The morning that I killed Charlie Harris, the air tasted like lead and the sky was gunmetal grey. Suddenly exhausted, I slouched in a white leather armchair and gazed out of the grubby window of the East London flat, barely focusing on the rows of concrete blocks being smudged by the winter rain. I was starting to get used to these bouts of mental and physical fatigue, putting it down to my age, but they still draped me in a cloak of gloom. My brief moment of morbid self-attention soon melted into annoyance, however. Annoyance with Charlie, of course, but with myself, more than anything else. I’d been messy.
Eventually, I turned to look at Charlie’s corpse and sighed. He was flat on his back on the fluffy white rug, where he’d collapsed five minutes before. He was a big man, dressed in an
