Predator: an absolutely gripping psychological serial killer thriller

by Zoe Caldwell

  ‘How long was he in for?’ Priya asks.

  ‘Can’t have been more than two years, maybe even less,’ Briony says, glancing across the bar, a scathing look in her eyes.

  ‘Why did he get let out so early?’ I sneer.

  ‘Think he had some health problems. A heart murmur or something. They went easy on him during his trial because of that. Maybe that’s why, but I honestly don’t know,’ Briony comments, sighing.

  ‘They probably reduced his sentence for good behaviour too,’ Priya suggests. ‘They go far too easy on some of these people.’

  Damn straight.

  ‘He had another conviction dating back to the eighties. Molested a little boy back then too,’ Briony recalls. ‘He probably just kept his head down so he could get out quickly and abuse more kids.’ Briony visibly shudders at the thought.

  ‘They should have locked him up and thrown away the key,’ Annika states firmly.

  Or murdered him. Way faster and far more efficient.

  ‘I’m not going to look right now, but what does he look like?’ I ask.

  ‘Pale, pasty old guy. Cheap navy suit. Red pocket square.’ Briony sneers, shaking her head before picking up her drink and taking another sip.

  My friends are gawping over this information, stunned to discover there’s a paedophile in our midst. There’s even talk of asking security to remove him. I sip my wine and try to act nonchalant, but I can’t take any more. I need to check this guy out.

  ‘I’m going to the loo,’ I say, placing my glass on the table and getting up. As I walk towards the toilets, I do a scan of the bar, focusing on the area Briony was glancing towards, but I can’t spot this pale pasty cunt in his cheap suit. Damn it. I weave through the punters gathered around the bar.

  ‘Hi, Camilla,’ a guy I met at an art show a few months ago says. His name’s Mungo Tuck, which has always sounded to me like it should be a brand of zany health-food snack bars, but Mungo’s a painter. Fairly talented, if you like cutesy landscapes. He smiles, giving me an unsubtle appreciative look. Clearly had a few. He’s good-looking in a wholesome, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kind of way. Totally not my type.

  ‘Hey, Mungo,’ I reply, aware that the two friends he’s standing with are now also checking me out. Urgh. ‘How are you?’ I ask, rhetorically, while squeezing past him. ‘Sorry, I just need to…’ I mutter. ‘Chat in a bit,’ I say over my shoulder as I make my way through the throng, casting my eyes around for Miles as I go.

  Where the fuck is he? I’m looking around, but I can’t see him. I make my way to the toilets, even though I don’t need to go. I lock myself in a cubicle and get my phone out, googling Miles Brady.

  A stream of headlines appears.

  Jail for Paedo Pianist.

  Pianist who performed for the Queen JAILED for indecent assaults.

  Concert Pianist abused piano pupil who idolised him, court told.

  ‘Vile predator’: Judge slams pianist who preyed on pupils.

  The headlines are accompanied by his picture. He’s the worst kind of creep, because despite being pale and a bit pasty, he has kind-looking brown eyes. Slightly beady, behind glasses. He looks completely harmless. He smiles in one of the shots, posing in front of a grand piano. He seems so guileless, almost sweet. If I had kids, I’d probably let them have lessons with him too. Actually, fuck that. I’d install fucking CCTV with what I know about men, but still, I can see where the parents who hired him were coming from. He looks nice.

  I click on one of the articles – ‘Pianist Miles Brady jailed for indecent assaults’ – and have a read.

  INTERNATIONALLY-renowned concert pianist Miles Brady has been jailed for five years after a jury found him guilty of sexual offences against three of his former music students.

  Brady, 53, who once performed for the Queen, was today branded a ‘systematic and relentless’ abuser of young boys who had looked up to him as either a gifted musician and trusted mentor.

  The court heard that Brady had preyed upon three boys, aged between eight and fourteen, to whom he had been providing private piano tuition in west London. Brady filmed his assaults using a camcorder and was found to be in possession of 3,500 indecent images of children, as well as a manual on how to groom minors.

  The defendant was previously sentenced in 1989 for sexual activity with a child he met when volunteering with a local orchestra while living in his hometown of Cheshire.

