The fucker hadn’t told him he was going to do it like that.

  For a wild, desperate moment he thought he’d given himself away, but when he looked up he saw the looks in the eyes of the detectives, cold professionalism suddenly stripped, now human and warm with sympathy.

  They closed the file quickly, sat him back down, brought him tissues, water. They faced him from across the table with hands folded and promised him, in slow, sincere tones, that they would do everything in their power to bring the perpetrator to justice.

  That’s what they called the guy. The “perpetrator.”

  Raymond didn’t know what to call him anymore.

  As he left the interview room, tears still wet on his cheeks, the female detective had placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. By then he was over the initial shock, and he had a clear moment to appreciate what a piece of work she was. Tight white blouse, sleek black suit pants. Very tidy. He’d had to think unsexy thoughts very quickly.

  Dead puppies. Dead puppies. Dead puppies.

  Dead—

  No.

  Now, lying beside Stacey, he pressed his hands into his eyes to block out the memory of those photos. He was glad he’d only glimpsed them, glad he hadn’t been made to flip through them, spend time poring over them, exploring in detail the peeled skin and mutilated flesh.

  He needed to sleep. The cases he had coming up would be arduous and lengthy. Late nights reading briefs in the office fuelled only by coffee and blow. He didn’t have the time or the energy to keep returning to the corner of his mind that kept flicking through those red-glare images in some kind of macabre, subconscious slideshow.

  One by one, he tensed the major muscles of his body and allowed them to relax, feeling the dead weight of his body sink into the mattress and the tension slowly ebb from his muscles.

  Beside him Stacey purred softly. Even her snores were sensual, somehow. Within minutes he slept and dreamed.

  * * *

  It’s a cold night but Raymond doesn’t hurry. It would not do to attract attention. Beyond that, one of the great benefits of having money and power is that you no longer need to hurry to do anything.

  He turns into an alleyway dominated by the silhouettes of big dumpsters and piles of trash. Stray lamplight glints off the stagnant, filthy water pooling among the dips and cracks in the concrete. Steam rises from a sewer grate midway down the alleyway, the odourless smoke of treated excrement. A whole river of shit, just metres below his designer shoes.

  Raymond reaches into the pocket of his thick woollen trench coat and removes his cell phone. It’s an old model, pre-smartphone era, with a pre-paid SIM card registered under a fictitious name. There must be no trace of the night’s event.

  He sends a new text message, a single word to the only number held within the phone’s memory: Here.

  From the mouth of darkness, he hears a beep as the message is delivered.

  There is a sudden rustle and a shadow emerges from behind the furthest dumpster. It shambles forward, feet splashing through the pooled water, uncaring of the sound.

  Fucking idiot. If he is such a professional, didn’t he know how to be quiet?

  Raymond hisses softly and looks over his shoulder. The rest of the street is void of people, void of souls with eyes and ears to see and hear, mouths to speak. There is only him and the shadow, splashing to the mouth of the alley where it stops, leans against the wall.

  He cannot see the face. Somehow he finds that he wants to, that maybe he feels like he needs to. But in this game, that would be stupid.

  “I hear you’re looking to take care of a friend.” The man’s voice is hushed, but there is a hint of dark humour in it. The tone is slow, but alert. The accent is sophisticated, a contrast to the foulness of the black, the dark, the alley and the dumpsters with their collected gore of rotting trash.

  “Yes I am. A lady. I have all the details and the money for you.”

  “So what did she do?”

  “Fuck off. It’s none of your business.”

  “It is if you want me to kill her for you. Those are the rules—take it or leave it. You want me to snuff some bitch for you, then I want to know why you want her dead.”

  The humour in the man’s voice thickens as he speaks, and Raymond realises that he’s being mocked. Mocked for being a white-collar yuppie trying to call his first hit.

  Raymond doesn’t reply. The silence closes around them, finding rhythm in the sound of water dripping somewhere further down, in the low rumble of cars gliding down the nearby roads.

