One
Seven was Carol’snumber. Not a big number. Pathetic, really, stopped before she got started, but it was enough to call her a serial killer. Enough to make her point.
Or was it more? Convicted for seven anyway. Perhaps there were a few others—it all got a bit hazy toward the end there. Harold Shipman had got through hundreds, but that was easy. A doctor killing patients, old ladies who walked into his surgery. They were sitting ducks, hardly worth the effort. Tap-ins. Now, picking seven (or whatever her number was) moving targets, young healthy people going about their business, andmurderingthem, that took skill. That took guts.
Of course, this was all in the past. Now Carol could hardly be bothered to get up and find the TV remote, let alone chase down a man, knock him to the ground, stab him in the neck, drag him into the van, take him for a drive, bury him in the woods, clean up, and leave a clue for the police to make it interesting. Carol wasretired now. Which was why she was heading to Sheldon Oaks to be with the rest of the retirees, the rest of the sitting ducks.
Want to know how to knock a few decades off your sentence? Tell them where the bodies are buried. Carol’s choice was a popular one—Epping Forest. The only problem was finding a patch of ground without a body already in it. You’d think the difficulty would be getting the corpse out of the van and dragging it deep enough into the woods, but things were different back then. After dark, there’d always be someone else with their own body to ditch. Usually, the other killer would be a professional, a gangster, something like that—not a simple hobbyist like Carol. You’d help them to carry theirs, they’d help you with yours—a real sense of community. People were friendlier in the old days, not like it is now.
Carol noticed the sound of tires on gravel, a noise she hadn’t heard in years, as the taxi slowly pulled into the driveway. She braced herself for a new beginning, her new placid existence. The driver, who hadn’t said a word on the journey, took her luggage from the boot as Carol looked at her new home. The frontage was big and rectangular. Carol hadn’t a clue of the history, but to her it looked like a converted grand hotel, at least a hundred years old. Downton Abbey, but every character is Maggie Smith’s age. Sheldon Oaks was in Hampstead, a wealthy part of North London, its pretty grounds bordering Hampstead Heath. This was the sort of place the rich came to die.
Carol walked into the plush lobby area.
“Oh dear. Ms. Quinn. Welcome. I’m terribly sorry but I don’t think your removals people have arrived.” Elisa, the concierge, had dark hair, expensive glasses, and was well put-together butcurrently fretting. She spoke in a European accent. Everything here had class, thought Carol, like a five-star hotel that accepted guests only over the age of sixty-five. Elisa walked over to her from behind the reception desk.
“That’s all right. I didn’t use a removals service,” said Carol.
“Oh, I see. You have some family helping you? Are they here? Let me get you a seat.”
Carol remained standing. “No. Just me. I have this but that will be all.” She nodded down to her wheelie case, small enough to qualify as hand luggage for the overhead locker on most flights.
“So the rest of your things will be arriving another day?”
“No, no. This is it. Thank you. If my apartment is ready, I’d like to move in, please.”
Elisa failed to disguise her shock. This was not a normal arrival, clearly. Most new residents, Carol supposed, came to Sheldon Oaks having gone through months of packing, organizing possessions accumulated over a lifetime. Many arrived traumatized, no doubt, after taking the contents of a four-floor house and downsizing enough to fit them into a one-room apartment, their adult children standing over them, lecturing them about how this was for the best, assuring them that the urgency with which they were moving them into a home had absolutely nothing to do with a desire to sell the family’s biggest asset at the top of the housing market.
Here was Carol Quinn, seventy-five, short and scrappy, with shoulder-length gray hair and a small visor cap, arriving in a cab straight from prison.
“Ms. Quinn!” Giles Temple, the owner, emerged from a back room. “Let me take that for you. Journey okay?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Carol recognized Giles from the brochures. In photographs he’d been smartly suited and airbrushed. In person, you got a sense of who the real Giles Temple was. Fortyish and out of shape, with blue eyes and chaotic blond hair, wearing an old-fashioned rugby shirt and tattered aqua-blue shorts. It was the sort of outfit that only a man with an expensive education could get away with.
Giles lowered his voice. “And did you come straight from…?”
“Prison, yes.”
“Surrey. That’s right, Surrey,” said Giles, placing a glossier spin on her answer.
Carol was aware that Giles and Elisa had had discussions about the ethics of welcoming a recent lag, a convicted serial killer no less, into their luxury retirement community directly from HMP Bronzefield. When making arrangements, they’d accidentally forwarded Carol their whole email conversation on the subject and were still apparently unaware that she had read it all. Giles and Elisa had agreed there was a balance to be struck. Yes, with this particular resident, there was a higher-than-comfortable possibility of her murdering a significant percentage of the Sheldon Oaks “family,” but on the other hand, in this day and age, did they really have the right to be so prejudiced? Carol was being released for a reason. She was reformed, wasn’t she? They had to have faith in the criminal justice system. Who were they to judge another human being who’d paid their debt to society? Also, new purchases had been far lower than projected in recent months, the accounts weren’t looking great, and Carol had offered not to rent but to buy an apartment outright, at full price and in cash. If that meant there was the ever-so-slight risk of them all beingslaughtered one by one—blood seeping from the cracks in the windows, trickling down into Hampstead, drowning the city in gore—it was a risk they were prepared to take.
•••
With Elisa andGiles gone, Carol sat on a wicker chair on her new balcony, enjoying the early-summer sunshine. A few weeks ago, she’d been allowed out for the day to tour her new apartment. Floor-to-ceiling windows, hardwood floors. The last time she’d had her own place, everyone wanted carpet.
Her kitchen intimidated her. It had one of those ovens you see on cookery shows where the door disappears underneath when you open it, and a fridge with a thing in the door that you could push a glass into and ice would pop out. The TV was six times bigger than any she’d ever owned. Most decadent of all, her bedroom was en suite, which meant she hadtwobathrooms. Her bladder wasn’t as strong as it used to be, granted, but even at her age she had need for only one bathroom at any one time.
The brochure described the “design ethic” as “contemporary.” Carol, when telling her fellow inmates about it, opted for the word “lovely.”
She had known for a while now that her lifestyle was about to change dramatically, but it hadn’t felt real until now. To actually be here, a free woman, living in the most luxurious surroundings, a world away from where she’d just spent hour after hour, day after day, year after year.Thirty-five years.Carol had earned this.
She looked out over the pretty gardens and sighed in satisfaction. No high walls, no barbed wire, no screws. No cons in jogging bottoms using their one hour outdoors to drag pensively on acigarette and tell, for the eight hundredth time, the story of how “everything went wrong when I met Darren.” Just some flower beds and a freshly cut lawn with a game of croquet in progress. A young man was banging in a post for a rope fence that marked the border between the lawns and the driveway. Everything was orderly here, everything was quaint. And beyond the grounds of Sheldon Oaks was Hampstead Heath, a paradise that overlooked her favorite city, a city she could now enjoy anytime she liked.
Not now, though, because Carol had just remembered her bed. She walked through her one-floor flat and into her bedroom. There it was. Thirty-five years of sleeping on a paper-thin, less-than-single mattress, and now she was looking at a giant double bed. And it was all hers.
Carol kicked off her slip-ons, lay back, and closed her eyes. She soon fell into a deep and peaceful sleep, dreaming of the last time she was in a bed this size, methodically cutting off a man’s ear with a pair of nail scissors she’d bought that afternoon from the pharmacy.
