The Rain Killer Read Online Free

and when he needs them.’
    ‘Maybe he pre-selects his victims,’ Townsend suggested. ‘DI Ramsay seems to think he could be.’
    ‘Possibly,’ Sean partially agreed, ‘but people in their line of work are unreliable. Just because they’re there one week doesn’t mean they’ll be there the next. And don’t forget he needs the right weather. He needs the rain.’
    ‘So you think he cruises for victims rather than pre-selects?’
    ‘When the need to take another overwhelms him he waits for the rain,’ Sean explained, never looking away from the photographs, ‘then he goes searching – searching for the perfect victim. If he can’t find exactly what he’s looking for he goes home. If it stops raining he goes home. He has control, but it still means he spends a lot of time cruising, which means he’s driving around the streets a lot – and always in the rain. He’s giving us a chance to find him and stop him, and find him and stop him we have to, because this one won’t give it up unless we make him.’
    ‘I know he won’t,’ Townsend agreed, ‘they never do, but why? Why can’t he stop?’
    ‘Because whatever it is he’s trying to satisfy can never be satisfied,’ Sean explained. ‘The more he feeds the beast, the hungrier it becomes.’
    ***
    His entire body burnt with pain as he forced himself to complete yet another set of press-ups – the smoke from the dozens of candles and joss-sticks swirling around his body as he pumped his arms over and over again, raising his body from the floor until finally, drained of oxygen, the fibres of his muscles could lift his weight no more and he collapsed on the ornate rug that covered the centre of the living room in his small rented flat.
    Exhausted as he was, he still managed to control his breathing – not gulping for air, but breathing in slowly and deeply, everything under control – just as he’d trained himself to do over years and years of practice.
The mind must always control the body
. After less than a minute he was able to spring into a standing position and walk slowly to a large mirror dominating one entire wall. He glanced at the television that quietly played a sadistic pornographic film, but his interest in it was passing. It was his own reflection that he longed to see. His toned body glimmered with sweat – every sinew defined and visible – but it was the beauty of the colourful creature that wrapped itself around him that transfixed him. The huge head of a mighty serpent, mouth gaping with fangs bared, covered his chest and the thick scaly body trailed over his shoulder and wound down his back before coiling back around his lower torso and then spiraling around his right leg – the tip of the great beast’s tail resting on his foot.
    As he flexed his muscles the snake seemed to come alive – moving and writhing, man and beast becoming one. But the serpent needed feeding – needed to be fed the bodies and souls of the whores that plagued the streets of London, just as they had the squalid alleys of where he was raised
as a child in a house made of other people’s rubbish. Where he and his mother shared a cockroach-infested cooking area with too many other families of the ghetto. Where there were no sanitation facilities or sewage disposal other than the filthy water that flowed in the streets outside. Where he watched his mother lie with strangers from the nearby city to make enough money to keep them both alive. His mother who beat him when he cried or complained to make him strong enough to survive. His mother who taught him to steal and fight. And how well she taught him as he rose to become one of the most feared faces in the ghetto – a reputation that soon attracted the attention of the local crime boss, who took him from the ghetto and put his particular talents to his own use. But amongst the professional
beatings and killings he fed his own desires. He fed the beast that became stronger and stronger until he as a man no