The Killer Next Door

Chapter Forty-One

His love is forged in tears. They spring from his eyes as they struggle for that one final breath, pour down his cheeks while his hands are still about their necks. As he watches the light die out, the surprise, the fear, the pain melt away into nothingness, he feels his chest tighten as though his heart will break. For a moment, as the tears flood down, he will find it hard to swallow. He will take his hands from them and press them to his face, bend double and let the sorrow out.

‘I’m sorry,’ he tells her. ‘I’m sorry, oh, I’m so sorry.’

I’m out of control, he thinks. I no longer have any control over it – over this – this love. It’s got too much for me, now. The loneliness is too extreme. I thought my ladies would heal me. That it would stop this longing, this ache, this empty hole in me if they could never leave.

But it’s all backwards, this love of his. It starts the right way, every time. The way it starts for everyone. A chance meeting, a flash of attraction. The thinking about her when she’s not there, the slow build of intrigue, the fire of passion. But after that it’s all wrong. After the passion comes the mourning, and then the contentment, the relationship, the moments of easy intimacy. And then, creeping over him, day by day, the indifference. He feels nothing for Marianne now. He looks at her and he can barely remember the devotion that filled him just a few weeks ago. She’s just another withered, wizened disappointment, and him with the gnawing emptiness that grows and grows each day.

He looks at the God Girl and feels another rush of sorrow. My God, he thinks, I never even found out what your name was. I’m out of control. I am. If I’m going to do this, if I’m going to make these… sacrifices for love, the very least I owe them, the very least I owe myself, is the tenderness of anticipation. I’ve never been one of those people, going out to discotheques in search of thrills, collecting and throwing women away as though they were last night’s garbage. When I mate, I want it to be for life. I always have. And now look.

She struggled, far more than Marianne or Nikki did. Not a surprise, really, for his girls before have known him. Have at least known him well enough to have let their guard down, sit down in a chair, be relaxed and unready. The God Girl was torn between the need to evangelise and the awareness that she had come to a flat alone with a stranger. She didn’t sit, didn’t turn her back on him, but stood against the draining board, her Bible in her hand, and talked about Jesus until he wanted to howl at the moon. In the end he had to ask her to draw a map of where her church was, just to get her to take his eye off him for a moment and turn her back. And when he pounced, she was bending over the table, just feet between her and the door, and she fought and fought. Got off a scream, as well. First time anyone’s managed that.

Like riding a bucking bronco, he thinks, remembering her strength. Surprisingly strong, for one so slight. With a plastic bag over her head and both his hands clamped tight to hold it shut, she threw him from side to side as though she were made of springs.

Never gentle, he thinks. It’s never gentle. I wish it were. I wish there were some way to help them quietly off to sleep. That their transformation was a moment of quiet blue peace.

Her mouth is open. Thomas wipes his eyes and peels the bag away, gazes into the bloodshot eyes. Hazel, he thinks. That’s the colour they should have been, not this gooseberry green that goes so badly with the red of petechial haemorrhaging. Her blue veins, already so close to the surface, have bulged upwards, arterial roadmaps scrawled across her lovely features. Her nose, already a little overlarge for his particular taste, is, he realises, broken.

She’s spoiled. Quite spoiled. All that suffering, all that sadness, and he’s come out with nothing, just a useless ugly thing, a bonfire Guy, no good to any man.

He drops her to the floor and sits down heavily in his chair, next to her powder-blue leatherette handbag with its spill of spectacles and prayer pamphlets. Puts his face in his hands and begins to sob.