confess I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Paul's punishment. Perhaps because he had deserved so much more than Adam, perhaps because I had had higher expectations of him in the first place, or perhaps simply because I was getting better at what I had to do. Whatever the reason, my second excursion into murder left me feeling as if I'd found my true vocation at last.
We dry up our tears, and . discover that a transaction which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.
"OK, Andy, it's show time Tony said to the blank screen of his computer. After Carol had dropped him off, he'd stumbled upstairs, kicking off his shoes and letting his quilted baseball jacket lie where it fell on the landing. Pausing only to empty his bladder, he'd burrowed under the duvet and fallen into the deepest sleep he'd known for months. When he'd woken, it had been after noon. But for once, he felt no guilt about the work he should have been doing. He felt refreshed, excited, elated even. Searching Stevie McConnell's house had given him a new certainty that he really did understand what he was doing. He had known, with absolute clarity, that Handy Andy did not live like that. And although it wasn't something he could admit to anyone outside the tight circle of fellow profilers, there was a real rush in realizing that he could probably find his way into Handy Andy's head and map a path through the tortured labyrinth of his unique logic. All he had to do now was find the key to the door.
In the office. Tony powered his way through the remaining piles of documents, making notes as he went along. Then he closed the blinds and told his secretary to hold all his calls. He moved his own chair round the desk so that it faced the visitor's chair. On the desk to one side, he placed his tape recorder, still switched off. He walked over to the door and stood with his- back to it, contemplating the room. Some poem he'd once read echoed in his mind. Something about a road that divided in a wood, and the importance of choosing the branch less travelled by. For as long as he could recall, his fascinations had led him down the road less travelled by. It was the road that his patients walked, the dark path that led into the undergrowth, away from the dappled sunshine of the broad path. "I need to understand why you chose that road, Andy," Tony murmured.
"This is what I do best, Andy. You see, I know what draws me to that road. But I'm not like you. I can go back when I want to. I can choose the sunny path.
I don't have to be here. All I'm doing is studying your footsteps. Or at least, that's what I tell the world.
"But we know the truth, don't we? You can't hide from me, Andy," he said softly.
"I'm just like you, you see. I'm your mirror image. I'm the poacher turned gamekeeper. It's only hunting you that keeps me from being you. I'm here, waiting for you. Journey's end." He stood for a moment longer, savouring the admission he'd made to himself.
Finally, he sat down in his chair and leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands loosely linked.
"OK, Andy," he said.
"It's just you and me. We're going to skip the preliminaries; all that stuff where we do the verbal arm wrestling and you eventually decide to talk to me.
We're going straight for it. First off, I want to say how impressed I am. I've never seen a cleaner job. I don't just mean the bodies, I mean the whole thing. Sweet as a nut, you did it. Never a witness.
Let me rephrase that. Never anybody seeing any significance in what they saw or heard, because there must have been people who saw or heard something, but they didn't make the connection. How did you manage to be so invisible? " He pressed 'record' on the cassette recorder, then stood up and stepped across to the other chair.
Tony took a deep breath and deliberately relaxed his body. He used breathing techniques to put himself into a light state of trance. He instructed his conscious mind to let go, to allow his higher self to access directly all he knew about Handy Andy and