by Rosie Walker
No answer.
‘Zoe? The door.’
Still no answer. Helen can hear Zoe wandering around, and the low thump of bass on her stereo, but either Zoe didn’t hear or she’s choosing to ignore her.
Helen rinses her hands and walks to the door while she dries them on a tea towel. She pulls open the front door. Tony’s standing on the step, his face yellow in the porch light.
‘You’re not my daughter,’ he says with a chuckle. He’s grinning; clearly he heard her shouting for Zoe. He’s teasing, but Helen’s not feeling jovial this evening. She steps aside to invite her ex-husband into the house. ‘She’s still packing her bag; you might have to wait a while.’
‘That’s not unexpected.’ He steps into the hall and picks up the ballet shoe, examining its stains with a curious look on his face. ‘I won’t ask.’
‘Alfie brought it home.’ She tells him about the Lune Hospital while Tony examines the shoe.
‘Sounds like your kind of project, cool architecture with a side of local history.’ Tony drops the shoe back onto the carpet. ‘Need to wash my hands now, though. Train your dog not to pick up rubbish.’
‘He’s untrainable,’ she jokes, and Alfie wags his tail as she ruffles his ears.
He rinses his hands in the downstairs loo and follows Helen into the living room, where he throws himself onto the sofa and puts his feet on the coffee table without removing his shoes. Helen winces but doesn’t say anything. Let Melanie whine about shoes on the coffee table in their own house.
For a moment, Helen feels light, more carefree. She doesn’t have to nag another adult about anything ever again if she doesn’t want to. Her only responsibilities are to herself and Zoe, no one else. It’s quite liberating, given enough distance from the pain of a divorce. And it did need four years of distance to really appreciate.
‘Fancy a glass of wine while you wait?’ she asks, waving her own glass of red at Tony through the doorway from the kitchen.
Tony gives her a thumbs up. ‘Just a little one; I’m driving.’
She hands him a glass and sits next to him on the sofa.
‘How are you doing?’ he says in that voice he reserves for friendly concern, as if she’s ill or someone’s died.
She can’t let him use that voice on her, not anymore. ‘Really great, thank you. Never better. Looking forward to a night in on my own, actually. I might open another bottle.’
He chuckles. ‘Good for you.’
‘How about you?’
‘I suspect we’ll have our hands full with the twins and Zoe all night. I think they’re dying to play some new game with her.’
Zoe enters the living room in a cloud of perfume, her hair backcombed and a huge amount of eyeliner on her lower lashes.
‘Hey, panda-eyes!’ teases Tony.
Zoe ignores his remark. ‘I can’t play with the twins tonight, I’m afraid. I have plans.’
Tony’s face falls, and he looks like a young man again, the young man Helen met years before. ‘But you’re coming over to ours to stay,’ he says firmly.
‘Well, no one asked me what my plans were. And I have plans already, so yes I’m sleeping at yours but I’m not staying in.’
Tony sits forward, lowering his feet onto the floor and setting down his wine glass where his heels were. ‘Yes, you are. We have a standing arrangement with Melanie and the twins.’
‘I’ll have dinner with you guys, but I’m going out later with my friends. It’s been arranged for ages.’ She sits in the armchair and pulls her denim skirt down her thighs to cover some skin.
Tony shakes his head and looks at Helen, his eyes pleading with her to fix this somehow.
Helen shrugs. This one’s Tony’s to fix; Helen has to battle with Zoe’s teenage strops most days, and now it’s his turn.
Tony stands up and drains his wine glass, grabbing his car keys off the table. ‘Come on, then. You’re at least having dinner with the family before you go anywhere.’
‘That’s fine,’ states Zoe. She stands, pulling down her skirt again and shouldering her backpack.
‘Did you bring clothes for college tomorrow?’ asks Helen. ‘Wouldn’t want you to have to wear that outfit in class.’
‘Yes, Mum.’ Zoe leans down and kisses Helen on the cheek.
