Career of Evil

19 Workshop of the Telescopes

He had known the second he laid eyes on The Secretary that morning that she was out of kilter, off-balance. Look at her, sitting in the window of the Garrick, the large students’ restaurant serving the LSE. She was plain today. Puffy, red-eyed, pale. He could probably take the seat next to her and the stupid bitch wouldn’t notice. Concentrating on the tart with the silver hair, who was working on a laptop a few tables away, she had no attention to spare for men. Suited him. She’d be noticing him before long. He’d be her last sight on earth.

He didn’t need to look like Pretty Boy today; he never approached them sexually if they were upset. That was when he became the friend in need, the avuncular stranger. Not all men are like that, darling. You deserve better. Let me walk you home. Come on, I’ll give you a lift. You could do almost anything with them if you made them forget you had a dick.

He entered the crowded restaurant, skulking around the counter, buying a coffee and finding himself a corner where he could watch her from behind.

Her engagement ring was missing. That was interesting. It shone a new light on the holdall she had been alternately carrying over her shoulder and hiding under tables. Was she planning to sleep somewhere other than the flat in Ealing? Might she be heading down a deserted street for once, a shortcut with poor lighting, a lonely underpass?

The very first time he’d killed had been like that: a simple question of seizing the moment. He remembered it in snapshots, like a slideshow, because it had been thrilling and new. That was before he had honed it to an art, before he had started playing it like the game it was.

She’d been plump and dark. Her mate had just left, got into a punter’s car and disappeared. The bloke in the car had not known that he was choosing which of them would survive the night.

He, meanwhile, had been driving up and down the street with his knife in his pocket. When he had been sure that she was alone, completely alone, he had drawn up and leaned across the passenger seat to talk to her through the window. His mouth had been dry as he asked for it. She had agreed a price and got in the car. They had driven down a nearby dead end where neither streetlights nor passersby would trouble them.

He got what he’d asked for, then, as she was straightening up, before he had even zipped up his flies, he had punched her, knocking her back into the car door, the back of her head banging off the window. Before she could make a sound he’d pulled out the knife.

The meaty thump of the blade in her flesh — the heat of her blood gushing over his hands — she did not even scream but gasped, moaned, sinking down in the seat as he pounded the blade into her again and again. He had torn the gold pendant from around her neck. He had not thought, then, about taking the ultimate trophy: a bit of her, but instead wiped his hands on her dress while she sat slumped beside him, twitching in her death throes. He had reversed out of the alleyway, trembling with fear and elation, and driven out of town with the body beside him, keeping carefully to the speed limit, looking in his rearview mirror every few seconds. There was a place he had checked out just a few days previously, a stretch of deserted countryside and an overgrown ditch. She had made a heavy, wet thump when he rolled her into it.

He had her pendant still, along with a few other souvenirs. They were his treasure. What, he wondered, would he take from The Secretary?

A Chinese boy near him was reading something on a tablet. Behavioral Economics. Dumb psychological crap. He had seen a psychologist once, been forced to.

“Tell me about your mother.”

The little bald man had literally said it, the joke line, the cliché. They were supposed to be smart, psychologists. He’d played along for the fun of it, telling the idiot about his mother: that she was a cold, mean, screwed-up bitch. His birth had been an inconvenience, an embarrassment to her, and she wouldn’t have cared if he’d lived or died.

“And your father?”

“I haven’t got a father,” he’d said.

“You mean you never see him?”

Silence.

“You don’t know who he is?”

Silence.

“Or you simply don’t like him?”

He said nothing. He was tired of playing along. People were brain dead if they fell for this kind of crap, but he had long since realized that other people were brain dead.

In any case, he’d told the truth: he had no father. The man who had filled that role, if you wanted to call it that — the one who had knocked him around day in, day out (“a hard man, but a fair man”) — had not fathered him. Violence and rejection, that was what family meant to him. At the same time, home was where he had learned to survive, to box clever. He had always known that he was superior, even when he’d been cowering under the kitchen table as a child. Yes, even then he’d known that he was made of better stuff than the bastard coming at him with his big fist and his clenched face...

The Secretary stood up, imitating the tart with the silver hair, who was just leaving with her laptop in a case. He downed his coffee in one and followed.

She was so easy today, so easy! She’d lost all her wariness; she barely had attention to spare for the platinum whore. He boarded the same Tube train as the pair of them, keeping his back to The Secretary but watching her reflection from between the reaching arms of a bunch of Kiwi tourists. He found it easy to slip into the crowd behind her when she left the train.

The three of them moved in procession, the silver-haired tart, The Secretary and him, up the stairs, onto the pavement, along the road to Spearmint Rhino... he was already late home, but he could not resist this. She had not stayed out after dark before and the holdall and the lack of engagement ring all added up to an irresistible opportunity. He would simply have to make up some story for It.

The silver-haired tart disappeared into the club. The Secretary slowed down and stood irresolute on the pavement. He slid out his mobile and pulled back into a shadowy doorway, watching her.