eyes narrowing in a bitter little frown. With a tilt of his head the second bubble burst into the ether leaving only traces of what he imagined to be a diabolic chuckle.
He spotted her under the lamp, a slim girl, taller than Cathy (he cursed himself for making comparisons) with luxuriant shoulderlength hair. Something about the way she held herself made him drive around the square for a second look. It was running the risk of being caught on any CCTV cameras that might be working, Pattison knew, but risk served to add an extra spice to the thrill of it all. Under the street light he noticed the raw carelessness of her expression as if she was daring anyone to stop. Daring them to ask, to do what it was she knew they wanted. It was at once seductive and compelling. Even as he let the window open silently he could feel a swelling in his groin.
When she turned to him with a proper smile, not the junkedup glassy stare of so many of the women he’d been with in this city, he knew that this one would be special.
‘I know a place,’ she told him, her voice tantalising the erogenous zones, making him feel that surge of male power, that urge to dominate one of those girls in the street.
He jerked his thumb, a command to get in, then, as soon as she’d clicked her seat belt in place Pattison drove off, head held high as the big car leapt into the night. Another conquest was beginning; another woman was fit to be given a doing.
After giving him a few directions she didn’t speak again until the city had fallen behind them, its myriad lights cast off like a spangled garment.
‘Next left,’ she intoned, one hand placed for a second upon his thigh.
He risked a glance at her and she smiled encouragingly.
‘Not far now,’ she assured him, her fingers sliding slowly up the webbing strap of her seatbelt.
The country lane by the wood looked safe enough, Pattison told himself as his foot pressed the brake. There was a double click as they undid their seat belts and he reached across for her, hungry to begin.
‘Wait.’
The word made him back off as she rummaged in the bag at her feet. He thought he understood, heart beating with anticipation. They all used protection after all. And it would have been crass stupidity on his part not to be careful. Never knew where they’d been.
When she straightened up again he saw her hands full of a dark shadow that became an explosion of light and pain.
Then total darkness as his heart burst into shattered pulp.
The nightly garbage collection cleared Glasgow city streets of more than the usual detritus that night. The woman added the clothes she’d worn, rolled tightly in a double layer of supermarket carrier bags, to the pile lying in the doorway of the cobbled lane. Any residue from the gun or contact traces from her victim might have found its way onto her hair and clothing, traces that she was keen to destroy.
It was a place she knew well. And somehow it was fitting to leave the evidence (that would never be found) in the very spot where two women had been brutalised, the place no longer cordoned off by police tape. If she could have taken any of her victims there she would have enjoyed some dramatic irony in the situation. But it was too much of a risk. Thrusting her tart’s clothes deep into the heavy duty bin liner was as near a twisted joke as she could contrive.
Walking slowly uphill to Blythswood Square and the hotel, she was already planning her next outing. Not this week, though, and probably not the next. She would watch the aftermath of the shooting impinge itself on the city’s consciousness. And, above all, she would follow the progress of the senior investigating officer’s investigation. Or rather, she smiled to herself as she asked for her room key, their lack of it.
Killing time, she told herself, liking the phrase so much that she spoke it out loud as she walked up the back stairs:
‘Killing time.’
There was the semblance of a day job, of course, and what it entailed, but she could pretend to herself that there were shift patterns; days off and the need to maintain an appearance of normality. Washing the car, shopping for groceries, doing the laundry; all the things that filled in the space between the day-to-day