Tooth and Claw (17 page)

While he lay there, he replayed the details of the fox’s death
in his head. The bullet had struck exactly where he had been aiming. The sight appeared to be perfectly aligned with the barrel of the rifle. He had zeroed it years before, when he used to dream about hunting and rehearse all the actions, but he had been worried that the time in the ground had caused it to drift as the metal expanded in summer and contracted in winter. Fortunately, the soil had acted as an insulating blanket. He would fire a few more shots at different ranges, just to check, but it looked as if the bullets would still go where he wanted them to.

Eventually, when he was sure that nobody was coming to investigate, he slid out from between the groundsheets. Water that had pooled in the hollow of his spine suddenly spilled down his buttocks; warm, like blood. He stood, muscles and joints complaining at the sudden movement, and stretched, easing the kinks in his body. The gentle breeze was beautifully cool on his forehead and on his damp scalp. He looked around, checking that there was nobody else within sight. Shots were not uncommon on the Essex marshes – farmers hunting rabbits or shooting at birds – but a man with a rifle was unusual.

The cold and the wet meant that there were no insects around, and the fox’s body was lying undisturbed. Crows would eventually pick at it, badgers and foxes and polecats would tear at it, but the cold would hold back the decay. It was too wrecked for him to take home and use in one of his dioramas. Too mutilated.

After torture and mutilation, and then a bomb, not to mention all the ones that had gone before, Carl had decided to try something more traditional for his next victim. The thought had come to him the night before, lying in bed, wide awake, gently masturbating, excited by the fact that his mother would finally be investigating one of his crimes. He was going to shoot
someone. He was going to do it at long range, using the rifle, but to distinguish it from the bomb on the station platform, which was arguably a similar form of long-range murder, he had decided that he was going to shoot someone in their own living room. He would probably choose a block of flats rather than a house, and fire from an unoccupied flat in another, nearby block. Finding the location to shoot from was going to be protracted, if not actually difficult – he would have to conduct surveillance of a likely block of flats that was one of a pair, or a group, and look for windows that were not lit up for several nights on end, then compare their addresses with the register of voters to ensure that they were actually unoccupied rather than just the homes of people who were on holiday – but once he had located a good candidate, facing another block, he would be able to break in easily as long as the doors were not actually boarded up. Then he could take his time, scanning the windows opposite with his sniper scope until he found someone to kill. Someone old, he had decided. Or very young. Most of his victims so far had been between twenty and fifty, although he had done the best he could to ring the changes on social standing, sex and appearance. The rule was that no two murders could share any characteristic in common, save for the fact that someone was dead who had been alive, and that death had been violent and unexpected. So – perhaps a child, shot in their bedroom by the glow of a nightlight as they stared in wonder out at the world below. Hit in the throat so that they choked on their own blood as they died, parents running into the room and trying to make sense of the carnage; the broken glass, the gore and the thrashing limbs. And Carl could watch it all from the safety of his firing position, secure in the knowledge that he was safe until the police arrived, and even then it would take them hours to work out where the shot had come from.

It would be like looking into a glass-fronted display case, where stuffed animals acted out a private tragedy for his sole benefit.

Something moved in his peripheral vision. He turned his head gradually, trying not to make any sudden movements that might alert someone to his presence, always assuming they hadn’t already seen him.

A hiker was making their way across the open ground of the salt marshes. Carl couldn’t tell whether it was male or female – the figure was too far away – but it was wearing a bulky waterproof parka in a violent lime green, jeans, a black rucksack and a thermal hat. The boots that the figure was wearing were good, ankle-protecting hiking boots rather than the trainers that he saw some people walking across the salt marshes in. The figure was heading at an angle to where Carl stood, and wasn’t looking in his direction. If they had heard the shot, they had just put it down to farmers.

