He had a pill in his pocket, anger in his limbs. He was ready for anything. He scanned the room, looking for the weak, the needy, the dispossessed. Society demanded that people be part of a couple, a demand that the conventional took to heart. This was especially true as Christmas neared and all of the traditional songs spoke of love and life partnerships.
It took him an hour, and a couple of false starts, to find her. Small and slender – in other words, easy to overpower. A dyed blonde, so someone desperate for flattery or to fit into some conformist idea of womanhood. No one spent hundreds of pounds and many hours at the hairdressers having their roots retouched unless a certain look was important to them. She was staring at the men in the room, ignoring her mate who was slumped back in her chair and looked close to sleep.
‘Too late a night for your pal?’ he asked, sitting down.
‘Yeah, she’s been on the vodka. It always does that to her.’
‘Never liked the stuff,’ he said, noticing that she was on something darker.
‘Nor me, but it’s half-price vodka night.’
‘So, what are you drinking?’
‘Vodka and coke,’ she said, looking surprised that he had to ask.
‘Fancy another one?’
It would be her last for some time.
‘Nah, I’d better get Latoya home.’
Christ, who came up with these girls’ names? It sounded like something from the ghetto. His own name had class – Adam, the supposed first man.
‘You’re not going to drive, are you?’ he asked, looking sternly at her half-empty tumbler.
‘Well, I couldn’t before!’ she said, and giggled loudly.
‘So how did you get here?’
‘Walked.’
‘OK, well my car’s outside and I’ve only had half of this.’ He indicated his pint. ‘I’m happy to give you a lift.’
‘To Latoya’s?’
No, to Alaska. He fought back the sarcastic remark.
‘To her house then to yours. Or we can drop her off and you and I can carry on to another club.’
‘It’ll cost more now that it’s after eleven.’
She hadn’t had much to drink if she knew what time it was and remembered the typical club rules, but the Rohypnol would take away her short-term memory. She’d assume that she’d been very drunk.
‘Hey, I got a tax rebate so I’m flush.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Personal trainer.’
‘Same here,’ she said, looking absurdly pleased.
Fuck – the last thing he wanted was to be questioned at length about his pretend vocation. The best thing to do was to turn the conversation around so that it was all about her.
‘I could see that you were fit! Do you do lots of cardio?’
‘Lots of everything.’
‘Same here. It’s all about surprising the body, isn’t it?’
Hers was about to get the biggest surprise . . .
‘I’ve just started doing zumba,’ she said.
‘Is that right?’ He had no idea what that was.
‘You know, half dance, half aerobics,’ she added helpfully.
‘A bit too girly for me,’ he said with a manly smile.
‘I’ve rugby players come to my aerobics class.’
Probably to letch, he thought sourly. ‘I have lots of women in my weightlifting class,’ he replied.
‘We should attend each other’s classes.’
Now, that really would be something.
‘For starters, we should get your friend home before she passes out.’
She giggled. ‘Will we take an arm each?’
Not in a million years – that way they’d be noticed by security and by other dancers.
‘No, let’s wake her up properly.’
He shook one of her arms and his intended victim – damn, he’d forgotten to ask her name – shook the other. Latoya opened her eyes and glared at them but got to her feet when they urged her on. She walked unsteadily in front of them, Adam occasionally encouraging her by prodding gently at her back.
They reached the car park without incident and he put both girls in the back seat, got Latoya’s address from her and keyed the details into his satnav. Good, she was only a short drive away.
They soon reached her house, a downstairs flat, and he and her friend walked her to the door, helped her find her keys.
‘I’ll make her a mug of tea, sober her up,’ Adam said. An idea was forming. He hadn’t enjoyed three-in-a-bed for several years.
He went to the loo whilst the kettle came to the boil, used the time to check out the place. She lived alone, which was ideal for his purposes, and there was no shaving foam or spare toothbrush or any other suggestion that there was a boyfriend in the vicinity who might call round. He made three mugs of black tea, put date rape drugs into two of them and added a little milk to the unadulterated mug. He put all three on a tray, with the milk bottle, and took them into the tiny, airless lounge.
‘Pure Stepford husband,’ he murmured, ‘even if I do say so myself.’
Both girls looked at him blankly: they obviously hadn’t seen the film or its various spin-offs. Not that it really mattered – in ten minutes, they’d be so out of it that he wouldn’t have to create a rapport.
‘Chloe, want to put some whisky in these?’ asked Latoya.
Ah, so that was the personal trainer’s moniker. Adam smiled conspiratorially at Chloe and she smiled back.
‘No, Latoya, we’re trying to make you feel better.’
‘Looking at him is making me feel much better,’ Latoya said.
He looked at Chloe and gave her another smile, one which hopefully reassured her that he wasn’t after her mate.
‘All that dancing earlier on has made me thirsty,’ he murmured and drank deeply of his tea, knowing that it would encourage them to do likewise. Human beings were pack animals and they ate and drank more when they were in company which was why a capitalist society discouraged loners like him. If the need for sex and money hadn’t forced him to make connections, he could happily spend day after day in solitude, just driving around the country or reading the latest psychology books and thinking up new mind games to try out on his more vulnerable patients or next girlfriend.
