The dazzling overhead lights were painful to look at, like staring directly into the sun, but there was nothing he could do about it. He felt his clothes being removed from his body. Occasionally he saw the top of a head covered in a mop of brown hair at the bottom of his field of vision.
‘Don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right. You’re going to be just fine. There is nothing to worry about, Patrick. You’re going to be just fine.’
The voice had a beautifully mellow, almost hypnotic tone to it. But O’Neill didn’t trust it at all. He desperately wanted to stand up and fight his way out. Whatever was about to happen to him, he wanted no part of it. But he was rooted to the spot. He might just as well have been made of stone.
A clatter of metal against metal was followed by the return of the head and a warm sensation on O’Neill’s chest as a soft palm pressed down on to the space between his nipples.
Again he tried to speak, to scream, to shout, to pull away, anything, but it was no good. A face, half hidden by a surgical mask and cap, appeared above his. Only the eyes were visible. And they were as cold as ice. The pressure from the fingers increased. O’Neill felt something – most likely a thumb – sliding back and forth across his chest, seemingly searching for something.
Suddenly the hand pushed him down hard, the weight of an entire body behind it. He felt his shoulder blades push into the metal beneath him, his spine straighten out and the breath hiss out of his lungs.
Then a new pain, a terrible pain. A hot burning sensation in the middle of his chest that grew wider and deeper in an instant. He caught a glint of metal, of something red. For a moment he thought he had been stuck with the syringe again, but this was far deeper, far more deadly than any needle.
He could feel blood rising up inside his mouth, cold air sweeping over the inside of his body. He could feel the life force seeping out of him. By the time he felt hands pulling the two sides of his ribcage apart, he knew he had only a few moments left.
The voice that had once gently called his name was now breathless with excitement.
It sounded as though she was laughing. Laughing at him and his pain but in his dying moments he realized the truth was far, far worse. The voice was not laughing, it was not even speaking. It was moaning. Writhing, rocking backwards and forwards in ecstasy.
The sound of euphoric laughter was still ringing in O’Neill’s ears as the life seeped out of him and the bright lights slowly faded into absolute, eternal darkness.
He didn’t look like a paedophile – but then again they never do. There was something about the way he carried himself that screamed out ‘I don’t belong here’. Not for the delights of under-age sex anyway.
But then you can’t argue with the facts. He was at the bench – and that one’s a bugger to find. Nobody goes there by accident. He was in the right place at the right time, and there was only one way he could have known about the meeting. So he had to pay the price.
It took me quite a while to get him into the car – all that dead weight – but once he was inside it was plain sailing. I tied the cables round his ankles the way I always do and used the jig to lift him up into the air. It’s poetry in motion to watch and never gives any trouble. A machine that’s designed for lifting dead cows isn’t going to struggle with a full-grown man, no matter how overweight he might be.
It was while he was upside down, swinging his merry way along to the killing room, that the wallet fell out of his back pocket. It gave me quite a shock at first. A police warrant card. Had they been watching me? Were they going to burst through the door at any moment? I got a bit paranoid, I don’t mind admitting, but it didn’t last long. It was so unlikely anything was going to happen. He had been alone. He had been off his guard. If this had been some kind of major operation to find the killer, they would have jumped me there and then.
But if they weren’t after me, they must have been after Bevan. It didn’t take me too long to learn that he had been taken into custody.
I know that in reality the police don’t have a clue about me. They’re chasing the likes of Billy Moorwood. They’re wasting their time. I’ve been too clever. Too careful. The clues all point somewhere else. That made it all the more deliciously ironic. I love the attention.
Anyway, just because Patrick O’Neill is a police officer doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve to die. And I must admit I am becoming incredibly excited at the prospect of my first killing of an innocent and I plan to make the most of it.
This will be even better than when I killed Chadwick. Not a lot of people knew about the fetish clubs he visited on a weekly basis, and even fewer knew about the awful things he did to some of the women he encountered there. Vulnerable women. Some of them little more than girls. Broken girls from broken homes. Lives shattered by abuse from an early age. He thought he could buy their silence and it worked to a degree. But then the smug bastard made the mistake of attacking the wrong person. A friend of mine. A good friend. She came round for a coffee and was trying to hold it together, then burst into tears and told me all about it, blurting out every sick, perverted and despicable thing he did to her. She was covered in bruises and whip marks from where he had beaten her to within an inch of her life for his sexual gratification. There had to be revenge.
I knew I was taking a risk when I dumped the bodies, but it had to be done. Chadwick’s victims had a right to know what had happened to him. They would know that he’d paid the ultimate price. I’ve now been doing this for so long without any recognition of all the effort I’ve put into clearing the streets. Until I dumped the bodies of the three stooges, not a word of my work had made it into the press. Chadwick had been a good kill. The others too. Righteous kills. I enjoyed every minute. I enjoyed all of them.
It took far longer to identify the other two than I thought it would have. The police can be so useless at times. You have to give them everything on a plate if you want to get anything done.
O’Neill had opened up easily enough, which is always the way when the body is warm, but there had been a surprising amount of fat around the internal organs. More than usual, and that was going to be difficult to dispose of. But the organs themselves, with the exception of the liver, turned out to be in remarkably healthy condition.
I continued the ‘work’ along the usual patterns with few variations. I am, however, particularly pleased with the level of mutilation I managed to achieve around the genital area. I was using a new combination of instruments that has proved highly effective. I will continue to do so.
I can’t deny it any more. It’s not about clearing the streets. It’s all about the killing. That was the real high. The sensations as the life force slipped out of him were more intense than any I have known. And I know why.
Killing the scum of the earth, doing the world a favour, has been fine up until now, but crossing that moral line has generated a massive new rush. I found myself masturbating once again. I have always been aroused by my work but having an innocent body has taken it to new ecstatic heights.
The risks are going to be greater, of course. O’Neill’s death is going to give the police a real bee in their bonnet about trying to track me down. I obliterated the trail to the others but this new one will be almost impossible to destroy completely. The net is going to close in. It’s only a matter of time.