him, my father, the monster, the thing, the thing that had caused me so much pain. I know it sounds crazy, but … do you get it, Gemma? Do you understand?’
He moved a step closer, and I stood there frozen, my eyes wide, fixed on his face. Was this real? Had my husband really just told me he’d killed somebody? My brain didn’t seem to be working properly, and a strange numbness was beginning to spread through me, upwards from my toes, my legs rigid and heavy, my stomach contracting. I stared at him, and opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
Richmond Park? One of the London murders being linked to the Bristol cases had happened in Richmond Park, hadn’t it? Did that mean? … please, no …
‘I felt good, for a while.’
He was talking again, and his eyes had taken on a slightly wild look now, casting around the room, not looking at me.
‘But then a few weeks after we got married, I went for a drink after work, and I just saw this guy, on the other side of the bar, and again, he looked a bit like Dad. He did, Gemma. Like it was my father, just sitting there, and I know, I know, there are a lot of guys around who look a bit like Dad, a bit like me, when you think about it … dark hair, dark eyebrows. But at the time, well, it was like fate, you know? I thought, here’s another one, sent to me. So I went over, and I said, “hey, are you my long-lost brother, look at us!” some bollocks like that, and we got chatting, and then he said he needed to get back home to his girlfriend, so I followed him. He got on the tube, I got on the tube … he’d left his car at Hounslow West tube station, parked in a nice dark corner, and even when I got there, watching him from the shadows, I wasn’t sure if it was going to happen again; I thought I might be able to control it that time, you know, but it was like the rage took me over, Gemma. It took me over. And so I grabbed something that was lying on the ground, I think it was a broken exhaust pipe, something like that, it was just there, and … well, the same thing again. The relief, the peace.’
‘The dead man,’ I whispered. My throat was beginning to constrict, and I wondered if soon I might not be able to breathe. Was this real? Was I really hearing this?
Danny laughed, then his face grew serious again.
‘The dead man,’ he said softly.
We looked at each other for a moment, then he took another step towards me. I could smell a faint odour, a mix of sweat and aftershave, sour and sweet. My mobile phone had started ringing again. Danny glanced towards the door to the hall, but the ringing stopped, the call going to voicemail. He looked back at me.
‘And then, nothing. I was OK. I felt better,’ he said. ‘I thought, that’s it. I’m OK, I’m over it, I can finally move on. Everything was good, for ages. I had you, we were planning our future, and everything was going to be OK. And somehow, I’d got away with it, too. Killing them, I mean. I hadn’t touched either of them, not with my hands, my body, so I knew there wouldn’t be any DNA or anything, and the two murder weapons … I’d got rid of those, stuck them in my backpack, chucked them away miles from where I’d used them. Even remembered to get rid of the app on the first one’s phone, and wiped all his emails so there’d be no evidence of any communication between us. Came in handy, having the job I do. It wasn’t hard. I had access to software to hide my own IP address, all that stuff. I won’t bore you with it, but I knew they’d never find me. But it didn’t last long, the peace. A few months later, it was back again, the anger, the hatred, and I knew I wasn’t done, Gemma. But I also knew that my luck couldn’t last, that one day soon it would run out. And I didn’t want to spend my life in prison, Gem. I couldn’t handle it. And so there was only one solution. To run. To disappear, and start a new