To Johnny, murder had become almost routine.

An unemotional moment, as common as withdrawing cash, only with a simple transfer between accounts,

sullied by that tiresome annoyance.

People.

I disposed of Dr. Henderson in the storeroom at Leopold Road by shooting him in the head,

and I put him in a tank of acid.

With the doctor dead, the asset should rightfully be his, but in his way was a wife.

Rosalie Henderson was a feisty angry neurotic,

doped upon sleeping pills, drowsy with drink, and bed-bound in a Brighton hotel,

who Johnny, a man her own brother had warned her against,

would have to lure out on the flimsy excuse that her

now dead husband, who she'd threatened to divorce, was sick.

Driven at night, in a strange car, to an isolated yard, this paranoid lady, with a lifelong

fear of the dark, would be led inside an odd little shed, illuminated by a single bulb, only to find no archie.

Instead, she would see three acid bottles, two steel drums, one empty, one full, a cracked monocle, a spatter of blood, a rubber apron, a set of

gauntlets, and in Johnny's hand her dead husband's revolver.

I went back to Brighton and brought up Mrs. Henderson on the pretext that her husband was ill.

I shot her in the storeroom and put her in another tank and disposed of her

with acid. But was it really that simple? Well yes, it was. In his diary, Johnny Mark the moment.

A is for Archie, R is for Rose.

I didn't deal with her until just before midnight.'

And yet, so trivial were their deaths, had it not been for that note, he'd have forgotten.

...