Personal

by S Thomas Thompson

  Heidi, that’s not it, Helen…. yes! That was it. Now what was her surname? Something is telling me it was a colour or shade.

  Augustine got down on to one knee in the clearing and looked at the boundaries. Although it appeared to be almost a perfect circle, there were no signs that the plants had been cut to make it like this. He got out his torch and moved closer. The feeling that he was hidden away from the rest of the world took over.

  Green, doesn’t sound right, Brown, no I’d remember that

  The plants on closer inspection backed up what Augustine had previously thought. There was no sign that this was manmade. He wanted to get out of there now he had discovered that, but him and his torch had one more task to carry out before he could head home.

  White, Black, Grey, nope, none of them

  The area around the cleared patch could have been hiding something sinister. The people of the neighbourhood must have been aware that something was going on with the flashing blue lights at either end of the street and sporadic activity in the middle. But none came out. Whether it was the persistent rain or the late hour, there was no audience to see the police do their work. But the next morning when things brightened up, there would be people in and around the site, even given the police tape across the front of the woods. Augustine wanted to check the area around the body before the souvenir hunters got there.

  Blue, now you’re just being silly, violet – yes that’s it. Helen Violet.

  Augustine found nothing and returned to his car, and then back home to bed. He had all the information he needed to give the new investigating officer as much to go on as possible at that time. All that was left for the day was to get undressed and drop off to sleep. Augustine knew that wouldn’t take long. Whether he would be able to stay asleep with another potential body to occupy his dreams was another matter altogether.

  13

  Al sat on his haunches in his home. He had been out for only an hour in total, but had added to his body of work that had been growing over previous weeks. He was quite proud of the one that he had enacted in the few hours of dark that were available at that time of year. It was someone that he had been watching and studying for some time. They were a slight departure from the work that he had been previously carrying out, but he felt that a small change might prompt the police to release the details of the letters he had left on the chest of his victim. So far, this information hadn’t been put out there in the public domain. Al was tempted to speculate about this on one of the message boards at the bottom of a news site so he could start to push this fact out there, but the possibility he was traced was too much of a risk. He had carried out one mission where there was risk involved and didn’t feel safe at all afterwards. The work of that night took him back to familiar ground and allowed him to feel comfortable again. He was back on track and was ready to keep going until the police had no choice but to reveal what he was saying to them.

  The walk back home was in stark contrast to the one he had made after killing the entertainer in the theatre. Then he was worried that he was being followed and too scared to return home in case it was being staked out. As there had been no visits to his home in the meantime and the only encounter he had with a member of the police force was coincidental, Al felt that he had no reason to fear coming home after a killing. He walked the dark streets from the park where he had met his victim without any thoughts that he could be seen or captured. Al was confident once again. That meant he would kill more often. But his confidence signalled terrible things for the city. People would suffer.

  The person who he had killed might take some time to find. It wasn’t the first time he had killed in this way. The park was on the edge of Washington, on the same side of town as Al’s home. The boundary of the park was under the flyover that brought traffic from the motorways to the various employers in the town in the early hours of the day and took them back home again after the work was done. This was where he arranged to meet someone. During his time on the dark web, Al started to look in some detail at the activities of some groups that he disagreed with. One of them was the homosexual community. It wasn’t just the fact that they were committing acts that he disagreed with, but they seemed to be far more promiscuous in his eyes than straight people. The fact that the straight people Al knew were all in and around him, and the gay people he knew were active users of a meet-up homosexual website didn’t strike him as the reason for the difference he spotted. He just viewed the way people connected with each other on there as something that needed to be stopped. Again, Al was tempted to leave a message. This would be his way or warning all the other users of the site to stop, but the risks involved were far too great.

  Al built up a profile on the site over the time he was observing. He thought it might come in useful at a later stage of his work. He was right, it was easy to isolate one user that seemed to respond to every request and he groomed him. He called himself TimidSam. It was to build up trust and develop a dialogue that could lead to a meeting one day. Or one night. And that night had just been and gone. TimidSam’s last night on earth.

  Al had arranged to meet him at the edge of the park under the flyover. He used the name ShyGuy123 and this seemed to strike a chord with his target. They could be timid and shy together. They were both a little nervous, so meeting in seclusion was Al’s way of getting TimidSam to meet. It gave Al all the time and solitude he needed to go about his work. The target was identified and met. The last act was to kill and then cut. Al loved this part of the mission he had set himself. It meant that he could take out some of his anger on the person he had decided must be taught a lesson. After death, they were a punchbag for him. Al cut TimidSam in a few strategic places that were designed to show anyone who found him just what he thought of the man.

  Al took some chloroform with him to render TimidSam unconscious so he could make the kill without a struggle. It was these tiny details that had given Al the run on the police for all these weeks. He could kill at will and never be caught, he thought as he stood there over the body, ready to deliver the blow that would finish them off. The detectives are like sparrows pecking away at the breadcrumbs I've dropped, hoping that one of them will be enough to fill their belly. But what has been left behind is carefully orchestrated. There's only enough breadcrumbs to leave them hungry for more, Al thought to himself. This time he suffocated the person laid in front of him. It was easier that way. There would be little in the way of blood and then he could tourniquet different parts of the body before making his cuts. This one was going to look like he had suffered. This one was going to be cut below the belt.

