Now The Cop was all business. She dropped her gun onto the bath mat, careful to put the safety on first. The Librarian was wielding the knife when she died, so The Cop only had to apply minimal pressure to strengthen her dead hand’s grip on the handle. The Cop raised the hand as far back as she could, and suspended the knife above him. A ray of mid-morning sun streamed in through the frosted glass on the bathroom window and hit the edge of the blade, silhouetting her face.
‘Listen carefully now, I’ve only got a small window of time to do this in before it’ll look suspicious, so I’ll be saying all this just the once: I don’t care about Franca Palermo. I don’t care how young she was, I don’t care how much she suffered; I could care less about her or any of your other victims and frankly my love, I could give a shit about you.’
The blade whipped through the air on its way down into his chest, then the knife rose again and hung suspended above him.
‘I’m a killer…I kill people. I don’t do it out of a profound sense of mercy, I’m not a vigilante, and it isn’t a career. This wasn’t my destiny,’ she rolled her eyes, ‘and anyone who says it is, well they’re either a thundering loony or a pretentious twat.’
The knife came down in the same spot, ripping through muscle, and covering The Cop’s face in his blood.
‘And please don’t be so conceited as to think that this was all about you. I haven’t been following your ins and outs all this time because I’m in love with you; I don’t even know your real name. You could be Rupert Thunderfart as far as I’m concerned.’
The knife see-sawed, digging down as it landed, hitting bone.
‘The truth is this is fun for me; has been since I was a kid. I displayed this penchant for causing grievous bodily harm very early on. I had to hide it, of course; Mummy didn’t like it. It was a guy like you who showed me a really good time; I s’pose you could say he gave me a voice. Anyway, I don’t take it nearly as seriously as you do; that’s why I wanted you so badly. I wanted to show you up for the deluded git you were. Poor old Marian The Librarian here was a gift from the gods in that respect.’
The Librarian’s arms flailed about comically.
‘She was completely crackers when we brought her in. Couldn’t utter a declarative sentence. I was the only one to get through to her, and that was off the clock. She didn’t know her own name when we found her. Not at all the sort of person who could be relied upon to give an accurate description of a suspect, much less lure him into her home.’
His declining heartbeat kicked up a couple of notches.
She bent down and whispered in his ear.
‘Thanks for the banter.’
He screamed as the blade pierced his heart, and it prized his lips and his upper and lower jaw apart so that his chin ended up resting on his chest. It was an expression of pure terror; frightening certainty that his work would go forever uncredited. The mortician who prepared him for burial ignored it, immune by then to the ravages of sudden death.
It was a woman’s face that would leave an impression on him.
He would see her in five years.
In the meantime, the owner of that face lived on, oblivious to the reckoning that lay ahead. She worked, payed her bills, drank beer and watched TV. The only thing that separated her from the billions of other cogs in the machine called life was her little hobby. It was so much fun that every time she did it, she would smile for days.
It was a smile her mortician would take with him to the grave.
ns 15.158.61.48da2
