I asked Anna to come back to my villa for a drink one day and she happily accepted, clearly hoping for an adulterous sexual relationship and finding the idea of a holiday fling appealing after the family problems she’d been having. And, of course, there was also the fact that I was younger than her husband, with none of his middle-aged fat since my body was well-toned from years and years of disciplined training. When we got back to my villa, I made her a drink and we sat down on the couch on the veranda.
The private white beach stretching out before us, the salty tang of the waves filling the air, and the muffled roar of the surf made it the perfect romantic spot. She’d only had a couple of drinks before she was kissing me. I laughed at her eagerness as her cocktail glass shattered on the floor and buttons were torn off my shirt. She sucked in her breath in pleased surprise as she ran her hands over the toned muscles of my chest and abdomen.
‘Aren’t you lean?’ she teased me. ‘You must work out all the time!’
‘Every day,’ I acknowledged with a smile, speaking softly in her ear.
She giggled as I drew her away from the cream couch, towards the beach… What are beaches there for anyway? She had asked me this bitterly one day while complaining of her husband’s inaction. I had never seen the attraction of beaches, myself. But this was for Anna, not for me. So we went down together in the sand, her eyes shining in excitement at the vile deliciousness of cheating on the person you’re supposed to love. I was aware of her hand caressing the back of my neck as, slowly, one by one, I teased the buttons of her shirt undone
… Then, while her hands were busy fumbling with my belt, I reached for the knife that was concealed at my ankle, and stabbed her in the neck with it.
We lay there, still for a moment, while she bled out under me. I knew where to do it so that her death would be relatively painless, almost instantaneous. The hidden video camera set up on the veranda caught everything. It was quite easy to wrap up her body in the plastic sheeting, put her in a crate, put the crate on board the little fishing boat I had rented, row out a little way and then drop the crate overboard into the Mediterranean.
I had planned for it all to take place on the beach because the ocean would wash away the bloodstained sand without my having to take any action to clean it up. The villa was filled with cream furniture and white sheets that would not have been so easy to clean — and it would never do to have mess. Mess was inefficient and led to too many questions.
I scrubbed and scrubbed at my hands in the bathroom afterwards so that not a drop of Anna’s blood remained, not even traces beneath my fingernails. Then I took all my clothes off and dropped them into a bath full of hot water to soak. As the water slowly turned red in the tub, I showered and removed all traces from my hair and skin. I do this every time. I can’t stand to be covered in someone else’s blood and, as I said before, it just doesn’t do to have mess.
Why did I kill Anna Sovanak? Why did I do it? Had she wronged me at some point in the past? Was she responsible for the death of someone I cared about? Was I in love with her? Was it jealousy? Envy? Spite? Was it a crime of passion? I believe I could have almost lived with myself if it had been a crime of passion. A crime of passion was still inexcusable, still inherently wicked… but at least it was understandable. There was some human element in the act. But the truth was, I felt nothing for Anna. No like or dislike. Nothing. I killed her because somebody paid me to.
The government, to be more precise — as they had paid me to commit countless other murders. We were not like James Bond. It was made quite clear to all assassins from the very beginning that if we ever got into trouble we’d be on our own. The government would not formally acknowledge us in any way. The Queen was never going to pin medals on any of our chests… We were the ones who got our hands dirty, and our superiors were grateful for that because it took the pressure off them, but at the same time — of course — it meant that they did not want to touch us.
I didn’t dare to open any more of the video files, but as my eyes ran down the names, I remembered each and every one of them… The poison, the guns, the knives, the strangulation, the blood… My employers insisted on video cameras where possible to make sure we didn’t back out as a consequence of becoming too attached to our marks. It had been known to happen, although never to me.
I couldn’t prevent the memories cascading in with a force that dazzled me, blinded me. I am an assassin. Life and death within the same body. Truly, a person of the In Between. I stared at the computer screen for a moment, wishing I could doubt it. Wishing I could deny what I knew to be true. But I remembered this. There was no Nicky. There was no Luke. They were just stories created to placate me, and then elaborated upon by a demon trying to manipulate me. I’ve only ever lived in grotty little flats or motels by myself. I am an orphan, as he said. I never got the chance to have a real family. After the incident at the orphanage, I had been almost overcome with the horror of what I had done, so far as my childish mind could truly grasp what had happened. It was not my fault he’d fallen. I was not to blame. But still it marked my life for ever.
And I had had no choice when the secret services had come to take me away from the orphanage. I had been six years old; I’d had to comply with the training I received as I grew up. But then, somewhere along the way, I realised I did have a choice. It was mine and I had made it. I would never be able to have a normal life now. Any friendships I might have would be built on lies, because any normal person would shrink away from me in horror if they knew what I had done — even though none of it was my fault. The government told us these people were dangerous, potential terrorists, threats to the safety of Britain. I think most of my co-workers clung to those reassurances.
Anna Sovanak, for example — I was told during my briefing that she had been designing a new kind of biological weapon, and there was fear that this might find its way into the hands of certain religious extremists with whom Anna supposedly had sympathies. I don’t know if this was true, although I suppose if she really had been working on developing new weapons, then that might explain why the story of her discovered body had been quietly consigned to page six. Who’s to say whether there were genuine reasons for my victims’ deaths, or whether they were simply political murders? You can’t think like that when you have a job to do. And it really doesn’t matter to me, for I believe that all human life is sacred: that life, in any form, even the smallest, tiniest insect, is absolutely and inherently sacred. And I loathed myself for what I’d done. There could be no greater sin than taking a life. And I had done it again and again and again. But there had hardly seemed any point in quitting.
I killed my first person when I was six years old, although I did not mean to and no one paid me for that crime. It was at the orphanage; I remembered it now. The other children there had taken a dislike to me right from the beginning, for whatever arbitrarily childish reason. But there was one in particular who really hated me. Aaron Thomas. He was older, about nine, and would bully me whenever he got the chance — and the nuns who ran the orphanage never troubled to do anything much about it, for it was all character building, wasn’t it?
Then, one day, while playing, Aaron fell through a third-storey window and was left gripping the window ledge, screaming for help. I ran to assist him. I didn’t hesitate for a moment, didn’t even think about all those horrible things he had done to me. But as I ran towards the window, I tripped on a child’s toy left in the middle of the floor, stumbled, and instinctively tried to right myself by grabbing on to whatever I could. It was unfortunate that my hands landed on the drawn up window, my weight bringing the pane of glass down hard on Aaron’s fingers. The boy let go at once with a scream of pain and fell to his death. One of the nuns had come in to the room in time to see me ‘leaping’ for the window to pull it down onto my former tormenter’s fingers, causing him to fall three storeys to the stone courtyard below. And that was what the other children there saw too. The nuns believed that, after quietly taking the pain and humiliation of being bullied for so long, I had finally lost my mind and committed murder with a coldness shocking in a child.