Career of Evil

“No!” Robin squealed as her right foot skidded out from under her, her left became caught in the hem of her long skirt and she slid into an undignified half-splits before toppling sideways and dropping her mobile.

“Oh bugger,” she moaned. Whatever she had slipped in looked like vomit or even diarrhea: some was clinging to her dress, to her sandal, and she had grazed her hand on landing, but it was the precise identity of the thick, yellow-brown, glutinous lumpy stuff that worried her most.

Somewhere in her vicinity a man burst out laughing. Cross and humiliated, she tried to get up without spreading the muck further over her clothes and shoes and did not look immediately for the source of the jeering noise.

“Sorry, hen,” said a soft Scottish voice right behind her. She looked around sharply and several volts of electricity seemed to pass through her.

In spite of the warmth of the day, he was wearing a windstopper hat with long earflaps, a red and black check jacket and jeans. A pair of metal crutches supported most of his substantial weight as he looked down at her, still grinning. Deep pockmarks disfigured his pale cheeks, his chin and the pouches beneath his small, dark eyes. The flesh on his thick neck spilled over his collar.

A plastic bag containing what looked like a few groceries hung from one hand. She could just see the tattooed dagger tip that she knew ran through a yellow rose higher on his forearm. The drops of tattooed blood running down his wrist looked like injuries.

“Ye’ll need a tap,” he said, grinning broadly as he pointed at her foot and the hem of her dress, “and a scrubbing brush.”

“Yes,” said Robin shakily. She bent to pick up her mobile. The screen was cracked.

“I live up there,” he said, nodding towards the flat she had been watching on and off for a month. “Ye can come up if y’want. Clean yerself up.”

“Oh no — that’s all right. Thanks very much, though,” said Robin breathlessly.

“Nae problem,” said Donald Laing.

His gaze slithered down her body. Her skin prickled, as though he had run a finger down her. Turning on his crutches, he began to move away, the plastic bag swinging awkwardly. Robin stood where he had left her, conscious of the blood pounding in her face.

He did not look back. The earflaps of his hat swayed like spaniel’s ears as he moved painfully slowly around the side of the flats and out of sight.

“Oh my God,” whispered Robin. Hand and knee smarting where she had fallen, she absentmindedly pushed her hair out of her face. Only then did she realize, with relief, from the smell on her fingers, that the slippery substance had been curry. Hurrying to a corner out of sight of Donald Laing’s windows, she pressed the keys of the cracked mobile and called Strike.

48 Here Comes That Feeling

The heatwave that had descended on London was his enemy. There was nowhere to hide his knives in a T-shirt, and the hats and high collars on which he relied for disguise looked out of place. He could do nothing but wait, fuming and impotent, in the place that It did not know about.

At last, on Sunday, the weather broke. Rain swept the parched parks, windscreen wipers danced, tourists donned their plastic ponchos and trudged on through the puddles regardless.

Full of excitement and determination, he pulled on a hat worn low over his eyes and donned his special jacket. As he walked, the knives bounced against his chest in the long makeshift pockets he’d ripped in the lining. The capital’s streets were hardly less crowded now than when he’d knifed the tart whose fingers sat in his icebox. Tourists and Londoners were still swarming everywhere like ants. Some of them had bought Union Jack umbrellas and hats. He barged into some of them for the simple pleasure of knocking them aside.

His need to kill was becoming urgent. The last few wasted days had slid past, his leave of absence from It slowly expiring, but The Secretary remained alive and free. He had searched for hours, trying to trace her and then, shockingly, she had been right there in front of him, the brazen bitch, in broad daylight — but there had been witnesses everywhere...

Poor impulse control, that fucking psychiatrist would have said, knowing what he’d done at the sight of her. Poor impulse control! He could control his impulses fine when he wanted — he was a man of superhuman cleverness, who had killed three women and maimed another without the police being any the wiser, so fuck the psychiatrist and his dumb diagnoses — but when he’d seen her right in front of him after all those empty days, he’d wanted to scare her, wanted to get up close, really close, close enough to smell her, speak to her, look into her frightened eyes.