Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  The fence at the far end was easy to climb. An alley at the rear was where residents left out their bin-bags for the dustmen to collect, and where local kids rode their bikes, and where teenagers smoked and fornicated. Foxgloves and nettles proliferated. Condoms strewed the path like large pale flatworms.

  I stole along the alley, unseen, unknown, a white blood-cell in a hidden vein.

  It was as I was approaching my car that I became aware of being watched.

  I had heard nothing untoward. I had seen no movement at the periphery of my vision. I just knew.

  A hypothalamic prickling. A certainty.

  I scanned the windows of the sodium-gilded houses.

  Curtains were firmly closed in most of them. Those that were uncurtained were unlit and empty. There was no face peering from any of them.

  Ahead: the street, snug with parked cars, not a soul in sight.

  Behind: the street, snug with parked cars, not a soul in sight.

  But someone was there, I was sure of it. Watching me.

  From the hedgerow of a front garden? Crouched between two vehicles? Concealed ramrod-straight behind the trunk of one of the sickly limes that paraded along the pavement?

  In the midst of small-hours stillness, I stared around.

  Gradually I was able to convince myself that there was no one on the street but me. The impression of being watched did not abate, but the evidence of my eyes and ears soon relegated it to the category of a phantom sensation. An illusion brought on by my adrenalised hyper-alert state. I needed that hyper-alert state to enable me to perform my work safely and successfully. On this occasion, it had been oversensitive and deceived me.

  I unlocked the car.

  As I drove away, I glanced in the rearview mirror.

  Nothing.

  But I checked the mirror several more times before reaching the end of the street and turning the corner.

  I slept the sleep of the just and woke late. I had no job. I was independently wealthy, floating free above the quotidian concerns of the masses, buoyed by a large share portfolio inherited from my dear departed parents. I did not feel guilty about this. Why should I? The money made it possible for me to do what I had to do. By performing a useful service, I gave back to the community whose hard work provided my income. The fact that I took pleasure in what I did was simply a bonus.

  Munching breakfast toast, I checked BBC News 24 on the off-chance that the Foreskin Collector’s death had gone public already. It had not. Never mind. Early days.

  In my study, I stuck The Divine Comedy’s Fin de Siècle into the stereo, and as the second track, “Thrillseeker”, got into gear, I booted up my computer. Accessing the folder I had named “Bluebeard”, I filled in an incident report on the elimination of the Foreskin Collector. Date, place, time of death, method of execution, any additional comments. Under the last heading I described the Tupperware box of prepuces, then wondered whether to mention the feeling I had had in the street of being observed.

  Best not to, I thought. It seemed somehow weak. It was an admission of vulnerability which I could accept inwardly but which would look stark and unforgiving when set in type.

  The Foreskin Collector brought my total up to fourteen.

  In “Bluebeard” I had a map of the country on which the location of each of my kills was flagged with a crimson dot. Seven of my previous kills were in my home city. The Foreskin Collector made it eight. The other six were evenly distributed across the map. It was time-consuming and logistically demanding to hunt down and kill away from home, and I preferred not to do it. Luckily, the city where I lived was large and spawned a healthy stock of specimens of the type of murderer I preyed on.

  For pleasure, I read through some of my earlier reports.

  The Judge. My first kill. My maiden effort. A retired Crown Court beak who had dedicated the autumn of his life to capturing children and subjecting them to mock trials in which they endured savage torture before being suffocated to death with a carrier-bag. Surprisingly strong for a fellow his age, the Judge had put up quite a fight, but once I had the piano-wire garrotte around his neck I knew that the outcome of the struggle was no longer in doubt and that his resistance had barely a minute left to run.

  The Bookworm. Staged his murders to resemble famous death-scenes from classic novels. Hanged one of his victims by a noose tied to a chimney-stack in the manner of Bill Sikes; pushed another beneath a train like Anna Karenina; crammed the mouth of another with powdered arsenic so that she perished the way Madame Bovary did. It crossed my mind that it would be poetic justice to crush his head in a bookbinder’s press, but, averse to that kind of preciousness, I settled for simply stabbing the pretentious bastard in the back.

  Jacqueline the Ripper. Went for male escorts exclusively. Employed their services, drugged their drinks, then murdered and castrated them, or castrated and murdered them, depending on how badly she was suffering from pre-menstrual tension. Apparently she was making a feminist statement, inverting gender norms, some Camille Paglia bullshit like that. I whacked her brains out with a baseball bat. A phallic riposte to her modus operandi? If so, an unconscious one.

  The Carpenter’s Son. Constructed bone crucifixes from the skeletons of his victims. His cellar housed one of the best-equipped private workshops I had ever come across.

  The Alliterator. Killed only people whose forenames and surnames began with the same letter and who lived in a place also beginning with that letter. He was working his way through the alphabet and had reached K when I caught up with him. A certain Kenneth Kirkland of Kettering would never know this, but he was alive today entirely thanks to me.

  Another “Bluebeard” file comprised a list of killers who were still out there doing their thing. I opened it and ran my eye down the column of nicknames I had culled from police reports and from the further reaches of the Internet.

