Sleep for me is a deep, dark pit from which I emerge coated in sweat and gasping for breath. Sometimes I cry out as I wake and lash out with my fists at the fragments of my dreams. It will be far too early to be awake, but I know there’s no way I’ll go back to sleep, and I lie there staring at the ceiling, and I think of how it all went wrong.
I was a hard-working and honest cop, a detective with the Major Investigation Unit. We were tasked with dealing with the worst crimes that plagued London.
It was intense and, at times, could be incredibly frustrating, but I was good at my job and it was going well for me. My career prospects were looking bright.
Sadly, the same could not be said of my private life.
I was married but my wife had moved out and filed for divorce. She said I was never there for her. That I was distant. Obsessed.
Thinking about her, about what she might be doing, about who she might be with instead of me, hurt. It made me feel physically sick.
Because I was still in love with her, and I knew I’d lost her.
This made me throw myself deeper into my work. I stayed at the station even later than before she left, delaying going back to the empty flat that reminded me of her, of all that could have been.
It was close to midnight when the alert came in about a suspicious death in Canary Wharf.
It was late January and rain struck the window in front of me as I got to my feet. I’d been staring at a screen for hours and felt drained. That wasn’t going to change now I had a fresh case.
I wasn’t the type of police officer who got an adrenaline rush on the way to investigate a new, potentially extreme crime.
I knew some fellow cops who did, men and women. I tried to keep my distance from them.
I rubbed a crick in my neck and headed for the elevator. Fifteen minutes later I’d signed out a pool car and was driving through the city centre’s maze of high rises and centuries-old buildings.
The area which had become the capital’s financial district in the last few decades, had once been a bustling dock, a fetid place where cutthroats waited in the back streets and opium was cheap.
Now towers rose around carefully designed squares and, if there were any dark places, they lingered in the hearts of man.
According to the developing reports that had come in over the radio, the victim had been found in a penthouse apartment by his fiancée, who had been away on business in New York. She’d let herself in and been confronted by a hideous sight.
I parked up at the entrance to the apartment block. A queasy looking concierge was in conversation with a uniformed officer.
I climbed out and winced as a spasm of pain ran up my back.
It was stress as much as a sedentary lifestyle that was making me feel like this. I was thirty-five years-old but sometimes felt more like an eighty-year-old man, on a very bad day.
I promised myself I would start going to the gym, then showed my ID to the officer and headed inside.
The lobby was classy, all wood panels and dark glass. It was bigger than my apartment and much nicer.
It smelt a whole lot better as well.
The elevator purred all the way to the top floor, where I stepped out onto a carpeted hallway. A little way down, a door stood open, and I could hear the murmur of activity taking place inside.
The apartment was open plan, over two levels, with stunning views over the river.
There was a man in a plush armchair facing the Thames, which flowed serenely in the darkness below.
He wasn’t enjoying the view.
He wasn’t enjoying anything.
His throat had been cut from ear to ear and his collarless linen shirt and slacks were stained with dried blood.
One of my junior colleagues came over and started giving me the details.
Our victim was twenty-five, worked in corporate finance in overseas markets, and was well-liked. His fiancé, who was in one of the apartment’s four bathrooms still vomiting, loved him very much and had been looking forward to their wedding that summer in Florence.
“He had everything,” my colleague added. “Money, love, and looks.”
I looked again at the man’s face. I had read somewhere once that the faces considered most beautiful are symmetrical. In perfect balance.
I didn’t have any kind of eye for that kind of thing, but I did agree that he was handsome. Could even maybe have been a classic movie star – in a different life.
His future now was the body bag which was being rolled out at his feet and a date with a pathologist.
I double checked with my colleague about other basic details, but there were no signs of forced entry, or a struggle.
There had, though, been a long, blond hair found on the pillow of his bed.
“And his fiancée is a redhead,” my colleague commented, “So maybe he was cheating on her and whoever he was with did this.”
I nodded. “It’s a possibility, but let’s keep an open mind and let the facts keep leading us.”
I wrote up my initial report, emailed it to the Head of the Major Investigation Unit, then left the crime scene at five am. Dawn was still hours away. The rain had been replaced by a cold wind.
I shivered and hurried back inside the car, turned the heater to full, and closed my eyes, just for a moment.
What felt like seconds later, someone was tapping on the window. My eyes shot open. There was a traffic warden looking at me.
“You can’t park here,” he said. “I’ve issued a ticket. Have a nice day.”
He smiled and walked away.
I stared at the paper wrapped inside a plastic bag tucked under one of my windscreen wipers and swore. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen asleep like that.
It was nine am. Rain clouds rolled across a grey sky.
