‘A smart man who has something you want.’
Luther acknowledges this with a gesture of the hand.
Sava smiles, shrugs.
Luther punches him in the face; a short jab with the weight of his shoulder behind it.
Sava falls to the floor. Luther kicks him in the ribs, then grabs his collar, hauls him to his feet and rams him headfirst into the wall of glass terrariums.
Tanks crash. Liberated crickets dance on Sava’s head and shoulders. They flit and skip across the floor.
The black snake glides down Sava’s arm, onto the carpet.
In one upended tank, tarantulas stir.
Luther drags Sava to his feet and throws him into the iguana tank. It doesn’t break: it’s made of heavy glass. But the impact throws it to the ground.
The floor hops with crickets; it crawls with spiders. A huge cockroach scuttles over Luther’s shoe as he jams Sava’s wrist between his shoulder blades and gives it a twist.
He presses Sava’s face into the hardwood floor. For a moment he’s driven to keep pushing until Sava’s skull fractures then collapses under the weight of his hand.
Luther bends, puts his lips to Sava’s ear. ‘You don’t understand,’ he says. ‘I really, really need your help.’
Howie waits outside in the cold, hands in pockets, stamping her feet for warmth, wishing she still smoked. But no one smokes any more, it’s one of those things. You smoke and people make you feel all weird about it.
She hears the sound of shattering glass, a muted bellow.
She glances nervously left and right.
She remembers being nine years old, a good girl who already wanted to be a police officer. A girl called Isabel dared her to steal something from the corner shop. Howie took a packet of Bach elor’s Super Noodles. For weeks she privately wept, believing a thief could never be a police officer; not even after she slipped back into the shop and quietly replaced the Super Noodles on the shelf.
Now, in the cold of a Maida Vale cul-de-sac, she thinks for a bit, listens to the sounds of muffled violence and wonders if she should call for backup.
She decides probably not.
She walks to the corner, where she’s out of earshot but can visually monitor the entrance to the flat.
She’s only there for a minute before Luther walks out, buttoning his coat. He walks towards Howie, silently challenging her to say something.
Howie doesn’t say anything.
Luther nods. ‘We need to speak to a man called Steve Bixby,’ he says. ‘He’s the man who put “Mr Torbalan” in contact with Sava.’
‘Okey dokey,’ she says. ‘Just point me in the right direction.’ Her voice is shaking.
Luther walks to the car.
Howie spots movement on his wide back. She half jogs a couple of steps and squints.
It’s a huge cricket, the hooks at the ends of its chitinous legs hooked into the weave of Luther’s overcoat.
‘Boss,’ she says.
He glances over his shoulder. ‘What?’
‘Big bug.’
He brushes at it. Can’t reach.
Howie steps up, hesitates, then brushes the cricket away in a sweeping motion. It lands on the pavement and plods towards the shelter of a wheelie bin. The cold will kill it soon.
Howie opens the passenger door for Luther, then closes it behind him. She jogs round to the driver’s seat and gets in.
Henry began to think about other people’s babies after all the other ways of growing his little family had gone variously and unpredictably wrong.
He began watching people on the streets, in shops, on buses, on the tube. Envious of their lives, he fell in love with them, with these perfect couples, these perfect little families.
Then, as now, he dressed to blend in. On winter evenings he liked to wear a business suit and a three-quarter-length overcoat in charcoal grey. A muted tie, Church’s shoes, tortoiseshell spectacles and a discreet, slightly old-fashioned leather briefcase.
On summer evenings he wore cargo shorts and Nike’s, carried a ballistic nylon laptop bag that didn’t contain a laptop – it contained the same murder kit he carried in his discreet, slightly old-fashioned briefcase: a balaclava helmet, a length of nylon rope, a Leatherman multitool, a roll of duct tape, a small jemmy, a screwdriver, an awl, syringes, scalpels, a roll of medium-sized kitchen bin liners, a serrated hunting knife.
Henry liked to follow them home. Usually, something was wrong; they lived in a flat with a downstairs security door, or with security cameras. Sometimes he couldn’t define what it was; a house had a vibe, an aura. It might have something to do with the architecture, perhaps, or the precise angle at which a bedroom window intersected with a street corner.
