Tony Park - Silent Predator

Tom fingered the faint scar above his right eyebrow. It was barely noticeable these days, but he saw it, and touched it, every morning when he shaved. His white summer uniform shirt had been drenched in blood from the cut inflicted by a drunk armed with a broken beer bottle the night he’d met Alex, nineteen years ago. She was still an intern and she was so beautiful he couldn’t help but ask her out on a date as she stitched him back together. She’d laughed and told him that as far as she knew there were rules against that sort of thing. He persisted. She relented. She was an Essex girl made good and he’d been sure they would grow old together. Her shifts and his unusual hours at home and abroad meant they had never really lived like a normal couple. They joked to friends that they only ever saw each other on birthdays — and never Christmas because they were both working. They’d both planned on retiring early, to make up for all the lost nights.

And here he was. Alone for more than a year now. Cheated of his life and his wife. He tried not to dwell on it, but everything in the house reminded him of her. How could it not? He left the hall light off as he walked through to the kitchen. Maybe by staying in the dark the memories would dim. He found the key on the hook by the little blackboard where she used to write her shopping lists. It was right where she had left it. Alex was the last person to have touched the key to Nick’s home. He stood there in the darkened kitchen and closed his eyes. He held the key in his fist and squeezed it until he felt the pain of the serrated metal edges digging into his palm. He opened his eyes and walked out again, ignoring the four or five letters sitting on the hallway floor.

Tom’s old hard top E-type Jag started first time and the V12 purred deeply, like a giant cat welcoming its owner home with a leg rub. Alex had wanted to get a new car, but Tom liked old things — old British things — and with overtime he could even afford to fill the tank once in a while. He could never see himself driving a Renault or something Japanese.

As he drove, settling into a slow lane of traffic, a vision of Alex’s wasted body, her eyes so deep in their sockets they looked bruised, popped into his head. He screwed his eyes shut for a second. A horn blasted beside him and he realised he had momentarily drifted out of his lane. He forced himself to concentrate and ignored the young black man’s abuse as the boy racer overtook him. ‘Get a grip,’ he said out loud in the car. The clock on the dashboard said nine pm. He felt like a drink.

Tom let the traffic signs lead him to the A406 and joined the rolling traffic jam for the leg that would take him around the western side of London to Kingston in the south west, which was where Nick lived, not far from Henry the Eighth’s Hampton Court palace. He became conscious of a car beside him, not accelerating or decelerating. He looked across and saw a blonde woman in a BMW Z4 convertible. Pretty, late thirties or well-preserved early forties. She wore a plain white blouse — a businesswoman, he guessed, maybe driving home from work late. She looked across and smiled at him. He smiled back, but mustn’t have done a very good job because she planted her foot and whizzed past him. Twenty years ago he might have done the same and chased her through the traffic. Now he just felt guilty as Alex smiled back at him, bravely, despite the tubes draining and filling her poisoned body. He shook his head. They — he — had just passed the one year anniversary of her death. That had been a tough, drunken night.

The drive took him past Richmond Park. Once the hunting estate of kings, it was now a Royal Park, open to all. He negotiated his way off the A307, around Kingston’s town centre, and found the quiet street where Nick lived. He’d been there with Alex enough times to remember the way. He pulled up outside the Edwardian semi. He rapped on the door and waited. No reply. He tried again.

He turned the key and opened the door, listening for beeps. He didn’t recall there being an alarm in the house and he hoped Nick hadn’t decided to install one since his last visit nearly two years ago.

The house was only a few degrees warmer than the cool night air, so the central heating must have been off. ‘Nick?’ he called. He walked on thick white carpet down the hallway. He vaguely remembered a darker hue. Deidre had taken Nick’s kids to live with her and her boss, an orthopaedic surgeon. Tom recalled thinking that Nick had seemed more angry at her choice of partner than the fact she had left him. Both he and Alex had sensed that the marriage had been on rocky ground for several years.

What did surprise Tom, however, was the new look in the house. The antique sideboards and overstuffed chintz sofas must have been all Deidre, as Tom almost had to blink at the minimalist, virtually all-white decor of the once cluttered lounge room. White leather and chrome retro-modern lounge chairs surrounded a glass-topped coffee table. A wide-screen plasma was hung on the wall and surround-sound speakers had taken the place of Constable prints and poorly executed landscapes by some relative of Deidre’s.

The only colour in the room came from a leopard skin in the centre of the floor. It looked garishly out of place. The kitchen, too, had been transformed from faux-country timber benchtops and wood grain laminate door panels into a sleek showpiece of gleaming stainless steel and black granite. ‘Nick?’ Tom called again, louder.

He walked upstairs and passed one of the kids’ rooms, which had been converted into an office with a flat-screen monitor on top of an antique leather-topped desk, the only concession to pre-twenty-first century living Tom had seen so far. The second bedroom contained an array of new-looking gym equipment — treadmill, exercise bike and a multifunction piece of kit which looked more like a futuristic torture device than an exercise machine. Tom jogged fifteen kilometres every second day of the week, no matter the weather, and followed his run with a hundred sit-ups and sixty push-ups. He thought gyms were posy, smelly places populated by people trying to pick each other up.

The main bedroom was the reverse of the lounge. Dark blue carpet; a king-size bed with a dark grey duvet patterned with black Chinese calligraphy; black satin sheets turned down; a feature wall painted a colour Alex would have called eggplant, and deep, dark reds on the other three. Tom turned on the light and noticed the dimmer switch. He twiddled it and smiled as he looked up into the new recessed lighting. On the feature wall was an impressionistic painting which, despite its blurred lines, was clearly of a naked woman reclining with her hands between her legs. Nick, it seemed, had embraced the bachelor lifestyle with a vengeance and this passion pit was clearly his operational headquarters. The bedside chest of drawers — made of some kind of black wood — contained two boxes of condoms and some porn DVDs. The movies were hetero and hard core by the look of them, but nothing kinky. Tom slid open a full-length mirrored wardrobe which revealed, in addition to shelves of neatly folded clothes and a rack of suits, another wide-screen TV and a player for the disks. There was also a digital video camera on a tripod. ‘You dog,’ Tom said.

What was clear was that Nick was not home and nor did he appear to have been in the house for some period of time. Tom walked back downstairs to the kitchen, where the telephone was. He had noticed the blinking red light on the answering machine, but had avoided intruding further into his colleague’s private life until necessary. It was necessary now. He pushed the button.

The machine beeped and a woman’s voice said: ‘It’s me. I don’t know how you got my number, but I’ll see you. Tonight. I’m on at the club from six until two.’ The tone sounded again. There were no other messages.