Of course, if he’d had the sense he was born with—that had been a favorite phrase of his mother’s, vicious bitch that she’d been (You haven’t got the sense you were born with, have you, you stupid little bastard?)—if he’d had the sense he was born with, he wouldn’t have followed The Secretary the very day after handing her the leg. Only it had been difficult to resist the temptation when he did not know when he would next have a chance. The urge to tail her again had grown upon him in the night, to see what she looked like now that she had opened his present.
From tomorrow, his freedom would be severely curtailed, because It would be home and It required his attention when It was around. Keeping It happy was very important, not least because It earned the money. Stupid and ugly and grateful for affection, It had barely noticed that It was keeping him.
Once he’d seen It off to work that morning he had hurried out of the house to wait for The Secretary at her home station, which had been a smart decision, because she hadn’t gone to the office at all. He had thought the arrival of the leg might disrupt her routine and he had been right. He was nearly always right.
He knew how to follow people. At some points today he had been wearing a beanie hat, at others he had been bareheaded. He had stripped to his T-shirt, then worn his jacket and then his jacket turned inside out, sunglasses on, sunglasses off.
The Secretary’s value to him—over and above the value any female had to him, if he could get her alone—was in what he was going to do, through her, to Strike. His ambition to be avenged on Strike—permanently, brutally avenged—had grown in him until it became the central ambition of his life. He had always been this way. If someone crossed him they were marked and at some point, whenever opportunity presented itself, even if it took years, they would get theirs. Cormoran Strike had done him more harm than any other human being ever, and he was going to pay a just price.
He had lost track of Strike for several years and then an explosion of publicity had revealed the bastard: celebrated, heroic. This was the status he had always wanted, had craved. It had been like drinking acid, choking down the fawning articles about the cunt, but he had devoured everything he could, because you needed to know your target if you wanted to cause maximum damage. He intended to inflict as much pain on Cormoran Strike as was—not humanly possible, because he knew himself to be something more than human—as was superhumanly possible. It would go way beyond a knife in the ribs in the dark. No, Strike’s punishment was going to be slower and stranger, frightening, tortuous and finally devastating.
Nobody would ever know he’d done it; why should they? He’d escaped without detection three times now: three women dead and nobody had a clue who’d done it. This knowledge enabled him to read today’s Metro without the slightest trace of fear; to feel only pride and satisfaction at the hysterical accounts of the severed leg, to savor the whiff of fear and confusion that rose from each story, the bleating incomprehension of the sheep-like masses who scent a wolf.
All he needed now was for The Secretary to take one short walk down a deserted stretch of road… but London throbbed and teemed with people all day long and here he was, frustrated and wary, watching her as he hung around the London School of Economics.
She was tracking someone too, and it was easy to see who that was. Her target had bright platinum hair extensions and led The Secretary, midafternoon, all the way back to Tottenham Court Road.
The Secretary disappeared inside a pub opposite the lap-dancing club into which her mark had gone. He debated following her inside, but she seemed dangerously watchful today, so he entered a cheap Japanese restaurant with plate-glass windows opposite the pub, took a table near the window and waited for her to emerge.
It would happen, he told himself, staring through his shades into the busy road. He would get her. He had to hold on to that thought, because this evening he was going to have to return to It and the half-life, the lie-life, that allowed the real Him to walk and breathe in secret.
The smeared and dusty London window reflected his naked expression, stripped of the civilized coating he wore to beguile the women who had fallen prey to his charm and his knives. To the surface had risen the creature that lived within, the creature that wanted nothing except to establish its dominance.
8
I seem to see a rose,
I reach out, then it goes.
Blue ?yster Cult, “Lonely Teardrops”