I slapped him so hard his head cracked against the back board of the Judas chair. He cried out, and tears sprang into his eyes. ‘You dirty, filthy baby,’ I shouted at him. ‘You don’t deserve my love. Look at you, pissing and crying like some little girl. You’re not a man.’
Hearing my mother’s words coming from my mouth shattered my self-control as nothing else could have done. I kept hitting him, revelling in the crunch of cartilage as his nose collapsed under my fist. I was beside myself with anger. He’d fooled me into thinking he was something he wasn’t. I’d thought Paul was strong and brave, intelligent and sensitive. But he was just a stupid, cowardly, lecherous pig, a pathetic excuse for a man. How had I ever let myself imagine he could be a worthy partner? He wasn’t even resisting, just sitting there mewing like a kitten, letting me hit him.
Panting with exertion and anger, I finally stopped. I stepped back and stared contemptuously at him, watching his tears wash lines through the blood on his face. ‘You brought this on yourself,’ I hissed. All my careful plans had gone up in smoke.
But now, I didn’t want to give him the second chance I’d given Adam. I didn’t want Paul’s love, not under any circumstances. He didn’t deserve me. I stepped round to the back of the chair and grasped the tongue of the strap. ‘No,’ he whimpered. ‘Please, no.’
‘You had your chance,’ I said angrily. ‘You had your chance and you blew it. You’ve no one to blame but yourself, coming here and pissing on the floor like a baby who can’t control itself.’ I pulled the strap, tightening it enough to let me slip it free of the buckle. Then I let it slide free.
Paul’s muscles instantly clenched, holding him rigidly in place, a scant half-inch above the spike. I moved round into his line of vision and slowly stripped off, caressing my body, imagining what his hands would have felt like. His eyes bulged with effort as he tried to keep himself in place. I sat down and slowly, deliciously began to rub myself, irresistibly turned on by his fight to stay away from the agonizing spike.
‘You could have been doing this,’ I sneered, aroused still further by the quivering of his thighs and calves. ‘You could have been making love instead of fighting to keep your arse in working order.’
If he’d worked out like Adam had, the pleasure would have lasted longer. As it was, his screams of agony mingled with my groans of pleasure. I came like a Guy Fawkes rocket, fire flashing through me and erupting in an orgasm that had me buckling at the knees.
He tried to pull free, but the barbs just cut deeper into his tender flesh. I lay back in the chair, savouring the waves of pleasure that flowed through me after my orgasm, Paul’s moans and screams an extravagant counterpoint to my sexual satisfaction.
As time passed, he sank lower on the spike, and his screams moderated to whimpering groans. To my surprise, I felt sexual desire rise in me again. After the exquisite pleasure of my first orgasm, I wanted my excitement matched again. I reached for the control box for the electrical current to the spike, and pressed the button that completed the circuit. Even with a relatively low current, Paul’s body convulsed in an arc that wrenched him almost clear of the spike, a fine spray of blood spattering the floor for a couple of feet around.
I matched the rhythms of our two bodies, the speed and intensity of our mutual excitement keeping perfect pace. I felt my muscles quiver like his as I thrust against my hand. As I came, my body arched in sync with his, my gasps echoed by his last agonized cries before unconsciousness came.
I have to confess I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Paul’s punishment. Perhaps because he had deserved so much more than Adam, perhaps because I had had higher expectations of him in the first place, or perhaps simply because I was getting better at what I had to do. Whatever the reason, my second excursion into murder left me feeling as if I’d found my true vocation at last.
We dry up our tears, and … discover that a transaction which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.
‘OK, Andy, it’s showtime,’ Tony said to the blank screen of his computer. After Carol had dropped him off, he’d stumbled upstairs, kicking off his shoes and letting his quilted baseball jacket lie where it fell on the landing. Pausing only to empty his bladder, he’d burrowed under the duvet and fallen into the deepest sleep he’d known for months. When he’d woken, it had been after noon. But for once, he felt no guilt about the work he should have been doing. He felt refreshed, excited, elated even. Searching Stevie McConnell’s house had given him a new certainty that he really did understand what he was doing. He had known, with absolute clarity, that Handy Andy did not live like that. And although it wasn’t something he could admit to anyone outside the tight circle of fellow profilers, there was a real rush in realizing that he could probably find his way into Handy Andy’s head and map a path through the tortured labyrinth of his unique logic. All he had to do now was find the key to the door.
In the office, Tony powered his way through the remaining piles of documents, making notes as he went along. Then he closed the blinds and told his secretary to hold all his calls. He moved his own chair round the desk so that it faced the visitor’s chair. On the desk to one side, he placed his tape recorder, still switched off. He walked over to the door and stood with his back to it, contemplating the room. Some poem he’d once read echoed in his mind. Something about a road that divided in a wood, and the importance of choosing the branch less travelled by. For as long as he could recall, his fascinations had led him down the road less travelled by. It was the road that his patients walked, the dark path that led into the undergrowth, away from the dappled sunshine of the broad path. ‘I need to understand why you chose that road, Andy,’ Tony murmured. ‘This is what I do best, Andy. You see, I know what draws me to that road. But I’m not like you. I can go back when I want to. I can choose the sunny path. I don’t have to be here. All I’m doing is studying your footsteps. Or at least, that’s what I tell the world.
‘But we know the truth, don’t we? You can’t hide from me, Andy,’ he said softly. ‘I’m just like you, you see. I’m your mirror image. I’m the poacher turned gamekeeper. It’s only hunting you that keeps me from being you. I’m here, waiting for you. Journey’s end.’ He stood for a moment longer, savouring the admission he’d made to himself.
Finally, he sat down in his chair and leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands loosely linked. ‘OK, Andy,’ he said. ‘It’s just you and me. We’re going to skip the preliminaries; all that stuff where we do the verbal arm wrestling and you eventually decide to talk to me. We’re going straight for it. First off, I want to say how impressed I am. I’ve never seen a cleaner job. I don’t just mean the bodies, I mean the whole thing. Sweet as a nut, you did it. Never a witness. Let me rephrase that. Never anybody seeing any significance in what they saw or heard, because there must have been people who saw or heard something, but they didn’t make the connection. How did you manage to be so invisible?’ He pressed ‘record’ on the cassette recorder, then stood up and stepped across to the other chair.
Tony took a deep breath and deliberately relaxed his body. He used breathing techniques to put himself into a light state of trance. He instructed his conscious mind to let go, to allow his higher self to access directly all he knew about Handy Andy and to answer for him. When he spoke, even his voice was different. The timbre was rougher, the tones deeper. ‘I blended in. I took care. I watched and I learned.’
Tony swapped chairs again. ‘You obviously did a good job of it,’ he said. ‘How did you choose them?’
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