  After weighing his immediate options, he sighs.

  “She’s my wife. Justine. Let’s call the reason “marital dispute.” Are you happy?”

  “Justine. Terrible name. The Marquis de Sade wrote a book about a woman called Justine. Did you know?”

  The man lifts his head and a trace of light escaping from a nearby streetlamp momentarily illuminates his eyes. Bloodshot, glaring. Sharp with focus and intelligence, dark with indecent knowledge. The man moves forward a single step and extends a gloved hand.

  Raymond reaches into his pocket and pulls out the envelope containing money, photographs of Justine and a guide through her expected schedule. He slaps it into the man’s gloved hand. “Half the money is there. You’ll get the other half when I know she’s dead.”

  “Any specs on how you want it done?”

  “No. I don’t want to know anything about it until after the fact.”

  “So she’s open range?”

  “Whatever. Just so long as I stay clean.”

  The man laughs, a soft chuckle stuttering out the back of his throat. “You won’t stay clean, mister,” he says. “Not in your own head. No way, no how.”

  “You know what I mean. How long will it take?”

  “Not long. You’ll see. Keep an eye on the news.” The man grins at him. A lifeless smile full of teeth. “A pleasure doing business with you, sir.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  The man turns, splashing back through the puddles he’d crossed before with the same chaos of sound shattering the stillness, then disappears behind the dumpsters.

  Like a fucking rat. Has Ray just handed his future, his money, his chances of a perfect life, all to a fucking quasi-cultured alley rat?

  It is too late now. He was one of the best, Raymond knew that. He’d found the guy himself, after all, after weeks of painstakingly checking through all the tips and lists of names available to him as part of client-lawyer confidentiality. He hadn’t made his choice lightly. He’d just have to put it out of his mind and trust that this guy really did know what he was doing.

  Raymond thinks about going home to see if he can catch Stacey on the 11:00 p.m. edition on Channel Four. His cock stirs, just thinking about her.

  Now he just has to wait.

  * * *

  “Hey, mister slick lawyer,” the voice oozed into his ear. He turned from his highball to see Stacey wriggling herself up onto the barstool beside him. If she had one flaw, it was that she was a little on the short side. When they’d first met face-to-face at that cocktail club six months ago, he’d made a show and a joke of picking her up every time she wanted to sit down on one of the high bar stools. Everyone there had laughed and said how cute it was. Even Justine, smiling tight-lipped as she sipped her tonic water, too stupid, too damn trusting to let herself see how much Ray enjoyed putting his hands on Stacey’s waist, her hips, sometimes grabbing her a little higher for the lift so that he could see her cleavage come together just inches from his nose.

  “You’re late,” he said to her, signalling the barman.

  “Vermouth, straight up,” Stacey shouted across the bar.

  The barman nodded, his eyes nipping to and away from her as he got to work. God, how Ray loved that. In his head he called it the “made you look” game. Wherever he took her, nobody could keep their eyes off.

  “So glad you’re not the jealous type,” Stacey said, fluffing her hair, smiling. “I had a killer day at work. The last thing I could handle would be some sort of ego war between you and whoever looked at me.”

  “Nah,” he said, picking up his glass. “What’s the point?”

  She giggled, slapping his shoulder. “Although a little jealousy wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Jealousy is for dumb kids who don’t have the balls to believe they can keep what they’ve got.” He smiled at her, a cold smile, one he’d already got her well used to. “I’m not worried.”

  “So that means you wanna keep me?” She put her hand on his knee, sliding it up and around to his inner thigh, where she knew he was most sensitive.

  He pushed her hand away. “For now, I guess.”

  Inside, he was roaring victory. Grinning at himself. Backslaps all round. He was a winner, all right. What had he ever lost?

  Beside him, Stacey wasn’t looking like such a winner. “Don’t be a dick tonight,” she said softly. “I wasn’t kidding about my day.”

