That was where he’d gone wrong. That Polish bitch didn’t even have a live-in boyfriend. She had no idea of what it took to be a perfect wife. How could she? She couldn’t even speak English properly, for starters. He hated her stupid accent. If he’d realised she was a foreigner, he wouldn’t have chosen her. Her looks had confused him, tricked him into thinking she was the one. That had always been what let Sirikit down. Her English was good, but she still had a bit of an accent, which grated on him. But more than that, she was dark. He wanted a blonde. He’d always wanted a blonde. Ever since he’d seen Lauren Hutton in American Gigolo when he was barely a teenager, that was what he’d wanted. That was what he’d married, and the replacement would have to be blonde too.

It was naïve to think that a woman who didn’t already know how to take care of a man could be broken in easily. The Polish bitch had fought him every inch of the way. He’d made it plain to her that, just like in Star Trek, resistance was futile. He’d tried every trick in the book, every technique he could think of before he finally had to concede you couldn’t alter their fundamental nature. This one wouldn’t give in and she wouldn’t give up. In the end, the only satisfaction for him had been the final beating. He’d stripped everything from her that defined her and in the process he had made it clear what she really was – a lump of faceless, useless meat. No use even for sex. He’d washed her clean of any trace of him, made sure nobody else could get any use out of her then kicked her to death.

At least it had confirmed that there was, as he had suspected, genuine satisfaction to be had from finishing with the ones who let him down. He’d planned it for the very first one but he’d been thwarted. He’d fantasised about doing it, but the reality had outstripped the fantasy. That heady, drunken moment of absolute power when life finally leaked away was the best feeling he’d ever known.

But still. He was an optimist. He wanted to believe there could be as much delight in the perfect wife as there was in the perfect dealing out of death. And so he’d tried again. But the next one had been no better. He should have known. He’d hoped that the reason she was divorced was that her husband had been a poor excuse for a man, giving her no opportunity to demonstrate what she was capable of.