His need to kill was becoming urgent. The last few wasted days had slid past, his leave of absence from It slowly expiring, but The Secretary remained alive and free. He had searched for hours, trying to trace her and then, shockingly, she had been right there in front of him, the brazen bitch, in broad daylight—but there had been witnesses everywhere…

Poor impulse control, that fucking psychiatrist would have said, knowing what he’d done at the sight of her. Poor impulse control! He could control his impulses fine when he wanted—he was a man of superhuman cleverness, who had killed three women and maimed another without the police being any the wiser, so fuck the psychiatrist and his dumb diagnoses—but when he’d seen her right in front of him after all those empty days, he’d wanted to scare her, wanted to get up close, really close, close enough to smell her, speak to her, look into her frightened eyes.

Then she’d strutted away and he had not dared follow her, not then, but it had almost killed him to let her go. She ought to be lying in parcels of meat in his fridge by now. He ought to have witnessed her face in that ecstasy of terror and death, when he owned them completely and they were his to play with.

So here he was, walking through the chilly rain, burning inside because it was Sunday and she had gone again, back to the place where he could never get near her, because Pretty Boy was always there.

He needed more freedom, a lot more freedom. The real obstacle was having It at home all the time, spying on him, clinging to him. All that would have to change. He’d already pushed It unwillingly back into work. Now he had decided that he would have to pretend to It that he had a new job. If necessary, he’d steal to get cash, pretend he’d earned it—he’d done that plenty of times before. Then, freed up, he’d be able to put in the time he really needed to make sure he was close at hand when The Secretary dropped her guard, when nobody was looking, when she turned the wrong corner…

The passersby had as little life as automata to him. Stupid, stupid, stupid… Everywhere he walked he looked for her, the one he’d do next. Not The Secretary, no, because the bitch was back behind her white front door with Pretty Boy, but any woman stupid enough, drunk enough, to walk a short way with a man and his knives. He had to do one before he went back to It, he had to. It would be all that could keep him going, once he was back pretending to be the man It loved. His eyes flickered from under his hat, sorting them, discarding them: the women with men, the women with kids clutching them, but no women alone, none the way he needed them…

He walked for miles until darkness fell, past lit pubs where men and women laughed and flirted, past restaurants and cinemas, looking, waiting, with a hunter’s patience. Sunday night and the workers were returning home early, but it did not matter: there were still tourists everywhere, out-of-towners, drawn by the history and mystery of London…