Without thinking, Carl cocked the rifle and brought it up to his shoulder, settling the butt comfortably into the curve of his collarbone. His left hand supported the stock, the cross-hatching rough under his fingers. His right hand curled around the grip, his right forefinger sliding naturally inside the trigger guard and around the cold metal of the trigger. He gazed through the sights at the hiker, brought so close by the magnification that he could see the North Face logo on the jacket and the Kangol logo on the thermal hat.

The hiker was a man in his early thirties, Carl judged. He had fair hair, and he hadn’t shaved for a few days. His eyes were green. Unaware that he was being watched, he reached up and picked at his nose as he walked. He gazed around at the landscape of the Essex salt marshes and smiled in simple pleasure. Carl could see the glistening of a light sweat on his forehead.

The notch of the sights was centred on the bridge of his nose. As he walked, Carl moved the rifle to track him.

He had no idea that Carl was watching him. He had no idea that Carl could just move his right forefinger a few millimetres and send a bullet spinning towards him at 1500 metres per second. He wouldn’t even hear the shot before the bullet entered his skull and tumbled end over end through his brain tissue, scrambling everything in its path in an expanding cone of destruction before exiting through the back of his head in a fist-sized hole and a cloud of vaporised blood and bone.

He could do it. He could kill him now, add another body to his growing list, another case for his mother to potentially get called in to investigate. He felt his finger twitch as contradictory messages were sent to it – shoot, don’t shoot. Shoot, don’t shoot.

Carl abruptly relaxed the pressure on the trigger. He was the wrong age, and his eyes were the wrong colour. Carl had already killed a man in his early thirties with green eyes. It had been a few years ago, but he distinctly remembered. Carl had been sitting behind him in a cinema in Ilford, watching
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
, and while the man had been concentrating on the scene where the sea monster was pulling the pirate ship beneath the waves Carl had slid a thin knife into the junction of his spine and his skull. He had died instantly, jerking in his seat and fouling himself as his body shut down. Carl had left the cinema quickly, before the smell of faeces drifted too far and people complained.

He couldn’t kill another thirty-year-old with green eyes. It would break the rules, and the rules were the only thing keeping him going. Blue eyes he could have accepted. The same for brown, as long as their owner wasn’t Asian, because he had once strangled an Asian man with brown eyes. Green, however, was out of bounds now.

Reluctantly he let the rifle drop. In the distance the hiker carried on, oblivious to the fact that his life had been spared thanks to a genetic quirk.

The blood on the fox was congealing in the cold. He debated briefly whether he should dispose of it himself, but decided in the end that the local wildlife would do it for him. He rewrapped the rifle and then detached the elasticated cords from the bushes and rolled up the groundsheets. Within ten minutes there was no sign that he had been there at all; no sign except, of course, for the rapidly stiffening corpse of a fox and the shell casing lying in the mud.

As he trudged back to the house, his mind ranged over the people that he had killed. He had notched up quite a tally, to the extent that he was running out of variations. The thought depressed him and filled him with a vague sense of panic. He couldn’t stop now – the game wasn’t over yet. His mother had only just started playing the game, and was a long way from admitting defeat. The long range rifle shot he had been saving up, but by now he had knifed, strangled, blown up, drowned, bludgeoned and tortured ten people. Ten people that he had never even met, and had no knowledge of apart from what little he had been able to glean from watching them for a few hours or a few days. Ten people who had not caused him any pain or inconvenienced him in any way. Ten people who differed from each other in almost every way – height, weight, sex, age, social class and sexual preference.

His route took him away from the direction of the Creeksea estate and towards where he had buried the rifle previously. Part of him, the lazy part, wanted to keep it in the house until he needed it, but the other part of him, the part that would go to almost infinite pains to assure his own safety, told him
that having a rifle in the house was inviting trouble. Best to bury it again, even if he dug it up two days later.

