by Zoe Caldwell
I waited a while until he came around. He was drugged and disorientated, but he started putting up a fight, twisting and turning and screaming and shouting, trying to wrench himself free. I held a knife to his neck and warned him I’d slash his throat if he made one more sudden movement, or dared scream one more time. I meant it and he could tell.
I ordered him to confess to every single one of his rapes or I’d slaughter him. He pleaded innocence at first, until I stuffed a ball gag in his mouth and tried out my brand-new nail gun on one of his hands, shooting through it like stigmata. That got him talking.
Panting with fear, delirious with shock and the drugs, he began his story. The Life and Times of a Rapist. His offences began way earlier than the one he’d been banged up for. I knew they would have done. They started when he was just twelve years old, when he raped a little girl behind the bike sheds at school. He went on and on.
After rape seven or eight, I couldn’t take any more. I put the ball gag back on him and emptied my nail gun into his flesh, before slashing his throat for good measure. Then I sat back and watched him die.
It was way better than any movie.
I felt satiated for a while after that.
I didn’t strike again for quite some time. I landed the promotion I’d been craving and became the assistant editor at Couture, and I was too busy getting to grips with my new role to even think about killing, but eventually, the hunger crept back, and I decided to go paedo-hunting again. I rejoined the chat room where I met @justaguy78 and posed as a twelve-year-old girl called Lexie. Within a few minutes, I got talking to @birdwoody. He asked what I was up to. I told him I was in care, that I’d had an argument with my foster parents, said I was feeling down. Like most predators, @birdwoody took my vulnerability as a green light to prey on me, and rapidly moved the conversation on to sex. He asked what I was wearing, what my underwear was like. He wanted me to send him pictures and when I shyly refused, he asked if I’d like to meet instead. I told him I lived in Hayes, but even though he was in Leeds, he wasn’t deterred. He was so stupid that he even agreed to send a selfie at the petrol station on the drive down. He was a weedy, tiny, little man. I knew it wouldn’t be hard to take him down. I asked him to meet me late at night in a subway where I knew there was no CCTV, telling him I’d sneak out of bed once my foster parents were asleep so we could spend the night chatting in his car.
I waited in the shadows until he appeared, barely breathing. He didn’t notice me until I ran towards him and swung at him with a baseball bat. He gasped in shock and pain, buckling to the ground. Then I grabbed his scraggly hair, yanked his face up, and stared into his fearful, beady, erratic eyes before jamming a screwdriver through his left eyeball. I thought stabbing someone through the eye would be a badass way to kill, but even serial killers have a gore threshold and the sight of @birdwoody’s eyeball bursting and dripping down his face like a bloody egg yolk was too much for me, coupled with the gruesome squelch of his brain against the screwdriver. I had to swallow vomit back to avoid leaving DNA all over the scene. My throat was burning from stomach acid for what felt like days and every time I thought of the kill, I felt the bile rising again. I couldn’t bring myself to kill for quite a while after that, but then I saw Mantegna’s painting in Vienna and I knew it was only a matter of time.
I jot the names down and scan the list.
Martin
Gerard
Ahmed
@justaguy
Edmond
Kevin
@birdwoody
Julian
God. Eight men. Hard to believe it’s that many. I’d go down for life if the police ever found out. I’d get multiple life sentences. I’d never see the light of day again.
There’s a knock at my office door. Jess.
I flip my notepad closed. ‘Yep.’
She peers around. ‘Just letting you know you have a meeting with Poppy about the kitten heels feature.’
‘I’d completely forgotten,’ I reply, genuinely startled. I’d been so focused on writing my list that my meeting with our features director about kitten heels was the last thing on my mind. ‘Thanks, Jess.’
‘No worries,’ she says.
‘Can’t believe kitten heels are making a comeback,’ I add.
‘Yeah, those things need to die.’ Jess laughs, rolling her eyes as she closes the door behind her.
Jess and I may have totally different fashion sense but one thing we both agree on is that you should either go hard or go home when it comes to pumps. Flats or six-inch, no in-between.
