Osiris broke the whore’s neck and dumped her body in a ditch just five miles down the M74 from where Selina had been killed at Strathclyde Park.
Every newspaper and TV channel had been plastered with details of her death. Osiris decided it was time to turn the country’s morbid fascination with murder into blind panic now that a killer was on the loose.
That’s why he had carried out a copycat killing. The prostitute he’d picked up in Glasgow’s notorious Blythswood Square had clearly worked the streets for years and knew how to handle a violent punter, but no one she’d ever encountered had shown the same strength and ferocity as Osiris, who had broken her jaw with one punch and knocked her out with another, showing remarkable dexterity within the confines of the car.
Osiris hated coppers, and this would act as a distraction for what he had in mind. He knew time was short. Sooner or later the cops were going to get lucky and he wouldn’t be able to bluff and bluster his way out of it. That simply could not be allowed to happen. Osiris had to be free to carry out his work, which, in his warped mind, he often considered charitable. Life couldn’t have been so great for the whore he’d just dumped. As far as he was concerned it was a mercy killing. He was ridding the earth of another ‘disease-spreading parasite’ – no bad thing. But what he had planned next would be highly risky. He needed to concentrate. He needed his CDs.
Osiris pressed play on his car stereo and let the soothing words wash over him. ‘People ask me, “How did you get to the top?” Then “How much do you earn?” usually follows.’ Much laughter from the studio audience followed. The American voice continued. ‘But only a loser asks questions like that. There is no quick fix or secret to get to the top. I had firm beliefs that what I was doing was right and different from all the rest. And I stuck to my guns.’ Americans so loved speaking in clichés, but that bit still made Osiris smile. He too knew that what he was doing was right and different from the rest. The self-help guru added, ‘As for how much I earned last year – it was two hundred million dollars when I floated my company, thank you very much.’ That got whoops and rapturous applause from the studio crowd.
But Osiris cared little for cash. Killing was his currency.