As midnight strikes I am talking to a couple of regulars from the Tree when a drunken guest trips over his own feet and cannons into me. I stagger back a few steps before my feet catch on something. Twisting as I fall, I see water rushing towards my face.

Instinct makes my hands go out to break my fall, but they don’t get any resistance from the water as I tumble into the pool.

I go in head first. I can feel my knees hit the edge of the pool as water swirls around my head. My eyes and mouth are pressed shut as I thrash my arms around to try and escape the water. The only effect it has is to draw my legs into the pool after me.

Despite my terror, I feel them slithering over the pool’s edging. I can also feel my heart racing as panic sets in.

With my body submerged, I thrash for what seems like hours until I find the right way up.

Pushing my feet down, I locate the bottom of the pool and thrust upwards, desperate to be out of the water as soon as possible – to feel cool air on my skin.

I just hope I’m not at the deep end. If I am, I’ll have to be rescued.

When my head breaks the surface I gasp in a precious lungful of air. My push off the bottom is so fuelled by terror it sees me shoot so far out of the water that I lose my balance and stumble backwards when I land.

A firm hand on my back stops me going under again. My eyes seek the shortest route to safety. I’m three large steps from the side, but the chest level water slows my exit from the pool.

To my mind it is a living beast, clinging to me, holding on so I can be pulled into its depths and pressured by invasive rivulets, until I open my mouth for air and let it conquer me.

Concerned with nothing but escape, I ignore the laughter of the party-goers. It’s not their fault they don’t know I can’t swim. That any body of water deeper than a puddle scares me witless.

I feel a hand on mine. It’s Alfonse reaching into the pool and guiding me to the chrome steps. I realise for the first time my eyes are stinging and my mouth has clamped shut.

Clambering up the ladder, I see concern in Alfonse’s face and mirth in everyone else’s.

‘Sorry, dude. Dunno what I tripped on.’ The slurred words come from the drunk who’d bumped me.

Knowing that delivering a gut punch to a drunk is a good way to get hurled on, I grab his shirt with shaking hands, shift my weight from one hip to the other and toss him into the middle of the pool. Let the water beast have him.

He’s lucky. If there weren’t still kids running around, I’d leave him lying in a bloody heap.

Claude arrives and tosses a towel at me. ‘C’mon. I’ll loan you a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.’

I follow him into the house, happy to be out of everyone’s gaze and away from the water.

33

The Watcher settles down in front of his computer with an energy shake and a packet of power bars.

His fingers tap out the beat of the seventies classic rock songs blaring from his iPod. He’s too young to have liked the bands in their heyday, but when he reached his teens, he fell in love with the riffs and lyrics. It’s a love that has deepened over time. Now he won’t listen to anything else.

He chases threads of intelligence as he probes the lives of those who’ve helped him select his next victims.

He’s thankful for the internet, for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Each of these networks is loaded with information about his targets and helpers.

It doesn’t take long to draw up a list of possibles. After that he just has to whittle down the list until he can select the most appropriate victims. The next ones must have a different connection. Must be able to be taken down together.

The opportunity has come along to throw a delicious curveball into the pattern and he is excited about making the pitch.

He knows how much the police are under pressure. He’d watched the cars arrive at Panchtraik Reservoir.

It had been inspired to place Evie Starr’s body up there.

After Paul Johnson’s body had been found on the road towards the reservoir, the siting of the old woman’s body would make the cops think it was someone travelling that way.

Wait until the coroner got her on the slab, cut her open. Then they’d see the power of what they were dealing with.

Getting the addresses for potential targets and reconnoitring via Google Street View, he learns as much as he can from the internet.

Satisfied he can do no more without carrying out some physical reconnaissance, he turns his attention to the kills themselves.

He writes down a new method on a scrap of paper, scrunches it into a ball and tosses it into the glass bowl with the others.

After mixing them up with a finger, he picks one out, unfolds it and reads the contents. He smiles; the method is a good one. He’s been looking forward to it being selected.

Next he has to work out where to leave their bodies. Unsure whether he should go for two separate dump sites or put them together, he weighs up the pros and cons until an idea strikes him.

He examines the idea from a few angles but finds nothing wrong or dangerous about it. In fact, the more he thinks about it, the better it seems. If set up in the right way, their final resting place will throw police suspicion away from himself. It might only buy him a few days, but any advantage gained can only be a good thing.

Every day wasted by his pursuers will mean another victim to add to his tally.

He only has two concerns now.

The tally.

The pattern.

34

I arrive at Alfonse’s house dressed in clothes loaned from Claude. By a stroke of luck, before I was knocked into the pool I’d passed my cell to someone who wanted to check it out before their next upgrade.

Alfonse and I take our usual seats at his table ready to compare notes. I gesture for him to start and lean back in my chair, hoping he’s learned more than I have.

‘I take it you met George Chalmers and his fiancée?’

I nod. ‘Yeah. I think it’s safe to remove him from our enquiries. He was never a likely suspect. Besides, he’s now engaged and about to become a father. You’d have to be a certified whack-job to get into that position while still obsessed by an ex.’

‘Agreed. I spoke to a few people about Pete Lester. Megan Hutchison told me he’s been seeing her sister for the last six months. Apparently they got together while he was still dating someone else. Megan couldn’t remember the other girl’s name but said her sister had been yelled at by her one night when she was at the Tree with Pete.’

I cast my mind back to try and recall some details but nothing comes back to me. It isn’t unusual for two girls to get into a slanging match at the Tree. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the situation is calmed down by friends or the man whose attention they are competing for.

It is the other occasions when things get out of hand. When men fight they tend to punch or kick at each other. Women, on the other hand, claw, scratch and pull hair, which makes it much harder to separate them. Plus, of course, I can’t retaliate when they start attacking me.

‘So, with Upson out of town at the time she was murdered and the other two in stable relationships, it’s not looking as if it’s any of those three. Agreed?’

He nods. ‘So that puts us back to the wives and girlfriends.’

‘Unless it’s nothing to do with her clients and is something else altogether.’

‘Like what?’

‘A family member doing it to stop her hooking. Or…’ I fall silent, trying to pick the right words.

‘Or what?’

‘Or it’s someone killing people at random. Three people have been found murdered within four days.’