The Perfect Murder: Spine-chilling short stories for long summer nights

16,080 minutes. Or 382,400 seconds. Ticking by seemingly endlessly as my world came to this moment. The clock on the kitchen wall ticking them off. Tick tock, tick tock. More beeping from the computer in the living room, his little network of scum wondering where he’d gotten to.

That was how we’d found the little bastard. Not that I’d had a lot to do with that part.

I knew now it was all a game to him. He liked action. Specifically, me causing pain on his behalf. A bomb scare in town, a couple of no-mark, no-future, scallies beaten to death near Toxteth … an old woman gassed …

Action. Moving me around a chess board marked with Liverpool landmarks and people, like a pawn. Making me do things he knew I had no choice but to do.

I found my voice. ‘Where is he?’

Warm, mid-summer autumn breeze entered through the open window, causing a few takeaway flyers to flutter to the floor from the worktop. I feel a bead of sweat form on my forehead. We’re standing only inches from each other. I could feel his breath on me, short and rapid. The rotting smell of it making me wrinkle my nose. I move closer and he tries to shrink back. There’s nowhere he can move to though.

‘Tell me.’ I say, my voice low, ‘I promise to make this easy on you.’

***

I guessed he could barely believe I’d carried out his first job. Murder. Plain and simple, those were the facts. No matter how I dressed it up to myself, I’d killed those two lads out of my own selfish needs. The second job, that was just about putting me in more danger I supposed. See if I’d be willing to plan and carry out something of that magnitude, no matter the fact that it was all a ruse.

The third job … there was no doubting his thinking behind that.

I could spend hours justifying the first job. Two scallies, who probably wouldn’t end up contributing anything worthwhile to society, who probably had done unconscionable things themselves … I was doing the world a favour.

Even I didn’t buy it. I was a killer. No matter the justification for it.

The second job. Well, no one really got badly hurt. Yeah, some people panicked and got banged up a bit, and there was that one woman still in hospital, but I was sure she’d be okay eventually. The story had already disappeared from the papers and TV. A few days and they were discussing something else. Just one of those hoaxes that happens every now and again. They’d release the tape of my calls at some point, but I wasn’t unduly worried. No knocks at the door in three days, so I’d begun to breathe a bit easier.

The email came on the fourth day following my Liverpool One jaunt.

I started shaking before I’d even finished the first paragraph. No, no, no. Not this. I couldn’t possibly justify it.

A defenceless old woman. That was how he described his required target. Not just a woman, not just old, defenceless as well. Just to ram the point home to me, exactly what I was being tasked with.

I deliberated for hours, although I knew what I’d do eventually. The only decision I needed to make was how. Choose someone I was already acquainted with, not family of course, but maybe a friend of my mother’s or nan’s.