As he placed the rifle back in its hole and scooped the disturbed earth back over it, then covered the earth with moss and bracken, he considered when he should kill his next victim. Serial killers, if you believed the television programmes and films, either killed at fixed intervals – every twenty-third of November, for instance, or on a full moon – or with increasing frequency as their obsessions got a tighter and tighter grip of them. That seemed to be mostly how they got caught – they were predictable. From the start, Carl had striven to be unpredictable, not only in his choice of victim but also in when he killed them. The longest he had gone between murders was almost a year; the shortest – between the torture of the TV presenter and the blowing up of the commuter – was two days. In between were gaps of weeks and months. No pattern, therefore no predictability. The trouble was that the more people he killed, the more there was that he couldn’t repeat. He might, at some stage, even be forced to go for two or three years between killings.

It would be just like lying still in a hide and watching some animal. He would cope.

After the next murder, he decided, he was going to have to be more creative. Poison was still an option. Perhaps he could run somebody down with a car – not his own car, obviously, but one that he would have to steal. Maybe he could push a victim under a train, or from the top of a building. After that he might have to relax the rules a little bit – rather than just killing one person in their thirties and then moving on, he could actually narrow it down to years and assume that a 32-year-old who was knifed counted separately from a 33-year-old. The thought made him uneasy, as if he was nearing a line that should not be crossed, but he couldn’t see any other way around
it. Not if he wanted to keep going, and he did. He really did.

After all, what else was he going to do with his time?

He felt a weight lift from his shoulders as the door of the house closed behind him. The house was his refuge, the hide from which he watched the world going by. He felt safe there.

His father was watching TV in the living room when Carl entered. He was even dressed, although his feet were still bare.

‘Dad? Are you all right?’

‘I felt like getting up. I don’t want to end up a complete invalid.’ His eyes were watery, defensive.

‘That’s fine. What about … your colostomy bag?’

‘I changed it myself. And cleaned everything.’

‘With antiseptic powder?’

Nicholas nodded. ‘With antiseptic powder. I’m not stupid.’

‘I know,’ Carl said gently. Reassuringly. ‘I know. Would you like some food? I’m going out later for a while, but we can have lunch together.’

Nicholas smiled. ‘I’d enjoy that. Where are you going?’

Carl hesitated. He didn’t want to tell his father that he was going to be driving his mother around. Nicholas still clung to the increasingly unlikely belief that Eleanor was going to come back to them, once she had got her work life into balance. Carl didn’t have the heart to tell him that it wasn’t going to happen. Not unless Carl’s plans worked out, and that could take a while.

‘Just to see some friends,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll have my mobile on. You can call me if there’s a problem. I’ll be back for dinner.’

‘Is it a girl?’ his father asked, eyes twinkling. ‘You could stay out later. Take her out for a meal.’

Carl felt his stomach clench. When would he ever get a chance to meet a girl, let alone go out with one? ‘It’s just some friends,’ he repeated, controlling the sudden flush of anger. ‘From the Hunt. We’re having a coffee. Nothing special.’

He prepared soup and some sandwiches, then left his father watching TV and got changed into something at least reasonably smart. Then he drove across to his mother’s house, in Maldon. It was an old house, probably dating back to Victorian times, if not earlier. Carl had never been inside. Eleanor had never invited him or Nicholas in. He wasn’t even sure if she shared it or lived alone. She kept her life shrouded.

She was waiting in the doorway as he pulled up in her driveway: a tall woman with a shock of grey hair, kept long and styled but never dyed. She had always hated pretence of any kind. She was wearing a loose jacket over a long, rather formal dress. No necklace, no earrings. No rings of any sort. The afternoon sun cast a roseate glow over her papery skin.

‘I expected you to be late,’ she said, opening the rear passenger door and sliding a large briefcase in, then following it. Anger sparked in Carl’s chest at the automatic assumption that he was a chauffeur and she was a passenger, rather than he her son and she his mother and both of them in the front seats, but he snuffed it out. He couldn’t alienate or irritate her tonight. He had to be there with her, at the scene.

‘I said I’d be here at three o’clock, and I am,’ he replied quietly. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Drive to Chigwell. I will direct you when we get there.’