Nightshade

88

Colin Stevenson popped two of the tablets in his mouth and washed them down with malt whisky. He was halfway through the bottle, a twenty-year-old single malt that was as smooth a whisky as he’d ever drunk. He sat back in his chair and stared at the computer screen. He’d thought about deleting everything on his hard drive, but from what the Met sergeant had told him there’d be no point. The Met investigators had everything already.

Running was pointless, Stevenson knew that. Even if he could get out of the country there would be nowhere to hide. Wherever he went they’d find him and they’d drag him back and he’d get life. Except that life as a convicted sex offender wouldn’t be any sort of life. And then there were the dead kids, too. McBride was dead, but they’d find some way of linking him to the deaths and then they’d throw away the key.

He picked up another two tablets off the desk, swallowed them and drank more whisky before refilling the glass. There had been just over fifty tablets in the vial and he was sure that they would be more than enough to do the job. They’d been prescribed a year earlier when he’d been having trouble sleeping. His GP had given him all the usual warnings about not taking too many and about the dangers of becoming addicted, but Stevenson was a decorated police inspector in a stressful job, so the doctor had signed several repeat prescriptions without a second thought.

Stevenson couldn’t do prison. Not as a sex offender. It would be hell on earth. He swallowed two more tablets and took another mouthful of whisky. He opened the file of videos and watched a short clip that he’d taken a couple of years earlier. It was a ten-year-old boy. Jason. Stevenson smiled and drank more whisky as he watched the video of himself stroking the boy’s soft skin. There was nothing that came close to the feeling of young flesh. Stevenson shuddered and felt himself growing hard. He switched off the video and opened a Word file. They said that confession was good for the soul, but Stevenson didn’t believe in souls, any more than he believed in God or Heaven. But he did want people to know why he was doing what he was doing. He wasn’t taking the coward’s way out, it was important to Stevenson that people knew that. It took courage to end your life on your own terms. The coward’s way would have been to let justice take its course and to die behind bars a sad, old man. Stevenson wouldn’t die behind bars, nor would he run and hide. He’d do what had to be done and he’d do it without any fuss. He’d had a good run. And hand on heart he had no regrets. In a perfect world he’d have gone to his grave with no one any the wiser, but the world wasn’t perfect. He swallowed two more tablets and gulped down more whisky. He could feel them starting to work but he knew he had enough time to get a few things off his chest. He began to type.