In his gloved left hand, he’s holding the pair of tortoiseshell-framed glasses with the broken lens.
And in his right hand is a hunting knife.
Pamela
He was married. She had known that almost from the start.
It was why he was so secretive—because he was terrified of being found out. Hence the lonely hearts ad. Hence the pseudonym and the codes they used, the way he always insisted they meet in a neutral location so the neighbors didn’t see her at his house, and he wasn’t spotted at hers. The way they promised to each other that they wouldn’t send letters or cards that might fall into the wrong hands, or the way he always called her from a payphone when he was out and about, never from his home phone. He’d talked about getting each of them one of those new mobile phones but she didn’t really see the point in those things.
The secrecy made it more exciting at the beginning, like a passionate forbidden love affair in a film or a novel.
But now Pamela was eager to move things forward.
And so was he.
It wasn’t surprising: as an Aquarius she was highly compatible with his best Leo traits. It was truly a match made in the stars and it had been missing from her life for so long that she had almost grown used to its absence, like a missing tooth that you no longer notice. It was only when he’d shown her what they could have together that she realized what she’d been lacking all these years.
He was young too, could almost have been her son if she’d had any children. She got the sense that his other half was verycontrolling, very jealous, that they had married far too young, before either of them really knew what they wanted out of life. He was looking for more in a relationship, for the maturity and wisdom he couldn’t get from someone his own age. He didn’t even like to acknowledge his wife’s existence, but at their third rendezvous he’d forgotten to take off his wedding ring and he couldn’t very well deny it then, could he?
They’d been taking things slowly so far, because of his job as well as his wife.
But now he’d shown her he was ready to move to the next stage.
She straightened her best jacket and looked at herself in the mirror one more time, pushed the new tortoiseshell glasses up her nose, and checked her hair was just right. Excitement bubbled in her stomach, an unfamiliar tingle of nerves and anticipation that made her smile to herself—a little secret smile—every time she thought of him. She’d even woken up smiling, knowing that today was the day.
Pamela pulled the front door of the small terraced house shut behind her and picked up her small overnight bag. She’d memorized his instructions, just like he’d told her. Not even writing them down, just repeating them over and over in her head until she had them off by heart:
Leave your car at home.
Don’t take a bus or taxi either.
Walk the fifteen minutes down to the lay-by on the other side of the railway bridge.
Be there at 7:25 p.m. exactly, not a minute earlier or later, and he would arrive to pick her up.
Checking her watch one last time, Pamela set off into the gathering dusk.
61
The hunting knife has a wide, shining blade that curves to a wicked point.
Clutched in Webber’s big fist it looks small, almost like a child’s toy, but it’s still six inches of razor-sharp serrated steel and I have nothing—absolutelynothing—with which to defend myself. I straighten up slowly, taking one step back away from him until my heel bangs against the end wall of the annex. No way out. It’s incredibly claustrophobic in here and we’re barely three feet apart. He’s taller, bigger, heavier than me, and I’m completely boxed in, away from the door.
My limbs flood with adrenaline, a surging electricity of fear as an overload of signals all rush to my brain at once—fight or die, fight to live because if he beats you then Jess and the kids will be next—my eyes flicking between his face and the blade, watching for the first hint of movement in either one.
I was an idiot. And I was probably going to die because of it.Time for you to learn a lesson. Somehow he had lured me back here, had appealed to my curiosity with his spiel about cold cases, forgotten victims, and a serial killer’s sidekick who had never been caught. Becauseof coursehe knew all those details. Of course he did. How could I have gotten him so wrong? But it didn’t matter now. It was too late for any of that: I had woken something up and now it was here, in my house.
We stare at each other for a moment, his blue eyes unblinking above the thick graying beard, the perfect black of his pupils like two pinpricks in the harsh light of the bare bulb. The slim metallic pull-cord for the light switch hangs down from the ceiling between us, just within my reach. If I can grab that, plunge the room into darkness, I might have half a chance of getting around him, behind him, disarming him somehow. Or maybe even escaping, trapping him in here.
“Gordon,” I say, “what are you—”
“What do your instincts tell you to do now,” he says evenly, “in a situation like this?”
I roll onto the balls of my feet, ready to lunge for the pull-cord.
“What?”
He raises the knife toward me, light flashing off the blade.