  The Clockwatcher.

  The Creationist.

  Dave the Deviant.

  The Organ Grinder.

  Abaddon Slice.

  The Prince of Wails.

  Stephen Thing.

  Black Velvet Glove.

  Pureheart Peter.

  Siseneg.

  The Midwife.

  Procrustes.

  Cluedo Man.

  The Haemophile.

  Captain Scalpel.

  And nearly a dozen more. All extant. All infesting the country. A secret underworld of murderers most ordinary people never got to hear about. Symptoms of a malaise that was infecting the entire human race.

  Out there. Roaming. Raping. Ripping. Rending. Rendering. Reducing. Razoring. Roasting. Ruining.

  At random, I selected one of them as my next target. I closed my eyes and plonked a forefinger on the screen.

  Procrustes.

  Researching was always the fun part. I would set out knowing little about my target other than a nickname and an M.O., and through diligence and application would begin to narrow down a location, a pattern, a mindset, an address, a real name. It was the thrill of the chase eked out over a period of weeks, sometimes months. Throughout, I would feel a deliciously grim doggedness in the pit of my stomach. As the clues fell into place like tumblers in a lock, my sense of anticipation would mount. Before I had even set eyes on the man or (more rarely) woman I was about to kill, I would begin to know how he or she walked, talked, dressed, gestured. I would begin to know sleeping habits and shopping patterns, food preferences and entertainment tastes. Cruising the Web at home or leafing through tomes and twiddling through microfiche in libraries, I would edge my way towards identifying my target, and once that was achieved, our first, final, fatal meeting would not be far off.

  It was foreplay, of a kind. Preparation toward a satisfying climax.

  How was I able to find these people when the police, with their substantial criminological resources, could not? I often asked myself that question, and the answer I had come up with was threefold.

  Firstly, I had the time to dedicate myself
wholeheartedly to the search. I was a loner, devoted to no one and nothing except finding and killing killers. I was prepared to put in long days and work through the night. According to the newspapers, police morale was at an all-time low, thanks to budget cuts, rising crime rates, and public mistrust. I had a sense of mission which few police officers, in these straitened times, shared.

  Secondly, I had a genuine empathy with the people I hunted. I was one of them, after all. They were my kind.

  Thirdly, I was just that bit brighter and more imaginative than the average Plod.

  The Foreskin Collector made the ten o’clock bulletins on the evening of the day I began my search for Procrustes.

  The police covered up for me, as they had in the past. Officially, the Foreskin Collector had committed suicide, stricken with guilt over his heinous crimes. There was no mention at all of my mark on his body.

  The police had tacitly given me carte blanche to continue.

  Going in, all I knew about Procrustes was that he either truncated his victims with a hacksaw or stretched them on a rack until they were precisely five feet ten inches tall, taking his cue from the robber in the Theseus legend who cut or elongated travellers to fit the length of a bed. So far six bodies had turned up on wasteground in six different towns over the space of two years. Each victim had been either remarkably tall or remarkably short before Procrustes “standardised” them, which led me to conclude that he was taking care to choose people who were nowhere near his five-feet-ten ideal. If he were to kill someone of that exact height, it would invalidate his whole scheme and he would probably self-destruct.

  I settled down to the task of pinning him down.

  Days whirled by. Weeks danced past. I delved among clippings. I pored over maps. I rifled through records. I looked. I laboured. I learned.

  The picture formed, coalescing, crystallising.

  During this period, that feeling of being watched recurred a number of times.

  Once, in a library, I had the distinct impression that somebody was scrutinising me across the room. Raising my head from the university journal I was studying, I gazed around with surreptitious idleness. All the other library-users were bent over their reading matter. The librarian, returning books to shelves, had her back to me. No one was paying me any attention.

  Yet I could have sworn that, somewhere in that large dusty room, somewhere amid the bookcases and thousand upon thousand of stacked volumes, there was someone with their eyes on me.

  Another time, I was out shopping for groceries when I became convinced that I was being tracked along the supermarket aisles. Because of my lifestyle I was able to visit the supermarket at times when it was not crowded. As I trundled to and fro with my trolley, I was sure that one of the few other shoppers in the store was dogging me. I kept sensing someone close behind me. Consequently, whenever I halted to load an item into my trolley, I would cast a glance in both directions along the aisle I was in. If there was anyone in sight, however, it was seldom the same person twice. My follower, assuming he or she existed, would have to have been a master of disguise, capable of switching between personae in the twinkling of an eye.

  A couple of times while working out in the gym I felt strongly that one of my fellow exercisers was staring at me. People in gyms have a tendency to eye one another up, but this was more than that. I used the wall-mirrors to see if I could spot my observer. Everyone was absorbed with their treadmilling or cycling or weightlifting. Everywhere I saw the usual red faces and puffed cheeks and strained veins, nothing out of the ordinary.

  At one point I even thought I was being watched while in my house. I was in my study, at my computer, when the now-familiar tingle started up in my brain. I went to the window. The view was of back gardens, the rears of the houses on the street behind, a distant gasometer. No one was visible except for a child clambering on a climbing frame three gardens along from mine.