Officially my next shift did not start till midday, but I was keen to see what progress there had been on the case.
I drove past a number of gyms on my way back to the station. I stopped at one and paid for a guest pass – because their showers were way better than the ones at the police station.
I didn’t have any clean clothes to change into, but I still felt a lot better when I arrived back at my desk.
The case had progressed. Information had been collated and CCTV footage checked. A young blond woman had been seen entering the building the morning before the murder. She was by any standards stunningly attractive and glided through the lobby as if she owned the place.
There were no more sightings of her, but there was footage of someone shady looking leaving around eight pm.
They were wrapped up in a baggy hooded sweatshirt and joggers and no features could be made out. Maybe it was her, maybe not.
I logged onto my workstation. I was confident a breakthrough was on the way.
Two nights later, the investigation had stalled.
There were no leads on the identity of the blond woman and no other persons of interest.
A friend of the victim claimed to have seen him in a five-star restaurant in the West End on the night his body was found around eleven pm – which was not possible as the man was already dead by then. This friend was later arrested for being in possession of class A drugs, so their statement was discounted as they were clearly an unreliable witness.
It felt like we were staring at a brick wall.
The midnight hour had been and gone but I was still around.
The station was quiet.
The senior officer in charge of the investigation, had told everyone to go home and make a fresh start in the morning.
I still couldn’t face my apartment.
I leant back in my seat, my eyelids growing heavy – when an alert appeared on my computer.
A suspicious death.
In Knightsbridge. A wealthy, exclusive district.
Not a good week to be rich, I thought with a weary smile and dragged myself to my feet.
The scene this time was a townhouse. It dated back to Georgian times but had been renovated multiple times. The basement housed a sauna and a swimming pool.
The once crystal-clear blue water was now streaked with blood.
And a woman lay floating in the middle of the pool.
Her throat had been cut.
She’d been beautiful once, with her life stretching out ahead of her.
And the way she had been killed, and her good looks and obvious wealth brought a very unwelcome thought to the front of my mind:
Apart from the gender of the victim, it’s the same M.O.
The next morning in a crowded briefing room the Head of the Unit addressed all the officers working on the original, and now, this new case.
“There is the possibility that we are dealing with a potential serial killer here and we are going to play this investigation very close to our chests. The families of both victims are high profile and influential and they do not want these tragedies splashed all over the tabloids. Is that understood?”
He looked slowly around the room. Passing on information to a journalist was an easy way to make money, but as he met the eyes of everyone there, it was clear there would be a world of pain for anyone who leaked information.
“Good,” he said. “Now, the two victims moved in the same social circles. They were not friends, but it is probable that their paths crossed. I’m going to assign a team to make contact with known associates of both victims who share their characteristics: young, good-looking and rich – but still alive. Let’s keep it that way. And I want all contacts to be made in person, in as low-key way as possible. There’s no point keeping this out of the gutter press if a single person tweets about it.”
And that was the briefing over. It was time to hit the streets.
As I drove to the home address of the first name on my list, the world around me seemed distant. The office blocks and the shops, all brightly lit against the gloom of a winter’s day. The people rushing in and out of the tube stations. The cars and the buses and the bikes crammed into the roads.
This was a world that did not know there was a monster in their midst – and that I was on its trail.
When I arrived, I parked in front of the house. It overlooked Regent’s Park, a view that would in itself add some more noughts to the price of this property.
As I climbed out of the car a wave of dizziness passed over me.
I was running on empty.
Forget about the gym, I needed to sleep.
I took slow, shallow breaths and felt steadier on my feet.
It was going to be fine, I told myself. I’d done thousands of interviews in my time in the force, and this was just going to be a gentle chat in affluent surroundings.
I pressed the buzzer and when a woman’s voice asked me what I wanted, I showed my ID to the camera in the door.
A few moments later the door opened.
And, as the cliché says, my breath was taken away.
The woman who stood in the hallway was maybe in her early thirties. Her long, dark hair hung loose over her shoulders and she had stunning green eyes.
She was the most beautiful woman I had seen in my life.
“Is there a problem, officer?” she asked.
I swallowed. All of a sudden, I was a gawky teenager again who struggled to even speak to a member of the opposite sex.
“No,” I managed to answer. “I just have a few questions.”
She tucked a loose strand of hair behind an ear, and my internal temperature shot up.
“Sure,” she said, “Do you want to come in.”
I followed her down a hallway decorated with ornate paintings. The scent she was wearing made my skin tingle.
We reached a lounge that looked like it was straight out of a Sunday supplement dedicated to the lives of the rich and famous.
She stood in the centre of the room and smiled.
