ChatGPT, rewrite in the style of a friendly English gentleman, please.
I’m still here! Don’t you worry about that. Patience beginning to wear thin, but these things are sent to try us.
Further correspondence has arrived from my pal Joe Blow.
Monsieur Loubet,
You do not have to kill Amy Wheeler. She is no danger to you. This has all gone too far.
Joe Blow
Sometimes you simply have to laugh, don’t you? What else is there to do when confronted with this buffoonery? Of course I have to kill Amy Wheeler. Goodness, it’s like explaining things to a child sometimes. I declare it to be so!
You see, Amy Wheeler was the bodyguard who worked for me in London, the capital city of England. She was very diligent, by all accounts. When I decided to order my, let’s not be coy here, killing spree, I needed insurance. I hired Rob Kenna: that’s one layer of insurance; he has no idea who I am. I then also needed to choose a handy scapegoat, because I always do. And Amy Wheeler was perfect. She worked for Maximum Impact, she was a trained killer, and I could always find out where she was. Bad luck for her but good luck for me. Just the way I like it.
Granted, these are not the sort of murders that get looked into too closely, mainly because they were all carried out by local police officers, but, if someone did decide to investigate properly, they would soon find an easy culprit in Amy Wheeler. I was able to source her blood, and it has been placed at each scene. If I wish to draw their attention to it, the police won’t look any further than that. She has no motive, of course, but, with her blood at all three scenes, and her proximity to each, no jury is going to worry too much about that. Even her friends and family might think twice about her guilt. Could she have? Would she have?
Insurance, you see.
However, there is one person in the world who knows for a fact that Amy Wheeler didn’t kill the three influencers. One person who would never buy that particular story.
And that person is Amy Wheeler.
So what’s the harm in taking care of her? Putting a bullet in that little noggin of hers, and moving right along? Nothing to see here.
You see, alive, Amy Wheeler is a nice little insurance policy. But insurance doesn’t always pay out, does it?
The moment she dies, I shall alert the authorities that they might like to cross-check the blood samples at the three scenes, and, what do you know, they can compare it with the recently spilled, still-warm blood of her fresh corpse!
Dead, she is the end of the story altogether. So you see why I am anxious to get that sorted out once and for all?
My understanding is that she is still yet to die, but it is all in hand! Jolly good, I should hope so too. Rob Kenna knows her death is a priority, and knows the penalty if he fails.
And, now that I really think about it, after Amy Wheeler dies, I should probably find out who Joe Blow is, and have them killed too.
These are all loose ends for another day, however, as my mind is already on other things. All ties must be cut with Maximum Impact, that’s very clear, but I do plan to keep using influencers to smuggle my money. There seem to be an awful lot of them about.
Vivid Viral Media, the company Joe Blow and I have been using for this scheme, is fully under my control, so I have decided to keep using it, and find my influencers there.
There’s always another fool around another corner!
51
You’re not really supposed to have your phone on school premises. They tell the kids not to bring them in, so it does look bad when the adults do. Some of the teachers pay no attention to this rule. They glue themselves to their phones, every break time in the staff room, quickly hiding them, and tutting, if a child knocks on the door.
Bonnie would love to be brave enough to do the same, but, as a teaching assistant, she feels she doesn’t have the status to be able to pull it off. But, equally, when you are checking for likes and waiting for news, you do have to look at your phone sometimes.
And this is why Bonnie is in a cubicle in the girls’ toilet outside Unicorn Class when she gets the news she’s been praying for.
The email is not from Felicity, which is what she would have expected, but instead from a “Bookings Committee.” Would Bonnie be free to fly to São Paulo, in Brazil, on Thursday, to film a three-minute promotional video for an organic paint brand? Non-negotiable fee of £20,000. Please confirm.
Bonnie rereads the email. Then re-rereads it. Perhaps she is getting it wrong somehow? Brazil? Twenty thousand pounds?
This can’t be right.
Twenty thousand pounds will change her life.
She checks again. It must say £2,000 surely? Even that is beyond her dreams. But it doesn’t say £2,000, it says £20,000.
As quietly as she is able, Bonnie starts to cry. She’s thinking of the friends who encouraged her. Who told her to dream her dream. How close she came to ignoring them, to thinking that things like this don’t happen to people like her. Even on the morning she visited Felicity Woollaston, she’d nearly turned back, thought better of it, doubted herself.
“Impostor syndrome,” her best friend had called it. The feeling that you’re not good enough, that you don’t know enough, that you’re not worthy enough. But Bonnie had swallowed her fear, and got on the train.
And now here she was. Heading to Brazil, with an unimaginable amount of money coming her way. Mum will look after the kids, she’s sure of that. And as for her job here, well, she loves the children, even likes a few of the teachers, but they will all understand when she hands in her notice. Some of them will even be happy for her.
Organic paint? Bonnie hadn’t realized that paint wasn’t already organic. She should have been aware, she supposes. She will do some reading up. “Hi, I’m Bonnie Gregor, I’m just in Brazil, enjoying the sunshine, I try to get out here two or three times a year if I can, just to top up my tan…”
Note to self: book spray tan.
“…and I’m hopping on Instagram to let you know about an insane new product I think you’re going to love. A lot of people don’t realize that paint isn’t organic, and, I guess, to me, organic is so important. That’s why I was excited to come across…”
Note to self: find out the name of the paint.
“…XXX Paint. No chemicals, no e-numbers, no artificial colorings, just paint as it should be, natural, fragrance-free, whol—”
There is a knock at the door, and a young child says, “I really need the toilet.”
“One minute,” says Bonnie.
