TWO YOUNG OFF-DUTY police officers, glory-seeking constables so eager for a trophy collar they hadn’t called for reinforcements, got lucky. They were suspicious of this wiry man in his jeans and pullover, his iron-grey ponytail tied neatly off at the back of his head. They didn’t like the way he hung around the sixth-form college, or tried to chat to female students as they waited at the bus stop.
They lost him for a while, then one of them thought they saw movement by the wooden fence surrounding a field. Locals tramped across it in order to collect chestnuts in Thinways forest each November. They followed the figure through deep snow to a crumbling stone platform in an abandoned North Yorkshire train station where they found him trying to swallow the heart of ten-year-old Jemima Cartledge. The rest of her body lay in the snow nearby, ringed with an ugly spattered circle of blood and faeces. He’d attempted to set fire to her corpse but her clothes were too damp. Her singed hair sent an unbroken line of thin smoke into the cold blue sky.
‘Kill me,’ he’d begged them. They hadn’t, so he had dispatched the two of them, informing them of his retirement as they breathed their last red gasps into the snow.
November 18, 1976. The Picnic Man. Gyorsi Salavaria. The final bow.
He thought of that moment of his ending every day. He should not have allowed it to happen. He had been weak. He’d had no faith. He should have kept going, knowing that he would need to remain at the peak of his fitness, both physically and mentally. This was not the kind of thing you just tossed off, like a hobby. It took an enormous amount of psychological steel to turn a living creature into a dead thing. And now it was time to return to it. His enforced hibernation was at an end. They expected him to turn it on, go back to being the monster, the phantom, the slippery Picnic Man.
Everything that had occurred since then – the TV coverage, the stupefaction that his reign of terror was suddenly over, this long period of hiding, the self-doubt, the late-night radio phone-ins where lonely women had asked for his hand in marriage – all of it seemed to have come from a time before his retreat. Only that moment seemed to exist within his memory with clarity. Everything else was lustreless, befogged. He supposed that time in the snow, with a throat full of warm blood, was the last time he had felt alive. Thirty years withdrawn. Happy fucking birthday.
He could and should have gone on. He had endured a moment of stupid weakness and it had deposited him in a self-imposed exile, a hell.
Once upon a time he had pranced clear of anybody with his scent in their nostrils: young, intelligent, hungry, he was a man whose senses had become super attenuated. A fly seeing the approaching swipe almost before it has been launched. The police had been moving through syrup. But he had allowed himself to be found cheaply, for a momentary lack of confidence. He thought his people had abandoned him, were unimpressed with his work; they had simply read the situation much better than him, with the coldness and logic that he had yet to learn. His exposure might lead to his capture, which in turn could lead to their being discovered. And so they had created some distance. Shedding the emotive side of himself, the human part, had shielded him from understanding the situation. He understood that now. Any warmth or sympathy that existed within him before his self-imposed exile had shrivelled and was as useless as a vestigial organ or limb.
They had needed to aestivate that long-ago summer, they told him; they could sense it would be a hot one. Despite his offerings, there seemed to be no change in the Queen’s condition and they decided they must preserve their energies until the inevitable occurred. He was to go into hiding for as long as it took. It had been hard for him to comprehend. He had struck out in this direction, driven by an instinct planted within him since birth, since before birth. He had killed nine children on a spree that lasted three years. The media storm that surrounded his activity did not impress him, nor his reputation as Britain’s most feared serial killer. He derived no pride from eluding the police, no consternation that the newspapers wrongly accused him of eating his prey. All that mattered to him was the means to an end.
Thirty years on, that end was here, but not in the way he had envisioned it.
He knew he must leave soon, because although She was dead, Her replacement would need to be found. A return to strength was not out of the question, but it could not happen while he was decaying in a collapsed, forgotten barn. What was important was the quality of his flesh, the commitment, the speed and efficiency of the kill. What really mattered was how they read his dedication, his passion. He must return.
He rose from the uncomfortable metal camp-bed with its thin mattress and death-grey blanket. He walked the three paces to the shattered door that separated him from the corridor.
