Chapter Two

It was the morning after…

As Greg opened his eyes, it all came flooding back and his recollection of the previous night’s events began unfolding in his head. A massive adrenaline rush passed through him.

All the planning, all the times he had held his own private dress rehearsals, the secret way he had picked his victims, through their own self-selection. All the time the motive in his mind was the same; it never changed or lost focus. It was murder!

Greg was a very popular guy. His full name was Gregory Jason O’Hara. He was twenty-three and lived in a small flat in Raglan Court, Wembley Park, North London. The flat was not his, he leased it. Greg thought highly of his landlord; the rent was reasonable, any repairs were carried out with the minimum amount of fuss and Greg was shown respect and privacy. The truth was that Greg had only met his landlord once.

Greg was just about six foot tall, weighed about twelve stone and was in very good shape. He was very proud of the fact that he had passed his driving test on his first attempt. He owned a van due to his need to transport large loads. It was a white Ford Escort. It looked like a standard van; Greg had not made any very noticeable modifications.

He was not a bad-looking guy, though the small scar under his right eye sometimes made him feel a bit paranoid. He got the scar in a fight when he was younger. A guy had pushed into Greg in a burger bar, late after the pubs had kicked everyone out. Greg was trying to get a snack whilst on his way home with some friends, when a guy behind them in the queue kept nudging Greg in his back. There was an exchange of words and the guy punched Greg, cutting him just below his right eye. The guy was wearing a chunky ring. A lucky punch! Although Greg did not retaliate at the time, he got his revenge a few weeks later when he saw the same guy on his own. The guy was drunk; Greg was sober. It was easy for Greg to even the score. Greg believed that you should never get mad, you should get even.

Greg’s mother and father had moved back to Ireland and his younger sister went with them. That was nearly four years ago, though Greg still missed them all greatly.

Ireland was the country of Greg’s birth. He was born in a city called Cork. Cork is the Irish Republic’s second largest city, situated on an island between the two channels of the Lee River. The family home, a modest two up-two down terrace was all they could afford at the time, as Greg’s father was the only breadwinner in the household. The mortgage repayments stretched their already elasticised budget. The property was ideal for a new family starting up but was never meant for the long-term. The small yard at the rear would never have been large enough for Greg to spend his playtimes and the house soon became overcrowded once his sister arrived. It was then that Greg’s parents decided to sell up and make a new life in England. The small amount of money they had made from the sale was just enough to get the O’Hara family of four on the ferry, with a little left over to enable them to set up home on the mainland.

Greg only had patchy memories of his birthplace. The tall statue of Father Matthew, the founder of The Irish Temperance Movement, St. Anne’s Church where he had been christened, the English Market which his mother would push him around in his pram where it seemed that everyone knew everyone. A large city of over twelve million souls, Cork was a friendly place; people always seemed to find the time to ask after the well-being of others and were always willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Greg’s mother often took him to Bishop Lucey Park. The vast greenery offered him the freedom to run free as far and as fast as his little legs would take him ‘Slow down, Greg!’ his mother would call out. Greg had inbuilt selective-hearing at a young age, and would be unable to hear his mother, his pounding heart muffling all outside noise.

Greg’s parents had come to England not long after his fourth birthday. His sister, Elise, was three years his junior. They had first settled in Kilburn, North West London. Kilburn was known to most Londoners as ‘Little Ireland,’ this was because most of the people living in the area were either Irish settlers looking for work, or direct descendants of those who had previously migrated from the Emerald Isle.

They moved in to a terraced house on Dyne Road, just off the Kilburn High Road, using some of the capital from the sale of the home in Ireland to pay for the rental deposit. Greg’s father saw this as a step down as they did not own the property but renting privately was the only option open to them at the time. It was not long before Greg’s father had a full time job, and enough money saved to place a small deposit on a three-bedroom house in Wembley Park. They moved three years later. Oakington Crescent was a very quiet residential area and the large rear garden was perfect. The O’Hara stamp soon made the place feel like home.

As the years flew by, the time arrived for Greg to leave school and he got himself a job working for Brent Borough Council as a refuse collector. The money was OK. Greg was fairly bright but, more important than that, he was very streetwise. The work kept him active – easy Monday to Friday stuff. The money was always in the bank on time. Greg had worked for the council for five years, though not always in the same role. It was only the first two years that he worked on the bins as a refuse collector. It was OK, but you had to work as a part of a team and you had to work at the pace of everyone else in the team. When a job as street cleaner became available, Greg filled out his internal application in record time. His two years of service, along with his unblemished record, put Greg head and shoulders above the other applicants. The money was about the same but it meant that all the older guys could no longer bully him. Though that was during work, if they tried that outside work it would have been a different story.

In the evening, depending on how he felt, Greg would sometimes go to the gym and work out. He was a great believer in self-discipline. He did not smoke and only drank alcohol at weekends. Even if he went for a drink with a few friends during the week he would not drink alcohol. Greg thought of himself as a bit of a boxer, he had a speedball in his room and had gained a large collection of archive boxing videos. He worshiped Mike Tyson. Iron Mike had pure punching power!

Greg left home a few months after his eighteenth birthday. He found a one bedroom flat in the same area he had grew up in. The flat was in Raglan Court, on the Empire Road, still in Wembley Park and a few minutes’ walk away from the family home. Everything about it was perfect.

‘If you like it, you should take it,’ Greg’s mother told him.

‘What do you think, Dad?’ Greg asked his father.

‘It’s clean, and the location is great. But, son, I’m not the one who’s going to have to live there, am I? I agree with your mother, if you like it, you should take it!’ his father said, smiling.

His mother and father had helped him in all that they could. They gave him bedding, pots and pans and even a kettle along with other things he needed to set up his new home. Greg enjoyed the privacy as well as his newfound independence.

As the months drifted along, Greg made his new home very welcoming and a nice place to be.

Greg was not seeing anyone at the moment. He was straight, though he had some gay friends. He had been dating a girl for a while, though as the time drew nearer for his plan to hatch he ended the relationship for obvious reasons. Karen Hogan was a lovely girl; she was twenty-seven, a little older than Greg was. Karen still lived at home with her mother in Kingsbury, a nice, almost suburban area in North London. Her mother’s three-bedroom semidetached house in Elthorne Road was close to a huge park – Kingsbury Park. The allotments opposite meant the area was a quiet residential one.

Her parents had lived in the property all their married life. They moved in to the ex-council property and rented for the first few years and then bought it when Maggie Thatcher introduced the right to buy act in the late eighties.

Karen’s father had died when she was six and her mother had never got over his death, or even bothered with men since her husband died.

She was a tall, leggy kind of woman. Her long blonde hair, green eyes and slim-line figure drew many admirers. Greg was never the jealous type. When other guys looked, he took it as a compliment. The twenty-seven year old had her head well screwed firmly on her shoulders. She had a great job, also with Brent Borough Council, in the planning department in the same office block as Greg. This is where they met. Karen was the only girl that Greg ever felt serious about. Before that he had had a string of one-night-stands. Karen was only meant to be a one-night-stand but the sex was out of this world. Their relationship had lasted about eighteen months. Greg had told Karen that he felt suffocated and needed some space to breathe. Karen knew that when guys tell you that it just means they are bored with you, though this was not the case. Greg had other reasons for ending their relationship just over six months ago.