Page 6 of Watching You

The Watcher

Sitting in the car he’d hired using a fake driving licence ordered off the internet, he watched the entrance to the doctors’ car park at St Columba hospital.

He couldn’t get distracted or look away.

Gone were the days when cars had to pull up at the barrier.

The new hospital was all mod cons. Number plate recognition meant that the woman he was there to see would breeze straight through into the multi-storey then enter the hospital from an internal corridor he couldn’t access.

A couple of years ago, things were simpler.

Now everywhere you looked it was two-factor verification for social media and emails, thumbprint access to laptops and facial recognition security systems. Technology was sucking all the fun out of stalking.

His target drove a Tesla. It was such a quiet car that he’d been inspired to hire only electric cars himself whenever possible.

You could, he’d found, follow someone at no more than a few metres behind, and as long as they had their mind on other things, they really didn’t notice you until they happened to turn around.

There she was now, driving slowly, presumably out of respect for the elderly attending their endless attempts to prolong their useless lives, mindful of the hard-of-hearing or the blind, or whoever else the hospital klaxon-called to its tax-funded doors.

He slipped a little lower in his seat, in spite of the baseball cap on his head and the fact that he’d recently shaved his hair and learned how to use make-up to disguise his face.

He’d been able to sit at the table next to her in the hospital café just a week earlier when she’d been chatting with a man he’d quickly realised was a police officer.

In the circumstances, that wasn’t just bold, it was outrageous.

He hadn’t liked how friendly they were getting.

It had been hard to hear much of the conversation with other people clattering cups and shouting sandwich orders across him, but Dr Waterfall had appeared to be flirting by the end, and the policeman was practically panting at her. He didn’t like it. Not one bit.

A police officer involved in Beth’s life would make it infinitely more difficult for him to get near her, and proximity was everything.

Being familiar with her routine, her preferences, her pleasures and irritants was useful for making plans, because sooner or later he was going to have to really do something about her, but also the act of spying on her, passing her unnoticed in a corridor or stealing a tiny trinket from her handbag in the supermarket helped with his rage.

Breaking into her house and climbing between her cool, cotton sheets was even better.

Rage, he knew now, was so much more than just anger.

True rage was cold at its centre. It was a complex structure that resembled Escher’s Relativity to a much greater degree than Dante’s Inferno .

It was impossible to climb out of because its gravitational pull was irresistible.

He had to get rid of that fury somewhere, and he’d found the perfect escape.

But also, he had to admit that he sort of liked the hospital. The people he saw there were weak, and that made him feel strong. Other people’s losses made him feel more human. Best of all, it was too busy for him to think.

His daily headache flared, and he winced.

He was used to the pain but not the wave of nausea that came with it.

The painkillers he took only made his stomach worse, but without them the pain in his head would leave him bedridden and unable to look at a screen, and he had to be able to trade.

Stocks and shares purchased from a life insurance policy payout on his mother – low risk, steady return – made his life possible.

The carer’s allowance he got for his father wouldn’t even cover the bills.

But he had no office, no boss, no nine to five.

His time was pretty much his own, provided he watched the markets and adjusted his portfolio accordingly.

Speaking of his father, he ought to get back to him, and anyway, Beth had long since gone inside.

He had things to do at home until the carer’s shift started again.

He’d decided to order another deep-fake video through the darknet.

He’d done it before and been amazed at how easy and cheap it had been.

Later on, when he was free from his domestic obligations, he would drive to the good doctor’s house.

He’d long since figured out how to avoid the security cameras that covered both back and front doors, but that weren’t positioned to fully show the conservatory or the whole garden.

Disengaging the alarm was so much easier than people realised as long as you were willing to commit the time to learning the various systems that were the most popular on the market.

He’d use the skeleton keys he’d trained with.

Move an item, take something or leave something.

Some days, even that was boring for him, and yes, occasionally it felt like a real job. He’d had jobs in the past, before his mother’s death and his father’s stroke. He wasn’t stupid. Maybe he’d never be a surgeon like Dr Beth Waterfall, but he learned fast and he had skills.

More importantly, he had a score to settle. A couple, in fact.

She was spiralling out of control, losing a little more of herself every day, and given that he’d already taken her daughter, there really shouldn’t have been anything left to lose. There would be a reckoning. But not yet.

For now, Beth Waterfall was still his plaything.