First Born(67)

The area is heaving with skeletons and ghosts and men in hockey masks. There’s a dog dressed up like a demon and two babies in a walker, each one with a clown mask.

Dinner is Shake Shack and it is delicious. The queue is long and the restaurant is packed. When I’m done with my cheeseburger and fries and frozen custard I discreetly deposit my rubber gloves with my food carton in the garbage bins. This place, tonight, this many people – they’ll fill a hundred black bags or more. There won’t be any DNA in the dumpster bag because I used gloves at all times to handle the costume. Gloves to remove it from its packet, and gloves to put it on. There won’t be any of my sweat on the costume because, although I didn’t wear any underarm anti-perspirant – a measure to mitigate sweat from elsewhere – I did have extra-absorbent night-time sanitary towels taped under each armpit. That minimised any sweating from my forehead or neck, and made sure it was collected in the towels. I’m not a sweaty person anyway, far from it, but you need to take extra precautions. Before conducting a covert mission it’s always prudent to scrub down. So that’s what I did. I scrubbed down, scraping my skin, cleaning my nails thoroughly, clipping them short, violently brushing my hair, scouring my eyebrows and lashes. Those measures, combined with the sanitary towels, hazmat suit, mask, hat, wig, gloves and back-up liquid Band-Aid fingertips, should ensure there isn’t any trace of my DNA in that hotel room. And if there is, well, then I have the argument that maybe KT slept with him there on a previous occasion. Can you imagine how many DNA samples are present in one Manhattan hotel room? I feel almost sick just thinking about it.

I want to walk home because I’m exhausted. The adrenaline’s burnt away, leaving me tired and chilled.

I want to lock myself in my room and run a deep bath.

Instead I find a late-night electrical store near Madame Tussaud’s. There are a few dozen people checking out tablets and phones and TVs. Text message from Martinez apologising for no Crimestoppers coverage of KT’s case. Says a kid’s missing and that took priority. I reply OK, thanks, and then I use my back to shield one of the wifi-connected display iPads, so the camera can’t pick up the screen image. My Scream mask is still in place.

I load YouTube.

I search for my first ever video to see how it’s doing.





Chapter 39


I accidentally have 3.2 thousand subscribers.

The video has been viewed almost seven hundred thousand times in fifteen hours.

It has already been quoted, reviewed, critiqued, ripped apart and lauded by seven well-known YouTubers, each with over a hundred thousand subscribers. The #BagbyTroll hashtag has gone viral. The anonymous Gmail linked to my anonymous YouTube account has over three hundred messages in the inbox.

No response yet from Shawn Bagby. How will he recover from this? Will he ever recover? That’s the thing about stars created by social media. The fans giveth, and the fans surely do taketh away. And there’s not a single thing he can do about it.

I walk home, tired, treading over the obliterated remains of a jack-o’-lantern left out on 57th Street. The crowds have thinned and the morning light is starting to reveal itself.

Bath.

Bed.



I wake at eleven and order room service. Canadian bacon, free-range eggs, La Colombe coffee, orange juice with ice. It’s nice that I can trust the ice. It’s one less thing to worry about.

The wrongs, I realise, in the most part have now been righted.

I take a bite of crispy bacon and dip it into an egg until the yolk bursts. It’s top quality. All the food here is top quality. It’s not going to be easy adapting back to powdered soups and microwave meals. But I’ll manage. There will be a period of post-Ritz adjustment and then I’ll be fine. The forty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars I’m still in possession of should cushion the blow.

Nothing relevant on the news channels.

Maybe the story will break after I’ve left, just as it did last time. There is no better alibi than being halfway across the world. Of course, my alibi is weaker this time as I’m known to have been in Manhattan recently. It’s not as perfect. But I have enough layers of subterfuge to hide what I did. I have layers within the layers. I was careful.

It was easier before because I wasn’t in the system. When the police checked where I was on KT’s death day, they would most probably, using their contacts and data, have seen that I’d never applied for, nor been issued, an ESTA visa waiver. They had no record of my fingerprints as I’d never travelled through US customs or immigration channels. They might, using their contacts in Europe, have ascertained that my passport had never once been used to cross an international border. I was one of many people who never leave their home country. I was in the UK on the day KT died. I didn’t fly to New York privately then fly back to London then fly on a commercial airline back to New York. Nobody would do a thing like that.

The world outside is preparing itself for the New York marathon. There are signs up all around New York explaining which roads will be closed and at what times. There are colour-coded routes for élite runners and standard runners. I’ve decided to fly back the day after the marathon. Part of me wanted to leave earlier, today, to simplify things, to mitigate risk, but the view from my suite window is too scintillating to resist. I’ll do what KT would have done. I’ll live life. The telescope on my window ledge, combined with minibar and room service, means I have the best view of the twenty-six-mile-mark finishing line in all of New York. That’s just too good a chance to give up.