Their eyes met as he drew level and she nodded a polite good morning. The Disciple smiled a weary acknowledgment as he visualised himself slitting her throat. He knew how good it would make him feel to watch her blood spurt high in the air, gushing out of a neatly severed artery.
He quickly dispelled the dangerously compelling desires these thoughts conjured up.
Discipline had to be maintained at all times or his cover would be blown. It was just like being an undercover spy in communist Russia. He would have made a good spy, he thought, trying not to glance back at the woman.
A strong breeze was already clearing the grey clouds from the sky and the coming day promised to be a vast improvement on the preceding one.
He looked up as a police car whizzed past at high speed. The siren soon faded, but the killer continued to watch until the blue lights became a small glow in the distance. He wondered where they were going. Was their call connected to his work? They were certainly heading in the right direction.
He stopped to buy a morning paper from the stall outside the tube station. The wizened old proprietor was a real East End ‘geezer’, full of Cockney rhyming slang and dropped aitches.
Folding the Red Top under his arm, The Disciple walked the short distance to his favourite café. He ordered coffee and a fry up, and then took a seat by the window, where he could watch the world go by as he ate. Flicking through the newspaper while he waited for his food to arrive, the killer immediately spotted the name on the paper’s lead story: Teresa Miller.
He smiled in satisfaction.
He had chosen well.
◆◆◆
Standing alone, Tyler surveyed the body in silence. If Hell was the afterlife version of a jail sentence, he hoped the needless mutilation of this cadaver would guarantee that the perpetrator, a creature Jack envisaged as something less than human to start with, and all the more dangerous because of it, spent all of eternity in Prison Hades.
Like most detectives, or cops in general for that matter, he liked things to be clear-cut: cause and effect equals end result. Unfortunately, things rarely seemed to work out that way, at least not in real life.
In any homicide, it helped to know what motivated a person to commit such an extreme crime. Love, hate, greed, revenge, and jealousy; at least one of these factors usually appeared in the matrix.
It was equally true that, on the odd occasion, there was no discernible motive; the murder had occurred simply because the pressure of a particular situation, or of life in general, had proved too much, causing the killer to snap without warning.
He’d known from day one that this killer was different from any other he’d dealt with before; he’d said as much to Tony Dillon. No matter how hard he tried, he still found it impossible to fathom the evil behind these atrocities.
The woman lying before him had been senselessly murdered, her corpse unforgivably mutilated. A teenage boy had discovered her while cutting through St. James Passage on his morning paper round; it was an experience that would scar the poor sod for a long time to come.
As Tyler looked down at the lifeless husk on the flowerbed, he felt his anger rise like bile. There were those who argued that there were no evil people in the world, just individuals who were incredibly sick; Jack knew differently. This killer’s actions went way beyond sick. They were acts of unspeakable evil, carried out by a dark force inhabiting a flesh-coated shell that was cleverly disguised to appear human.
The killing had occurred within City of London jurisdiction and, technically, this was their investigation. However, after lengthy discussions at the highest level, it had been agreed that it made sense for the Met to take primacy as this was part of an ongoing series they were already dealing with.
The forensic team was standing by to enter the crime scene, ready to begin the lengthy process of crime analysis. As usual, they had been instructed to wait until they were given a green light from the SIO. Sam Calvin, the Crime Scene Manager, had just arrived and was in the process of unloading his van.
Tyler asked for a few moments alone with the victim, so that he could study the scene without interruption. The deceased looked to be in her mid to late thirties at a guess. From the way she was dressed, Tyler doubted that she was a prostitute. Had the killer mistaken her for one? She was lying flat on her back, her right leg bent at a forty-five-degree angle, her left one straight. The full lips of her open mouth were already blue where cyanosis had set in.
“Poor cow,” he said softly.
The woman’s throat had been cut open in a similar fashion to Tracey Phillips, leaving a frightful wound that gaped open like a second hungry mouth. There was no evidence of an arterial bleed, so either she had been killed elsewhere and then dumped here or the incision had been inflicted post-mortem. Jack suspected the latter, and if that were the case it was a deviation from the previous attack. Both eyes had been removed, and her nose had been sliced off – her ears, too.
The second murder
