My Life as a Killer

Maxim Jakubowski

My nights are full of guilt. A price I am willing to pay.

The way to look at it is to convince myself it’s just a job.

Killing people. Cleaning up. Whatever you prefer to call it.

Someone has to do it.

The first time, it was personal. That was a mistake. But I got away with it. Well, insofar as it launched me on my new career.

I was in love with a woman. Or maybe in retrospect I was only actually in lust. She was blonde, tall and slim and had a wanton spark in her green eyes that just spoke to me in seductive ways. Her name was Cathleen. We’d met at a function, we’d heavily flirted, quickly fucked, and then done the deed a few more times in wholesome abandon. In hotel rooms, over pleasantly dirty weekends in coastal towns. Only for her husband to somehow find out about us and come knocking at my office door, accusing, begging, threatening.

I remembered the things she’d said about him during our brief conversations when our hands, lips and other useful parts of our anatomy were not jousting under the bed covers. How she felt he took her for granted. How he lacked imagination. I did not attempt to justify the affair, just stated the facts but this only served to make him angrier.

I also was married, had children even. This he had discovered in the process of investigating what sort of man his own wife was betraying him with. His anger bubbled to the surface and he asked me how I would feel if my family found out about my extracurricular activities. Now I knew I was not a perfect man and this was not my first instance of adultery, and my soul could live with the fact, but I don’t react well to threats.

‘You’d really contact my wife and tell all?’ I asked him. His name was Christopher, he looked like a Christopher not a Chris and wore an off the peg grey suit.

‘You bet I would.’

That night I killed him.

We agreed to a further meeting to keep discussing the matter, although my mind was made up already. I needed time to think. And plan. I hinted to him I was willing to let Cathleen go and cease the affair. I asked him for a few hours respite.

We drove to an isolated part of Blackheath Common, parked separately and made our way to the shelter of the trees as a thin rain had begun to fall which I realised would muddy any possible trail or footprints in the grass. He had no suspicion and it was easy to take him by surprise. I surprised him from behind and, after much struggle, succeeded in strangling him with the leather belt I had kept in my jacket pocket. I never thought it would be so easy. I’d read countless crime books and now put my plan into action. I would transfer his body to the boot of his own car and take him to a vast building site I’d spotted earlier and which could be accessed through a gap in a wonky wooden fence and dispose of the corpse there. I was wearing gloves, old clothes and shoes I would burn later. It was straightforward. What I hadn’t expected was that Cathleen would be waiting in their car and the look of shock on her face when she saw me carrying Christopher’s body towards the vehicle was one of sheer horror and told its own story.

There was one thing all my reading had taught me: not to leave witnesses.

I knew there was no point trying to justify myself or invoke her love. She had to go. I killed her too. With the back-up knife I had brought along for contingency. It was a waste, and I knew it but I had no other alternative.

There was a large pit at the site where the new building’s foundations were being prepared. The bodies fell into darkness and, luckily enough, from the rim of the pit were immediately lost in shadow. In all likelihood, the cement would pour down and cover them before they were noticed.

I surprised myself with the degree of calm and steadiness with which I was conducting the whole improvised operation.

I drove their car away from the building site. It was a two-years old Volvo which had been purchased second-hand and had over 60,000 miles on the counter. I emptied the glove compartment and disposed of any documents as we crossed the Thames at Richmond Bridge. I abandoned the car near a rough Brixton estate, leaving it visibly unlocked, trusting local wannabes to complete a disappearance job on it.

And then returned to my own car under the curtain of rain, hoping I wouldn’t catch a cold.

For weeks I awaited a knock at my door and found sleep difficult to achieve, but no one came. Nor was there anything in the newspapers.

A year passed and I even embarked on further affairs, albeit specifically keeping clear of married women this time.

My mind somehow brushed the whole episode away. It was as if nothing had ever happened – aside from the indelible memory of Cathleen’s white skin and ever so distinctive moans of pleasure when we had made love – and I had been given a bonus Monopoly card to get out of jail and keep on living as I had always done.

But the mind works in mysterious ways and, gradually, it began again and again to evoke the feeling of calm transcendence I had briefly experienced that night, and I was increasingly overcome with a sense of yearning I couldn’t properly explain.

As if I needed to kill again.

I am not a bad man, I tell myself; just a slave to my cravings, sexual, financial and otherwise, I reckon.

I thought of a way to fan the flames inside me and came up with a solution.

Many of the women I met were through the Internet. This led me to the Craigslist site. I carefully crafted an ad, which was both ambiguous enough as well as self-explanatory if you had the right mindset. Should anyone misunderstand it (and two thirds of respondents did, which didn’t surprise me) all I had to do was fail to respond to it.

The majority of murders are committed by close acquaintances or family and motive is the main reason the arrow of guilt and suspicion quickly points in their direction. Naturally I’d read Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. I’d even seen the movie.