  As he stood in the shower and thought back to his meeting in the park, Al decided that he wouldn’t wait long for the next one. He had several targets lined up and knew their movements off by heart. The first thing he did when arriving home was to move TimidSam from the wall of targets to the wall of victims. It made him feel like he was making progress, in the same way that businesses set targets and then congratulate themselves when their goal has been achieved, Al tried to think of some way to pat himself on the back in the immediate aftermath of a killing. Moving the image of the target from one wall to another was a good start. It signalled that this was a job well done. He was still working on an addition to this celebration but for the time being it was sufficiently satisfying on its own.

  There were three or four people that he could kill next. The police were not helping him in publicising the full details of his crimes, so more bodies would make them think about getting all the information out there so the public could lend a hand. That was his theory, in any case. Al finished in the shower and dried himself off. He had used antibacterial disinfectant to wash in after every murder on the off chance that there were traces of blood on him. The clothes that he wore were burned in the vegetable patch at the end of his garden every time. He was cautious to the nth degree as there was a lot more people to kill and he wanted to kill without being detected. It was part of the plan and was keeping
him going.

  Al looked in the mirror in the living room and then sharply pulled his gaze away again. He hadn’t looked at himself in the face for some time. He felt no reason to. He didn’t know why the mirror was still there on the wall. He could shave with the use of the mirrored tiles in the bathroom and he didn’t want to see what he looked like any longer. The small face of a mirrored tile only gave the smallest glimpses of his person at one time. He couldn’t piece them together as a whole. Al was fearful that he would look very different now he was a killer. He knew the work he was carrying out was the right thing, but he was concerned that something might give the game away.

  Ever since he was young, Al had believed in the power to know someone’s secrets by looking at them. He first noticed that when he looked through a newspaper he could pick out the people that were dead just from the images. He would go through the paper page by page without looking at any headlines, captions or words, from the photograph, he would determine whether the person in the image was dead and put a mark next to the photo. Then Al would go back through the newspaper and read the details to confirm his thoughts. He was never wrong. Every image with a mark next to it would be that of someone who was no longer living.

  He wondered if this was a skill that was common. So, at school he would ask others to do the same thing with the newspaper he bought on the way in. Nobody else was quite as accurate as him, but Al noticed that people were able to pick this out around 85% of the time. He had to investigate further.

  But he couldn’t find a way to test this theory any further until he reached the age of 18. He then volunteered to help in the local prison. He would go in and meet people, listen to them speak and generally be supportive. Al would listen to people for a few minutes and then think about what crime they committed to be in there. In his mind, he would split people into one of two categories –

  Those that had killed someone

  Those that had not

  After making up his mind, Al would speak to prison guards and find out what these people were in for. As with the images in the newspapers, he would be right every single time. Al carried this ability with him wherever he went. It was easy for him to spot someone who had killed. It wasn’t something he wanted to see in the mirror. He decided that he would take it down after the next killing to see if it would burn with his clothes.

  And Al was concerned that others had the same ability as him. After learning that others could spot the dead in newspaper images just like him, he was now worried that others could spot those that had killed too. When he walked the streets, he tried to keep his head down. If someone looked in his direction, then he immediately assumed that they had picked him out as a murderer. Al went out in the early morning and the late evening to avoid these looks. He decided that he was best to avoid all people rather than feel this way.

  Al got dressed and had a decision to make. He had to decide whether to go to sleep now and further the chances that he became a nocturnal animal like the bats he had seen on the way to the park or the fox that had walked across his path on the way home or whether he would stay up, have some breakfast and live something like a normal life. Al went to the kitchen and put some breakfast together. He wanted to research in the day and do his work whenever it was most appropriate. Al sat down in front of the television and slowly ate his cereal. On the screen was the local news about a body found in woodland that had been there for several months. Al laughed and continued eating.

  14

  Augustine raised his head from the pillow and wondered what the time was. The days where he had an alarm clock right next to his king-size bed were over. He pushed back the silk-feel sheets and let the air of the room wash over the naked top half of his body. He went through stages of wearing bedclothes and then not. It didn’t go with the seasons or any trends he picked up in the magazines he had delivered on subscription and browsed through from time to time. GQ was his favourite, and he wanted to know how to retain some degree of style now he was a little older. He shopped in the places they recommended, wore the clothes they said were in fashion and generally looked to these magazines for some inspiration. Augustine felt it was the substitute for having a woman in his life that would ordinarily do all of these things for him. He saw it as fall back when he didn’t have someone to talk to about interior design or what clothes went with what. He still had no confidence that they were the right choices. He was satisfied that he had someone to blame, though. The sheets felt right to Augustine when he bought them. He had arrived at the store as a direct result of another set of sheets he had seen in GQ that were not available when he got there. He didn’t fancy another visit to the store, let alone a 6 week wait for them to come back in stock so he looked for an alternative. While feeling sheets (was this really how people selected their bed linen?) Augustine came across the ones he was partially under at that moment. They still felt the same way now as they did when he put his hands on them in the store. Sleeping in them on his own and getting them dry cleaned had preserved the feel, Augustine thought to himself as he considered how long they had been on, how many times he had actually made it as far as his bedroom at that time, and when he needed to next change them. He couldn’t decide, so Augustine made up his mind that he would swap them over that morning before he made it to work.