‘Bye, love you,’ calls Helen as Zoe head out of the door. ‘Be careful, Zoe, okay?’ she calls, remembering that newspaper article. Outside, there’s a slam as Zoe gets in the car and closes the door behind her. Through the passenger window, Helen can see Zoe’s face lit up blue by the light on her phone as her thumbs tap on the screen to share the injustice of being a teenager.
Tony turns around and frowns at Helen, rolling his eyes slightly.
‘Find out where she’s going and who with before you let her go anywhere. And make her wear jeans if you can.’
Tony salutes and follows Zoe out of the house.
The front door closes behind them and the house is quiet. Helen glances at Alfie, who’s on his bed looking at her, his head resting on his paws.
‘Peace at last, Alf.’
Him
‘Petra?’ he whispers. No response.
He stops in the hall, silent, listening. Nothing. He moves down the darkened corridor, his footsteps echoing on the wooden floorboards. The kitchen is dark, blinds drawn against the daylight, a plate waiting to be washed by the sink.
Even though he didn’t choose it himself, this house is ideal for his purposes: at the end of a quiet street where everyone is too concerned with what others think of them to notice what is actually happening around them.
It was his childhood house, where he learned to be the person he is now, under the firm guiding hand of his mother. For him, it is the place where he sleeps, the place where he stores his belongings, but it is not his home. She had an inkling of the full depths of who he is, he suspects. Enough to teach him how to hide it, to use it. She showed him how to keep his intense anger inside, to store it and channel its power for useful purposes. He will always be grateful to her for the lessons she taught him, even though the process of learning was painful.
He has lived alone since his mother departed. The mere thought of sharing his space with another makes him shiver. But Petra is different.
He opens the back door, stepping out into the garden. It’s a small patch of grass bordered by high wooden fences on either side, with man-height hedges to block out the neighbours.
‘Petra?’ He hears a bell tinkling and a muffled mew. Petra emerges from under one of the bushes, her tail upright, mouth stuffed full of something furry. She meows again. He is always surprised by how loudly Petra can call while her mouth is full. She’s a beautiful cat, larger than a normal tabby. She looks more like a miniature leopard than a domesticated feline. She drops her prize at his feet.
Petra has caught a vole. It tries to scuttle away, dragging a broken leg. Its black eyes shine with fear. She’s clearly been playing with it for some time. Domestic cats can play with an injured animal for hours before killing them.
Petra reaches out with her paw, pinning the creature to the patio. She looks up at him, seeking approval.
He understands feline emotions, they’re so legible. He moves his features into a smile, sure the cat can read his expression too. He reaches down to stroke Petra’s neck, behind her ears. She pushes against his hand, brushing his palm with her whiskers, acknowledging his superiority.
‘Good girl, you’ve brought home a plaything for us.’ He settles on the step, leaning against the doorframe. There’s going to be a nice little performance. Petra likes to play with her food.
The cat lies down, tucking her front legs underneath her and smothering the vole. She can probably feel it wriggling under her chest. He imagines the cat’s satisfaction at feeling the creature’s futile twitches; the mastery of knowing there is no way she can be thwarted.
Petra watches him, her steady gaze trained on the human’s, eye to eye. He respects this cat more than any human. S
he knows her own mind, asks for nothing, does whatever she wants, and causes destruction without the encumbrance of remorse. Remorse is a waste of time. It’s a weakness, a pointless construction of the inferior brain. The big cats feel no remorse; you don’t see a lion apologising to the disembowelled zebra, crying over its bloodied corpse. No. The lion is a survivor, fighting to get what it needs and consuming where it can.
One could argue that the domestic cat is an unnecessary killer: with a bowl full of cat food on their owner’s kitchen floor, why do they slaughter unsuspecting and undefended rodents and birds? Why torture them before they put them to death? But he understands and respects that. It’s entertainment. Instinct. Desire. And all without remorse.