I volunteered to dispose of total strangers. I set a fee. Which was not negotiable. Built in a number of fail safe conditions to protect my anonymity and ensure I was never actually seen by any of my customers. It wasn’t even that I needed the money but I estimated that doing it for free would convey the wrong impression, even if I knew all too damn well that there was something quite askew about my motivations and the loose screw inside me pushing me into this risky direction.

It was a challenge.

Paradoxically, it made me feel alive, killing people.

Invariably, I didn’t wish to know anything unnecessary about the targets bar the bare facts needed in order to identify them, or the reasons they had been set up by others out of hate, jealousy, greed or whatever had prompted their names to be assigned to me. Each new task became an exercise in murder.

I was cautious. Never accepted a job close to home, and declined all hits that might entail travelling overseas as working on familiar territory was both safer and more straightforward. Severed all contacts with any client post-payment and destroyed the pay-as-you-go phone and SIM card used for the transaction. Took my time, planning meticulously, setting up alternative methods, routes of escape, ways of disposal. Taking very particular care to ensure there would be no witnesses – unlike that first time. Tried not to repeat myself. I only read crime fiction as part of my training and education; you learn a lot that way, insofar as what not to do.

There was the American banker who was found hung from a bridge close to the Tate Modern. He would leave his City office every day to jog home and I tailed him for two weeks until the right moment presented itself and I could work unseen despite the full moon above.

And then the call girl who fell out of the window of a top floor luxury apartment in Southwark. Her silk nightie unfurled around her taut body as she took flight, like a parachute or a flower. She didn’t even scream. I think she was even expecting me, just like the victim in Hemingway’s story ‘The Killers’.

I had to pour over car manuals to make the death by carbon monoxide inhalation in his garage of a man whose name I didn’t even know – just his address and his photograph – seem accidental.

Ahmed was a small fry drug dealer in Tottenham and he never suspected me until I drew the knife and aimed straight at his heart. It was messier than I’d hoped, and I was breathless as I took flight following the killing, hoping no passers-by would notice the blood against my dark clothing as I rushed from the scene in haste.

A car burned on a cliff by the sea, its driver trapped inside as I watched from a safe distance. Another man appeared to drown, while a woman in suburbia succumbed to poison I had acquired, alongside birdseed, a mousetrap and a pack of AAA batteries in a cash and carry warehouse near Croydon Airport.

I tried to vary my methods, so that all the deaths appeared accidental, or random enough not to attract undue attention. Whenever possible, I avoided being left with a body to dispose of.

And, of course, this being Britain, I never used a gun. Not that I even knew where to get hold of one had it proven necessary.

I realise that one day everything is bound to catch up with me and my nightmares are not for the weak, but I travel through the days a figure of honesty and normalcy. This is the life I have chosen and I have no wish to change. Some people drink, others collect books or paintings or jewellery. I kill. That’s who I now am.

The black cellphone I keep in my office drawer vibrates three times. It’s an agreed signal. I leave the building at leisure. I know I have fifteen minutes to reach the phone box across Soho Square.

I’m there well in time when the phone inside the old-fashioned red box rings. I quickly check around me and see the usual lunch hour sunbathers and office workers biting into sandwiches and sipping from small cartons or bottles of water or beer. Nothing overly suspicious.

I keep a folded handkerchief between my mouth and the receiver.

It’s a woman’s voice.

Sounding a little familiar, but it’s not a good line.

I grunt my responses.

She is just confirming the arrangements tentatively made beforehand re the fee for the hit and the information I require.

There is an envelope with the relevant details awaiting me in a luggage locker at King’s Cross Station as agreed, for which I have a spare key already.

I wait a whole week. I always do. I never agree on a time span for a given job with any of the clients. A death cannot be rushed. If they are too anxious, I regretfully decline the hit.

It’s rush hour and the station is buzzing with commuters and passers-by rushing in every conceivable direction. I lose myself in the crowd and carefully survey the scene until I am confident there is no obvious surveillance.

I reach the small compartment and turn the key in the lock. There is a large, brown jiffy bag inside. I seize it and swiftly close the locker and walk away, disappearing amongst the sea of folks rushing down into the bowels of the Underground towards the Northern Line. I change several times. Just in case. Better safe than sorry, I know. Once home, I see a note from my wife; she is out with the kids at the local Cineworld. I move to my study and open the envelope to discover who is my target this time.

There is a single sheet of paper, on which the name, home and office address of the hit is laid out in capital letters.

Mine.

And a photograph.

Mine.

Now I know why the voice on the Soho Square telephone sounded familiar. I guess it’s the affairs with other women that have caught up with me, not the killings.

I’m fucked.

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER, born in London in 1953, is the author of more than fifty novels and twelve short story collections, including the Bryant & May mysteries, about two Golden Age detectives investigating impossible London crimes. His recent work includes the War of the Worlds videogame with Sir Patrick Stewart, a graphic novel and a Hammer horror radio play. His latest books are the comedy-thriller Plastic and the memoir Film Freak. He divides his time between London and Barcelona.