  I scroll through the article, flicking through the others as well, picking out details, piecing together a picture of this monster. I take in various quotes.

  ‘A dangerous and predatory abuser of children.’

  ‘Convinced his pupils his assaults were normal.’

  ‘Brady’s victims felt lucky to have such a celebrated tutor and were scared to say anything in case the lessons stopped.’

  I read an article stating that one of Brady’s victims, an eleven-year-old, didn’t speak up about the abuse as he was ‘fearful that if he said anything, it would be the end of his hopes as a pianist’.

  Apparently, another of Brady’s victims, a thirteen-year-old, was invited to his home for a ‘masterclass’ on Brady’s personal piano, but was greeted by Brady in a pink dressing gown, ‘which he took off to reveal he was naked, before abusing the boy’.

  Urgh. I click through the articles, comparing them. This pink dressing gown makes a fair few appearances. It seems Brady liked to lie next to his victims in bed wearing it, while trying to coax them into touching him. It gives me the creeps. Big time. What did he think it made him look like? A giant fucking marshmallow? Mister Blobby? A cuddly Care Bear?

  My eyes prick with tears. I hate him. I really, really hate him.

  I close the toilet seat, sit down and grab some loo roll. Two years after being sentenced and he’s out drinking, while those poor children’s lives are wrecked. Those kids will never, ever view the world in quite the same way again. They’ll never fully trust again. Or be quite as light and happy and carefree again. They have a life sentence to endure, but this twisted piece of shit is out and about, doing his thing. He’ll probably keep raping and pillaging to his heart’s content, destroying more lives, taking more innocence, and making the world an even darker, more horrific place. Tears fall down my cheeks. I mop them up with the tissue. Black smears stain the white; my mascara’s running, I need to pull myself together. My friends will be wondering what the hell I’m doing in here anyway. I draw in a deep, raggedy breath and blink the tears back. I blink it all back. Swallow it all in. But it never goes. It just builds and builds inside me. A ball of rage. Waiting to get out.

  I press the corner of the tissues I’m holding against my tongue and dab at my mascara stains, before dusting my cheeks with a bit of powder. I blink until my eyes look normal again, top up my mascara, apply a slick of my lipstick – Orgasm by NARS. Fuck’s sake.

  Funnily enough, Miles Brady is the first person I see when I come out of the toilets. Perhaps it’s the law of attraction. My thoughts have conjured him, or else the universe wants him dead, because there he is, reclining in an armchair in an ugly navy suit with a red pocket square. He’s sitting at a table with another old bastard, sipping whisky, laughing at something. It hits me again how normal he looks, how nice. He’s the kind of guy you’d stop in the street and ask for directions if you were lost. The sort of man you’d imagine is a loving dad or granddad even, a caring husband. And yet he dresses up as a marshmallow and tries to get little boys to touch him. I don’t know what to think. I just wanted one night off. Just one night, to hang out with my friends, have a few drinks and forget that the world is full of creeps, but I can’t get away from them. They’re everywhere.

  As I walk back to my table, I stop and chat to Mungo again. Better my friends think I’ve been busy talking to him all this time than googling a paedophile in the loo. Not that they’d ever suspect that. They’d probably approve of me talking to Mungo though. He’s the type they’d like to see me end up with – a sweet, attracti
ve, posh boy. They don’t really approve of my lovers.

  We chat a bit about Mungo’s art, his studio, and for a few moments, I allow myself to bask in the warm glow of Mungo’s lovely sheltered life, his unselfconscious privilege. I take it in, like sunshine. I gaze into his emerald-green eyes, smell his clean, fresh scent, return his friendly smile, but then, the shadows come back and my thoughts start to wander, retreating back to Miles Brady and as Mungo tells me about his upcoming exhibition, I ponder the ways I’d like to kill Miles.

  I could hang him with the tie of his pink dressing gown. Or I could lock him up in a dungeon and leave him there with no food or water and then, after about a week, as he’s about to die of thirst, I could give him one glass of water, to keep him going. Then I could cut his arm off while he’s starving to death, cook it up for him with some herbs and sauce and present it to him. I could get him to cannibalise himself to death. I read about that on Reddit recently. I’m not sure if it would work but it sounds fucking cool.