Petra digs her claws into the fur of the vole, tossing its broken body into the air. It lands on the concrete with a small thump. The helpless creature tries to get away, but now both of its rear legs are broken and it drags the back half of its body behind it along the patio. Petra watches the painful progress, letting the vole believe it has a chance of escape. She follows slowly, legs retracted into her body, muscles taut, stomach and head close to the ground. A little killing machine.
He leans forward, hands on his knees. There’s a delicate trail of blood spotted across the flagstones, and Petra releases the vole for long enough for him to see that the small intestine is hanging out of a gash in the abdomen. Nice work, cat. The vole lies on its side, belly heaving with its last breaths. Its eyes still sparkle. He stands up and walks over to the creature.
‘My turn,’ he says to Petra. The cat steps back to watch. She respects her master.
He steps forward, placing the toe of his boot on the vole’s head. Transferring his weight into his right leg, he prepares to press down on the skull, anticipating the crunch through the sole of his boot.
The vole’s whiskers shudder, nose still sniffing the air in its last moments. Its eyelid twitches, its black eye shines. If he moves closer, he would see his own face reflected back at him in that vole’s eye. He’d see the grimace on his face as he took its life.
The muscle in his thigh flexes and he’s ready to stomp, to crush the bones.
He sucks in air through his teeth with a hiss. ‘No.’
Something stops him at the last moment. He lifts his foot off the creature and stands, hands on hips, staring out into the garden, the grass high and waving in the breeze.
He nods at Petra and leaves her with the vole, still shivering on the patio. Let nature take its course today.
There’s no time to waste; it’s time to make some plans. He needs to get the wheels turning faster on his next victim. Years of waiting; years of biting his tongue, doing as he’s told. The meek good-boy who never put a foot wrong. A servant.
***
He enters the house through the patio and gathers two surgical gloves from the kitchen cupboard where he keeps his cleaning supplies. He pulls them over his hands and flexes his fingers until the fit is snug. From his bag he removes his most recent plunder: a stolen baseball cap and woollen gloves. He lays them out on the kitchen table, the clean oak his mother used to polish every Sunday.
Next, he picks up one of the gloves, pinched between his thumb and forefinger as if it’s poisoned. He pulls it over his surgically-gloved hand, testing the fit. They’re slightly large on him, which is fine – better that he can wear the surgical gloves underneath: uncontaminated DNA can mingle with the blood of victims to produce the perfect frame.
Inside the hat, loose hairs and skin cells hide in the folds of the material. He sits for a moment, staring at the ring of dried sweat and the back of the embroidered letters inside. Then: an idea. He climbs the stairs and opens the door to his mother’s bedroom.
The air smells of her talcum powder and Chanel No. 5 perfume, which he still sprays into the air every month or so when the scent starts to fade. Everything is as she left it when she went to hospital and never came home again: the chintz bedclothes are perfectly smooth, with one cushion positioned in the centre of two pillows. The dressing table is framed by a row of her ‘lotions and potions’, as she called them: face moisturiser, night cream, serum, face powder, and many other creams, powders and gels of unknown purpose.
He sits at the dressing table, where his mother sat for hours as she rolled curlers in her hair or wrapped it around tongs for a night out. She was glamorous in her youth; she knew she was beautiful, and she liked to attract men to her ‘like bees around a honeypot’; another one of her little phrases.
She liked to entice men and see what she could get from them, how far they’d go to win her favour. Her son was no exception. She was proud of how men strove to impress her; she played a game to win their hearts and then stomp on them. A game that she showed her son how to play, on a different scale.
She liked to toy with men’s hearts – particularly those who were easily won and easily hurt. She liked those who didn’t question what she wanted from them: the ones less clever than the rest, or those who thought that attractive women owed them attention. She taught him not to push, not to question her, to give her the respect she deserved.
His fingers stray to the raised scar on his left forearm, the white circular burn, like a button to push when he wants to remember. He still loves her, even now. Misses her presence around the house, even though part of him sighs with relief every time he returns home and remembers that she’s no longer here. That she can’t hurt him now.
