Her Final Victim

by NJ Moss

  I wait until I hear her breathing get heavier. There’s a difference between shallow and deep sleep.

  When I’m sure she’s not going to wake up, I slide around the edge of the door and walk carefully into her bedroom. She’s conveniently left the boiler room door open. I don’t have to worry about creaking wood giving me away.

  My blood is pumping hot. I’m rock-hard. I have to fight the urge to grab myself. That’s for when I’m alone and reliving this moment. I won’t do anything to wake her. I’ve slipped up in that way before.

  Her bedroom is a mess. Clothes are spread everywhere, three—no, four plates on her desk. Three mugs. It’s interesting to see how much effort she puts in when I come over. Normally her bedroom is spotless.

  I walk to the edge of the bed, resting my elbow against the back of her computer chair.

  Oh, God, she’s there, right there.

  I could reach out and touch her if I wanted.

  She’s lying on her side, her back to me, which makes it even better. She doesn’t have to be Lacy anymore. She could be any woman.

  She’s kicked off her blankets and she lies with a pillow stuffed between her legs. Her pyjamas aren’t the sexy silky things she puts on for my visits. She’s wearing a loose-fitting tank top and tatty old bottoms with a hole in the arse. She shifts in her sleep, stretching her legs, sticking her hips out. Her brown hair cascades across the sheets, with streaks of tempting grey in it.

  Does she know what she’s doing to me?

  I bite down to stop from making any noise. I have to leave soon. I’ve got what I needed. A drum beats in my head. I never experience this certainty at any other time in my life. Maybe I seem certain to other people. Maybe I’m a good pretender. But I never feel it.

  Here, I don’t have to stress. Because she’s right there. I could climb into bed and press myself against her. I could reach up between her legs and rub her like I’ve rubbed her before. And, in the moments before she remembers she’s supposed to be afraid, she’d like it. She’d grind against me. She’d moan and she’d shiver and maybe we’d fuck. I’d cradle her face in my hands.

  “You’re right here,” I’d tell her, and she’d smile. Because she’d know how true it is.

  She murmurs and rolls onto her back, exposing her throat, a few lines hinting at the wrinkles that aren’t far off.

  Hurting this woman doesn’t interest me. I needed to see her. That’s all.

  I head for the door, picking my footsteps carefully. The tension in my groin is becoming too much to handle. No porn is as good as this, even if they made some proper realistic virtual-reality stuff. I feel pre-cum leaking and my teeth throb from gritting them.

  I move down the hallway – there are no pets to bother me – and to her front door. My shoes are where I left them, neatly arranged next to the welcome mat. There’s a certain thrill in leaving them here, like I’ve been invited to visit. I arrived late, so there wasn’t much chance of her wandering to the front door and spotting them. After priming the alarm, I slip them on and let myself out, locking the door behind me.

  3

  Hazel

  I like to dance around the studio as I work, holding my paintbrush like a weapon. I fling it at the A3-sized canvas. Droplets of rose-red flare across the upper part of the work, joining the nature-greens and the big swathe of sun-yellow I added earlier this morning. Paint flecks my cheeks and my denim dungarees, but I don’t care. I feel alive. This is awesome.

  I step back, studying my work. It’s leaning toward an abstract nature scene, with lots of vivid colours and personal expression in the piece. I wipe my hands on my dungarees – I love these things, messy from a dozen other paintings – and go to a table in the corner and grab my phone.

  There’s an art to selfies most people will never understand.

  I could have a full face of make-up and my hair could be worked into a gorgeous weave, but if I was standing against a grimy prison backdrop, it’d hardly matter. Although… yeah, maybe I could post something like: I’ll never let prison make me forget how beautiful I am. Okay, fine, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. It means I’m really clever when it comes to social media.

  I stand with the corner of my painting just about in view, with the window showing a slice of our garden. The garden’s a bit of a mess beyond this specific window, but I’ve made sure it’s sublime from this angle. I’ve put a trellis with interwoven vines out there, making the light hazy.

