Bad Apple

Read the Opening

A man is easiest to kill in his home, where he has already decided he is safe.

The wall clock chimes on the hour, signalling I have been hiding inside Edmund Vane’s house for almost six hours now. I came in through the garden door before the sun set, while his cleaner was vacuuming the floor above me, and I have spent the evening learning the landscape of his rooms. Which radiator ticks? Which floorboard outside the study creaks? How long the halls stay dark after the motion light flicks off? A house tells you everything if you are patient, and patience is the only virtue my father ever taught me that I’m glad to own. The rest of what he gave, I’d hand back if there were anyone left to take it.

Vane comes home at ten, the alarm disarming with four sullen notes. His sigh echoes through the empty house as he moves to the study to pour a glass of whiskey. It’s all very ordinary for a life that has perhaps a minute left to run as the office chair grunts under his weight.

Vane stole from people who do not forgive, and that is the whole of his crime and sentence. I am not here to judge him; that’s above my station. I am merely the full stop at the end of a sentence other men have written. I do not hate him either—I never hated any of them. That would require me to imagine them as people, and I learned a long time ago not to do that. I never wonder what they call their wives or whether their knees ache in the cold. You cannot grieve a problem, and people are just problems to solve.

My shoes are silent on the Persian rug as I cross the hall. He never hears me as I sink the needle into his clammy skin. I hold him as the life drains from him, almost gently, the way you’d hold a dog to be put down. Fifteen seconds, and no more. Panic leaves marks, and then people ask questions. A man who died peacefully in his office chair leaves none.

When it is done, I straighten his glass and turn off the lamp. I’m about to leave when a photograph on his desk catches my attention. A girl, six or seven, on his shoulders at some Spanish beach, both laughing at whoever held the camera.

Father would call looking a weakness, and he’s right. He is almost always right.

I leave the way I came. Behind me, I leave a death that asks no questions. A heart of fifty-eight years that simply stopped in a man who worked too hard, drank too much, and never quite got over his ex-wife. By morning, there will be a sad, unremarkable story, and then no story at all.