Career of Evil

She drew breath to scream, but he had the knife ready and it sank deep between her ribs with ease, nothing like the last one, who’d fought so hard and so stubbornly. The noise died on her stained lips as the hot blood poured over his gloved hand, soaking the material. She jerked convulsively, tried to speak, her eyes rolled upwards into whiteness and her entire body sagged, still pinned by the knife.

“Good girl,” he whispered, pulling the carving knife free as she fell, dying, into his arms.

He dragged her deeper into the recess, where a pile of rubbish sat waiting for collection. Kicking the black bags aside, he dumped her in a corner then pulled out his machete. Souvenirs were imperative, but he only had seconds. Another door might open, or her dozy bitches of friends might come back in their taxi...

He slashed and sawed, put his warm, oozing trophies in his pocket, then piled up the rubbish over and on her.

It had taken less than five minutes. He felt like a king, like a god. Away he walked, knives safely stowed, panting in the cool, clean night air, jogging a little once he was on the main road again. He was already a block away when he heard raucous female voices shouting in the distance.

“Heather! Heather, where are you, you silly cow?”

“Heather can’t hear you,” he whispered into the darkness.

He tried to stop himself laughing, burying his face in his collar, but he could not restrain his jubilation. Deep in his pockets, his sopping fingers were playing with the rubbery cartilage and skin to which her earrings — little plastic ice-cream cones — were still attached.

49

It’s the time in the season for a maniac at night.

                        Blue Öyster Cult, “Madness to the Method”

The weather remained cool, rain-flecked and faintly blustery as June entered its second week. The blaze of sunlit pageantry that had surrounded the royal wedding had receded into memory: the giddy high tide of romantic fervor had ebbed, the wedding merchandise and congratulatory banners had been removed from shop windows and the capital’s newspapers returned to more mundane matters, including an imminent Tube strike.

Then horror exploded across Wednesday’s front pages. The mutilated body of a young woman had been uncovered beneath bin bags, and within a few hours of the first police appeal for information the world had been informed that a twenty-first-century Jack the Ripper was stalking the streets of London.

Three women had been attacked and mutilated, but the Met appeared to have no leads. In their stampede to cover every possible aspect of the story — maps of London showing the location of each attack, pictures of the three victims — the journalists revealed themselves determined to make up for lost time, aware that they might have arrived a little late at the party. They had previously treated the killing of Kelsey Platt as a lone act of madness and sadism, and the subsequent attack on Lila Monkton, the eighteen-year-old prostitute, had gained virtually no media coverage. A girl who had been selling herself for sex on the day of the royal wedding could hardly expect to oust a new-minted duchess from the front pages.

The murder of Heather Smart, a twenty-two-year-old building society employee from Nottingham, was an entirely different matter. The headlines virtually wrote themselves, for Heather was a wonderfully relatable heroine with her steady job, her innocent desire to see the capital’s landmarks and a boyfriend who was a primary school teacher. Heather had been to see The Lion King the night before her death, had eaten dim sum in Chinatown and posed for photographs in Hyde Park with the Life Guards riding past in the background. Endless column inches could be spun out of the long weekend to celebrate her sister-in-law’s thirtieth birthday, which had culminated in a brutal, sordid death in the back lot of an adult entertainment store.

The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus. There were discussions of the deplorable drunken tendencies of the young British woman, with reciprocal accusations of victim-blaming. There were horror-struck articles about sexual violence, tempered with reminders that these attacks were far less common than in other countries. There were interviews with the distraught, guilt-stricken friends who had accidentally abandoned Heather, which in turn spawned attacks and vilifications on social media, leading back to a defense of the grieving young women.