Extract From Notebook 4
I was waiting in the shadows when you came home tonight, Nell. It was dark, so I guessed you’d be feeling uneasy.
I don’t know how you manage to persuade taxi drivers to drop you at the door but they always do, even if it means having to back the cab down or do a twelve-point turn to be able to drive back up the road.
They never leave until you’ve turned on the light in the hall and have waved to them from the sitting-room window.
I’m guessing you ask for them to wait until you’re safe inside before driving off.
Safe. The word makes me smile. If you knew how unsafe you are, despite your bolted door and your security-locked windows, you’d probably curl into a ball and give up.
I could kill you now if I wanted. But it amuses me to play a little more with you, up the fear factor, so that when it happens you’ll be glad that the time has come.
Because, in the same way that anticipation is often greater than the event, the fear of being murdered is often worse than its actual deliverance.
As always, you didn’t just turn the light on in the hall and the sitting room, you turned on each and every light until the house was ablaze.
That made me laugh, because I could have cut the electricity and gotten inside your house before you’d had time to reach for a flashlight, and I’d have been there, waiting for you in the dark.
Because that’s how it will happen when I kill you.