Laura was not the only person with Nietzsche in mind. Thou goest to woman, do not forget to take thy whip! His pen circled the passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra, as memory called up the beautiful face, the intelligent, wide eyes. There would be no need of a hood when they met again at the college.
This time he wanted to see her face as she went, as she slipped away into darkness. Hannah was simply not the kind of person you would want to see die. In life she’d been clumsy, gauche. As he choked her, she would probably have looked off-putting.
That wouldn’t be the case with his next encounter. She was beautiful, vital. She had a great body and he couldn’t wait to see her wide, generous mouth, the full lips parting sensuously, the tip of her tongue provocatively visible, as she breathed her last.
Revenge, he thought, revenge.
They say it is a dish best eaten cold.
He also knew the secret of Wittgenstein’s mirror. Soon it would have something truly remarkable to reflect.
He didn’t know that much about Wittgenstein, his ideas were a bit too mathematical, but he did know the famous quote, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Soon, witness and victim, mirror and woman, would prove the truth of this dictum.
He knew the college well. There were few premier-league colleges in Oxford that he hadn’t worked in at one time or another. He even knew the room intimately. It couldn’t have been better chosen, if he’d done it himself. It was perfect for the purpose.
All would go according to plan. The music for their final meeting had been selected. ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).’ The song was particularly apposite; her death would indeed make him feel mighty real.
The long, delicate fingers underlined another passage by the German philosopher. To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. He felt he knew a great deal about suffering.
Now it would be someone else’s turn.