Should he go back into the basement so he could leave the cat beside her? No, that was too much of a risk. He’d leave the cat in the bushes outside. It wasn’t perfect, but he was being flexible, like The Book said. Measure twice, cut once. Then he’d clean the knife and put it away. Until the next time. The coverall would go into a big padded envelope.
And tomorrow — this was genius — he was going to take the envelope down to the post office and send it to a made-up address in Glasgow. He’d have to get it weighed, have to talk to the woman behind the counter who always looked at him as if he smelt or something, but that didn’t matter. By the time they found it — if they found it — she would have forgotten. Or it would be too late.
He knew quite a lot about her. She lived on her own. With her cat.
Modus operandi. Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
And now he’s waiting in the shadows by the door that leads into the basement. He feels as though he’s been waiting a long time, but it’s only been five minutes when he checks his watch.
He can hear her. She’s approaching the basement, breathing hard, stumbling slightly as if she’s more tired than she expected to be. She opens the door, and he can see her silhouetted against the moonlight. She doesn’t see him in his cave of shadows.
Then she’s past him, heading towards the steps up out of the basement, towards the locked door.
She’s trapped. He’s got her.
Moving silently, he follows her. Then something brushes past him and he freezes, his heart hammering.
Not now! Not when he’s so ready.
But it’s only the cat, running up the stairs behind her. It must have got out of the flat when he opened the door.
It doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s even better. If she heard anything — and she didn’t he’s sure of that — but if she did, she’ll think it’s the cat. And now he’ll have the cat in here with him. Just like he planned. No one can stop him now.
The dumb cow. Dead.
The cat. Dead.
She’s almost at the door. He hangs back, wanting to hear what she does when she finds it’s locked. Will she be scared? Will she realise?
He jumps as he hears her speak. He’s never heard her voice before. “Hello, puss. What are you doing down here? You hungry again? He doesn’t look after you, does he?”
Oh, she’ll pay for that. And he’ll let her see how well he can look after a cat in a few minutes. Once the duct tape is in place he can take all the time in the world.
But she’s not talking to the cat any more. She says something under her breath, sounding annoyed, a bit irritated, and she rattles the door. He can’t let her do that. His heart is beating fast. It’s now. Now! Quietly, quickly, he flies up the steps.
She hears him, and half turns, the cat in her arms, but he’s right in front of her holding the knife towards her face.
“Shut up. I won’t hurt you.”
She lets the cat fall from her hands and it flees.
Too late, cat. Too late.
But she ducks and slides, and suddenly she’s under his arm and past him, running down the steps ahead of him.
Running towards the outer door.
He leaps down the steps behind her, momentum carrying him forward, and she’s there, in front of him, kneeling, just the way it was supposed to be, only not, only not...
In his dreams, she wasn’t the one holding the knife.
Karma watched the final twitches with clinical interest. This bit was always an anti-climax, frankly. Still, she was done here. It had been trickier than she’d expected. She thought he would attack as she came into the basement. She hadn’t credited him with the intelligence to lock the door at the top of the steps. Oh well. You live, and you learn.
So much for planning.
The cat wound round her legs, purring. She picked it up. It was going to need a home. Well, she could do that. It was time to take a break after all, take — she smiled — her ‘cool down’ period. Then she could go back to her site and wait for another one to walk into her honey trap.
The Dummies’ Guide to Serial Killing, by Karma.
First find your dummy.
That’s it.
#Metoo
Lauren Henderson
Mary Poppins. That’s what he called me. Book my car, Mary Poppins. Get me the penthouse suite, Mary Poppins, and stay there with me pretending to make notes until I want to be alone with the latest actress wannabe and give you the nod to leave. Get my Viagra out of the fridge. Pour me a shot of tequila. Suck my cock, Mary Poppins.
He must have told me to suck his cock a thousand times. But it was reflexive; he spewed out that command to everyone, men as well as women.
No, that’s not true, now I think about it. He never said it to women over thirty-five.
The first time he told me to do it, on my starting day as his latest PA, I raised my eyebrows and said: “I’m sure you’re joking, Mr Van Stratten, but I don’t find that very amusing,” and he roared with laughter and said: “Jesus, they hired me Mary Poppins! Where’s your umbrella!”
Thank God, by then I’d been in New York long enough to learn how much Americans love a posh British accent. Now that I’ve smoothed out the rolling Cambridgeshire accent that had people at university asking where I came from, my own is bog-standard middle class. I wanted to be neutral, not to stand out; that’s always been my preference. I’m an observer, not a participant. It’s what made me such a good PA. I always said that in interviews, and it always got me the job, because people could see it was true.
But in New York, it was harder to be neutral. Everyone was something; everyone was pigeonholed and classified. Being English in itself was laden with meaning. They thought you were more intelligent, more sophisticated, more educated than they were. And if you could manage an upper-class, Downton Abbey above-stairs accent, that put ten grand right away on your yearly salary.
I could never pass for posh back home, never. There are a million little things that give you away. We’re so attuned to accents in the UK, so aware of the tiniest inflexion, turn of phrase, inability to spell hors d’oeuvres or per se correctly. I don’t even think I could pass for upper-middle. You need to know about opera and ballet and classical music for that. Posh people don’t do culture, necessarily, but upper-middle ones do.
I said I was an observer.
But in New York, I watched other Brit expats and poshed up my accent, and it gave me power and money. Not only that: for Jared Van Stratten, I was Mary Poppins, and no one wants to have sex with Mary Poppins. As Jared once said, she could kill your boner just by looking at it.
Which suited me fine. It was protection. He had such a choice of starlets available to him that we office workers were far, far down any list of women he’d want to have sex with.
But Jared was an animal. I never believed in sex addiction until I started working for him; I thought it was an excuse that men use to cheat on their wives. I had never seen anything like his behaviour before, and I still can’t quite believe it. Trust me, if you’d been sitting just outside his office, and regularly gone in there after one of his sessions to clear up, you wouldn’t have believed it either. And yes, if you’re wondering, he got a big kick out of strolling out of that office once the starlet had left, adjusting his trousers, watching Mary Poppins snapping on a pair of latex gloves, picking up a box of disinfectant wipes and heading into a room that smelt of semen and poppers and fear sweat and sometimes, slightly, of urine, to clean bodily fluids off his leather sofas.