  I take a few with a broad smile. Then a few artistic serious ones. I take a few where it’s mostly my face and then I get my stick and arch my back and give the suggestion of sexiness. I’m not being gaudy about it though. When I’m done, I’ve got one hundred and two images to choose from. I always like to hone it down to one or two, because then I know they’re the absolute best.

  There’s nothing better on a sunny spring morning than expressing myself through my art. Whoever you are, remember: you MATTER, I SEE you, I HEAR you. If I can do it, anybody can.

  I add hashtags using a website I subscribe to. They generate the best ones for me, and then I’m done. I reward myself with a quick scroll.

  I try not to let myself care about how little my follower count has increased lately. I started my Instagram account in my early teens, but I only really began to put effort in four years ago. Since then, I’ve gained eighty thousand followers, for a total of almost a hundred thousand. I know it’s not as many as some people, but I’m proud. The only problem is I’ve been getting dribs and drabs lately. I haven’t had a day where I’ve lost followers yet though, so that’s something.

  I end up on Kirk Hope’s profile.

  He’s an influencer I’ve been following since I was like fifteen. I used to be obsessed with him because we’re the same age and we have the same birthday.

  He started with pranks and comedy sketches and now he does a little of everything. I try not to come here too often – I’m committed to Jamie – but sometimes I can’t help it. In recent years, Kirk has gotten ripped. His teeth are straight and shiny and white. His hair is tousled and blond. He’s exactly twenty-two years, two hundred and thirty-five days old.

  “Coffee?” Jamie says from the doorway.

  I look up. My husband always seems a little tired and deflated when he returns from Cardiff. He works as a manager at a recruitment consultancy company and spends two weeks at the Cardiff office and two here, in Bristol. Sometimes he commutes back in the evenings and weekends, but mostly he stays up there, too exhausted from his long hours to come home.

  “No, I’m okay.”

  He walks into the room, yawning. His hair is spiky from sleep, his jaws covered in a matching black beardy shadow. His dressing gown is open to show his Calvin Klein boxer shorts. He’s got a different sort of body to Kirk Hope: thicker, stronger, less pretty-boy-ish. “Come here, H.”

  I slip my phone into my pocket and walk over to him, wrapping my arms around his broad shoulders. His aftershave and his sweat and his just-Jamie scent washes over me. I smile up at him. My man really is handsome, especially with his bright green eyes.

  Lots of people comment on how striking Jamie’s eyes are.

  He smooths his hand up my back and pulls me close, leaning down and placing his lips against the top of my head. He inhales and lets out a satisfied groan. “Goddamn, I missed you.”

  I hug him tighter. “You always say that.”

  “I say it because it’s true.” He slides his hand down my back toward my bum, and I move with him, shaping my body to the path his touch takes. I can feel him getting excited, and I feel an answering song inside of me.

  A memory hits me, annoyingly. I want to enjoy this moment.

  Mum got way too drunk once when Dad was at sea. I lurked outside the living room, ear pressed against the door, as she ranted down the phone at one of her friends. She wouldn’t talk to me, obviously, because I’m only her daughter. A woman has to please her man. That’s what this younger generation doesn’t understand, with this do-it
-yourself nonsense. Keep your man happy and you can have a simple life, an easy life, a comfortable life.

  I push my mother’s voice away. This isn’t the same as her and Dad. Jamie and I are happy together… mostly, even if there are a few niggling issues, a few things I’d rather he didn’t do.

  I study him. I could draw this man’s face from memory in a hundred years. I’m certain of that. I’m lucky we have such an excellent marriage. I don’t regret marrying young one bit. I repeat the sentiment in my mind, making it true.

  I. Don’t. Regret. Marrying. Jamie.

  “You have to say it.” I moan, making my voice breathy and high-pitched, the way he likes. Does that make me like Mum, changing my voice to fit my husband’s desires, or does that make me a loving wife?

  His hands make deeper impressions through my dungarees, making my skin hungry for more. “I see you, Hazel Smithson. I see all of you. You’re never invisible with me. Everything you do, everything you are… I’ll always be watching.”

