Remember Why You Fear Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

bright or cheery. “I’ve not even had a sniff of sex in ages,” she complained. “What if this toyboy in sixty-seven years’ time is the next bit of sex I get? It’s a mistake,” she concluded, with a wisdom that Harry had never expected of her, “to see in the way you die an explanation of how you live. The fact I’m going to die bonking a Brazilian does not mean I’m a great lover. Death is just another bit of stuff that happens.”
    And then, one day, just suddenly, it all stopped.
    “A quiet day today,” the secretary told Harry, when, by noon, no one had knocked at the door. But it was a quiet week as well. At the end of the month, with no patients calling, Harry paid her off. She said she was sorry the job was over. “I felt we were doing some good.” Harry told her he was sorry too.
    But, surprisingly, sorrier still was the cat. The ginger little tabby had been a great favourite with all Harry’s victims, taking their minds off the operations ahead of them. It’d enjoyed parading around the waiting room of a morning, checking out all the newcomers, and allowing itself to be stroked and petted and made a fuss of. Now the cat would stare out of the window, eyeing anyone who walked up the street—and visibly sagging with disappointment when the passer-by wouldn’t stop at the house. The cat’s fur grew matted and coarse, it no longer washed itself. It had no interest in eating, it had no interest in anything. It was beginning to pine away.
    Harry could see his cat was dying. And it seemed to him an extraordinary piece of cruelty that he should never know exactly when the cat was to die, when its suffering was to stop. The cat would lie, listless, looking at him with pleading eyes. Harry recognized the look; it was the same expression he’d seen in Jeffrey White’s when he’d bled to death in the kitchen all those months ago.
    Harry cradled the cat in his arms, and stroked its fur. He’d never liked the cat, and the cat had never much liked him—but it purred for Harry now, and Harry was touched. The cat heaved with a huge sigh that seemed to echo down its thinning body, and then gave the gentlest of mews. And Harry knew there was no person more humane than him to end the poor cat’s life, and that the cat knew it too, he’d seen the fact of it countless times in this very house. Because Harry was the greatest killer of all, and he
was
special, and that’s why he’d been singled out, that’s why he couldn’t die, why they wouldn’t let him die, he had a job to do. He wrung the cat’s neck so quickly the cat would never have known. And he carried its frail little body up to Mary’s room, and left it with all the other corpses.
    And then he sat down and cried. He hadn’t cried for any of these deaths, he hadn’t found the time. But he cried now, and he cried himself asleep.
    The next morning he started when he heard something at the door. Still dozing in the armchair, he sprang to his feet. Ready to welcome another client, to practise his expertise with gentle care.
    But instead, lying on the doormat, was an off-brown envelope.
    Numbly he picked it up. And opened it. And read it.
    “HENRY PETER CLIFFORD” said the stamp.
    And, underneath, just the one word:
    “Cancer.”
    And that was it. Not even a date. Not even the recognition that there should have been a date. Just this one word, this ordinary death, this trivial death, laughing at him.
    He turned over the card. And, in the same handwriting he’d seen before, in ballpoint pen: “Sorry. We lost this behind the sofa cushion.”
    Harry sighed. He put the card back in the envelope for safe keeping, laid it gently down upon the hall table. He wondered what he should do with the rest of the day, the rest of his life. He couldn’t think of anything.
    So he went upstairs to bed. Drew the curtains. And, lying in the darkness, explored his body for a lump.

GEORGE CLOONEY’S
MOUSTACHE
    I tried writing this on toilet paper but it’s hard