The Killer Inside Read Free Page A

write back. I’m not going anywhere .
    Not everything is hate mail.
    There are these women. I can smell their desperation on the page. The lipstick marks and smudged-by-perfume-spray handwriting. They think they are being naughty. Dangerous because there is no way their sordid fantasies will ever come to fruition, because my life is to end within these walls.
    Her address is written in the top right corner of the letter. Imagine her disappointment if I never respond again. Picture her natural beauty turn to washed-out trepidation when I turn up at her house one day.
    She sent me playing cards. They all do. I tell them I like to collect them. That the act of shuffling has a calming effect on me. They never send me an entire pack. This tasteless whore dropped thirteen cards in with her letter: the entire suit of hearts. Unoriginal. Unworthy. I get this a lot.
    I don’t know whether she asked how I’d kill her because she wants me to do it to her, because she wants to touch herself while thinking of me slicing her open, or if she is looking for ideas of how to murder somebody herself. I don’t know because I have seven more letters like this that I must respond to today. These women are everything I despise about humanity.
    I’m allowed to use a pencil now. They tried to give me a crayon in the beginning, patronising me with words like trust and abuse and dangerous . I explained that as long asI have teeth, I can kill someone; I can even kill myself. Putting a pen in my hand does not make a person any more at risk or any safer. The temptation is always there. I choose whether or not to act on it. That is the game, the struggle.
    My next letter contains a topless photo of a pale-skinned redhead. She is slim and beautiful and I do not believe for a second that the person in the picture is the same person that wrote this letter, that posted a king and queen of hearts with the barely legible childlike scrawl, asking me what I would like to do to her. She rants on about Girl 3 and how she wants to put her fingers between her legs then move them to her mouth. That she wants to taste me. She wants to know the sweet flavour of evil on her tongue.
    This is not the letter I have been waiting for. I would prefer another rudimentary dressing-down from The Lord. All of His letters are the same, too, but at least they are real. At least they are honest.
    When a photograph of a woman in a powder-blue bikini drops on to the reception desk of this hospital for people who want to be like me, that woman is not a bored housewife, she is not a successful businessperson searching for a clandestine thrill, she is a recruit, a follower, a pawn to grow my legacy. She is camouflage with her breasts on show. She is subterfuge with one hand in her underwear. She is deception and distraction dressed up as rehabilitation.
    She is nothing that I need but everything I need to use.
    Detective Inspector January David, you still have a little time to chase your ghosts.
    And I will wait patiently for mine.

Eames
    September 2009
    Crowthorne, Berkshire
    People hear that a child has gone missing and they say, ‘We have to catch this guy.’
    A body is uncovered by a dog-walker on the common and you hear, ‘What kind of a man would do this?’
    It’s rarely a woman that springs to mind. That’s how we got away with it. Nobody would have suspected Audrey, least of all her husband. Even if I came clean now, Detective Inspector January David would not believe me. Even though I am dwarfed by the sterility of this hospital cell, forcing out another fifteen sit-ups, the door locked from the outside, I have won. I’m free. He is the one in a prison.
    And another woman torments the fragile mind of my police adversary. Another killer rips apart the heart of the capital with her threat of more victims. The orderly who feels he has befriended me in some way explains the brazen destruction left by Celeste Varrick. The new star. He says her picture is all over the