The woman entered and the man closed the door behind her, shutting out the sound of the rain.
'Where…?' began the woman.
The man pointed to the table where the telephone sat and the woman smiled and brushed lightly past him. He stiffened as her arm made contact with him on the way past. God, she was good this one, much more subtle than the whores but just as evil. He felt the hardness begin and swallowed as she picked up the receiver. Her back was to him. He could see the line of her underwear through the material of her skirt where it stretched across her buttocks. She moved her weight to the other foot and turned to smile at him while she waited for the number to ring through. The smile faltered a little when he did not return it and she turned to face the wall again.
The bitch was beginning to suspect that he was on to her little game and that pleased him. He wanted her to know. He wanted her to be afraid. He walked over to where the beaker of water was simmering.
'Darling? It's me. The bloody car's packed in and I…'
The woman's voice changed to a scream as a cascade of boiling water hit the back of her neck. She dropped the phone and slumped to her knees with her hands behind her head, trying to bury her face between her thighs in a futile attempt to escape the agony. She sucked in air in great gulps but found it impossible to scream again. Shock had paralysed her larynx. Too late she tried to cover her face as another container was emptied over her. This time it was cold but within seconds it had turned to fire and acid fumes filled her nostrils. Her eyes became burning embers as hitherto undreamed of levels of pain became reality. Her previously unblemished skin started to peel and smoulder. Her lips swelled to twice their normal size and her blistered tongue grew too large for her mouth. She whimpered like a wounded animal as she crawled around the floor looking blindly for a way out of the nightmare.
The man replaced the dangling receiver with its distantly calling voice and smiled thinly for the first time. 'Now I can see what you really look like,' he hissed. 'Now that the powder and the paint have gone I can see the real you. You're ugly! Evil! He went to the bathroom and came back wearing his apron and carrying his instruments.
The floor was awash with blood and the man now had a corpse to dispose of before morning. Easier said than done. If he could reduce the cadaver to packages of manageable size his options would be wider. The immediate problem lay in the fact that he did not have a saw in the flat. He had knives that would deal with flesh and sinew but not with bones. He could not risk leaving the apartment to go fetch one; he would have to break the bones instead.
The first leg was the worst. He did not know how much pressure to apply and consequently needed three or four attempts before making the break. He changed his technique and pressed a block of wood into service as a bridge, placing each limb in turn on the bridge so that a sharp blow from the heel of his right foot made a clean snap.
Sweat was running off him by the time he had the body cut and packed into six plastic sacks. The next question was what to do with them. Burial in some out of the way place was the obvious thing but just as he had no call to keep a saw in the basement likewise he had no reason to have a spade. He had no way of digging a hole even if he could think of a good lonely spot. He considered the alternatives of a river or a canal perhaps but both had their drawbacks.
Contracting noises were coming from the gas fire which he had switched off. He looked at the scorch marks on the old radiants and thought, Fire! That would be best solution of all, not a domestic fireplace but a furnace or better still, an incinerator.
Lots of places had incinerators but only two kinds of establishment had incinerators where the discovery of human bones would not cause an immediate outcry. Crematoria and, much more conveniently, hospitals!
First he would have to get his car. He did not normally bring his car to the flat, preferring the anonymity that public transport afforded him. Cars had numbers attached to them. A sudden icicle of fear climbed the man's spine. The woman had had a car! That was why she had come to the door in the first place! The police would be looking for her car! Her husband would have contacted them after her phone call had been cut off. How could he have been so stupid as to overlook the car? The woman's words came back to him, 'the only light in the street'.
The man almost sprinted over to the door and switched the light off. He stood in the darkness, his breathing made uneven with threatening panic. Think! he commanded himself. Don't panic. Think! The police did not routinely patrol the street outside. There was an excellent chance that neither they nor anyone else would have had reason to come into the street and across the car but he would have to move it. It was too close for comfort. His next thought was that he couldn't. It had broken down!
Once again the man had to get a grip on himself as he felt circumstances close in on him. There was a chance that the problem with the car was associated with all the rain they had had in the last few hours. Water in the electrics perhaps? There was only one way to find out. He rummaged through the woman's handbag and found the car keys, noting the Volkswagen emblem on the fob. He put on his coat and then slipped on a fresh pair of surgical gloves. He didn't want to leave any prints on the vehicle. He opened the door slightly. All was quiet outside. The rain had stopped but gurgling sounds coming from the down pipes on the side of the building said that it had only done so recently.
The car was parked at the far end of the street. It was a dark blue Volkswagen Polo. This pleased him. There had to be thousands of dark coloured Polos around the city. He opened the driver's door and undid the bonnet catch. The dirty state of the engine told him that it had been some considerable time since anyone else had done so. It was a typical 'second car' that didn't get too much in the way of maintenance, the little woman's 'run around' for shopping and taking the kids to school. It had no status value other than to exist, unlike the 'master's' Cavalier or Sierra which would shine like the sun and merit instant attention at the slightest cough.
The man removed the distributor cap and cleaned the inside with his handkerchief. He prised the contacts apart and slid a corner of the handkerchief between them to dry them out. He replaced the cap and wiped the plug leads and the main lead from the ignition coil. Satisfied with what he had done, he dropped the bonnet back down and tried the starter. The engine whirred into life and settled down to an idle.
Things were going well again. The man's confidence was returning. Perhaps he could now kill two birds with one stone? The car was generally dirty. It was quite difficult to read the registration plates as it was. With a bit more dirt applied to the rear one and a corner snapped off the front one he could risk driving it across town. He wouldn't need to fetch and use his own car at all. He turned the vehicle in a jerky three point turn, through unfamiliarity with the Polo's clutch and drove it along to the step leading down to the flat. Checking thoroughly that none of the bags was leaking, the man lined them up by the door and then loaded them quickly and quietly into the back.
At three thirty am a figure clad in white tunic and trousers and wearing a surgical mask and cap wheeled a trolley into the boiler house of Kerr Memorial Hospital. The attendant on duty put down his paper and got up from the table which he shared with an open paper bag containing sandwiches and a half full bottle of milk.