  I snatched the curtains shut and got back to work.

  Had I been constantly perceiving that I was being monitored and followed, I would have concluded that I was not mistaken and would have taken appropriate countermeasures. In the event, since the sense of surveillance came so infrequently and intermittently, I was able to dismiss it as a trick of the imagination. I was not the sort to be prone to paranoia. I decided I had been working too hard. I had, after all, been hunting and killing killers non-stop for nigh on six years. It was time to take a sabbatical. Once I had dealt with Procrustes, I promised myself I would book a long holiday. Visit some exotic places, relax, let myself be waited on by waiters, massaged by masseuses, sunned by the sun, waved by waves.

  If you work alone, sometimes you cannot tell when you need a break. Sometimes your subconscious has to drop increasingly unsubtle hints.

  So I thought.

  Procrustes was a disgraced, disgruntled professor of classics. Having been fired from his university post for assaulting an undergraduate who could not properly conjugate a Greek pluperfect, he now scratched a living as a private tutor. In his leisure time, he abducted strangers and forcibly lengthened or foreshortened them in his basement. He himself was one inch taller than five feet ten. His mission was to be able to look down on everyone, but his classicist’s sense of empirical precision compelled him to want to look down on everyone equally, from that small but crucial one-inch advantage.

  I spent a fortnight in the university town acquainting myself with Procrustes’s routine, such as it was. I could simply have cornered him in a dark alleyway one night and slashed open an artery, but it was important to me to develop a rapport with my target, to understand the urges and inner rhythms he obeyed. It brought us closer together and turned the act of killing into something approaching a consummation.

  Finally, after much loitering and tailing and stalking and staking-out, it was time. I was ready. So, in a different way, was Procrustes.

  I broke into his house while he was out at the pub one evening.

  For an hour I lay in wait, a statue-still, shallow-breathing presence in his home.

  His nemesis.

  As a classicist, he would have appreciated the reference.

  On the wall of my bedroom at home there was a framed poster depicting a little fish about to be eaten by a larger fish, in turn about to be eaten by a larger fish, in turn about to be eaten by a yet larger fish. It was, I had been told once, a visual allegory of capitalism.

  Perhaps.

  To me, it was emblematic of what I did. I preyed on the predator. I fed on the fish that fed on the little fish.

  I thought of that poster every time I made a kill.

  Procrustes let himself in around ten p.m. Somewhat the worse for wear, he fumbled with his keys and dropped them on the doormat. He picked them up and closed the door behind him. He started singing softly: “Gaudeamus igitur, iuvenes dum sumus …”

  Let us rejoice therefore, while we are still young men.

  Ensconced on his landing, huddled out of sight, I heard him walk to the kitchen and get out a saucepan.

  His nightly nightcap: Horlicks with a tot of whisky.

  I could not imagine a more disgusting drink.

  A few minutes later, steaming mug in hand, he returned to the hallway and began to climb the stairs.

  I had the Gerber out and ready.

  The mug fell, splashing hot white liquid across the landing carpet. The sweet, rank smell of milk and malt filled my nostrils. Malt from both the Horlicks and the whisky.

  Forcing him against the wall, I stared deep into his eyes.

  I did not have to say anything. He knew who I was and why I was there.

  The knife whickered in the dark. Strings of blood graced the wallpaper. Useless wet sounds cluttered his throat.

  When the sentience had gone from his face, I lowered him to the floor and, kneeling, sawed open his tanktop sweater. Then I undid his shirt and painstakingly etched the six letters into the meat of his chest.

  K-I-L-L-E-R.

  I settled back on my haun
ches.

  As always, there was satisfaction at the completion of a job, mingled with disappointment at losing the goal I had been building up to the past few weeks. A feeling as at the end of a piece of music which, with the last note, turns from a major key to a minor. A Phrygian cadence, as it is known.

  And then: an unexpected sound, as though one of the orchestra had dropped an instrument.

  A gun to the back of my head, and the tock of a hammer being cocked.

  It was him. I knew it in an instant.

  The one who had been watching me.

  The one who had been following me.

  All along, he had been real.

  “Don’t turn around,” he said.

  An accent I could not place. Scots, maybe?

  “This won’t hurt,” he promised.

  How did he know?

  “There aren’t many of your kind,” he told me. “You’re extremely rare. That makes hunting you a highly skilled and specialised occupation.”

  I saw it then. I had thought I was on the top of the pyramid. Below me the killers, below them their victims. But all along there was another level to the pyramid of which I had been unaware, and this man was at its apex.

  He killed the killers who killed killers.

  He was the fourth fish, the one that ate the fish that ate the fish that ate the little fish.

  I heard the first click of the trigger being depressed. A preliminary catch. All he had to do now was squeeze a tiny bit tighter.

  There was no escape. I was weirdly calm.

  I was a killer killer-killer. That made my killer a killer killer-killer killer.

  Was there a yet higher category? Killer killer-killer-killer killer? And above that another one, and so on, like an ever-expanding food-chain of death? Mortality ad infinitum?