I reach for my handbag and take the Tiffany pill box I keep in there containing emergency Valium. I bite half a pill and swallow it with a sip of my cold untouched coffee. I tear the page of names out of my notebook and feed it into my shredder. It may be in shorthand, but I’m not taking any more chances. Paranoia is eating away at me, although the Valium should take the edge off. Not to mention get me through an hour of going on about kitten heels.
6
I get that he was hot and everything, but surely there are better things to talk about on a Friday night than some knobhead who’s been murdered?
But no, my friends are insisting on picking apart every detail of Julian’s death.
‘It’s just so intense,’ Annika comments, stirring her straw through the ice cubes of her Negroni cocktail. ‘It must have been a crime of passion. You don’t shoot someone with arrows like that unless you really hate them.’
Of all my friends, Annika is the most likely to have spent the week poring over the papers. A former model with pale Swedish features, she now lives with her financier boyfriend in a sprawling estate in Surrey, where she has a perfume studio. She claims to spend her days making bespoke scents for private clients, and while she is indeed a master at what she does, she also has the kind of salacious knowledge of current affairs and celebrity gossip that can only really be gleaned from a lot of time spent reading the papers, listening to the radio and watching chat shows.
Annika’s probably my least interesting friend, but if it wasn’t for her, our little group might not even exist. She’s the glue that binds us all together. The one who texts everyone and organises drinks, spa days, and books tables at the nicest restaurants. She’s like our group’s administrator and for that, I’m so grateful.
‘Yeah,’ Briony murmurs, taking a sip of her Sauvignon Blanc. ‘It’s horrific. Poor guy.’
Like Annika, Briony also spends a lot of time at home. She’s an actress, although she hasn’t worked for quite a while. She hasn’t really needed to, and anyway the dust has only just settled on her second divorce – an acrimonious split that left her several million richer but with an air of exhaustion that she’s still trying to shake. A lot of people wouldn’t believe it, looking at how rich Briony’s got from both her messy divorces, but she’s only ever wanted a simple family life. She’s actually an incredibly sweet and caring person. But when you look like her, with her Debbie Harry style, rock star temperament and neurosis to match, happily ever after is harder than you’d think to come by. Even Briony is exhausted by her own drama at this point, although she’s trying to straighten her life out. She devotes herself to her kids – Spencer and Eugene. Her life revolves around them these days.
‘It’s really sad. He was so young too. Only twenty-eight. Younger than us,’ Priya points out, shaking her head.
Priya is probably the most academically smart in our group, but she does have a slightly annoying tendency to see the world in black and white and point out the obvious. She’s an Oxford-educated lawyer who works in-house as a solicitor for a global investment bank. She’s an absolute force to be reckoned with – incisive, clever, strong-minded, while also being impeccably glamorous and put together. She’s a little less creative than the sort of people I usually spend time with, but I have a lot of respect for her strength and success. Like me, Priya grew up on a council estate and managed to get ahead through sheer grit and determination, although unlike me, s
he got to the top through merit rather than murder. Priya doesn’t realise I’m from a similar background to her though. Like everyone else in my life, she thinks I had a cushy childhood in Suffolk.
‘It’s so sad. What a loss,’ Briony agrees, shaking her head morosely. She’s probably imagining how she’d feel if a similar fate befell Spencer or Eugene.
I roll my eyes.
‘Guys, you know, this Julian bloke might have been a real asshole, right? If someone went to the effort of killing him like that, maybe he did something really fucked up to deserve it,’ I suggest.
Annika scoffs, raising an eyebrow. ‘So you’re saying if someone does something fucked up, it’s justifiable to string them up to a post and shoot them with arrows?’
