by Luke Delaney
I had already decided to spend the evening stalking the patrons of a Vauxhall nightclub, Utopia. What a ridiculous name. More like Hell, if you ask me. I told my wife I was going out of town on business, packed some spare clothes, toiletries, the usual things for a night away, and booked a hotel room in Victoria. I could hardly turn up at home in the early hours. That would arouse suspicions. I couldn’t have that. Everything at home needed to appear. . normal.
I also packed a paper painter’s suit that I bought at Homebase, several pairs of surgical gloves-readily available from all sorts of shops-a shower cap, and some plastic bags to cover my feet. A little noisy, but effective. And last but not least a syringe. All fitted neatly into a small knapsack.
Avoiding the CCTV cameras that swamped the area, I watched the entrance to the club from the shadows of the railway bridge as the sound of the trains reverberated through the archways.
I had already spied my target entering the club earlier that evening. The excitement made my testicles tighten. Yes, he was truly worthy of my special attentions. This wasn’t the first time I had seen him. I had watched him a couple of weeks earlier, watched him whore himself inside the club to whoever could match his price. I had been searching for the perfect victim, knowing the police would only check CCTV from the night he died or, if they were especially diligent, maybe the week before.
I had stood in the midst of the heaving throng of stinking, foul humanity, bodies brushing past my own, tainting my being with their diseased imperfection, while at the same time inflaming my already excited, heightened senses. I so wanted to reach out and take each and every one of them by the throat, crushing trachea after trachea as the dead began to pile at my feet. I fought hard to control the surging strength within, then terror gripped me, terror like I have never felt in my entire life. Terror that the real me was revealing itself, that all those around me could see me changing in front of their very eyes, my skin glowing a brilliant red, bright white light spilling from my eyes and ears, vomiting from my mouth. Heavy drops of sweat had snaked down my back, guided by my swelling, cramping back muscles. Somehow I had managed to move my legs, pushing through a crowd of squabbling worshippers until I reached the bar and stared into the giant mirror hanging behind it. Relief washed over me, slowing my heart and cooling my sweat as I could see I hadn’t changed, hadn’t betrayed myself.
Now the time for watching was over. It was time for my prize, my release, my relief. All was in place. All was as it needed to be. At last I saw him leaving the club. He was shouting good-byes, but seemed to be alone. He walked casually under the railway bridge, heading toward Vauxhall Bridge. I moved quickly and silently to the other side of the railway bridge and waited for him. As he neared, I stepped out. He saw me, but didn’t look scared. He returned my smile as I spoke to him.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes,” he replied, still smiling, stepping closer to the streetlight to better see me. “Is there something I can do for. . you,” he said, recognition spreading across his face. “We really must stop meeting like this.” Yes, I’d been with him before. A risk, but a calculated one. A little more than a week ago, inside the nightclub, I’d introduced myself without speaking, making sure he saw my smiling face just long enough so he’d recognize it again. Later I met him outside. I paid him what he asked, all in advance, and we went back to his flat where I defiled myself inside him and even allowed him to defile the inside of me. The sex wasn’t important, or even pleasurable-that wasn’t the point of being with him. I wanted to feel him while he was alive, to understand he wasn’t merely an inanimate thing, but a real live person. I couldn’t be with him like that the night I dispatched him in case I left the faintest trace of semen or saliva on his body. Being with him a week or so before would give any such evidence time to degrade and die. And of course we practiced safe sex: he to protect himself from the Gay Plague and I to protect myself from detection. I’d shaved away my pubic hair so none could be left at the scene and wore a full-faced rubber mask that also covered my head, stopping any head hairs from being left either, as well as rubber gloves to eliminate the risk of leaving fingerprints-all of which the little queer thought was simply part of the fun. But the fun, the real fun, was yet to come, and I had more than a week to fantasize about the events that lay ahead.
The days had passed painfully slowly, testing my patience and control to the limit, but the memories of the night I had been with him and the thought of things to come carried me through, and before I knew it he was standing in front of me, his small, straight white teeth glistening in the streetlights, his oval-shaped head too large for his scrawny neck, perched on slim, narrow shoulders. His hair was blond and straight, shoulder-length, styled to make him look like a surfer, but his skin was pale and his body weak. The most athletic thing he had ever done was drop to his knees. His T-shirt was too tight and short, revealing his flat stomach, disappearing into hipster designer jeans worn to provoke the sexual urges of his peers.
I told him I needed to be with him again. I lied that I had been inside the club and had seen him dancing, that I had been too nervous to approach him then, but now I really wanted him. We talked some more crap then he said, “You know I’m not cheap. If you want to be with me again it’ll cost.”
He suggested we go to my place, so I told him my boyfriend would be there, but he started rambling on about not taking people back to his flat and how last time had been an exception, until I pulled another two fifties from my wallet and thrust them into his hand. He smiled.
We went to my car, fixed with false plates, and drove to his shithole in southeast London where I was sure not to park too close to his block. Telling him I didn’t want to take the risk of being seen walking to his flat with him, I suggested that he go ahead and leave the door unlocked.