  This, of course, was the slippery slope. This was when emotional bullshit starts tying knots around perfectly functional physical bonds.

  “Jesus, Stacey. Me too, okay?”

  Stacey’s drink arrived and she took a small sip, grimaced. “I need to talk to you about something,” she said. “About Justine.”

  He felt a flare of irritation, a jolt of rabid emotion. He reached over and grabbed her knee, squeezing tight, digging his fingers into the soft of her flesh. “Not here, you dumb bitch,” he snapped. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Wincing, she crossed her leg away from him and took a large gulp of her drink. “It’s professional, okay?” she said. “Pro-fes-sion-al. Christ.”

  He turned away from her, squaring up to his drink. “Out with it.”

  “We got a tip-off at the news room. Your wife’s murder wasn’t just a murder. There’s a tape.”

  His blood pulsed from hot to cold.

  “Apparently it was all filmed and sold as a snuff tape. Our guy got hold of a copy. I was wondering if the cops had got in touch with you about that. We’ve had to share the information with them, of course.”

  “No, they haven’t said a word.”

  “Uh huh,” she nodded, “I guess they’re still verifying the information, hoping to confirm it before they tell you. Trying to spare you the added grief, I suppose. It explains a lot, really, about the way the murder went down. Abandoned garage, body in so many small pieces. All that blood, all those wounds inflicted before death. We’re going to do a spot on it tomorrow night. I thought you’d like to know in case the cops don’t get to you first.”

  Ray’s highball wasn’t kicking hard enough.

  “The technique is an emulation of Chinese slow slicing,” Stacey said, talking to herself now. “Or ‘death by a thousand cuts.’ It’s an old method of execution, made illegal in 1905. It was almost always enacted for public display. Except the Chinese could keep it going for days.”

  Ray put his head in his hands. Behind his eyes, he saw Justine’s eyeless face, black holes streaming bloody tears. Her mouth a meaty smile of blood-painted teeth, her lips snipped off in neat lines of finely sliced flesh.

  Stacey wasn’t talking to him anymore. She was reciting the facts for her performance the next night. She was running through the data given to her, probably thinking about her wardrobe options as she did it.

  “They often took the eyes out first, so the victim wouldn’t know where the next cut was going.” Stacey took another sip. “Or so our researchers tell me.”

  Justine. Fucking Justine. She was supposed to be forgotten now. He’d already put her in the ground, hadn’t he? He’d already sold off that ridiculous redbrick house—along with most of her possessions—hadn’t he? He’d already torn up every photo and scrubbed every memory, and here she was, set to make a prime-time return to drag out all the gory details of her final hours on this earth.

  Slow slicing. It made Ray think of carving beef.

  “So,” Stacey turned to him, snapping out of her reverie. “I think you owe me a thank you. Oh, and an apology for calling me a dumb bitch.”

  He glanced over at her, the elegant arc of her professionally plucked eyebrow raised accusingly.

  He sighed and ordered another round.

  * * *

  Raymond White, nineteen, walks Justine Meyer out of the campus theatre and across the empty parking lot. It’s autumn, early evening, and the light that surrounds them glows orange through the drifts of dying leaves, everything around them caught in the glow of the sinking sun. Her blonde hair catches it too, rolls in the breeze, turns a soft auburn. She shivers. Smiling, she wraps her arms around herself, hiding the sharpening points of her nipples as he puts his arm around her.

  “You were really awesome in that play,” he says.

  She shrugs, her shoulders tense under the weight of his arm. “Yeah.”

  “Come on, you know you were. If you want to be a big actress someday, you’ve got to learn to push your profile. That starts by learning how to take a compliment.”

  “I never know,” she says, “if compliments are real. Do you?”

  “Sure they are,” he says. “Even if people are only saying it because they want something from you, it doesn’t make it any less true.”

  She relaxes a little, hesitates, and then allows herself to put her arm around his waist. Her fist bunches around a handful of his shirt.