Eva, the only one of my friends who’s yet to voice an opinion on the subject of Julian, smiles wryly. Of all of my friends, Eva is probably my favourite. Not that I do best friends. And not that Eva would either. She’s an antiques dealer and tends to keep herself to herself a lot of the time, despite being effortlessly smart, interesting and cool. She dresses solely in black, vapes whenever possible and never wears makeup. She has a tendency to go off the radar a few times a year, holing herself up in a second home she owns in Venice. Rumour has it she has depression and likes to escape there, wandering along the dreamy canals – resetting – before coming back to London for round two.
I shrug. ‘I’m just saying, that just because he was young and good-looking, it doesn’t make him a saint. He might have been a real dick.’
‘Honestly, even if he was a “dick”,’ Annika mocks, doing air quotes, ‘he still didn’t deserve to die like that, Camilla. No one does.’
I shrug, reaching for my Montepulciano. I take a sip as my friends continue to lament Julian’s death. The only person who’s not joining in is Eva, who puffs on her e-cigarette.
As much as I like Annika, Briony and Priya, it’s moments like these that I realise I’ll never fully relate to them. Julian did deserve the death he got. If anything, I went easy on him. Cunts like him deserve brutal slayings. If my friends had seen the pictures on his phone, then maybe they’d agree.
‘Did you hear he was on a date?’ Briony comments.
The news reports released this detail a few days ago. Julian had apparently told a friend he was heading out to meet a girl called Rachel. He’d texted a few hours earlier and said he was going to ‘get some’. Asshole. He got some all right. Got some arrows to the chest. But his friend started blabbing about this and reporters have been going crazy, dubbing Julian’s fateful night his ‘deadly date’. It’s kind of annoying, but still, Julian having been on a date with a girl called Rachel hardly incriminates me. It’s not like they can trace his phone records back to me. Naturally, I destroyed his SIM.
‘Yeah, I heard that. Do you think she did it?’ Annika asks, her eyes glowing with excitement.
I suppress the urge to laugh, exchanging a sly smile with Eva instead. This is the thing about my nice law-abiding friends. They pretend to be holier than thou, all high and mighty, and yet I haven’t seen them this animated for weeks. They love a good murder. They and the rest of London are one hundred per cent getting off on this.
‘No, a woman could never have done that,’ Briony comments, sipping her cocktail, her black fingernails cupping the glass. Briony doesn’t only have the looks of Debbie Harry, she has the style too. She wears the kind of clothes that would make most women want to hide from reflective surfaces, but she can get away with it. She manages to look cool in ratty old T-shirts, skinny jeans, crumpled leather jackets and shapeless floral smocks. Even now, she’s wearing a worn, grey chiffon dress with a daisy print that looks like something she picked up in a charity shop, yet with her face, it somehow seems cool.
‘He looked huge. As if a woman could have overpowered him,’ Briony scoffs.
She said something similar when my ‘Sugar Daddy Slayer’ kill was in the papers. That was a hair-raising night. We were sitting in this bar and someone had brought a copy of the Evening Standard with them, with the grainy image of me leaving the hotel in that blonde wig and fedora. There was this odd, unnerving moment, when Briony looked up from the picture and kind of squinted at me, as though she recognised me. I pretended I didn’t see her look, brushed it aside. I guess it was nothing though, because we carried on drinking, had a good night. Things were fine.
‘But according to his friend, he was heading out to see her,’ Priya points out. ‘It could have been her.’
‘I just find it hard to believe that some girl would kill her date like that,’ Briony remarks, pulling a face. ‘I mean, seriously!’
‘It would explain why she’s single,’ Eva interjects, and everyone falls about laughing.
Bitches.
I laugh along with them though. Even though I’m laughing at myself.
They keep chatting away about my kill, gossiping, occasionally interrupting their salacious speculation with interjections about what a ‘tragedy’ the murder is. I sip my wine, trying not to smirk as I look around the bar, at all the other young people out on a Friday night. I feel almost like a normal woman. To an outsider, I fit in, but inside, it’s a constant effort. An act. It’s easier to pass as normal in a group, like this. One to one, however, tends to be suicide. The coldness and aloofness I conduct myself with at work, that some people even revere me for, doesn’t fly when your friend’s just been dumped or is trying to have a sentimental girly ‘moment’. The social cues of friendship are easier to pick up on in a pack. I simply mirror. There’s a lag sometimes, a blank gaze on my face where an emotion should be, but I vibe off my friends, quickly correct it, join in.
