Jack Be Nimble

Chapter 1

1 31st August

It felt odd punching an unconscious woman. Wrong, almost. Almost. The tranquilliser wouldn’t be wearing off for some time yet, so he had plenty of time to revel in the rollercoaster of emotions.

He steadied himself by leaning forward on the edge of the bathtub, the plastic wrap crunching and rustling as he did so. He had a sudden urge to spit in her face, but knew he had to control himself. Leaving his DNA on the body wouldn’t be a great start.

It was getting almost unbearably hot inside the beekeeper’s suit but he couldn’t remove anything until it was all over. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

He pulled the knife out of its leather sheath and turned it in his hand, the light glistening off the steel and bouncing around the room. He pulled it under his nostrils and sniffed. It smelt of nothing — perhaps faintly of leather — but it wasn’t the smell he was interested in. It was the sensation.

He looked down at her body and noticed a red mark already appearing where he’d punched her. All he needed to do now was wait until a bruise had started to develop. He couldn’t kill her before then, as much as he desperately wanted to. He was fighting the urge with every fibre of his being. He didn’t know whether it was excitement, joy or extreme anxiety. Right now he knew only one thing: he had to stick to the plan.

Going off track now could be disastrous. Every minuscule aspect of this had to be carried out to a T. For every stage, he’d even worked out a secondary and, in most cases, a tertiary option should unforeseen circumstances arise. Because unforeseen circumstances always arose.

The only thing he could not be sure of were the exact timings, but that didn’t matter too much. The plan he was working from didn’t have exact timings. He knew that the red mark on her face would build slightly and some swelling would occur. With any luck, he’d have cracked her cheekbone or caused tissue damage which would be spotted anyway. He wasn’t waiting for a full-on purple shiner — that could take days. No, just a nice red welt would do. Enough for them to spot it.

Cutting through her neck hadn’t felt at all like he had expected it to. It was like slicing a tough, stringy chicken breast. Even with his ultra-sharp knife he had to rock the knife and work with it to get the effect he wanted. Before long he was almost down to the vertebrae. He’d placed a plastic screen over her upper body and was now struggling to see through it, such was the amount of blood that’d hit it. This job needed to be clean, though, because they couldn’t catch him. Not just yet. Not until he was ready.

He carefully peeled back the plastic glove over his left wrist to look at his watch. It was almost time.