  This is a girl too uptight to even open her hands, let alone her legs. This one, Ray thinks to himself, is the biggest challenge I’ve had yet.

  “I still can’t believe you’re talking to me,” she says, giggling. She sounds younger when she giggles. It betrays how little experience she really has. “You know, all through high school, no one really paid attention to me. I was too bookish I guess. Then I get to university, I’m in one play and now the whole world wants to be my friend. It’s kinda hard to know who’s sincere.”

  He stops, and for a moment she’s ahead of him; for a moment, he has to grab at her shoulder, pull her back. Facing her, he forces himself to relax, he bends to put his lips to her cheek. What this girl wants, he thinks, is Romeo. What this girl wants is sweet promises and sweeping gestures. She’s too cautious for backseat groping. She’s too artsy for bowling alleys and drinking games.

  She smells amazing. Like cinnamon and vanilla-scented soap.

  Speaking into her hair, he says, “Everyone is sincere, when they’re in the presence of beauty.”

  In his head, crowds go wild. He can hear the cheers, can almost feel the backslaps. An older girl, one less country fresh, would’ve laughed him into his car by now. But not Justine. Not her. So far it’s like he can do no wrong.

  Careful now, he tells himself. Slowly now.

  “You know what they say about you?” he says into her ear.

  She shakes her head, a stiff little movement that rouses a drift of perfume, delicate and oversweet.

  “They say you’re the prettiest girl in town. And you know what they say about me?”

  She nods.

  “What do they say about me?”

  “That you’re the one who’s really going places.”

  “What could be more perfect?” he whispers, closing his arms tight around her, amazed at the sensation of the muscles surrounding her spine twitching spasmodically under her shirt. A thousand uncontrollable nerve pulses working away like piano strings at his touch, his words, his proximity. “What could be more perfect than you and me together?” he asks.

  She laughs now, a sudden explosion of sound that makes Ray jerk back, that rings in his ear. Oblivious, she says, “You and me in a big, redbrick house, with lots of babies, and…” She stops, thinking. “And…”

  “And you famous in feature films!”

  “Oh, I don’t want that,” she says, suddenly serious, shaking her head. “I don’t want to be famous. I just want to make art.”

  “All right, beautiful Justine, whatever you want. I’ll do everything I can to give it to you.”

  Giggling again, she takes the step forward, puts herself back in his arms.

  Give it to her, Ray tells himself to internal laughter, high with a sense of victory.

  Got it in the bag.

  * * *

  Stacey staggered over to the bed, snaking her dress up over her head before sitting down heavily on the edge. Tossing her hair over her shoulder, she fixed her eyes on Ray. “So, Mr. White, do you have any comment on the suggestion that your wife’s murder was filmed and sold as art?”

  Grinning, Ray leaned in the doorway, watching her. Even half-drunk and dressed only in her underwear, she was a born TV journalist. It wasn’t only in the quickness of the words, or her style of matching callous quips with revealing information. Giving her audience the meat and the sauce all in one simple bite. She had it even in the sharp patterns her eyebrows made, conveying seriousness, sharpness, sincerity. Saying Yes, I’m sexy, but I’m a professional, too. She had that delicate balance that any journalist of her type needs, that ability to grab at her audience with her looks, and then trap them there with her skills. She was smart. He forgot, sometimes, how smart she was.

  “No comment, ma’am,” he said.

  “Oh, call me ma’am again and I’ll get my gaffer to ram his mic up your ass.” She grinned, melting out of her pose and back into herself.

  Ray tried to harden his features, found that he couldn’t. But just as he was about to burst out laughing, the Stacey he knew and loved to fuck vanished, and the mask came up again.

  Stacey Bishop, hardboiled news reporter. Purveyor of the nasty facts.

  “Mr. White, what kind of justice would you like to see delivered to the perpetrator of this monstrous crime?”