  ‘We should hang out sometime,’ Mungo suggests.

  ‘Sure!’ I reply, plastering a smile onto my face. ‘Sounds great.’

  I tell him I should be getting back to my friends and it’s only when I’m approaching our table that I realise I never gave Mungo my number. I was too preoccupied thinking about Miles. Oh well, Mungo can find me if he wants me.

  I hesitate as I sit down. Briony’s got her coat on. Priya’s draped a pashmina around her shoulders. A bill rests on a silver dish on the table, a few cards next to it. A waiter comes over carrying a card machine.

  ‘I can’t stay here with that creep around,’ Briony explains in a hushed voice.

  ‘We were thinking of The Cauldron,’ Annika tells me, slipping on her Moncler coat.

  ‘Sounds good,’ I reply, recalling the new cocktail bar around the corner as I take my wallet out of my bag.

  I glance over my shoulder to see Miles throwing his head back in laughter at something his friend has said. Asshole. I’ll deal with him later.

  7

  I know there are nicer things I could be doing on a Saturday morning than googling paedophiles, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

  Curled up under a cashmere blanket on my Amode sofa with my iPad on my lap, I set to work finding out as much as possible about Miles Brady. I’ve moved on from the information about his cases. I’ve read enough, I don’t need to torture myself. Now I’m focusing on his personal life: where he lives, what health condition he suffers from, where he hangs out. It’s surprisingly easy. All I had to do was look up a few old geezers who go to the private members bar we were at last night, add them on Facebook and eventually, I found my way to his page. Turns out he’s trying to reinvent himself as Giles Bradshaw. Idiot. His profile photo was of a cat, hopefully not his own. The last thing I need after killing him is to find a home for a poor little pussy. Giles the cat lover could have been someone else, but maybe he should have untagged himself from his friends’ photos. I’d recognise that creepy, pasty face anywhere.

  Now that I’ve found him, I have to decide what I’m going to do with him. I do like the idea of locking him up somewhere and slowly starving him to death, forcing him to cannibalise himself Reddit-style, but I should probably exercise some restraint with the whole Julian thing going on. It would be easier to make it look like a natural death or an accident. He definitely deserves something way more torturous, but as long as he’s gone, that’s the main thing. That might bring his victims some peace. And stop him creating new ones.

  My phone buzzes. It’s a notification from the Met Police’s Twitter account.

  @MetpoliceUK: Do you recognise this woman? Detectives are appealing to the public for information to identify this individual, seen with crossbow attack victim Julian Taylor on the night he was brutally murdered in Hayes on Sunday, 18th January.

  Oh my God. The picture is of me and Julian, staggering down the street in Hayes. I don’t look like myself, I’ve got my Ciara wig on and the denim cap I was wearing does a good job of concealing most of my face, but the tip of my nose is visible, my lips, the angle of my jawline. Fuck. I scroll through Twitter, browsing different accounts, but the police have only released one image. It’s grainy. On first impression, you’d never think it was me, but the lips are my lips, the jawline is my jawline. My hands bead with sweat, my heart’s thumping. The Met’s tweet already has seventy-seven likes and forty-three retweets. It’s got eighteen comments. I scroll through them.

  @jonah0871: Catch this bitch

  @tony5stevens: Lunatic

  @claire_xx: What the fuck?! No way she killed him!

  Someone’s left a GIF of a Funny Yellow Guy cartoon character with flashing red lights going off around its head with the words ‘Freak Alert!’. Rude.

  @jimbob_90 has written, ‘I’d swipe right tbh’ with a see no evil bear emoji. Haha.

  I click onto a tweet with a link to a BBC article about the photo. It’s already the third most read story on their site. What the… How long has this information been circulating? I click onto the Daily Mail – nothing yet – but they’ll no doubt be all over this in minutes. Fuck’s sake. I was beginning to think the whole thing was about to blow over since there hadn’t been an update for days, but this picture is going to fire everything up. I refresh Twitter and sure enough, there’s an article from The Sun, with the headline ‘Could this woman be crossbow victim’s “deadly date”?’ Great. People are going to love that. The comments are already pouring in.

