Howard Staple listened to the radio with interest, another body had been found in the city. This brought the total to five in as many months.
The buzz of conversation started up immediately amongst his colleagues. Who was responsible? Why? Were the victims connected in any way? And most of all, when were the police going to catch the killer. Howard joined in with the conversation, well, he never exactly joined in, just skirted around the edges making the expected noises of shock or agreement. He had little in common with these people, and he knew they didn’t particularly like him. It didn’t matter though, he knew he had the upper hand. He knew that one of these people could well be the next victim. His next victim.
Howard had never intended to become a serial killer, but the thrill had become too hard to resist. He had accidentally killed a man many years ago, and despite it being in self defense, found he enjoyed the experience. It was the most exhilarating thing he had ever done. He had been the victim of an attempted mugging on his way home late one night, the mugger was obviously drunk and wielding a knife. Howard never carried large amounts of cash on him, so the man wouldn’t have got away with much. But it was more than that, Howard felt he would have lost a lot more than his wallet that night, he would have lost his pride. When the man went for him, his karate instinct - buried since his teens - kicked in and in one swoop grabbed him by his arm, spun him over and knocked him to the ground. The sound of his skull smashing against the pavement sealed his fate.
In a panic, Howard had dragged the body down to the river nearby then rushed home. The corpse hadn’t been discovered for almost a week, and after a only a few days of nail biting, Howard had then begun to feel rather pleased with himself. He relished the feeling of knowing something that nobody else had even the slightest inkling about. Even when the body was discovered, by a dog walker as they often are, the police had very little to go on. The man wasn’t identified and no witnesses came forward. He had, quite literally, got away with murder.
He looked around at the faces of his colleagues, fear was on most of them - particularly the women. Sheila was nibbling her thumbnail, saying she didn’t want to go out that weekend but it was a close friend's birthday so she would have to.
“Just get a taxi, you’ll be fine.” Tina told her.
“But what if the murderer is a taxi driver?” Sheila said, looking even more afraid now. “I wouldn’t normally be too worried but it is literally happening on our doorstep.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Howard told her, Sheila was one of the few colleagues he actually liked, and he never killed without a good reason, which is how he justified his actions to himself.
Howard wasn’t a particularly religious man but he did believe that there was an afterlife, a heaven and hell, or some sort of equivalent at least. He believed that the way you lived your life on Earth determined where you went next. And because he only killed, ‘the vermin’ as he called them, he believed he was doing a good public service. He was cleansing society, ridding the streets of the villains and making them safe for good people like Sheila, who would never harm a soul.
He had never feared the dead, firmly believing that it was the only the living that would harm you. He had been in the same job as a mortician for over twenty years now, and respectfully bid farewell to hundreds of people. Being the last person to see someone before they were laid to rest gave him a small sense of pride. Once he began killing, this was greatly outdone by being the last person that someone else saw before they died. The look of pure terror in their eyes as the realisation of what he was about to do sank in was truly priceless. He always told them why, they always knew the reason they were being killed was because he had found them out. Some tried to deny their crimes, others begged to be handed to the police, but nothing they could say would ever starve him of the satisfaction of the kill. He worked too hard on his investigations to simply hand the glory over to the police.
Life would have been easier for Howard if he had been accepted into the police force himself, but his dyslexia squashed that boyhood-dream. In a sense, he did work with them - or perhaps opposite. He thoroughly enjoyed staying one step ahead of the police investigations and outsmarting them. Regardless of who found the villain first, the outcome was the same and the vermin were taken care of.
“Come on then gang, time to get back to work.” The supervisor told them.
Howard washed his mug and returned to the mortuary, the hospital would soon be delivering more bodies, they had been already been told that one of them was that of a child.
Seeing dead children was the worst part of the job. He had heard about this little girl on the news. She had suffered a vicious attack after being kidnapped and hadn’t been discovered for over two weeks. Following several weeks of investigations, her body had only just been released for burial.
Howard looked at her tiny bashed up frame and felt sick to the core.
“I’ll find who did this to you,” he whispered to her. “I promise.”
