Mark Mills - The Information Officer

It hadn’t always been that way. The first, the very first, before the war—Elsie, the theater usherette with the crooked front tooth—had brought him little pleasure that he could recall now. He hadn’t set out to take her life, but she had recognized him, and silencing her for good had been the only sensible option.

A very observant girl, that one. He had made three visits to the theater in the course of a year, and on all three occasions had carefully avoided showing any interest in her, let alone talking to her. And yet, on a moonless night in a dense patch of woodland she had recognized him. An observant girl. And a foolish one. If she’d kept her mouth shut, she’d still be alive, not moldering in a coffin beneath a cheap headstone bearing the hopeful epitaph Now Flying with the Angels .

He had left it a good long while before visiting her grave, curious to know how it would feel. Standing over her, he had experienced no emotions of any real note—no guilt, no self-loathing, no regrets—just a mild puzzlement when he recalled the last moments of her life. Unlike the ones who had gone before her (and survived to tell the tale), she had not fought him; she had almost given herself to him. Why had she been so biddable, so unresisting, so accepting of the inevitable?

“Not my face. Don’t hurt my face,” she had said.

The voice of experience? Was her father to blame? Or an uncle? Had she spent her childhood submitting to the unnatural advances of some man in her life? It seemed quite likely. The thought had occurred to him at the time, and he had struggled to enter her, although once inside, he had soon hardened. And when it was over, she had wiped herself with the hem of her skirt and calmly announced that she had seen him before. She was even able to list two of the three productions he’d attended at the theater. She was searching for the name of the third—“No, don’t tell me”—when he closed his hands around her throat.

She resisted then, but succumbed so quickly that he thought she might be faking. She wasn’t, so he got to his feet and brushed himself down. He left her handbag in the narrow lane that led to her parents’ house, at the spot where he’d snatched her into the trees, so that she wouldn’t lie there undiscovered for too long. It was a small gesture to her. She had asked him not to harm her face, and he wanted the world to know that he hadn’t, before she became so much carrion for the animals and insects. And maybe her father, or whoever he was, would see his own sin reflected back at him in her unblemished features.

The car he had borrowed from a friend had been parked well off the beaten track, beyond the wood and over a hill. He drove through the night, passing through sleeping towns and villages, making good time, and was back in his bed before first light. Not one of the two hundred or so miles he’d covered in the round-trip was registered on the car’s odometer because he’d disconnected the cable.

Over the next few months he had grown sullen and depressed, disappointed by the experience. He had broken the ultimate taboo, and it had stirred almost nothing in him. He had tried to analyze why this might be, concluding that the answer lay in the fact that the situation had been forced on him. He had not set out to do it. He had simply responded to a pragmatic need, that of protecting his identity. He had not been in control of the situation, and control was where much of the pleasure lay. Control and anticipation. On both these scores, the incident with Elsie had been a disappointment.

Looking back, it was clear to him that he was always going to test this analysis. At the time, he had felt no overwhelming urge to do so. Well, not immediately. As always, the compulsion to strike again built up slowly, invading his thoughts by small but insistent degrees, taking them over until nothing else mattered.

He opted for a prostitute, a small and undernourished girl, birdlike in her brittleness. He had never been with a prostitute before, but something in the clinical character of the services on offer chimed with the experimental nature of what he was about to do. She was more than happy to drive off with him to a remote corner of the countryside; somewhat less happy when he produced the rope.

The promise of a substantial bonus and the fact that he was clearly a gentleman—A gentleman! That still brought a smile to his lips—persuaded her to play along. He gagged her as soon as her wrists and ankles were tied. It was a warm evening in June, and in the late, long twilight he could see hope in her eyes: the hope that she hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of her life.

Control, he discovered over the following few hours, was indeed the key, and the taking of a life because you wanted to, because you could—not because it was forced on you—was the quintessence of that control.

Peggy, the name she had given him, proved to be her nom de guerre. The sandstone tablet placed flush in the turf at her grave revealed that one Cybil Hughes had spent eighteen years on earth and was now In God’s Keeping .

Her gaunt, pinched face had been added to the gallery of other girls in his head. It was a place he visited every night before falling asleep, an imaginary space, yet somehow as real to him as any room. Its tall windows reached almost to the parquet floor and were swathed in loose blinds so diaphanous they barely muted the light bleeding into the room. It was always sunny outside, and the old wooden floor would creak beneath his feet as he made the rounds of the gilt-framed portraits, lingering every so often to recall the details, beginning with Mrs. Beckett before moving on to Constanze Kettelmann….

Chronology was important; it allowed him to trace his evolution, the slow mastery of those early impulses into some kind of method. Lying in bed at night, he would make his leisurely, unhurried rounds before selecting one of them, according to his mood, to help ease him into sleep, the memories melding seamlessly with his dreams.

The Maltese girls lent an exotic touch to his collection. With their honeyed complexions and deep, dark eyes, they exuded the easy sensuality of Gauguin’s native creatures, and he had rehung the gallery to give them their own wall. They marked a new departure, a union of business and pleasure.

The proposal had come from him. Lutz Kettelmann had then dangled it in front of his superiors, not expecting them to bite. But they had. Anything that undermined the faith of the Maltese in the British could only favor the Germans when they finally invaded the island. The order to proceed with caution had come on New Year’s Day, and he had done just that: five victims carefully selected from the lower reaches of society, dance hall hostesses, their deaths tainted with just enough ambiguity to arouse suspicion and get Maltese tongues wagging.

He hadn’t foreseen the ruthlessness of the British in burying the crimes. Malta Command had simply suppressed the matter, quite content, it seemed, for local girls to keep on dying. The shoulder tab in Carmela Cassar’s hand had been his way of forcing the affair into the open, and although it hadn’t been discovered by a Maltese, as he’d intended, at least the wheels were finally turning. He would have to keep the momentum up, but he had a few ideas up his sleeve on that score.

No, the thing was narrowing down to the fine point, not quite as rapidly as he’d planned, but the Upstanding’s imminent departure, far from being a setback, would see things accelerate now. His only mild cause for concern was Carmela Cassar. His baser instincts had got the better of him. Something about her had obliged him to spend time with her—a full twenty-four hours that were not going to go unnoticed. With hindsight, a foolish indulgence. At the time it had made complete, all-consuming sense to him. He would make no such mistakes next time round.