He ran his hands through his hair, felt the soft stubble on his chin. Long hair now, turning silver – he could see it if he pulled it in front of his face. He would not cut it, although he shaved regularly, religiously. He had not seen himself in a mirror for so long he had begun to doubt that they had ever existed. Mirrors seemed too fantastic to him to be true, like the technology they used to show on Tomorrow’s World. He had forgotten what his own face looked like, even as he traced the blunt blade of his straight-edge razor over its planes and curves and runnels. Even if he could remember, it would have changed beyond recognition now. Thirty years without being able to stare into his own eyes, question himself about what he had done with his life, demand some answers, some confirmation that he was on the right track, no matter what. It was difficult to keep focused when there was nothing to focus on any more.
What did he miss from normal life? Really, there wasn’t that much. A pint and a paper, the odd football match, a blow-job, a curry, and the feel of a cricket ball in his hands. Once he had been a fair cricket player, a bowler, able to swing the ball in or out depending on the state of the wicket, the state of the ball, the moisture in the air. Once he had been in love. Once he had thought about fathering children, rather than eating them. Destiny ruined your choices, ruined the notion that you ever really had any choices in the first place.
The only thing that hurt him was wondering about his mother, dead a long time now, but not so long that she didn’t know her son was a beast. Now and then it pinched him to imagine her holding him as a newborn, kissing his forehead, wondering at the size of his fingers, the softness of his skin. He would have been faultless in her eyes. His laughter would have brought her to the edge of tears, his simple look of need and love from his cot in the morning when he wakened would have given her belief in God.
When did you become disappointed in your offspring? Was there ever a time? When they grew obnoxious with teenage hormones, defaced by acne? Or were you always in thrall to them despite the way the dice fell? You sent them letters and cards professing love even while their irritation with your parochial life threatened to choke them. No detail, no matter how boring to them, was anything less than fascinating to you.
Time, studied in this way, was of immense interest to him. There was a poignancy in seeing the thrum of his heartbeat in the soft skin of his wrist and remembering a moment when a girlfriend from his teens pressed her tongue against the same spot after they had made love. Looking at that pulse in his skin made him feel that no time had passed between then and now. You grew older, but your memories kept you young. You could always be a virgin if you wanted it.
He touched his fingers to his eyes; he felt the tender flesh, the minuscule network of wrinkles and the way his tears filled it. He thought of death and love and the way the two were so intertwined that it was difficult to untangle them in his thoughts. He had killed but he had loved, too. Did that make him a bad man?
Death. It was both an end and a beginning. Tears were just his way of showing some respect.
He moved, as best his tired limbs would allow, to the part of the corridor where the wall gave itself up to the sprawling forest. He remembered a news programme he had listened to on the radio, not long after going into hiding. One of the ten-a-penny psychologists was talking about what Salavaria was really like, how a fiend like that functioned, how he had slipped the widening net persistently over the years. That he would never make eye contact because he must have the kind of penetrative eyes that people remembered.
The psychologist said he must be a very lonely man. But Salavaria had never felt that way. He felt separate. Intended. Chosen. Different. He was a link between the past and the future.
Nonsense from these psychologists – a breed of repellent, indecorous creatures who were regularly called upon to spout forth over wars and TV reality shows – did not impinge on him. When these so-called experts opened their mouths to speak, Salavaria sent his mind elsewhere. He imagined the purse and slither of other mouths as they talked their rot, and remembered the flavour of Rhiannon Tate’s freshly harvested kidneys, poached by the heat of her fear. He remembered the softness of Lisa Kerwin’s throat under his fingers and the yield of her trachea, like a Styrofoam cup. He remembered the almost supernatural sweetness of Debra Finnegan’s blood. He drank so much of it that his piss turned to treacle for days after.
The forest both stretched out around him and muscled in on his space. It was a paradox he loved. In many ways, he saw himself as the forest. He was patience and frustration; ancient and modern; strength and fragility. He had been here so long he had become a part of the forest. And somewhere beyond it, things were in motion; there was a way back, if he wanted it. He realised he did, very much.
The taste of hot meat. It would soon be back in his mouth, filling his nostrils with copper. The special flavour and texture. For the first time in three decades, he became impatient about having to wait.