Need You Dead

99 Saturday 30 April

I can’t see a damned thing through the windscreen. It’s all blurry, like it’s covered in rainwater, like that video of the guy walking down the street and in and out of Lorna Belling’s apartment building.

I can’t see anything and it’s only raining very lightly. My eyes won’t focus. Nothing will focus. This is the problem with Natural Selection or whatever you want to call it. We’ve evolved all wrong, we’ve not kept pace biologically with the way we’ve evolved sociologically. Go back to our hunter-gatherer days, if you suddenly found yourself face-to-face with a sabre-toothed tiger, your adrenaline would kick in, pumping into your veins to enable you to run like the wind. But if you don’t burn that stuff off by running, it makes you all jittery, muzzes your brain, stops your eyes from focusing properly.

We have different kinds of terror now, like being confronted by the VAT inspector, where the response we need is to remain calm, level-headed, highly focused. But still the damned adrenaline kicks in — or in my case, right now, kicks off.

It didn’t let me focus.

I got too anxious and blew it.

I should have waited for that damned detective from the Met, the Super Recognizer, to have got onto the M23 motorway, where he’d have been driving eighty, maybe ninety miles per hour, as he was in a hurry. And it would have been fully dark, half an hour, on from now. I was impatient, picked him off in a line of traffic, he was only doing fifty-five, maybe sixty. Did the classic car-chase manoeuvre, tapping him with the front of my car, the heavy part where the engine is, at the lightest point of his, behind the rear wheels. Knocked him sideways, then he rolled, I saw it in my mirror. Nice barrel rolls. But not enough. He might survive.

If I’d hit him at higher speed on the motorway and he’d flipped and barrel-rolled at eighty, that would pretty likely have been goodnight.

Now I don’t know where the hell I am. Where to go? He knows. Which means Roy Grace is going to know — if Weatherley lives.

I’m just not thinking straight.

I haven’t thought straight since April 20th, since —

Since —

Since Lorna Belling turned out her lights.

Maybe I turned them out.

Or maybe I didn’t.

The Super Recognizer knows who turned them out. He saw. He recognized.

This must be what hell feels like.

When everyone you know and love and respect is about to find out you’ve done a terrible thing — the worst thing a human being can do — and you’re going to lose everything.

This car needs fuel, I’m going to have to stop soon at a petrol station and be careful where I position it so no one spots the damage. I’ll have to get out, fill up, then go inside and pay. The guy or the woman I hand the money to will probably smile, and ask if I want a receipt. He — or maybe she — won’t know they’ve just served a murderer — who, if DS Weatherley dies, will be defined as a multiple killer — until they read the papers or watch the news tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. Then they’ll be shocked, and one day they’ll tell their grandchildren. ‘You’ll never guess what grandpa/grandma did! I once served a murderer in a petrol station!’

Oh Jesus.

There are blue flashing lights in my mirror.