  @steveguillion1: Scary. Find her and give her the death penalty. #hangher

  @markyboy17: *deletes Tinder

  @imran_named: Sorry but no way a woman did this

  @sweetirishgirl: Find her, lock her up and throw away the key. Sick

  @elaineDDingram: London these days. So glad I left

  @needaholiday: This is what happens when you ask to go Dutch on the bill

  It’s more of the same. Garbage. I’m about to click off, go and make a coffee, and try to forget about it when a new comment captures my attention.

  @adrianclark: Is it just me or do these two look kind of similar? Look at the face… SERIAL KILLER????

  @adrianclark has taken my picture and posted it next to the hotel security image of me after I killed that repulsive bastard Edmond Wyatt – the sugar daddy who was beating women up. The blurry image shows me in my blonde wig and a fedora, strutting through the hotel lobby, after I left the crime scene. Both pictures are nice and grainy, and you can barely see anything beyond the blonde curls and the hat in the hotel shot, and on the surface, the pictures don’t look particularly alike, but side by side, you can spot the similarities: the shape of my mouth is the same, so is the jawline. Oh shit. I fucking hate Twitter. Why are people always trying to be so quick and clever on there? They’re outsmarting the fucking cops. The cops I could handle.

  Who is this @adrianclark? I click onto his page. A young guy with a cute face – wide eyes and a dimple in his chin. Sheepskin jacket. Green hair. Three hundred and seventy-six followers. His bio reads: ‘21. Criminology, Newcastle University. Rat daddy.’ His tweets are all comments on murders. Retweets of criminology research. Pictures of his rats. Wry commentary on his life: ‘My hairdresser just very firmly told me that I should chase my dreams. I mean, thanks? But my hair looks awful?’ and ‘When your Uber rating’s 3.4 and you’ve never even been sick in a car. Just unlikeable then? FML.’ His tweet about me has seventeen likes already and five retweets. It’s only been two minutes. There are three comments.

  @bookishthings: omg… SAME PERSON!

  @scotinengland: You could be onto something. Have @metpoliceuk connected this?!

  @motorroller: Whaaaaaat?! Mind BLOWN!!! London has a serial killer!

  Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. I place my iPad down and get up. I pace around my flat. I walk over to my floor-to-ceiling window with its view over London. What the fuck am I going to do? Surely a rat-loving twenty-one-year-old with green hair isn’t going to be my downfall? And yet,
I’m sweating. I feel done for. The whole sugar daddy slayer thing blew over pretty quickly. No one came forward identifying me then, or at least if they did, the police never followed up on it. But what about now? What if the media gets wind of this serial killer angle? What if the police investigate it? No one will shut up about this if the police reveal there could be a serial killer on the loose. What if someone sees my face? Really sees it. Sees beyond the wigs and the hats and spots the lips, the jawline. What if this is the end? A chill sweeps over me. My heart pounds in my chest.

  No. It’s not going to happen as long as I stay calm and cool-headed. I look out over the city. I need to avoid being out and about as much as possible over the next few weeks. Keep a low profile. No one will suspect me at work. They wouldn’t dare, but what about Jess? What if she ties together the fact that my date’s name was Julian with the similarity in the images? What if she reports me? Would she do that? Surely not. Jess and I have worked together for years. She knows me as a decent person. Surely, she’d never really believe I could be a serial killer. And even if she did, would the police be able to do anything? So, I look a tiny bit like those pictures, and I went on a date with a guy called Julian, what else have they got on me? There’s no actual evidence tying me to the scene. I’m careful like that. And anyway, would Jess really jeopardise everything? The police wouldn’t be able to charge me, I’d be released, and yet our relationship would be ruined forever. I’d get another assistant, Jess would lose her job, word would get around about what she’d done, she’d never be hired again in fashion, she wouldn’t be able to keep up with the mortgage repayments on her lovely Clapham house. Her husband, Jake – an unemployed artist – wouldn’t exactly be able to cover it. They’d end up having to move out, rent some shitty flat. Jess wouldn’t want that. She definitely wouldn’t want that.