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towels at the sink, I was still uncomfortably sure I had trespassed on the edge of irrevocable death.
    Drummond’s lab coat was soaked with every sort of foul fluid in his suppurating sac of a body. But Waring had hung his on a peg near the door, and died in his hospital greens. Silently I blessed the boy. Then I slipped off his shoes and socks, tried on one of the ugly rubber-soled loafers. It fit like a boat, but I thought if I laced the shoes tightly and stuffed them with paper towels, I could keep them on my feet.
    With much tugging and heaving, I managed to remove his greens. In the pants pocket I found a small purse containing two twenty-pound notes and a few coins, which I kept. Waring’s body in its clean cotton briefs was smooth, pink, hairless but for a fine golden floss on his legs and lower belly. I no longer felt any attraction toward him; he reminded me of nothing so much as a newborn rat.
    It had been the same with my boys now and then. I’d have one freshly laid out and ready for the night, but instead of diving into his passive body, I would abruptly lose interest in him. This happened most often with boys who had died without any struggle at all.
    Waring’s greens were much too large, of course, and quite bloody. But beneath the clean lab coat I thought this might go unnoticed. I was in a hospital, after all. I saw his gold-rimmed spectacles on the floor, smeared with bloody fingerprints butundamaged. I wiped them and put them on, expecting the room to become a watery migraine blur. But at once my vision seemed sharper, the edges of things more clear. Imagine: this strapping lad’s astonished china-blue orbs were defective in just the same way as mine!
    Unsurprisingly, there was no proper mirror in the room. Who wants to examine his own face after slicing open chests and skulls all day? But some vain junior doctor (I suspected) had hung a small round glass on a nail above the sink. I studied my reflection, decided that the spectacles changed the look of my face a great deal, but I could still do better. Though prisoners’ hair is supposed to be kept quite short, I hadn’t seen a barber in weeks. My dark mane grew halfway down the back of my neck and hung messily over my forehead.
    I found a pair of surgical shears in the mess and began hacking away. I left the back long, but chopped several inches off the front and sides until my coarse hair stood up spikily. This seemed a plausibly trendy hairdo for an aging pathologist. I’d seen a character on TV sporting the very same style last time I’d been allowed into the lounge.
    I pulled the scalpel out of Waring’s throat and used surgical tape to bind it to the inside of my calf, where it would be easy to get at later. I was humming, pleased with my new look. With the spectacles and the haircut I thought I looked five years younger, and very much unlike England’s most notorious killer since Jack stalked whores in Whitechapel.
    Murderers are blessed with adaptive faces. We often appear bland and dull; no one ever passed the Ripper in the street and thought,
That chap looks as if he ate a girl’s kidney last night.
Years before my arrest I had seen several newspaper photos of an American killer of young women, all taken within a few months of one another. Without his name beneath them, you would not have recognized any two photos as the same man. He seemed able to alter the lines in his face, the shape of his eyes, his very bone structure. I could do none of this—at least I didn’t think so—but I’d done all right with what I had.
    When I pulled Waring’s lab coat off its peg, two things fell out of the pocket. One was a well-thumbed paperback called
America’s Favourite Cannibal: The Ed Gein Story.
The other was a set of car keys.
    I picked up the keys and ran my thumb over the buttery leather tab stamped
Jaguar.
Keys had been forbidden objects for so long that they felt dangerous in my