Michael Morley - Spider

Saturday, 30 June Georgetown, South Carolina

At the cool, dusky end of a sizzling day, barbecues spit flames while party laughter rolls along the banks of South Carolina's winding Black River.

Across town, in the sombre silence of Georgetown cemetery a solitary figure searches for the grave of someone once dear to him. He's travelled for days to make this pilgrimage and is already physically and emotionally drained. In his arms he carries a bundle of flowers, her favourite Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies. The first time he'd spoken to her, she'd been in a local park surrounded by thousands of them, and the flower had taken on a special meaning for both of them.

The headstones of the crowded cemetery bear names almost as old as America itself. Locals have been burying people in these plots since the country's first Spanish settlers grew old and died here, way back in the mid sixteenth century.

The grave he's looking for belongs to no one famous; there's no towering statue, no ornate family tomb to mark her place. Her anonymity disappeared only when her mutilated young body turned up bloated and decomposing in the Tupelo Swamp offshoot from the Black River, a stretch of ancient tumbling water that was once the conduit of commercial colonialism and the main waterway of South Carolina's plantations.

Finally, he sees her gravestone. Simple black marble, paid for by the community out of special grants for the poor. Engraved in gold lettering is her name: Sarah Elizabeth Kearney. But that wasn't what he called her. To him she was only ever 'Sugar' and he knew that to her he was only ever 'Spider'. Barely twenty-two years old, she was, like the Spider Lilies that had brought them together, just blossoming, just realizing her beauty and planting the seeds of her dreams.

Spider pulls out some weeds growing among the pebbles on her grave and lays down the big flowers. His mind slips back to their wonderful meeting twenty years ago this very day.

Sugar was so special.

She was his first.

The first he kidnapped.

The first he murdered.

Sunday, 1 July

San Quirico D'Orcia, Tuscany Jack King's nightmare catapulted him from his sleep.

He sat bolt upright in bed and, despite being dazed and disorientated, he instinctively grabbed for his holstered gun. Only there was no gun, and there hadn't been one since he quit his job as an FBI profiler more than three years ago.

'Wake up!' urged his wife. 'Wake up, Jack! You're okay; you're just dreaming again, it's only a dream.'

But Jack wasn't okay. He was far from okay.

He tried to slow his breathing, get his heartbeat down to normal, but his head still fizzed with images: bleached-white bloodless corpses floating in the Black River – the buzz of flies around dismembered young limbs – bold type headlines announcing the Black River Killer's latest kill. The horror show ran like some grainy speeded-up old movie that he'd seen far too many times.

Nancy got out of bed and switched the lights on.

'These nightmares of yours, they're scaring me to death. Jack, you've really got to go and see someone.'

Most days Jack looked as though he was living the dream, owning and running a small boutique hotel in a Tuscan village that time had barely altered and crime had hardly touched. But some nights – well, some nights he just couldn't keep up the pretence. And this sure as hell was one of them.

Jack squinted into the ugly brightness of the bedroom lights, sweat soaked his bare chest and ran down his back.

'Did you hear me? Jack?'

The visions had gone but now his head was filled with sounds: women screaming in pain, their desperate cries for help echoing out from the dark pits of his memory, and finally the unmistakable sound of razor-sharp steel slicing into human flesh.

Jack let out a hot, slow breath. 'I hear you, Nancy. Just give me a minute.'

It had been three years since his burnout, and despite a change of continents and lifestyles, the past and all its horrors were still haunting him.

Maybe his wife was right. Maybe he finally had to see someone.

Georgetown, South Carolina Sometimes, late at night, when he's teetering on the edge of sleep, his mind soft with secret thoughts and emotions, Spider is able to turn the clock back and return to his favourite time.

The first time.

Right now, with so many exciting things happening to him, he's keen to go back, eager to revisit the moments that have made him what he is.

Lying on his bed, his special bed, the room is dark and his eyes lightly closed. Soon months, years and decades flash by, until it is twenty years ago.

He's in sunny Georgetown, down on the Harbor-walk at the waterfront. A young woman strolls past, happy and carefree. She's slim bodied, dark-haired, respectable and simply dressed in a pink T-shirt, stylishly faded jeans and trainers. It's her week off work and she's chilling out, oblivious to the world, oblivious to the man she's just magnetised to her.

Spider watches her dine, alone.

Watches her go to her apartment above the baker's shop, alone.

And for days he watches her living there, alone.

Alone – and vulnerable. Just as he hoped.

Sarah Kearney never sees him, Spider's very careful about that, so careful he's almost invisible. But he's around. Always there. There, brushing by her in supermarkets, as she grocery shops for one. There, as she queues in the cinema for her solitary seat at the latest romcom. There, as she browses in the bookshop, and finally buys the cookery book, with its special recipes just for one.

The memories are delicious. Spider savours every second of his mental feast. My, oh my, remembering the old ones, especially the first one, is almost as good as planning the new ones, the next one.

But Sarah had been sweet. As sweet as Sugar.

Spider's heart races as he recalls how he followed her in his old Chevy as she caught a bus out to Landsford, a 400-acre state park off US-21 out towards Richburg. He had been his usual invisible self as she'd sauntered around the nineteenth century canals, sat a while near an old lock-keeper's cottage and finally headed out of the crowds to a solitary spot near the Catawba River.

Twenty years later he could still remember every word they'd spoken.

You never forget your first kill. Not a single second of it.

The air had been fresh with pine and grass, the sun hot and high, and Sugar, well Sugar had been sitting sweetly on a carpet of white flowers, cherishing one of the massive spiky blooms in the cup of her hand.

Pretty as a picture.

And then he'd shown himself. Confident and calm, polite and unthreatening. Just like he'd planned. Just like he'd dreamed.

'They're beautiful,' he said, walking confidently towards her. 'What are they?'

For a second she seemed startled, then she spoke up, just like her daddy had taught her. 'Lilies. Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies.' There was a warm drawl in her hesitant voice. A voice he'd craved to hear. A voice he knew he would soon be the last to listen to.

They sat and talked; he made her laugh, flattered her with compliments and even made her blush a little. It was a perfect afternoon. Just as he'd hoped.

They had coffee in the crowded cafe and he told her how he worked as a company auditor, a stuffy job that he hated. He had to come to the park for some space and air.

She knows just what he meant; she loved to be outside too.

When it got to the point where they should go, he'd told her that he'd had a lovely time, in fact he couldn't remember the last time he enjoyed himself so much. She blushed again and said she'd had fun too. It damn near broke his heart that he had to leave, had to deliver some boring accounts to some boring businessmen east of Georgetown.