  It’s my favourite quote from our wedding vows – we did our own – and it always makes me crazy for him. I leap up and wrap my legs around him. He chuckles and stumbles backward, slamming against the wall.

  “You’re crazy, H.”

  I bite his lip, not quite hard enough to draw blood. “As if you’d have it any other way.”

  4

  Millicent

  As the pit inside of me grows deeper and more demanding – as the days collapse into each other and I’m forced to accept the time has come – I try to console myself with work.

  My current contract is copywriting for a shower gel company. It’s exactly the sort of anaesthetic I require. They ask for a perky upbeat tone, and yet they also want it to be professional and businesslike. They seem utterly ignorant that these requests are dichotomously opposed. But that’s the way with people. They are both sinners and saints, evil and good, dead and alive.

  He walked away – his back, the shape of his shoulders, he kept walking.

  I push myself away from the desk, spinning in my chair with the engagement ring clutched tightly in my fist. Closing my eyes, I try to imagine what it would be like to truly clasp such a lofty item. If my imagination was more adept at sinking to the level of the sheep, perhaps I could see myself with some nice man: the sort of man who’d never hit a woman, belittle her, use her, reshape her.

  But the ring feels like cold metal, nothing else. I don’t know why I still have it.

  The news hardly covered the drug dealer cosplayer. There were a few articles here and there, but the city where I slew him is big and tumbling into fresh events endlessly. There isn’t time to care about a man in a tracksuit who was killed for some loose change and a cheap piece of jewellery.

  I’m in a different city now. I rarely stay in one place for long. I use websites where foolish people rent out their homes to strangers. My work makes moving easy. Perhaps there will be a day when some clever detective pieces together these unsolved murders with the wanderings of a freelance writer. But it hasn’t happened yet.

  I slide my hand across the keyboard, caressing the keys, and then to the edge where my memory stick waits for me. But what’s the use? I could peruse my past achievements in the vain hope something would erupt to lighted life inside of me, and yet I know it won’t. That epoch of my life has passed.

  I’m a wanderer now, truly: my soul as much as my profession.

  The shape of his back, the broadness of his shoulders, the back of his head – his footsteps…

  Clip-clip-clip, so loud on the concrete.

  How were they so loud? Am I remembering it wrongly? No, my perceptions are sharp, knotted around me like barbwire, honed to a level the bleaters cannot even imagine.

  I sigh, I sigh, I sigh.

  I am so fucking bored of sighing.

  Clicking away from Word, I navigate to Instagram, to Hazel Smithson’s page. Her profile photograph shows a vapid thing. She smiles widely and her cheeks are smooth and tight and her teeth are fake-looking and her hair is red, Viking-red, not blood-red. It’s dusky. The sort of shade bruises sometimes turn, and I think for a moment what it’d feel like to mark her exposed flesh. She’s short and she’s young and she’s far too obsessed with herself.

  If I were given a contract to write the most banal statements imaginable, Hazel Smithson’s profile would be my finished product.

  Believe in yourself.

  You can do anything if you put your mind to it.

  You’re beautiful.

  Remember to breathe today.

  You’re worth the world.

  On and on and on, incessantly, these vacuous statements flood her feed and people feed on them. They like them, comment about them, tell her she’s wonderful and insightful and brave.

  Brave? Brave?

  There’s nothing brave about typing out a few words and taking some over-sexualised photographs. Stalking the perverts of the night, doing what is necessary, eliminating future rapists and monsters… that’s bravery.

  I go to my bookmarks and click the post I saved a few days ago. The photograph was taken on Hazel and Jamie’s wedding day. Jamie looks dapper and happy in his suit, as though there’s not a devil lurking behind those frustratingly bright eyes of his. I despise how they shimmer, those eyes, how they stare into me.

  I think he can see me. I think he knows what I am.

