The pages are faded yellow. My cheeks cool as I flick through the book. The photos of the first two victims stare back at me: John and Valerie Watts. This was where it all began, a terrible nightmare that opened one Wednesday morning, presumably like any other, on the first day of June. The black and white images remind me of passport photos. Both husband and wife are remarkably void of expression. Their eyes are wide, sullen and sad. I can't help but imagine what their faces looked like in the moment before they were both stabbed to death with a cut-throat razor.
I blink the image out of my mind. It is replaced by another. I imagine my own face in the final moment before he made my world turn black. I force my eyes to stare at the words on the page, just to stay focussed on something - anything - other than that image. Seconds pass. Eventually I start absorbing the words. The dark clouds part and my mind clears.
The media tore into these two much more brutally than he ever did. It was a frenzy. I woke up one morning two days after the first killing and I could just tell from the atmosphere in the kitchen that something was wrong. My dad was quiet and my mum glanced nervously at her beloved newspaper. This was my cue to grab for it. My mouth dropped when I read the first page. I devoured every single word much more eagerly than I ever devoured my morning toast with butter.
The paper didn't disclose the full details, but they exposed as much as they could. The killer hadn't fled the scene immediately. He stayed around and carved one straight line down the chest of Valerie and then two straight lines down the chest of John.
I run a finger over my chest now, across my pink scars, just as Erica likes to do. An image floods my mind and I wince. I quickly pull my hand away.
The police said that the lines were most likely Roman numerals. The newspapers said that he was keeping count, recording a tally of his victims on their dead bodies. Baldwin gave a quote. He'd get slated for it over the coming days and weeks. They said that he'd created a media storm, that he had incited fear in the public. Baldwin said that it meant he intended to kill again and again. After all, who counts up to two? It was a public relations disaster. The media jumped on this, quickly gave the killer a name.
Spartacus was born.
The names they give to killers are rarely imaginative; they are usually simplistic. The media reaches out to the mass population, to lay people with limited knowledge and understanding. Everybody could relate to the significance of the name. Unfortunately, there was an element of grandeur to it. Even more unfortunately, the names often do.
And just as quickly as the name was born, just as Baldwin predicted, more people started to die.
My eyes flick over the pages. It floods back. Details of John and Valerie's alternative lifestyle trickled through on a daily basis. For a few days, they were the big story, not Spartacus. We didn't even know who he was, of course, but their dirty laundry was there for everybody to see. I dragged my seventeen-year-old self out of bed and ran down the stairs in the mornings to pick up the newspaper before my mum or dad just so I could discover what new obscenities had been uncovered about them. She liked to whip. He liked to watch. My parents pleaded for me not to read it, said that no good would come of it, but I ignored them. The stories about John and Valerie were just too fantastic to ignore; they sucked me in.
They'd been to a club in Cardiff the night they were killed. The paper made it clear that it was not a normal club that their respectable readers would ever contemplate visiting. Their motives were not innocent. And they went to the club together, for the same purpose. It wasn't just John (as the red-blooded male) who was a deviant; they both were. They were, it was revealed, sexual predators. John and Valerie often frequented the club and, by all accounts, they often brought singles or couples back to their house. Not for coffee or a game of Cluedo. For sex. John and Valerie were perfect fodder for the papers. They became the butt of jokes in the workplace and the playground.
The police interviewed a whole range of people who had seen them at the club that night. A handful admitted they'd previously engaged in intimate relations with John and Valerie. Their faces appeared in the newspapers. Most were middle-aged and unattractive. They were all women. None of them saw John and Valerie with anybody else that night. Definitely not a man. Many vouched that they left alone. The police concluded that John and Valerie Watts must have picked Spartacus up on their way home.
I turn the pages of the book and then, suddenly, it feels like somebody has punched my chest. Hard. I wipe away a layer of cold sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. This was the murder where it really hit home. This was the first victim I could really relate to; whose life was even remotely anything like my own.
Marie Davies.
She was the fifth victim, killed on the 16th night of June. The fourth victim, Judy Spencer, a middle-aged housewife