I didn’t mean to end up like this. Dead inside. But I remember when it happened. I was about twelve or thirteen. Before then, I was in pain. Loads of pain. I yearned for love, kindness, compassion, I craved it constantly. It was exhausting. I wanted to be free from my dad, I wanted peace and happiness, and then one weekend, he went out on a Friday night and left me naked and bound in the garage, unable to break free, starving, and by Sunday, when he came home and let me out, my feelings had gone. From that moment onwards, I never felt crushing lows or occasional highs again, I just felt drained, hollow. The only real emotions I experience these days are a fairly consistent low-level sadness, anger, greed, and desire, and frustration if I can’t get what I want. I don’t feel happiness or love or contentment. Or joy or hurt or shame. There’s something almost childish about those kinds of emotions to me because, in a way, I grew out of them. But I can fake them when I have to. Alcohol helps. I take another sip of wine.
Briony looks across the room, eyes wide, mouth dropping open. ‘Oh my God, he’s back…’ she mutters, shrinking into her seat.
‘Who? What?’
‘Back?’
‘Huh?’
We turn to look, following her gaze across the bar.
‘Stop it,’ Briony hisses, flapping her hand around, gesturing for us to turn back. ‘Stop looking. Seriously.’
Her voice is sharp and insistent, and we back down.
‘Who is it?’ I ask quietly, my interest piqued. Briony’s face looks like she’s seen a ghost and we don’t get many of them in this bar on a Friday night.
‘Don’t look,’ Briony implores. ‘Really don’t.’
‘Okay, okay.’ We all agree.
‘Miles Brady just walked in,’ she whispers.
‘Miles who?’ Priya asks.
‘Miles Brady. I can’t believe he’s showing his face after what he did.’ Briony shakes her head, looking over at him, not even trying to conceal her disgust. ‘The audacity.’
The urge to look is overwhelming but I manage to resist. I take a sip of wine.
‘So what did Miles Brady do then?’ I ask.
I expect I already know what Miles Brady, whoever he is, has done. It will be the same kind of thing that all of the men around this part of town have done. Cheating on their girlfriends or spouses, getting caught with the nanny, being bu
sted having had some drunken threesome, spunking the couple’s savings on an escort, or even, in the case of one acquaintance, getting found hooking up with the neighbour’s husband. What surprises me more than anything is why these men’s antics are even considered gossip-worthy anymore. Infidelity is so commonplace, it’s barely even worth mentioning.
‘He…’ Briony leans in, and gestures for us all to lean closer too. She fixes us with her kohl-lined eyes. ‘He molested children,’ she says.
What?
‘He was working as a piano teacher, offering private tuition to kids around Mayfair,’ Briony continues. ‘One of Spencer’s friend’s mums hired him. He’d had a really impressive career as a concert pianist. Played all over the world. He even performed for the Queen. All these parents were clamouring to sign up when they heard he was offering lessons. Anyway, one little boy went to his mum after a lesson and said Brady had exposed himself.’ Briony pauses, wincing at the words.
‘His mum freaked out and reported him to the police. Word got around. Then a few other parents got paranoid and asked their kids if anything had happened during their lessons. A couple of other kids spoke up. It turns out Miles had been abusing them,’ Briony says, shaking her head, her jaw tightening with anger.
‘How come we haven’t heard about this?’ I croak.
‘It was a few years ago now. I didn’t know Cynthia, Spencer’s friend’s mum, back then,’ Briony comments. ‘She’d be livid if she knew he was out.’
‘Out?’ I echo.
‘He was in jail. Got five years for child abuse – rape, molestation, exposing himself. Apparently, police found loads of child porn on his computer,’ Briony explains, glancing down, before taking a hungry sip of her cocktail.