Desire slammed into me.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I said in an unprofessionally shaky voice, “but…”
A mobile began to ring in another room.
“I better get that,” she said. “So many party invitations, so little time.”
With that she was gone.
I wiped sweat from my brow.
I really needed to get a grip. Splashing cold water on my face would be a start.
“Do you mind if I use your bathroom?” I called out in the direction she had gone. There was no answer, so I went in search of a bathroom.
There were way too many doors, and they were all closed, so I would have to take potluck.
I knocked on one door, opened it, to see it was a storage space.
I tried the next door along.
It was a bedroom. There was a woman lying on the bed. Her long dark hair lay over her shoulders and her beautiful green eyes stared blindly up at the ceiling.
A jagged line of red showed where her throat had been cut.
I didn’t reach for my radio to call it in.
I didn’t check her pulse.
I just stood there staring.
The dead woman on the bed looked exactly like the woman I had just been speaking to.
She was identical.
But, how?
I heard a movement behind me, snapped out of my fugue, and span round.
The woman was standing there, and she was very much alive.
And she sounded perfectly calm when she said, “You’ve found her. That’s such a shame. I could have had so much fun in this shape. Still, easy come, easy go.”
A new smile played across her lips, and as I watched with mounting horror as her features shifted. Her eyes grew larger and darker, until they were brown. Her hair receded and flecks of grey appeared in it, and there were flecks of grey in the dark stubble that now lined her chin.
A cold wave of fear passed through me as I struggled to comprehend what was happening.
The woman that had been standing in front of me was gone – and I was looking at myself.
The bags under my eyes, the scar on my left cheek where I’d been slashed when I was a constable on the beat.
They were all there. It was like I was looking in a mirror.
My flesh and blood reflection grinned and said in my voice, “This shape does not meet my usual high standard. I favour the aesthetically perfect. And a certain standard of lifestyle. But I can’t maintain each form for long, so I need a new pretty face and hot body to become once more desirable and successful. Ah well, after I dispose of you, I will move on, find a new handsome man or woman and shapeshift into them. First, though, there is the little matter of cutting your throat.”
With a swift movement he produced a blade. It was long and viciously sharp.
He moved towards me with a cold calculating expression in his eyes.
The blade was in his right hand.
He was raising it.
One accurate cut was all it would take.
I would be dead, bled out on the floor.
Terror pulsed through my veins.
He lunged, but I managed to parry him with my arm – which began to burn with pain.
He’d slashed my forearm from wrist to elbow and there was blood everywhere.
I felt nauseous, felt the world began to spin around me.
He came at me again.
This time, I met him head on, screaming out and throwing myself against him with every ounce of strength I could muster.
For a moment, we were two tangled bodies and I found myself lying on top of him on the floor.
I rolled away – and saw that the blade was sticking in his chest.
It was in almost up to the hilt.
I dragged myself away and propped myself up against a wall.
He was looking in horror at the blade protruding from his body. Slowly, his hands shaking like crazy, he pulled it out. And then he howled in pain.
It was not a sound any human being would have made.
He howled, and he began to change.
His face started to ripple. His eyes became dark, empty cavities, and his lips shrivelled, revealing cracked and rotted teeth.
His nose collapsed in on itself and his skin fell away.
His hands twisted into sharp stumps.
I watched, paralysed by fear, as the shape he had adopted slipped away and the true, grotesque being beneath was revealed.
It looked at me with its foul eyes and snarled in a distorted voice: “I will not die here. I will not become a freak to be dissected and hidden away.”
It began to crawl towards the open door.
I held up a hand, whispered, “Don’t.”
Then I passed out.
I rose in and out of consciousness over the hours that followed, and there are still gaps in my memory.
Twenty-four hours passed before the medics said I was fit enough to be interviewed.
Two detectives I did not recognise sat by my bed in the hospital and read me my rights.
Then they told me that a neighbour had heard shouting and screaming and phoned 999. By the time responding officers arrived it was too late. I was found in the room with the body of the victim. There was a blade on the floor.
It was clear the detectives’ minds were already made up.
“It looks like she fought back, before you killed her,” one of then said, their voice cold and hard.
“That seems clear to us,” his colleague added. “So, you need to come clean. Confess.”
That was eight months ago.
I’m on remand now and each night wake from a nightmare and lay staring at the ceiling of my prison cell.
I’m locked in for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours, apart from the days when my solicitor visits. Then I get an extra thirty minutes, which I spend in a windowless room.
My trial is coming up and, at the meetings, my solicitor pleads with me to forget about what I had told the police in the interview, and to tell him what really happened. To tell him the truth.
But this is the truth:
I had been on the trail of a monster that hid behind a human face.