You Are Dead

37

Saturday 13 December

He called it hunting.

The word had a nice ring to it.

The entire city was his hunting ground. In the summer months, dressed in a blazer and wearing his straw hat at a jaunty angle, he would regularly stroll along under the arches, and then along the pier. Next he would ride on the Volks Railway, where in the cramped intimacy of its hard seats he liked to talk to strangers, telling them this was the world’s oldest still-running electric train, and boring them with facts about it.

All the time as he hunted, walking along or sitting among the grockles, he was taking surreptitious photographs of those he considered had potential to be a project.

Photography had become so much easier these days, thanks to his iPhone camera. His potential projects would just see a man making a phone call. They would never know that they would become part of his Hall of Fame. He liked to spend time studying them all. And planning. Pages and pages of notes filling the filing cabinets in his VSP — his Very Secret Place — where he liked to go sometimes to do his planning, because he could think clearly there, away from the distraction of his current projects, and he enjoyed the fact that it was in such a very visible location.

VSP! He liked having a VSP!

The potentials he most studied were those who radiated vulnerability. Everyone was vulnerable at some point in their lives — but some were always vulnerable. These were the people who showed the biggest fear. And he wanted them to be afraid of him. Very seriously afraid. Nothing excited him more than seeing fear. Hearing fear. Touching fear. Feeling fear. Smelling fear. Tasting fear.

He liked to keep his potential projects under observation for long periods of time. Months, often. He liked to follow them. Of course, a lot merely went to the station to return to wherever they had come from. Some went to their cars. Those he would lose. But some walked home or took buses. They made his life much easier.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights were his favourite times. West Street in Brighton in particular, where it was so easy to be invisible. This gaudy strip of road, which he called ‘Chav Central’, ran from Brighton’s Clock Tower down to the seafront. It was lined with amusement arcades and clubs, and populated with drunken, scantily clad youngsters, and boisterous hen and stag parties often in ridiculous costumes, all under the watchful eye of a massive police presence. In his view it was a sewer of humanity. A cesspit.

He was always ready to rid it of one of its occupants.

Like the one he saw now, wobbling along on her bike, swinging out, with no lights on, into the sparse King’s Road traffic.

It was just gone 12.50 a.m.

Her name was Ashleigh Stanford. She was twenty-one years old. He had been keeping an eye on her for six months now. She worked Friday and Saturday nights behind the bar in a pub in the Lanes. When she had finished, she cycled back home to the flat she shared with her boyfriend in a quiet street in Hove, always looking a little bit drunk.

She was studying fashion design at Brighton University.

Ashleigh Stanford was, it turned out from his research, a distant but direct descendant of the dynastic landowning family, whose ancestors dated back to the seventeenth century and had at one time owned huge tracts of land around what was then called Brighthelmstone. He liked her historic connection to his city.

But there was something that he liked much more about her. Oh yes.

Ashleigh Stanford was perfect!

He started the engine, glanced in his mirrors, and drove the Streamline taxi liveried Skoda estate he had chosen tonight away from the meter bay, very slowly, his lights on dipped beam. He smiled to himself at his cunning. It was important to vary his vehicles. Taxis never looked out of place, anywhere, and this model was one of the most commonly used in Brighton. He’d bought the vehicle secondhand from a rural dealer in Yorkshire, and had a body shop local to them paint it with the distinctive turquoise bonnet. The taxi insignia decals he’d had made to order from a firm on the internet, and the roof light had been easy to come by.

Ashleigh, with a small rucksack on her back, was pedalling hard, wobbling and swerving around, heading west. Heading home? He’d find out soon enough!

There was something very symmetrical about the number three. Two’s company, three’s a crowd!

Felix would be fine with that. Harrison, as ever, would not be so sure. And bloody pedantic Marcus, he would really be against what he was about to do. And that proved he was right. Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

As his old science teacher at school liked to say, QED.

Quod erat demonstrandum!

He tailed Ashleigh at such a long distance that his dipped headlamps did not even register on her rear reflector. She pedalled on past the Peace Statue, and swung onto the cycle path alongside the Hove Lawns. He checked his mirrors and there was nothing behind him. Just himself and his pretty, young project. Heading home to her boyfriend.

Perfect!

She came off the cycle path and onto the road, to avoid a detour, and went over a red light at the junction with Grand Avenue, below the stern gaze of the statue of Queen Victoria. Then a few minutes later she shot the lights at the junction with Hove Street.

My, you’re a reckless one! You need to be taught a lesson in road safety. You’re not even wearing a helmet!

He was feeling impatient, shaking with excitement! He’d like to have taken her out now, but he was aware that there were cameras along the road here. Then suddenly, without indicating, she swung into the centre of the road and turned right past a block of flats on the corner, into Carlisle Road.

Oh yes, baby, perfect, thank you!

Turning off his lights, he turned right, also, and accelerated. Then as he drew close to her, he changed gear into neutral, feathered the accelerator pedal and coasted silently for some seconds, perspiring with excitement. Coming up close to her, so close he could see her long brown hair, flailing around behind her, in the glow of the street lighting.

They were halfway up the road, heading towards her flat, just short of the junction with New Church Road. He engaged a gear, silently, pressed the accelerator lightly, drew alongside her, saw her face through his side window, tight with exertion.

He swung the steering wheel over to the left. At the same time as hearing the metallic clang, he felt the impact. He braked hard, without squealing the tyres, not wanting to wake the sleeping street. He pulled the hypodermic syringe out of his pocket, then leapt out of the car and ran towards her. ‘God,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so...’

But there was no need for any apology. She was lying spread-eagled on the pavement, groaning, in shock. He looked over his shoulder, looked around, up at the windows of the houses on both sides of the street that might have had a view. No sign of any movement.

He knelt beside her, as if pretending to check her pulse, then opened her mouth, as if checking her airways, but instead he pressed the needle into her tongue and emptied the entire vial of ketamine. He sheathed and pocketed the syringe, looking carefully around again.

Then he half lifted, half dragged her to the rear of his car, opened the tailgate and hefted her in. He already had the rear seat folded flat. Then he opened her rucksack with his gloved hands, rummaged in it and pulled out her iPhone. Still looking carefully around, he ran back, tossed the phone into a thick laurel hedge beside a garden path and picked up her bike. He threw that in the rear also, on top of her, shut the tailgate, climbed in and drove off.

He was shaking in anticipation.

This felt so good. It really did!

His new project!

He felt such a burst of happiness deep inside him that he wanted to sing out loud and share how he felt with the whole world.

‘I got you, babe! Oh yeah!’

Over his shoulder he said, calmly, ‘You’re going to be another great project! You really are! Trust me! I’m on a roll!’