  The alarm clock was a few feet away. He had moved it to the other end of the chest of drawers by his bed for two reasons. Firstly, the light from the clock was strong and when Augustine was trying to force his body back into sleep mode, the green glow from the numbers on the clock would illuminate the room and get his brain working again. The second reason was that he rarely needed an alarm clock. It was there, and the alarm was set, but Augustine was always up hours before the time he input into the alarm screen. He figured it had been months since he last used the alarm but he could have been wrong. Time was abstract for Augustine. With no regular monitors of his time like a family or a 9-to-5 job, he just lived until someone told him something had happened. It could be that one of his relatives were ill (there were few of them left) or that a colleague was leaving his team or retiring. This would send Augustine into thinking mode for a few days. He would stop, take stock of the last period of time before reverting back into Augustine mode. He was much happier in his own mode and found the times in between tiring. Considering what had gone on in his life before was a drain on his resources. Just going about his daily routine and living from event to event was where Augustine would get his energy from.

  He thought twice about actually checking the time before just getting up and getting ready. He wanted to be early anyway to hand over the case he was dealing with the night before. He was sure that his boss Marie would have already decided who he was giving it to, and briefed them. Marie worked in the same efficient way that Augustine did. Maybe it was why he was still there even though his figures looked poor in comparison to others in his role. She appreciated the fact that he took on all the crappy cases that the rest of them didn’t want and she felt that he got closer to solving them than anyone else on the department would have. Marie was protective of Augustine when she explained what was going on to her bosses. They didn’t get close enough to the investigations to see what was going on. They just looked at the figures and saw an underachiever. Augustine wanted to do more, but didn’t stand much of a chance while there were paper-pushers in the higher echelons. He’d just have to keep plugging away.

  Whether the case he was handing over was going to be easy to solve was a matter for much debate. The body had been there for several months and the post mortem threw up nothing that would give the detective in charge a lead. Augustine thought for a few seconds that it was no different to the ones that he was working on but parked that thought in case it came out in the handover. The last thing he wanted was another detective giving him the brush off because of their figures. He wanted to hand this over with as much enthusiasm and attention to detail as he would expect from anyone else.

  Augustine arrived
at the station to see several pairs of eyes all fixed on his. The rest of the team hadn’t heard about the body until detective Jon Foley arrived asking what time Augustine would arrive in an aggressive voice. When Lou told the detective that Augustine wasn’t expected for at least a couple of hours, Foley said, “fuck it, I’ll wait in his office.” He was still sat there 90 minutes later when Augustine walked through the door. Before Lou could warn him, Augustine had seen the other detective in his office and guessed what had happened. Foley was up on his feet and at the door before Augustine could think or act, so he walked straight towards the other detective to get him back into the office and away from the prying eyes and ears of the team.

  “What are you fucking playing at…” were the only words heard by Electra, Lou and Gary – the three members of the team that were at the station in their office that morning. The rest was muffled by the door, but they could all guess what was happening. Electra wanted to protect Augustine from the shit that he was thrown by the other detectives. If he didn’t take on so many of the ‘lost causes’ that they pushed aside then they would all suffer. Augustine was doing them a favour, she thought. Electra has always had a soft spot for Augustine Boyle from the first time they met. She was young and had just got her first break moving out of being on the beat and to investigate higher level crimes. He was someone that had been around a few times and she developed a sort of crush on him. Not physical, but that she wanted to work with a detective just like Augustine. It became her mission. She would listen out for cases that he was involved in and try to see if there was an overlap with what she was doing. Electra wanted to capture the attention of this man and she wanted to work on his team. She thought that being an attractive young lady and him being notoriously single would help things. She wasn’t the type to sleep her way to the top but there was no harm in using the obvious attractions that she was given by nature. After a while they bumped into each other more often. She blushed each time they were close to each other and Electra was sure that he noticed. She didn’t want others to see her emotions, but it was a natural thing. Again, she consoled herself, it can’t hurt if he thinks I’m smitten. Electra thought about it when she finally joined the team. She was ecstatic and wanted to hug and kiss Augustine all over. At times, she was like a giddy schoolgirl inside but Electra almost never let that side of her out. She was guarded as could be. As Electra thought about her emotions, she heard the noise coming from her boss’s room. On the other side of the door there was a row continuing, but the tone made her feel it was running out of steam.