She taught him well, although she was a brutal teacher. His own methods take his mother’s approach one step further. He likes those who are easily tricked, enticed away from their friends, into a car, down the dark alley. They deserve to be taught a lesson. They shouldn’t be so stupid. They should sense the danger in him because it leaks from his every pore: if he can feel it, why can’t they? They deserve their fate, just like his mother’s men deserved to be cheated out of whatever they would give her.
He picks up the lotions and potions, feeling the weight of the pots and the cut-glass bottles. His mother’s hands once held those jars too, not so many years ago. No one else has touched these objects. Just him. He’s careful, placing them back in the exact position, lining up the edges where the ring of dust begins. He was a careless child once. He’s not careless anymore. The silver scars threading across his palms tell the story of a boy forced to pick up the jagged shards of anything he broke. But he’s not angry. He’s grateful.
He opens the top drawer, where her silken undergarments are laid out in folded rows. Pinks, creams, light blues – all pastel colours. No black or red; his mother wasn’t a whore.
He reaches to the back and finds what he knows is there: a pair of sheer stockings in a light colour, like skin.
It seems a shame to take them from his mother’s drawers, as if his collection will be incomplete now. He shakes his head. His mother has no use for a pair of stockings now, and she would understand.
Staring at his reflection in the dressing table mirror, he pulls the end of the stocking over his scalp, making a tight hat from the material. There. Now he’s protected from the baseball cap and the flakes of someone else’s skin and dried sweat. He ties a knot into the leg of the stocking and cuts off the remaining fabric with Mother’s nail scissors. Then he pulls the hat onto his head, tucking the stocking away and out of sight.
In the mirror, he doesn’t look like himself anymore.
‘Hi,’ he says to himself in the mirror. He smiles a little, practicing a friendly, open expression. He lifts his eyebrows up from their usual hooded frown. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Then again, it never has. Even in the old school photos stacked in the dresser drawer, never hung on the walls. She wasn’t like other mothers, with school portraits on proud display. They weren’t a normal family, inside their house with the doors closed and curtains drawn. Even then, he was pretending to be normal to the outside world, just like now.
He nods at himself in the mirror, smiles once more. His teeth look nice and white. ‘Nice to meet you.’
His voice seems to echo, even though the room is furnished and carpeted. It’s been a long time since someone spoke out loud in here.
‘Okay’ he says to himself. ‘Tonight, we’ll go out and paint the town red.’
Anonymous: How to get away with murder
By Urban Dark Reporter
Anonymous contributor claims to advise readers on the best techniques for committing horrible crimes*
* Editor’s note: This article is for entertainment purposes only; Urban Dark Reporter accepts no responsibility for any harm caused by following the directions outlined below.
Inspired by Leonard McVitie’s lesson plan (check back in a few days and all will be revealed), here’s an imagined syllabus for a willing pupil:
Location, Location, Location
Find a location with no connection to you; remote with no danger of being overheard. Your prey can run away, but you’ll soon catch them nearby with no witnesses. If you’re indoors, ensure it’s easy to hose down, and be ready to abandon it if it’s compromised.
Frame someone else
Plan in advance: select an unwitting person and plant evidence throughout their life. Sow seeds of doubt in the minds of their loved ones, charm their wives and children, go for dinner, and all the time, remove things and leave things behind. Steal their underwear, the hair from their hairbrush, their soiled clothes. Secrete tokens from your victims in a place they won’t be found until a police search, even a box of trophies if you can bear to part with it. They’ll be hard to leave behind but you will always know where they are.
Choose your victims
The ideal prey won’t be missed. However, children are easy to grab and transport, and most of them follow instruction from adults. Adult males are available and incautious, often putting themselves in risky situations. Teenage girls won’t fight, and often don’t recognise a threat until it’s too late. And they can’t take their booze. Adult women are a viable target but you must ensure vulnerability and lack of self-defence skill. Avoid fat ones of any demographic. They’re hard to transport, difficult to undress and disposing of their bodies is annoying.