Five minutes later, both girls were close to sleep.
‘Let’s go into the bedroom,’ he murmured. ‘Get you comfortable.’
He wanted them to walk there of their own volition, rather than have to be dragged.
Latoya, clearly the more sexed up of the two, got up immediately, giggled, and led the way, her generous hips swaying. Ironically, he much preferred Chloe with her petite frame and longer hair. Both girls stumbled slightly but kept walking until they reached the, unfortunately, single bed.
‘Let’s all lie down.’ He felt as if he was presenting some adult version of a kid’s show where everything was outlined in simple sentences. What can we see through the square window? Adam fucking two drugged-up girls . . .
They lay, shoulder to shoulder, for a moment. He watched, listened, they were close to losing consciousness.
‘Girls, take off each other’s clothes.’
He sat up to watch, impressed at how hard they tried to please him. Whenever they fumbled with a button or a zip, he helped. When they were naked, he rolled them both onto their stomachs and undressed himself. It was party time.
He rolled on a condom and sodomised Chloe first. She moaned but remained immobile. He orgasmed loudly, withdrew and wrapped the sheath in one of the tissues from his jacket pocket. He returned it to his pocket and got a new condom out of the pack. He reached under Latoya and played with her breasts and pussy for a few minutes, felt himself grow hard again. For a forty-year-old, he was wearing well.
Latoya was even easier to bugger and he slid in first time. The drug appeared to have relaxed her completely. He pinched her nipples and she whimpered softly, so, on some level, she could still feel sensation and pain. He took longer to
climax this time and she was bleeding slightly by the time that he pulled out of her so he used a few extra tissues to staunch the trickle of telltale red. He wanted everything to appear normal by the morning, for them to believe that they had had consensual sex, or no sex at all.
He dozed in between them for a couple of hours and when he woke up he was hard again. This was the life – no wining or dining, no pretending to be interested in their hobbies or lengthy stories about people he’d never even met. He fucked them like they were hookers but he didn’t pay and wasn’t limited to a half-hearted handjob in the car. He used Chloe’s mouth this time, pinching her nose until her lips parted obligingly and he thrust halfway down her throat.
Afterwards, though he again felt sleepy, he forced himself to leave. He’d be back in Weston by the time that they woke up, and they’d realize that they didn’t know his name or anything about him apart from a few details of his car. Most women didn’t even notice the make, only the colour. And it had been dark in the car park so they might not even have paid attention to that.
No, he’d gotten away with rape yet again – and it had been two for the price of one this time. In fact, there hadn’t been a price as he hadn’t even bought either girl a drink. He was, Adam thought, as he drove through the quiet Southampton streets, invincible. As long as his mind stayed sharp and his manhood stayed hard, he could go on and on.
THIRTY-NINE
He’d have to take a different approach as his current strategy wasn’t working. They were no nearer to catching Hannah and Kylie’s killer than they’d been at the start. Olivia had failed to make a breakthrough with Adam Neave, despite her extensive use of his therapy service. They’d told him that John had been murdered in the hope that he’d confess, but, in reality, the post-mortem had been inconclusive and it could have been suicide. The younger man had apparently had a history of depression and seemed to have been permanently disappointed with himself.
Morosely, Bill Winston updated his team about the operation. The national press returned their attention to the murders whenever it was a slow news week and had been highly critical of his apparent lack of progress. At the end of last month – December – they’d produced several features on unsolved murders of the past year. Both of the victims’ families were equally anxious to have the murderer – or, more likely, murderers – in the frame. They wanted instant results whereas a murder investigation often took months and even years.
The public thought that he could just arrest the most likely suspects and bully them into a confession, whereas the reality was very different. If he didn’t build a watertight case, the Crown Prosecution Service would throw it out. He also had to be careful where his undercover operation was concerned, as the judge would halt the case if he thought that it had been brought courtesy of a honeytrap.
Just to complicate matters, the police were going to have to speak to Adam’s colleagues, try to ascertain if he could have framed Nicholas, his more conventional brother. They’d rather have avoided this as it would put him on his guard. They wanted the man to relax and form a bond with the apparently bereaved Olivia, talk to her in detail about his late wife. But everything that Adam had said suggested that Helen had been genuinely low, that he had done everything that he could to help her. He hadn’t been critical of his spouse, not even when Olivia heavily criticised Zak. The psychologist had thought that the man would recognize psychopathic traits in others, so had encouraged the undercover policewoman to appear increasingly indifferent about her late husband, portray herself as a potential party girl. So far, it had been a waste of time and money as the therapist hadn’t taken the bait.
‘We’ll get him – or them,’ he told the sleep-deprived detectives in a desperate bid to boost morale. ‘We’re making inroads and everything comes to he who waits.’
But how long would they have to wait? And for whom? And, in the meantime, would another young woman have to die?
This was either the bravest thing that she’d ever done – or the most foolhardy. If her superiors found out, she would lose her job but she no longer cared. She was tired of police work, tired of her marriage and thoroughly bored with herself. She’d applied for and accepted this assignment because she craved excitement, and now she was about to find out how exciting life could actually get. None of her colleagues knew that she’d kissed Adam on her last visit – or that she’d made this appointment just for her own gratification, that it was playing no part in her undercover work.
