Shooting in the Dark

from me and walked out of the bedroom. I waited but she did not return.
    Eventually I got myself out of bed and hobbled through to the kitchen, where she was sitting on the high chair. ‘I’m sorry, Miriam.’
    She made me wait a full minute before she opened her arms and took my head against her scrawny breasts.
    ‘I didn’t want to hurt you,’ I said.
    ‘Who was she?’
    I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Nobody. Someone I met in a bar.’
    Miriam knows how to be silent. She understands the power it gives her. When I looked up there was not a hint of amusement or forgiveness in her face. Her jaw and bottom lip were, if anything, pushed even further forward than usual. Her eyes were like the points of black pins when she looked at me.
    ‘I’m really going to make you suffer,’ she said.
    I nodded. I knew she would.
    Miriam has been silent since then. She wants the punishment to fit the crime. She needs time to think. When she’s ready she’ll tell me what she wants to do, and I’ll submit to it. We have a democratic relationship. We are a modern couple.
    In the meantime I nurse my injuries and crouch in that delicious space of doubt and uncertainty created by the silence of my vengeful woman.
     
    I choked the life out of the blind woman.
    I played back the tape and heard her death-rattle. She expired beneath me like a balloon being let down.
    This has been my prayer: Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me. Because the truth of the matter is, I really didn’t want this job. It was not my choice; I was mission-oriented. Later, if it all comes out, if the monsters who run the media get their hands on it, they’ll label me psychotic.
    I really don’t want that to happen. I want truth to happen. I want light to happen. I want justice.
    A crime is a social or political concept. It is nothing more than that. A crime in Pakistan is not necessarily a crime in England. The people who do the ruling want us to believe that crime is more than that. That crime is something defined by the Divine. But it isn’t. It is man-made, and often only a tool that the power brokers use to maintain the status quo.
    I didn’t want to kill again. That is what my prayer was about. But my God did not take the cup away. It was mine to drink.
    Another thing. They’ll bring into dispute the level of my intelligence, maybe suggest that I am sexually inhibited. They’ll question my early life, how I was disciplined as a child, the order of my birth. The psychologists, my friends and colleagues, will gather around like vultures.
    I find this prospect disturbing. Psychology, for many of them, is a guessing game. What they will never understand is that I am of good intelligence, a skilled professional. I am not a random killer. I watch and I wait. I plan.
    Also, they’ll suggest that I am socially immature, when the contrary is the truth. I do not live alone, Miriam and I are an emotional unit. I am socially competent, from a good home. My father’s work was stable, and, had he lived, he would have been recognized as a hero.
    He was a hero.
    They don’t understand. That is the first point. The second is that they don’t want to understand these things. They, the press, the media, are mere propagandists for the ruling elite. They uphold the laws of the land, and their job is to undermine anything that threatens those laws. I carry a divine truth within me and therefore I am anathema to them. They will tear me limb from limb.
    Oh, I can hear them already... a failure of empathic bonding and attachment... resulted in the child becoming emotionally detached...
    I want one thing to be quite clear. I was not abused as a child. There was no question of anything like that in my background. My father was a good man who served the community. I will do anything to preserve his memory.
    I don’t mind if they say I’m suffering from some kind of mental illness. I know why they have to say that. Because if they say I’m sane, and they believe that they are sane also, then there is something that they have to share with me. In some respects, they reason, we are alike, and if we are alike, then they might also be led to take life.
    But the mental illness theory doesn’t hold water. Why do they say that people with mental illnesses commit murder, when everyone knows that people suffering mental illness are much more likely to harm themselves?
    Look at the thing objectively. Frederick and Rosemary West were responsible for the murder and