Her name was Clara. She was in her late thirties, red-haired, still quite young in the body but with a face already beginning to be lined and haggard with the effort of keeping up. She had to be busy in her career. She had to be a successful single parent. She had to jog five miles every morning. She had to be good at sex, and still need it, and enjoy it, and know how to say, in a kind of whining murmur, “Oh. That. Yes, that. Oh yes,” in the night. Was she puzzled to find herself here in a redbrick-and-terracotta Victorian hotel with a man who didn’t seem to understand any of these achievements? Kearney didn’t know. He looked round at the shiny off-white corridor walls, which reminded him of the junior schools of his childhood.

“This is a sad dump,” he said.

He took her by the hand and made her run down the stairs with him, then pulled her into an empty room which contained two or three billiard tables, where he killed her as quickly as he had all the others. She looked up at him, puzzlement replacing interest in her eyes before they filmed over. He had known her for perhaps four months. Early on in their relationship, she had described him as a “serial monogamist,” and he hoped perhaps she could now see the irony of this term, if not the linguistic inflation it represented.

In the street outside—shrugging, wiping one hand quickly and repeatedly across his mouth—he thought he saw a movement, a shadow on the wall, the suggestion of a movement in the orange streetlight. Rain, sleet and snow all seemed to be falling at once. In the mix, he thought he saw dozens of small motes of light. Sparks, he thought. Sparks in everything. Then he turned up the collar of his coat and quickly walked away. Looking for the place he had parked his car, he was soon lost in the maze of roads and pedestrian malls that led to the railway station. So he took a train instead, and didn’t return for some days. When he did, the car was still there, a red Lancia Integrale he had rather enjoyed owning.