But he still recalls with a thrilling tingle in his testicles the first Perfect Time.
She was small, olive-skinned. She wore a short skirt that made her legs seem long. She had short hair in a feathered pixie cut that appealed to him. And she was wearing trainers with no socks. Her brown ankles in the soft lining gave Henry a powerful erotic charge.
She got out at Tufnell Park, barely aware of his presence. She was on the phone the minute she emerged into the summer evening. The low sun and the traffic and the hot concrete smell, London late in June. A perfect moment. He had an erection so rigid it hurt.
She met her boyfriend outside a pub called the Lord Palmerston. He was tall, blond, broad-shouldered, and he moved with a certain masculine assurance that Henry associates with Oxford and Cambridge – perhaps wrongly.
He hung back while they embraced on a street corner, then kissed. He was rapt, watching their tongues slide over one another.
He nearly orgasmed when, disengaging from the kiss, the man brushed the palm of one hand over the tip of the woman’s breast.
Henry followed them home and watched them through the windows.
Later, he broke in.
He promised himself he’d go home if they’d made it difficult for him – but it was a hot night and they’d forgotten to latch the kitchen window.
He clambered in and tracked around the small flat. He watched them sleeping. It was such a hot night. They lay on opposite sides of the bed, the sheet between them, plaited into a thin rope from the vigour of their fucking.
The man lay curled and naked, his cock shrivelled into a nest of pubic hair, a smattering of acne across his wide shoulders.
She lay on her back with a forearm thrown across her eyes. Naked, she wore the pale outline of a bikini. It seemed a little less pale across her breasts and he wondered if she’d done some topless bathing recently.
He watched them from the bedroom door. He didn’t worry about being seen.
When he’d looked for long enough, he got on his hands and knees and searched among the discarded clothing on the bedroom floor. She’d been wearing a pair of pink and white Hello Kitty briefs. He picked them up, sniffed them, then masturbated into them. After two or three voluptuous tugs, what he experienced was less of an orgasm than a purging, like he was being turned inside out.
He knew he was taking a risk by leaving the underwear behind – but the thought excited him. The semen would be dry in the morning, he thought. She’d wake and bundle the Hello Kitty underwear into her handbag. She’d take them home and wash them, and then she’d wear them again. She’d wear them again and again. Henry loved the power this gave him over the secret folds of her cunt.
So he left the underwear where he’d found it, soaked in the gusset with his semen, and left the flat the way he’d come in.
It was a summer romance. Henry developed an addiction for the couple, whose names were Richard and Claire. Richard worked in the city, and Claire worked for a little production office in Soho; actually, what she did was man reception and make tea, but she was ambitious and cheerful and popular. Henry admired her for this.
He was on Claire’s train twice a week, enough for them to develop a silent, nodding acquaintance. One or twice they were crammed together in the rush hour, holding the straps, and he smelled her and felt the intensity of his secret knowledge – the pale bikini shape she wore on her skin, and the way she orgasmed. (First her feet would arch and then the muscles in her legs would tense and the tension would rise up her body and into her neck and head and face. Then there were flutters in her belly and she bit down on her lip. She bucked her hips and made small, private, strangled noises and sometimes when it was over she laughed the way people do when disembarking a roller coaster.)
Richard and Henry never even made it to the nodding acquaintance stage, although Henry contrived to be on Richard’s train just as often as Claire’s.
The more he got to know Richard, the more he grew to accept that he’d made a mistake. Claire was perfect but Richard wasn’t. He was like a crisp green apple that, when bitten, reveals its flesh to be floury and dry.
Richard was just a bloke. He had nothing of interest to say. He had no opinions that wouldn’t be held by any randomly selected man of his age, class and ethnicity.
Richard was a bore. Even the way he fucked quickly grew boring. When he buried his face in Claire’s holy cunt he’d sometimes look up to the ceiling, resentful of time spent bringing her off.
One evening, Henry followed Richard to a bar in Soho and saw him meet with another woman. He watched them get drunk. He watched Richard’s hand on her knee. He watched them kissing across the table.
