Career of Evil

29 I Just Like to Be Bad

Sometimes he found it hard to be with the people who thought themselves his friends: the men with whom he associated when he needed money. Theft was their main occupation, tomming of a Saturday night their recreation; he was popular among them, a mate, so they thought, a fellow, an equal. An equal!

The day the police had found her, all he had wanted was to be alone to savor the coverage. The stories in the paper made good reading. He felt proud: this was the first time he’d been able to kill in private, to take his time, to organize things as he’d wanted. He intended to do the same with The Secretary; to have time to enjoy her alive before he killed her.

His one frustration was there was no mention of the letters that were supposed to point the police to Strike, to make them interrogate and badger the fucker, drag his name through the mud in the papers, make the dumb public think he’d had something to do with it.

However, there were columns and columns of coverage, photographs of the flat where he’d done her, interviews with the pretty-boy police officer. He saved the stories: they were souvenirs, just like the bits of her he had taken for his private collection.

Of course, his pride and enjoyment had to be hidden from It, because It required very careful handling at the moment. It wasn’t happy, not happy at all. Life wasn’t panning out the way It had expected and he had to pretend to give a flying fuck, to be concerned, be a nice guy, because It was useful to him: It brought in money and It might have to give him alibis. You never knew whether they might be needed. He’d had a close call once before.

That had been the second time he had killed, in Milton Keynes. You didn’t shit on your own doorstep: that had always been one of his guiding principles. He had never been to Milton Keynes before or since and had no connection with the place. He had stolen a car, away from the boys, a solo job. He had had fake plates ready for a while. Then he had simply driven, wondering whether he would get lucky. There had been a couple of failed attempts since his first murder: trying to chat up girls in pubs, in clubs, trying to isolate them, was not working as well as it had in the past. He didn’t look as good as he once had, he knew that, but he didn’t want to establish a pattern of doing prostitutes. The police started to put two and two together if you went for the same type every time. Once he had managed to track a tipsy girl down an alleyway, but before he’d even drawn his knife out a pack of giggling kids had burst into view and he had taken off. After that he had given up on trying to pick up a girl in the usual way. It would have to be force.

He had driven for hours in increasing frustration; not a whiff of a victim in Milton Keynes. At ten to midnight he was on the verge of caving and sniffing out a hooker when he’d spotted her. She was arguing with her boyfriend on a roundabout in the middle of the road, a short-haired brunette in jeans. As he passed he kept an eye on the couple in his rearview mirror. He watched her storm away, as good as intoxicated by her own anger and tears. The infuriated man she had left behind shouted after her, then, with a gesture of disgust, stumbled off in the opposite direction.

He did a U-turn and drove back up the road towards her. She was sobbing as she walked, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

He had wound down the window.

“You all right, love?”

“Piss off!”

She sealed her fate by plunging angrily into bushes beside the road to get away from his crawling car. Another hundred yards would have taken her to a well-lit stretch of road.

All he had to do was turn off the road and park. He pulled on the balaclava before getting out of the car, the knife ready in his hand, and walked calmly back to the place where she had disappeared. He could hear her trying to fight her way back out of the dense patch of trees and shrubs, placed there by town planners to soften the contours of the wide gray dual carriageway. There was no streetlamp here. He was invisible to passing drivers as he skirted the dark foliage. As she beat her way back onto the pavement, he was standing ready to force her back in at knifepoint.

He had spent an hour in the bushes before leaving the body. He ripped her earrings from her lobes and then wielded his knife with abandon, hacking off bits of her. A gap in the traffic and he scurried, panting, back to the stolen car in the darkness, balaclava still in place.

He drove away, every particle of him elated and sated, his pockets seeping. Only then did the mist lift.

Last time, he had used a car from work, which he had subsequently cleaned thoroughly in full view of his workmates. He doubted anyone would be able to get the blood out of these cloth seats and his DNA would be on everything. What was he going to do? That was the closest he had ever come to panicking.

He drove miles north before abandoning the car in a lonely field far from the main road, not overlooked by any buildings. Here, shivering in the cold, he took off the fake plates, soaked one of his socks in the petrol tank, then chucked it into the bloody front seat and lit it. It took a long time for the car to properly catch; he had to reapproach it several times to help it along until finally, at three in the morning while he watched, shivering, from the cover of trees, it exploded. Then he ran.

It was winter, which meant at least that the balaclava did not look out of place. He buried the fake plates in a wood and hurried on, head bowed, hands in his pockets on his treasured souvenirs. He had considered burying them too, but he could not bring himself to do it. He had covered the bloodstains on his trousers with mud, kept his balaclava on at the station, acting drunk in a corner of the train carriage to keep people away from him, muttering to himself, projecting that aura of menace and madness that acted like a cordon when he wished to be left alone.

By the time he reached home they had found her body. He watched it on the TV that night, eating off a tray in his lap. They found the burnt-out car, but not the plates and — this really was proof of his own inimitable luck, the strange protective blessing the cosmos gave him — the boyfriend with whom she had argued was arrested, charged and, though the evidence against him was transparently weak, convicted! The thought of that dickhead serving his time still made him laugh sometimes...

Nevertheless, those long hours of driving through the darkness when he had known an encounter with the police might be fatal, when he had feared a request to turn out his pockets or a shrewd-eyed passenger noticing dried blood on him had taught him a powerful lesson. Plan every detail. Leave nothing to chance.

That was why he needed to nip out for some Vicks VapoRub. The number-one priority right now was to make sure that It’s stupid new scheme did not interfere with his own.