pushed at the door to Level 8, then held it open for a moment before stepping through, her senses alert. Not for the first time, Sandra wondered whether she ought to have worn shoes with flatter heels, so she could run better. She fumbled her mobile phone out of her bag and held it in her hand, gaining some reassurance from its familiar feel and the faint glow of its screen.
This was a night she hadn’t intended to be late. A last-minute meeting had gone on and on, thanks to endless grandstanding from colleagues who wanted to show off, middle managers who didn’t want to be seen to be the first going home. She’d been trapped for hours. And when it was finally over, the Divisional MD had taken her by the elbow and asked if she had a couple of minutes to go over her report. Why hadn’t he taken the trouble to read it before the meeting? But then, why should he, when he could eat into her personal time, knowing that she wouldn’t say no?
Her blue Skoda was parked at the far end of Level 8. It stood alone, the colour of its paintwork barely visible in the fluorescent lights. As she walked across the concrete, listening to the sound of her own heels, Sandra shivered inside the black jacket she wore for the office. She hated all these ramps and pillars. They were designed for machines, not for humans. The scale of the place was all wrong – the walls too thick, the roof too low, the slopes too steep for walking on. It made her feel like a child who’d wandered into an alien city. The mass of concrete threatened to crush her completely, to swallow her into its depths with a belch of exhaust fumes.
And there they were, the footsteps again.
Sandra knew the car park well, even remembered it being built in the eighties. Some feature of its design caused the slightest noise to travel all the way up through the levels, so that footsteps several floors below seemed to be right behind her as she walked to her car.
She’d experienced the effect many times before, yet it still deceived her. When it happened again tonight, Sandra couldn’t help turning round to see who was behind her. And, of course, there wasn’t anyone.
Every time she heard the sound of those footsteps, she turned round to look.
And every time she looked, there was no one there.
Every time, except the last.
Wasn’t it Sigmund Freud who said that every human being has a death instinct? Inside every person, the evil Thanatos fights an endless battle with Eros, the life instinct. And, according to Freud, evil is always dominant. In life, there has to be death. Killing is our natural impulse. The question isn’t whether we kill, but how we do it. The application of intelligence should refine the primeval urge, enrich it with reason and purpose.
Without a purpose, the act of death has no significance. It becomes a waste of time, a killing of no importance, half-hearted and incomplete. Too often, we fail at the final stage. We turn away and close our eyes as the gates swing open on a whole new world – the scented, carnal gardens of decomposition. We refuse to admire those flowing juices, the flowering bacteria, the dark, bloated blooms of putrefaction. This is the true nature of death. We should open our eyes and learn.
But in this case, everything will be perfect. Because this will be a real killing.
And it could be tonight, or maybe next week.
But it will be soon. I promise.
Melvyn Hudson had decided to do this evening’s removal himself. He liked a fresh body in the freezer at the end of the day – it meant there was work to do tomorrow. So he called Vernon out of the workshop and made him fetch the van. Vernon was useless with the grievers, of course. He always had been, ever since the old man had made them take him on. But at least he’d be where Hudson could keep an eye on him.
The vehicle they called the van was actually a modified Renault Espace with black paintwork, darkened windows and an HS number plate. Like the hearses and limousines, the van’s registration number told everyone it was from Hudson and Slack. Your dependable local firm.
They were dependable, all right. Bring out your dead – that might be a better slogan. Sometimes Melvyn felt like the council refuse man arriving to pick up an old fridge left on the back doorstep. Nobody worried about what happened to their unwanted rubbish. Their disused fridges could pile up in mouldering mountains on a landfill site somewhere and no one would be bothered, as long as they didn’t have to look at them. Most people were even more anxious to get a corpse off the premises.
A few minutes later, Vernon drove out on to Fargate, hunched over the steering wheel awkwardly, the way he did everything. Hudson had sworn to himself he’d get rid of Vernon if he messed up one more thing, no matter what old man Slack said. The lad was a liability, and this firm couldn’t afford liabilities any more.
Hudson snorted to himself as they drove through the centre of Edendale. Lad? Vernon was twenty-five, for heaven’s sake. He ought to be learning the business side of things, ready to take over when the time came. Some chance of that, though. Vernon was nowhere near the man his father had been. It had to be said that Richard had done a poor job of shaping his son. Not that there’d be a business much longer for anyone to run.
When they reached the house in Southwoods, Hudson asked the relatives to wait downstairs. There was nothing worse than having distressed grievers watching the deceased being manhandled into a body bag. If full rigor hadn’t set in, the corpse tended to flop around a bit. Sometimes, you’d almost think they were coming back to life.
This corpse was an old man, shrunken and smelly, with a bubble of grey froth on his lips. He wasn’t quite cold yet, but his skin felt like putty, flat and unresisting. Hudson thought that if he poked a finger hard enough into the man’s stomach, it would sink right in until it touched his spine.
Vernon was standing by the bed like an idiot, his arms hanging at his sides, his mind on anything but the job.
‘What’s up with you?’ said Hudson.
‘Melvyn, when you do a removal like this one, don’t you ever notice the little things in a person’s bedroom?’
‘Like what?’
‘Just the little things. Look, there’s a glass of water he’s only half drunk. There’s a razor here that somebody used to shave him with this morning. It’s still got some of his hairs on it, even though he’s dead.’
‘Of course he’s bloody dead,’ said Hudson, struggling to keep his voice down. ‘What do you think we’re doing here?’
‘Don’t you look at those things, Melvyn?’
‘No. It’s just a job. We’re professionals.’
‘But don’t you sometimes think … Well, while all this stuff is lying around, it’s as if he’s not really dead at all. He’s still here in the room.’
‘For God’s sake, leave off the thinking, Vernon, and get a grip on this stiff.’
Hudson took the knees of the corpse, while Vernon grasped the shoulders. An arm lifted and a hand flapped, as though waving goodbye.
‘Watch it, or he’ll end up on