Henry still walks down Claire’s street sometimes, and now and again, if he’s in the area, he might pop into one of the local pubs or Soho wine bars that Richard frequented.
He often wonders what happened to them; if they found happiness with other people. Sometimes he thinks of another man’s hands delving into those Hello Kitty briefs and slipping up inside her. He feels a warm glow of nostalgia.
But Richard and Claire had been an instructive exercise in the search for perfection; first impressions can dazzle, but you have to get over that wonderful exhilaration, the intense infatuation that feels like a kind of madness. You have to know all their moods, all their habits, good and bad.
As of today, Henry is actively watching sixteen couples in London; some childless, some not.
In a strongbox downstairs, he keeps a key to each of their houses. He likes to let himself in and walk around while they sleep. He likes to photograph them, film them. He likes to masturbate, although of course he no longer leaves his DNA behind him.
Henry knows how to be in a house and not be seen. He’s been doing it for years, since long before Patrick was born.
Now he digs out the laptop from its hiding place and boots it up. He and Patrick sit on the sofa as Henry scrolls through the list.
Patrick is reluctant, churlish; perhaps resentful of the beating Henry doled out earlier.
Henry makes his decision quickly. The Daltons. Handsome dad. Delicious mum. Perky, pretty little daughter.
Actually, he’d made his decision long before opening the laptop. But he likes the sense of ceremony and ritual.
He sends Patrick out, to get things ready.
At thirty-two, Caitlin Pearce has been a Samaritan for five years – since a few months after Megan Harris committed suicide.
Megan wasn’t a close friend, just someone Caitlin knew from uni; they saw each other mostly at weddings and birthdays, the occasional hen night, dinner parties. They spent a week in Faliraki as part of a group of seven or eight.
Caitlin didn’t even know Megan was unhappy. If anything, she’d been a little in awe of her, for Megan seemed as carefree as she was lovely.
After the funeral, Caitlin began to wonder if Megan had in fact been tired-looking and withdrawn at some of those boisterous girls’ nights out. Or perhaps that was her own guilt talking. Caitlin knew that survivor guilt taints memories of the suicide, that people left behind look for signs that simply may not have been there.
One evening, Megan had gone home from work and taken an overdose. Her flatmate found her in bed the next morning. Eight days later, Caitlin was sitting on a hard church pew in brand new funeral clothes and brand new funeral shoes that pinched her feet. And she sat dazed, looking at the coffin.
The instant permanence of it hit her hard; the fact that somebody could simply pop out of the world like a bubble.
It made the world seem less real. Caitlin slipped into what she now recognizes as a mild depressive illness. Everything felt like a film set; everyone she knew seemed like an actor. She looked through the rainy window of her fifth-storey flat, out at the London cityscape and thought:
That looks really realistic
.
After a few dismal months, she decided to do something about it; to do something good. So here she is, answering calls to the Samaritans, three volunteer shifts a month.
Right now it’s 5.38 p.m., and at the end of the line a young man is sobbing. When Caitlin asks what he wants to talk about he says, ‘It’s my dad. I want to kill him. I want to fucking kill him.’
‘What about your dad makes you feel like this?’
There is a long silence on the line. At the end of it, the caller says, ‘He took the baby. Emma. It was my dad.’
Quite often, you get a crank call. In your bones, you know it for what it is, but you have to take it seriously – because what if you were wrong?
‘Baby Emma?’ she says.
‘I was waiting in the car. I called the police, but they were too slow. She was all purple and wriggling. And then she got sick, like really sick, and he wouldn’t take her to hospital.’
Caitlin controls her voice. ‘And how did you feel about that?’
‘Fucked up. All fucked up in my head. I want to kill him. I honestly do. It would be so much easier if I could just kill him.’
Caitlin’s hands are cold.
‘There’s this family,’ says the caller. ‘The Daltons. He likes them.’
‘Likes what about them?’
‘Their little girl. They’ve got a daughter. He wants her to make babies for him. He says he’s never tried it with a virgin. She’s only little. She’s only eleven.’
Caitlin’s scared of flying, and she’s got the feeling now that she gets when boarding an aircraft, like her blood sugar has crashed. Her hands and feet are cold. Her voice is weak.