I waited a couple of minutes, then, as the street was empty, no one staring from windows, I walked to the flat. The block was old, cold, and smelled of piss, but he had been a good boy and left the door unlocked. I quietly entered and flicked the lock on. He appeared around the corner at the end of the corridor, from what I knew was the living room. He spoke.
“Was that you locking the door?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Can’t be too careful these days.”
“Afraid someone’s going to burst in on us and spoil the party?”
“Something like that.”
The excitement was unbearable. My stomach was so cramped with anticipation I could hardly breathe. Inside, my mind was screaming, but I was still wearing my nervous smile as I walked into the living room.
The whore knelt by his CD player. I told him I wanted to clean up a little and headed for the bathroom down the hallway.
I took my bag with me, and quickly, if somewhat awkwardly, pulled on the suit, the shower cap, rubber gloves, and finally the plastic bags over my shoes. I looked in the mirror, filling my lungs with air drawn in hard through my nose. I was ready.
Fully prepared, I returned to the living room. He turned and saw me dressed and resplendent. He started to giggle, covering his mouth as if to stop himself.
He spoke to me. “Is this how we’re going to get our kicks tonight then?”
They were the last words he spoke, although he may have said “please” a little later. By then the blood bubbling up into his mouth made it just a gargle.
With a smooth, swift, practiced hand I grabbed an iron statue of a naked Indian he kept on his side table and I used it to smash his skull, not hitting him hard enough to kill him straightaway, merely to render him semiconscious and virtually paralyzed. He had been on his knees when I hit him, which was good-less distance to fall meant less noise when he hit the floor.
I watched him for a while, standing over him like the victor in a prizefight, watching his chest rise and fall with each painful, strained breath, the blood initially spurting from the wound in his head, then slowing to a steady flow as his heart grew too weak to pump it at the pressure his body required to stay alive. Eve
ry few seconds his right leg would twitch like a dying bird.
It wouldn’t have been as I had dreamed if he hadn’t been at least partly conscious when I went to him with an ice pick I found in his drinks cabinet. I needed him to be alive as I cut him. I needed to see him try to stop me each time I pushed the ice pick into his dying body: not stabbing frenziedly, but placing it deliberately against his pale skin. Now and then he would reach up and pitifully try to defend himself from the torture. I told him not to be a naughty boy and continued with my work. It was a shame his brain hemorrhaging had caused his eyes to turn red, as I had wanted to contrast his blue eyes against the pale bloodied skin. Next time I’d do better.
His perforated body almost began to disgust me, to make me want to flee from the scene, but I couldn’t stop yet. Not until all was as close as it could be to how I had seen it in my mind the first time I knew I would be visiting him. When he finally died, a slow, quiet hiss of air escaping from his lips and the breaches in his chest wall told me that my fun had come to an end. I put on a clean pair of surgical gloves and took the three hundred pounds in cash I had given him earlier from his pants pocket. I really didn’t want to leave that behind. I carefully and quietly broke apart some furniture and generally arranged the room as if a violent struggle had occurred. Next I used the syringe I’d brought to draw blood from his mouth and sprayed it about the room: on the walls, over the furniture, on the carpet, making spray patterns to suggest a violent struggle had taken place. Then I moved to the corner of the room I had left clean. I removed my protective layers and put them inside a plastic bag and put that bag inside another plastic bag and repeated this twice more. I ensured that each plastic bag was tied securely and finally put the bundle in my knapsack. I put new plastic bags on my feet, not wanting to take the chance that I might step on a spot of blood-that sort of evidence can be difficult to explain. I put on another clean pair of rubber surgical gloves and left the living room. I would burn all of it in my garden the following evening, the safest way to dispose of such incriminating items. To burn them in a public place risked attracting attention, while burial would leave them at the mercy of inquisitive animals.
I moved quietly to the front door. I took the plastic bags off my shoes and looked through the peephole. Nobody about. Just to be sure, I listened at the door, careful not to let my ear press against it and possibly leave a mark, like a fingerprint, which I hear can happen.
When I was totally happy, I slipped out of the flat, leaving the front door open so as not to make any more noise than necessary. The statue of the Indian and the ice pick I threw in the Thames as I headed north to my hotel. The thought of the police wasting hours searching for weapons that wouldn’t help their investigation in the slightest pleased me.
When I reached my hotel I slipped in through the side door next to the bar, generally used only as a fire exit. I knew it could open from the outside and had no CCTV camera trained on it. I already had the key card for my room, having checked in earlier that day. I took a long shower, keeping the water as hot as I could bear, scrubbing skin, nails, and hair vigorously with a nailbrush until my entire body felt like it had been burned by flames. I had removed the plug cover to allow any items washed from my body to flow easily into London’s sewage system. After the shower I took a long steaming bath and scrubbed myself again. Once dry I lay naked on the bed and drank two bottles of water, at peace now. Satisfied. Soon sleep came and I dreamed the same beautiful dream over and over.
