Page 3 of The Killer’s Mark

Wendy ignored him. She pulled out her mobile telephone and stabbed the nine button three times.

‘Which service do you require?’ the emergency call handler said.

‘Police, please,’ Wendy replied.

‘May I ask what this is about?’

‘I’ve just discovered my father’s a monster.’

Five years later

The man snapped on a sterile glove. Just one. Two weren’t needed. Not for this. Two gloves would have been excessive. He pulled it tight. Made sure there were no air pockets. No twists or creases. He did this until the glove fitted him like the second skin it was supposed to be. An impermeable barrier, there to prevent the transmission of blood-borne pathogens.

And there would be blood.

The woman watched, emotionless. Resigned. She knew this would hurt. The man had told her it would hurt. He wasn’t being cruel. He was no sadist. He wouldn’t enjoy the pain he was about to inflict. He had told her so she would be prepared. So it wouldn’t be a surprise. A surprised person might flinch. His job depended on her remaining perfectly still.

His life depended on it.

He’d clamped his first woman. Used an engineer’s vice, padded with the kind of material used to protect fragile items in transit. He’d thought a vice would take the surprise out of the equation. Make it irrelevant. Even if the woman struggled, the body part would remain still. But it was a mistake, one he was lucky to survive. Because the first woman had bucked in pain. In surprise. And although the important body part had remained as still as a tree stump, she’d hurt her ankle. A sprain. If it had broken, it would have been a mistake he wouldn’t have been allowed to learn from.

Damaged goods.

From that point on, he’d done it the way he’d been trained. The way it had been done for millennia.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

The woman nodded. ‘Which foot?’

‘The right.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I knew that. I’m sorry, I’m babbling.’

‘It’s OK. There’s no need to be nervous. It’ll be over before you know it.’

She bit her lip and removed her shoes. She was wearing tights, so she removed those too. She had long legs, pale but exquisitely muscled. The man took no notice. All the women he worked on were like this. Innocent and perfectly formed. More importantly, they were unblemished. No tattoos, no scars, only their ears pierced.

The woman climbed onto the table. The man took a seat, then rolled it towards the bottom of the table. He pulled his workstation within easy reach.

‘I have a couple of things to do, then we’ll get started,’ he said.

The first thing was the ink. He slotted nine ink cups into the tilted stand and filled each one with a rich red ink. Next he picked up a pipette of black ink. Squeezed a drop into the first cup, two into the second, three into the third and four into the fourth. He stirred the cups and studied the different shades of red. Satisfied, he repeated the process with the next four cups, although this time he added white ink. He left the cup at the end untouched. The nine cups now each contained a slightly different shade of red, from pink to dark burgundy.

He opened an organ transfer box and pulled out a single vial. He showed it to the woman.

‘You know what this is?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘It’s blood.’

‘That’s right. It’s been tested and it’s quite safe. There is no need to worry.’

He picked up an empty pipette and filled it with blood from the vial. He added five drops to each of the nine ink cups. He didn’t know why he was required to do this, nor did he know where the blood had come from.

He certainly wasn’t going to ask.

It was symbolic anyway; the blood didn’t affect the ink’s colour.

He picked up his next-generation high-performance tattoo machine. It was wireless, and had an inbuilt vibration-dampening mechanism. It was the most advanced machine on the market. He had trained with one of the old ‘guns’, a vibrating, noisy, white-finger-inducing beast of a thing. Just ten minutes on the gun had left him with numb hands and a tingle up his arm. He could hold his new machine for as long as he had ink.