The very first time he’d killed had been like that: a simple question of seizing the moment. He remembered it in snapshots, like a slideshow, because it had been thrilling and new. That was before he had honed it to an art, before he had started playing it like the game it was.

She’d been plump and dark. Her mate had just left, got into a punter’s car and disappeared. The bloke in the car had not known that he was choosing which of them would survive the night.

He, meanwhile, had been driving up and down the street with his knife in his pocket. When he had been sure that she was alone, completely alone, he had drawn up and leaned across the passenger seat to talk to her through the window. His mouth had been dry as he asked for it. She had agreed a price and got in the car. They had driven down a nearby dead end where neither streetlights nor passersby would trouble them.

He got what he’d asked for, then, as she was straightening up, before he had even zipped up his flies, he had punched her, knocking her back into the car door, the back of her head banging off the window. Before she could make a sound he’d pulled out the knife.

The meaty thump of the blade in her flesh—the heat of her blood gushing over his hands—she did not even scream but gasped, moaned, sinking down in the seat as he pounded the blade into her again and again. He had torn the gold pendant from around her neck. He had not thought, then, about taking the ultimate trophy: a bit of her, but instead wiped his hands on her dress while she sat slumped beside him, twitching in her death throes. He had reversed out of the alleyway, trembling with fear and elation, and driven out of town with the body beside him, keeping carefully to the speed limit, looking in his rearview mirror every few seconds. There was a place he had checked out just a few days previously, a stretch of deserted countryside and an overgrown ditch. She had made a heavy, wet thump when he rolled her into it.

He had her pendant still, along with a few other souvenirs. They were his treasure. What, he wondered, would he take from The Secretary?

A Chinese boy near him was reading something on a tablet. Behavioral Economics. Dumb psychological crap. He had seen a psychologist once, been forced to.

“Tell me about your mother.”

The little bald man had literally said it, the joke line, the cliché. They were supposed to be smart, psychologists. He’d played along for the fun of it, telling the idiot about his mother: that she was a cold, mean, screwed-up bitch. His birth had been an inconvenience, an embarrassment to her, and she wouldn’t have cared if he’d lived or died.

“And your father?”

“I haven’t got a father,” he’d said.

“You mean you never see him?”