CHAPTER 3
Thursday, late afternoon
Sean and Donnelly walked along the corridors of Guy’s Hospital, heading for the mortuary. They were accompanied by Detective Constable Sam Muir, who would be acting as exhibits officer-taking responsibility for any objects the pathologist found on or in the body during the postmortem. Sean wondered if he would bump into his wife, Kate, one of the all too few doctors attending to the never-ending flow of patients through the Accident and Emergency Department-the sick and injured from the surrounding areas of Southwark, Bermondsey, and beyond. Some of London’s poorest and most forgotten, living in public housing projects where violence and crime were seldom far away, all of their degradation and suffering going unnoticed and unseen by the swarms of tourists wandering around Tower Bridge and Tooley Street. If only they knew how close they were to some of London’s most dangerous territory.
His mind returned to the victim’s parents. He and Sally had called at the small town house in Putney. A desirable neighborhood on the whole, but boisterous on weekend evenings. Sally had done most of the talking.
Daniel had been their only child. The mother was devastated and didn’t care who saw her fall to the floor screaming. Her despair was a physical pain. When she could speak, all she could say was the name of her son.
The father was stunned. He didn’t know whether to help his wife or collapse himself. He ended up doing neither. Sean took him into the living room. Sally stayed with the mother.
They knew their son was gay. It had bothered the father at first, but he had grown to accept it. What else could he do other than push the boy away? And he would never do that. He said his son worked as a nightclub manager. He wasn’t sure where, but Daniel had been doing well for himself and had no money problems, unlike other young people.
He hadn’t met any of his son’s friends. Daniel hadn’t kept in touch with his old school friends. He came home quite often, almost every Sunday, for lunch. If he had a boyfriend then neither he nor his wife knew about it. Their son had said he wasn’t interested in anything like that. They hadn’t pressed him.
The father had asked what they were to do now. His wife would be finished. She lived for the boy, not him. He knew it and didn’t mind-but with the boy gone?
He wanted to know who would do this to his boy-who would do this to them? Why? Sean had no answers.
As the three detectives entered the mortuary they could see Dr. Simon Canning preparing for the postmortem. A body lay covered with a green sheet on what Sean knew would be a cold, metal operating table. Water continually ran under the body to an exit drain as the pathologist did his work, so that the whole thing resembled a large, shallow stainless-steel bathtub.
Some detectives could detach themselves from the ugly reality of postmortems, bury themselves in the science and art of the procedure. Unfortunately, Sean was not one of those detectives. For days to come images of his own postmortem would blend with the memories of his shattered childhood. Meanwhile Dr. Simon Canning was busy arranging his tools-bright, shiny metal instruments for torturing the dead.
“Afternoon, Detectives.”
“Doctor. Good to see you again,” Sean replied.
“I doubt that,” said the pathologist. Canning was pleasant enough, but businesslike and succinct. “I hope you don’t mind, Inspector. I’ve started without you. I was just having a bit of a cleanup before continuing. Right then, shall we get on with it?”
The doctor pulled back the sheet covering the body with one quick movement of his arm. Sean almost expected him to say, “Voilà!” like a waiter lifting the lid off a silver platter.
The hair on the back and side of the head was matted with blood-it looked sticky. Sean could clearly see the gashes in the side of the head and the small stab marks all over the naked body.
“Seventy-seven,” Canning told him.
Sean realized he was being spoken to. He glanced up at the doctor. “Sorry?”
“Separate stab wounds. Seventy-seven in total. None in the back of the body. All in the front. Made by some form of stiletto knife, or an ice pick, but it’s the first blow to the head that killed him. Eventually.”
Dr. Canning pointed to the head wound. Sean forced himself to lean closer to the body. “One can see the ear is missing. Not cut off, but more a case of the victim being hit so hard that whatever he was hit with crushed the skull and still had enough energy to tear the ear away as the swing of the object carried through.”
“Nice” was all Sean said.<
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“And the victim was on his knees when the first blow was struck,” the doctor continued. “We can see the cut to the scalp is angled downward, not upward. The killer swung low, not high.”
“Or he was hit from behind?” Sean offered.
“No,” Canning told him. “He fell backward, not forward. Look at the stains from the flow of blood. They run to the back of the head, not toward the face.”
He looked at the detectives, making sure they were concentrating on what he was saying and not what they were seeing. He had their attention.
“But that’s all straightforward. The interesting thing is the angle of the stab wounds. Bearing in mind of course that our friend here has wounds from his ankles to his throat, I can be almost positive the victim was already prostrate on the floor when he was stabbed. That in itself isn’t unusual.” The doctor paused to catch his breath before continuing his lecture. “The interesting bit is this-most of the stab wounds are at the wrong angle of entry. You see?”
“I’m not quite with you, Doctor.”
“It’s like this.” Canning looked around for a prop. He found a pair of scissors. “First, I know the killer is probably right-handed. The angle of the stab wounds tells me that, as does the fact the victim was hit on the left side of his head. Now, imagine I’m the killer. The victim can play himself. In order to stab somebody from head to toe, the killer would have to be at the side of the body. Not on top, as you would first imagine. If he sat astride the body then it would have been difficult to reach around and stab the thighs, the shins.” The doctor twisted his body back toward the victim’s feet so as to give a practical demonstration. His point was well made.
“Also, the entire body has puncture wounds. There isn’t a large enough unmolested area to suggest the killer was sitting astride the victim.”
