Michael Morley - Spider

'Perfetto,' answered Massimo. 'Me too, but Orsetta, she would drive even the Holy Father to sin.'

'Well, it's not a complication I need in my life,' said Jack. 'The documents she gave me were useful, but I could do with more details.'

'We will prepare a full brief for you when you arrive.'

'Great, but I need the complete autopsy report as well. No disrespect, but your Medical Examiners are not US standard. Maybe we should have whoever did Cristina Barbuggiani's examination on standby for interview? Will you please check he isn't on holiday, and can see me sometime soon?'

'The pathologist you ask for is a she,' answered Mass. 'I will make sure she is available for interview while you are here.' Hesitantly, he added, 'There are – how should we say – some other post-mortem details that were not in the report that I sent you.'

Jack remembered that the papers he'd seen had been a top-level report, sent to the Prime Minister's private office. 'Mass, the documents I saw had gone to the Prime Minister himself. Are you saying there's something you are keeping from him, or is it something that you are keeping just from me?'

Massimo Albonetti screwed up his face. 'I'm afraid it's something I have had to keep from both of you. Only a few people know what I refer to, and I am sorry but I cannot go into it on a phone line like this one. I promise though, I will tell you the very minute you get here.'

Massimo said 'Ciao' and hung up before Jack could press the subject. And in that split second, Jack was sure he heard the Maserati growl down a gear and then let out a loud roar of hard acceleration.

Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York Spider leaves the basement and returns to his bedroom to fix his damaged hand. Beneath the sink in the bathroom he unlocks a medical cabinet that would be the envy of many a drugstore.

He looks through his stock of local anaesthetics – Procaine, Lidocaine, Novocaine and Prilocaine. He'd obtained them via a fake medical trading firm that he'd set up, enabling him to deal with an array of online liquidation companies that regularly auctioned off surplus drugs and medical equipment. He'd found more than enough salesmen happy to take his order online and ship the supplies without ever asking for any medical licence checks.

He settles on 50ml of Lidocaine, his favourite anaesthetic. He discards the rags he used in the basement to patch himself up, throwing them into the shower tray, not to wash but to take away and burn. The cloths had been in contact with the victim and he'd eventually get rid of them, along with the clothes he was wearing. Spider swabs the bitten area with a sterile wipe and injects the drug into the tissue surrounding the bite. As the nerves and muscles start to relax he checks out the wound. The bitch's teeth have opened up quite a cut, deep enough for it not to heal on its own.

Spider dips into the cabinet again and finds a box of wound closure Steri-strips. It's difficult with one hand, but he takes his time and soon does a decent job of closing the cut with the adhesive strip. He finishes it off with a wraparound elastic bandage and strips of Band-Aid.

After relocking the medicine cabinet he returns to the bedroom and sits on the edge of his coffin-like bed. He nurses the hand and checks the bandage, then turns on a small portable television beside him. The set crackles into life but there's no picture on the screen, just a fog of sizzling grey static.

The first channel he tunes to throws up a black-and-white picture of the road outside his house. The screen is split into four. The top two shots show wide-angle views of all approach roads to the house, coming from east and west. The lower two pictures feature tighter shots of the outside of the garage and the front door. The framing has been precisely calculated to capture the head and shoulders of any callers and the cameras have fully remote tilt, pan and zoom facilities to track any movements. Spider presses the remote control again, and once more, four quarter-frame black-and-white pictures fill the screen. Camera One shows the basement in an extra-wide shot. The black plastic on the walls, ceiling and floor have lowered the light level so much that it's impossible to see where one surface ends and another begins. The result is that the prostrate body of Lu Zagalsky appears to be floating in the middle of space. Of all the camera shots, it's this one that Spider loves most. He imagines her in the total, never-ending darkness of afterlife, suspended there for ever – eternally his. The next shot comes from an overhead camera, fixed to a 'hothead', a special device that allows the lens to rotate 360 degrees as well as zoom in and out. The third and fourth cameras are set at much lower angles. Camera Three is fixed behind Lu's head and looks down her body. Camera Four is a reverse angle, positioned at the same height as Camera Three but looking up her body from a line along her left foot. From his remote control, Spider is able to direct his own deathly video show, pulling in every imaginable combination of wide shots, close-ups, zooms, pans and tilts of his victim.

He creeps in on Lu's face.

The picture goes soft as the auto-focus kicks in and takes a second to get the correct focal length and exposure rates. The remote-control box also has a digi-pic facility which allows him to freeze-frame shots and download them to store or make digital printouts.

Spider watches her for a minute or two, his eyes locked on hers. He tries to get inside her mind, tries to imagine what is going on in her head as she lies there, naked and vulnerable in almost virtual darkness. He notices that she doesn't blink, that her body is no longer riddled with fear. He suspects that mentally she is removing herself from the scene, using some form of crude meditation to block out the reality of what is happening to her.

Or what is going to happen to her.

Spider fires off a couple of digi-pics that he thinks will at a later date be both pleasurable and useful for him, and then he switches the screen view to his favourite shot on Camera One.

The Lidocaine is making him feel groggy. He knows it'll last two to three hours before wearing off. He cradles his injured hand and lies down on his side in the coffin bed. The bed feels good, he is ready to rest. He reaches out his undamaged hand and strokes the glass of the TV screen next to him.

She looks so beautiful down there.

So wonderfully peaceful.

So nearly dead.

West Village, SoHo, New York Howie Baumguard's all-time favourite movie scene was in Pulp Fiction: the part when Vincent goes to the toilet during a stakeout at the apartment of runaway boxer Butch and then Butch unexpectedly appears in the doorway with a Mac-10 and blows the hitman away while his pants are still around his ankles. Like most boys, even those in their mid-thirties, Howie is hooked on toilet humour. But what he told people killed him most about this scene was the sheer realism of it. As a cop who had found people dead on the pan (one heavy drug-user and one geriatric Mafioso with a heart condition), he loved the fact that Tarantino 'has the balls to tell it how it is'. Fittingly, Howie was taking his regula-as-clockwork morning dump, just as his cell phone rang. Now usually Howie would take one peek at the user display and forget about it until a more opportune moment. But as this call showed an Italian prefix, he automatically jammed the phone to his ear.

'Baumguard residence, how the fuck can I help you?'

Jack's laugh rolled down the line before he answered. 'Well, Mr B, glad to find you're up bright and early. How're you doing?'

'Early bird gets to bite the head off the friggin' worm, you know me, boss.'

Jack let the 'boss' remark slide. He guessed the big guy had been saying it for so long that he still hadn't managed to kick the habit. 'Well, when you've finished your bowl of worms and Cheerios, maybe you can let me in on why you've been calling my beloved wife? You and she got some kind of thing going? Maybe she found a way into your heart at last?'