  Hazel looks magnificent in her wedding dress. Her hair tumbles around her shoulders. Her smile seems genuine and, ashamedly, it makes me wonder what it would feel like to wear a ring instead of take one from a corpse. It makes me want to open that smile wider with a box cutter, slit from the corner of her lip right up to her ear, and then keep dragging until her carmine grin seeps into her too-perfect hair.

  But Hazel doesn’t know her husband, and I very much doubt Jamie is privy to his wife’s deepest desires, her innermost secrets, the conclave of her unspoken wants and hates and uncertainties. There is a great lie in marriage: that one person can know another.

  I scroll through the comments. Before I decided to act upon my long-withheld desire, I had avoided social media. I still have no accounts under my name – except on freelancing websites for work – but I have become somewhat obsessed with scrolling. I’ve made a dummy account so the website doesn’t block me out. They’re determined to get their hooks in. It is addictive, which is probably why so many morons wander the streets with their stupid eyes fixated on their palms.

  Am I any better?

  Yes, this is research. That’s why it’s not the same.

  One comment reads, Congratulations. Maybe there’ll be a little Hazel or Jamie on the way soon?

  I want to reply and tell the commenter that, unfortunately, Jamie Smithson isn’t going to live long enough to father any children. But of course I don’t. Commenting is for cattle, and I am a wolf.

  5

  Jamie

  “I swear to God, kid, I’d go mental without you,” Ray says on speakerphone. I’m sitting in traffic on the Severn Bridge, the day dim and depressing. Or maybe it’s me. After two weeks with Hazel, I never enjoy leaving her. “Bunch of pussies, your generation. No offence.”

  I laugh. “None taken, boss.”

  “But you’re the exception.” I can tell he’s eating by the way he grunts between words. “What are you, thirty?”

  “Close enough.”

  I’m twenty-six, but Ray is an ex-alcoholic and he has problems with his memory. And, anyway, only an idiot corrects their boss. At least in my business. Kissing arse is the name of the game, and even if it pisses me off a little, it pays well enough that I can live with it.

  “Exactly. Thirty, but you’ve got that old-school mentality. Fucking Barbara. Emailing me with this holiday shit. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “I’ll sort it. You don’t need to worry about it. It’s out of your hands now.”

  “See!” Ray yells, as I inch the car forward and fight the urge to slam my fist down on the horn. Nobody kno
ws how to drive these days, I swear. “That’s what I wanted to hear.” A pause. “You’re coming to my birthday party when you get back, aren’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. I consider you a friend as well as my boss.”

  I lay it on thick in this last line, and Ray coughs out a laugh. “All right, all right, calm down. Just get this sorted.”

  “I will. You can count on me.”

  “I know I can. Speak later.”

  I hang up and let my head fall back. There’s some trouble at the tollbooth that really isn’t my problem. The business with Barbara won’t be an issue. She wants the ground-level grunts to be allowed to swan off on holiday whenever they feel like it, but it’s simply not in their contract. I’ll explain it to her. If she gives me any problems, I’ll lay it down flatly.

  That’s why Ray splits my time between the two offices. He knows I can put people in their place.

  I try not to think about how I got here. A man should always keep moving forward. But I’ve got to give myself some credit. I left uni at twenty-two and I went straight to work for Sunny Skies Recruitment. Right away, I knew I was made of stronger stuff than my colleagues. They were always complaining, bitching about how they had to stay late, how their work phones never stopped ringing.

  I made a point never to complain. I never took a sick day. I back-stabbed and I broke rules and I threw people under the bus, and now, in my mid-twenties, I own a three-bedroom house in Clifton, I drive a Range Rover. I’m married to the woman of my dreams. There’s no way I’m going to let some lazy slackers ruin that.

  Finally, the cars inch forward.

  I relax my grip on the steering wheel, smiling as a memory hits me.

  Are you trying to break it, tough guy? Hazel said on one of our earliest dates, when we were stuck in traffic. I didn’t know what she meant, and then she reached over and touched my hand. Relax. If we miss our reservation, take me to McDonald’s. I don’t care, as long as we’re together.