Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

His first impulse was to untie the poor woman, let her get dressed, tell her he was there for her husband, not for her. But at the same time he saw that there must be possibilities in having his victim’s wife bound, gagged and stripped, before him.

She looked at him fearfully, but there was far more in her eyes than simple fright. There was disbelief and many, many shades of embarrassment that were quite separate from the natural shock she was experiencing.

“Mrs Pryce, I presume,” Mick said cheerfully.

He looked closely at her body. He liked the look of it, the tight stomach, the small breasts with their dark pink nipples. Her skin was pale, and paler still where a bikini had protected areas from the sun, protected too a neat, wholesome-looking appendix scar close to her right hip bone. The patches of thigh visible above the top of her stockings were smooth and seemed, to Mick, to be crying out to be touched. Her pubic hair was short and trim, and he wondered if it had been cut that way to satisfy her husband’s tastes.

“Is there any money here?” he asked.

She was trying to be helpful. She nodded towards her handbag which was lying on the floor by her husband’s desk. Mick opened it, explored among the lipsticks and tissues and bunches of keys and found a purse with a couple of hundred pounds in it. He took the money gratefully.

“Thanks for helping to make my stay in London just that little bit more pleasurable,” he said.

Then she tried to be more helpful still. Her eyes flicked round the room, and settled on a metal cabinet with a rolling front. She seemed to be directing him there. Mick opened the cabinet and found it full of drugs samples. He turned away immediately.

“Not my thing,” he said by way of explanation. “I suppose I could try and sell them but I wouldn’t know one drug from another. Would you?”

He hoped that this brief interaction might help to make Louise Pryce a little less scared, but it didn’t work. He needed to say more. He said, “I imagine it must be strange being married to a doctor, knowing that he spends all day messing about with other people’s bodies, examining them, poking around in them, seeing all these tits and bums and all the labias and vulvas. And then he conies home to you. It must be weird for you. God knows there are a lot of sick people out there.

“The body’s such a strange thing, isn’t it, Mrs Pryce? It gives a lot of pleasure but it can give a lot of pain too. I mean, I intend to hurt your husband, and OK, I might think about hurting him mentally or emotionally, but let’s face it, the body’s what you think of hurting first, isn’t it?”

That didn’t do much to relax the woman either. He wanted to be reassuring. He said, “I can see that you’re frightened, Mrs Pryce, and I can understand why. There you are, all spread out like a road map, and here I am, and let’s face it, the road looks wide open. I mean, if I were someone like your husband I’d probably be right in there, no messing, straight into the Dartford Tunnel. That’s the kind of man your husband is, so I hear, or so they tell me. They say he’s the kind of man who gang-bangs strippers at private patties, at least that’s what they say about him in Sheffield. You look surprised. You probably didn’t think people in Sheffield talked about your husband. Well, it came as a bit of a shock to me too.”

The expression on her face was developing, maturing, changing from one of simple fear and confusion to a more complicated anguish, as it dawned on her that she might be in the presence of a genuine, dangerous lunatic.

“Frankly, Mrs Pryce, you’re a good-looking woman. No man in his right mind would kick you out of bed. But the problem I have is this: I want revenge on your husband and a lot of people would think that having sex with you would be a pretty good way of doing it. But I don’t know. I’d have to put my penis into a place where he normally puts his penis and that would be a bit disgusting, wouldn’t it?

“Now you might say that since your husband raped my girlfriend I’m forced to put my penis where he’s already had his, in any case, so I admit the issue isn’t all that clear. And I admit that unless you sleep exclusively with virgins you’re always going into a hole where some dodgy prick has been before you, so maybe that’s not really the issue, but anyway, the important thing is I’m not a rapist. Really I’m not. I mean, there are a lot of men, men who’d call themselves non-rapists, ordinary petty criminals, burglars, who if they broke into a house and found themselves in this position, well, they just couldn’t control themselves. But I’m not like that, you’ll be glad to know.

“And in any case, raping you because your husband raped my girlfriend, well, that’s not much of a revenge really, is it? If I was really going to rape someone I ought to rape him , didn’t I? I mean, that would be real revenge. Apparently there’s a lot of it about these days, maybe there always was but you hear a lot more about it now. It puts ideas into people’s heads.

“Of course, there are other things I could do to you that would be a long way short of rape that might piss off your husband every bit as much. Just having your wife seen naked by another man, that’d be enough to make some husbands feel angry and humiliated. But I was thinking of something more concrete. I mean, maybe if I just touched your breasts, stroked your nipples. Would they get hard, I wonder? Or I could stroke your fanny, only the outside at first and then maybe slip a finger in just for size, just testing the waters. Or maybe I should masturbate while I look at you. A lot of husbands would think that was a bit much. I’d be just standing here copping an eyeful, pulling the old pudding, and maybe just before I came I’d get up on the table and ejaculate all over you so that you got sperm on your belly and breasts and on your face and in your hair. Not in your mouth, of course, thanks to the sticking plaster. And when your husband got back he’d see this spunk all over you and he’d have to help you clean it off…”

The thought was so headily indecent that he had to stop talking for a moment. Then he continued, “But really, Mrs Pryce, you’ll be glad to hear I’m not going to do any of that stuff to you, because I think it’s morally wrong to get at a man through his wife or his children. I’m not a monster, Mrs Pryce, as you must have realized by now.

“You know, I always wonder about the sort of low-life villains who steal old ladies’ life savings, or threaten to kill people’s children, or who throw acid in the caretaker’s face. I mean, I say to myself, how can they do that? I think in most cases the answer is because they have no imagination. They can’t imagine what it’s like to be old or to have children or to have your face disfigured, because if they could imagine it they’d have some empathy with the victims and so they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. I think I can imagine more or less what it’s like to be raped, so I wouldn’t do that to you.

“But then I think about real villains, the real monsters. They do have imagination. They’re good at thinking up tortures that you and I could never ever possibly dream of. I was reading something in the papers, can’t remember where it was, Bosnia or Rwanda or Nicaragua or somewhere like that, where they’d capture men, fathers and sons, take them to gaol and then force them to give each other blow jobs.

“To me that’s more than just sick, it’s actually unimaginable. If I’d been given the rest of my life to think up something horrible to do to one of my enemies I’d never have come up with that. Never. So, maybe I’m wrong, maybe some of these guys do have imagination.”

Mick was aware that Louise Pryce seemed to be watching him closely, listening very carefully to what he was saying. He hardly thought she was interested in the philosophy of criminality, and he wondered if maybe she was just staring at him, listening to his voice, trying to commit things to memory that she could later recount to the police. But no, he couldn’t quite see that happening, couldn’t imagine the Pryces explaining to some honest constable how it was that she came to be in a position to be such a good observer.