He had driven for hours in increasing frustration; not a whiff of a victim in Milton Keynes. At ten to midnight he was on the verge of caving and sniffing out a hooker when he’d spotted her. She was arguing with her boyfriend on a roundabout in the middle of the road, a short-haired brunette in jeans. As he passed he kept an eye on the couple in his rearview mirror. He watched her storm away, as good as intoxicated by her own anger and tears. The infuriated man she had left behind shouted after her, then, with a gesture of disgust, stumbled off in the opposite direction.

He did a U-turn and drove back up the road towards her. She was sobbing as she walked, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

He had wound down the window.

“You all right, love?”

“Piss off!”

She sealed her fate by plunging angrily into bushes beside the road to get away from his crawling car. Another hundred yards would have taken her to a well-lit stretch of road.

All he had to do was turn off the road and park. He pulled on the balaclava before getting out of the car, the knife ready in his hand, and walked calmly back to the place where she had disappeared. He could hear her trying to fight her way back out of the dense patch of trees and shrubs, placed there by town planners to soften the contours of the wide gray dual carriageway. There was no streetlamp here. He was invisible to passing drivers as he skirted the dark foliage. As she beat her way back onto the pavement, he was standing ready to force her back in at knifepoint.

He had spent an hour in the bushes before leaving the body. He ripped her earrings from her lobes and then wielded his knife with abandon, hacking off bits of her. A gap in the traffic and he scurried, panting, back to the stolen car in the darkness, balaclava still in place.

He drove away, every particle of him elated and sated, his pockets seeping. Only then did the mist lift.

Last time, he had used a car from work, which he had subsequently cleaned thoroughly in full view of his workmates. He doubted anyone would be able to get the blood out of these cloth seats and his DNA would be on everything. What was he going to do? That was the closest he had ever come to panicking.

He drove miles north before abandoning the car in a lonely field far from the main road, not overlooked by any buildings. Here, shivering in the cold, he took off the fake plates, soaked one of his socks in the petrol tank, then chucked it into the bloody front seat and lit it. It took a long time for the car to properly catch; he had to reapproach it several times to help it along until finally, at three in the morning while he watched, shivering, from the cover of trees, it exploded. Then he ran.