Osiris used to be sloppy when it came to his nocturnal activities, as he now thought of them.
He’d nearly been captured several times, usually because he was blind drunk when he did what he liked to do with prostitutes. Once he was caught literally red-handed – hands dripping in blood from a hooker he’d just strangled to death. The problem was she’d haemorrhaged from both her nose and mouth, sending great spurts of the stuff all over his arms, face and body. Her screams had alerted a neighbour, who broke down the door, and Osiris had only escaped by leaping head first through the first-floor window. He still bore a three-inch scar running along his hairline from the shattered window-pane.
That had been a long time ago in Gateshead, but he’d got markedly better at his nocturnal activities after becoming addicted to self-help tapes. They were marvellous motivators: how to be better at what you do, how to feel good about yourself, how to plan your steps then set about achieving every one of your goals. Most of all they gave him the confidence he had lacked all his life. They had added a degree of professionalism to his work, turning him from a violent, drunken murderer into a cold-blooded killer.
Now he could appreciate and savour every moment of the kill, instead of waking up the next day with a sore head and covered in whores’ blood. Yes, these self-help tapes, and later CDs, had transformed his life, making him examine himself, his very foundations, to truly understand what made him tick.
After a long period of soul searching he had come to the conclusion that nothing made him tick at all. The only thing that ‘juiced him up’ – a phrase from one of the American gurus he listened to avidly – was killing.
As far as Osiris had been concerned he wasn’t crazy. ‘How can I be?’ he’d chortle to himself. ‘I’ve held down jobs all my life, married, raised a family, killed and killed and killed and never been caught. That’s not madness – that’s genius.’
His job allowed him to be a ‘commuting killer’, which meant he was able to put hundreds of miles between himself and his crime. The problem was avoiding detection. There was no doubt the police had his DNA profile in their database. No matter how careful the crime and how much protection he used, from condoms to surgical gloves, advances in forensic technology meant that every contact with a victim left behind a trace – and therefore clues – of some sort.
CCTV was Osiris’s other enemy. They were next to useless for preventing a ‘live crime’ – with an estimated 100,000 cameras in operation around Britain, it would be impossible for their operators to monitor them all – but they were the perfect crime-fighting tool to trace criminals after the event. They also provided evidence for their court trials afterwards.
Osiris was lucky that with the high mileage of his job he was able to change company cars frequently. Osiris would make sure each new car was a different colour, make and model from the last one. ‘I think I’d like a red Mondeo this time,’ was his running joke with Isabel in accounts.
‘What are you like?’ she would say with mock annoyance. ‘Most of the other managers stick with the same models, but not you, Vinnie, always looking to try something different.’
‘Ain’t that the truth,’ he’d say with a wink.
Osiris even impressed himself the way he was able to integrate and communicate with normal members of society, given he had started life as an outsider and felt anything but normal. In times of quiet reflection he would compare himself to an alcoholic. ‘Why do alcoholics drink? Because they love it. That’s me. I kill because I love killing. No more, no less.’
The self-help gurus had helped Osiris find the clarity he craved. In his world he was no longer the outsider, but a god. He was a God of Fertility. He knew this to be true. He had only had sex with his wife a handful of times throughout an unhappy ten-year marriage and she had fallen pregnant almost every time. He was also a God of the Dead – the body count left behind lay testament to that. And he was a God of the Resurrected. His grandparents had tried to terminate his life when he was still inside the womb, but had failed. A crime they later paid for with their lives.
It was the self-help tapes which had made him realise that. They hadn’t even told him anything he didn’t know already, but they had given him the tools to work it all out, or as he called it, the ‘almighty kick up the backside’ needed to achieve his one and only ambition. To be the biggest serial killer in British history.