Marc had already left for the office, so she was able to dress with especial care. She put on her new white lace bra and matching panties. Not that she planned to go all the way with the therapist, but the bra pushed her breasts up and made them look especially taut and alluring under her clothes, and the briefs clung to her like the proverbial second skin so left no visible panty line.
For her top half, she selected a tie-dye purple blouse which she left open to her cleavage, and teamed it with purple jeans. She looked trendy yet alternative and youthful without being mutton dressed as lamb. He’d returned her kiss during their last session, but she’d had to leave before her colleagues realized that something untoward was happening. Today she could kiss him at length and run her hands down his back . . .
The train journey seemed to take an age and she had an incredible desire to pace back and forth, but settled for staring out of the window. Was he, too, looking at his watch and wondering how far they would go?
At last she reached the station, hailed a cab, breathed fast and hard as it meandered its way towards Adam’s house. He was only the second man that she’d had any form of sexual contact with so their recent kiss probably meant more to her than it did to him. Indeed, he might receive kisses from all of his more attractive female patients. Was she young enough and bright enough to stand out?
‘Nice place,’ the cabbie said when they arrived.
‘It’s a friend’s house.’ She wondered belatedly if the taxi drivers knew the addresses of the local therapists, if they regularly had bunny boilers in the back of their cars. ‘Keep the change,’ she added, aware that she was giving him an unusually large tip.
‘You have a nice day, love,’ he said, smiling broadly.
Would she? Olivia wondered as she walked up the path. Or was she about to make a gigantic fool of herself?
He opened the door almost as soon as she rang.
‘Saw your taxi arrive.’
‘Surprised that you didn’t hear him, he was chatting me up so loudly!’
‘And were you tempted?’
‘No, he’s not my type.’
She watched, feeling shaky, as Adam closed the door and turned towards her. ‘So, who is your type?’
It was now or never. ‘Oh, I have a fetish for therapists.’
She stepped closer and lifted her face towards his.
To her relief and delight, he responded, his mouth coming down on hers, slowly increasing the pressure. Olivia slid her hands around his waist and pulled him closer, just as she had in her dreams. She felt his breathing quicken as she moved her palms down to his buttocks, tracing them through the black cords. Ironically he, too, was wearing a purple shirt, albeit a self-coloured one.
‘I could get struck off for this,’ he murmured, moving his hands to her hair.
‘I won’t tell. It’ll be our secret.’
‘You’re a beautiful young woman, Olivia, but I don’t want to take advantage . . .’
‘You aren’t. I want to be more than friends with you.’ She pressed her body closer to his, felt his erection pushing into her belly. She whimpered as her body responded, suddenly awash with lust.
He kissed her again, more passionately this time, before she felt his lips moving to her neck, creating new pathways of excitement. He was sensuous and assured yet eager, something that her husband hadn’t been for a long time. His mouth traced its way to her cleavage then back up again to her throat whilst inwardly she begged him to touch her breasts.
‘I love those,’
he said at last, palming her nipples through both layers of thin cotton. Olivia heard herself moan softly. Planning to stroke and kiss his chest, she started to unbutton his shirt.
‘We match,’ she said huskily.
‘Purple, the colour of mystics,’ he replied.
‘And kings.’ She wasn’t sure what to talk about but wanted to keep the conversation going, to make a connection.
‘Shall we take this to the bedroom?’ he continued. ‘We’d be a lot more comfortable lying down.’
Olivia hesitated. She’d promised herself that she’d only kiss and caress him through his clothes, hold out the promise of full sex for the future. She wanted cosy pub lunches, romantic dinners, day trips to pretty historic towns. There again, this wasn’t a one-night, or rather one-afternoon, stand as they’d been talking for many weeks, building up a relationship.
‘We won’t do anything that you’re not comfortable with,’ he added, as if sensing her uncertainty.
‘OK. It would be nice to just kiss and cuddle.’ She let herself be led along the corridor, an all-too-willing sacrificial lamb.
‘How long will your neighbour babysit?’ he asked, sitting down on the bed and pulling her down next to him.
Olivia felt flustered for a second, forgetting her supposed motherhood. ‘Oh, all day if I let her. Do you have any more patients arriving this afternoon?’
‘No, I sensed that you were conflicted, wanted to give you as much time as you required.’
If their relationship went anywhere, she’d have to resign from her job and tell him about her true identity. She’d explain that she’d given it all up because she believed his version of events, wanted to be with him more than anything else in the world. Surely, in the circumstances, he’d forgive her? By then, they’d have been dating for a few weeks and might even be a little in love . . .
Her lust intensified as he pushed her down on her back and rolled on top of her. His weight was exciting but not oppressive, and he smelt faintly of expensive male perfume or aftershave. He caressed her again and again through her clothes until a voice in her head begged him to take them off. Reaching for his shirt, she finished the unbuttoning, was pleased when he pulled it from his shoulders and threw it to the floor.
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