession.
She remembered the girl found dead near the market, a wilted flower on her chest, a smile traced with a thread of blood.
Flowers… darkness… art…
All words used in Edgar's article.
Could the killer be a famous writer?
Eliza laughed at the thought at first—but could not dismiss it.
She grabbed her pen and began writing in her notebook:
"The writer sees crime as art,
and art is his justification.
He does not kill for pleasure, but for inspiration."
Days passed, and Eliza began observing Edgar from a distance.
She attended all his lectures at the Writers' Club, sitting in the back rows, noting every word.
His voice was calm, his features composed, yet his eyes told another story…
A chilling coldness, as if a bloody past dripped behind them.
One night, after a seminar on "Madness and Creativity," she approached him for the first time.
She spoke with confidence:
"Your recent essays on pain are very striking, Professor Wilmore. Are they inspired by personal experience?"
He smiled quietly and replied:
"Isn't all art a form of suffering?"
"Perhaps," she said with a half-smile, "but some suffering is written with ink… and some with blood."
He looked at her long, as if trying to read her intentions.
Then he said:
"The difference… is that blood needs no grammar correction."
Her smile froze. That single sentence was enough to awaken the sleepless journalist inside her.
That night, Eliza returned to her small home on Wilburn Street, opened her notebook again, and wrote:
"Edgar Wilmore… the man who makes words bleed."
The more she read his stories, the more convinced she became that he was hiding something.
In his latest novel, he described a scene of a girl being killed in the same alley as the most recent murder, with identical details.
Yet the novel had been published a week before the incident.
She began contacting her sources: the police, detectives, even the coroner.
Everyone mocked her theory.
"Just a writer chasing journalistic thrills," one said.
But Eliza did not care.
She knew that behind London's fog,
there was a killer who wrote his poems on the bodies of his victims.
The next morning, a small brown envelope arrived at her desk, with no return address.
It seemed ordinary, but when she opened it, she found a white sheet of paper written in beautiful handwriting:
"To Mrs. Morgan,
I read your article about the city's silence.
You have eyes that see what is unspoken,
but beware, for staring too long into the darkness makes the darkness stare back at you."
It was unsigned. Only at the bottom of the page was a small rose drawn—its color a vivid red, as if dipped in living blood.
At that moment, Eliza realized something terrifying:
The killer knew her…
and was watching her.
Yet instead of fear, she lifted her head with a small smile.
She told herself:
"Very well, Edgar… let's play your game, but this time, I will write the ending."