Murder can be daunting if, like me, you’ve no experience. The Internet is a great help nowadays, an easy way to find a hired hit. It’s efficient and takes you out of the loop. You do your planning and execute through an easy 1-2-3 order process. It’s clean.

You’re obsessed with the small, blond-haired man in the pink shirt. Does he always wear a pink shirt or is it that the image that has got into your mind like a brain-worm? His every move, his every feature is etched into your brain. He was the one who should have taken away your fragility.

You need to get the planning right. Step 1 – select Target from the web menu options. That’s easy. You’re surprised at the extent of the targets list: 20 of them, starting with Husband and ending with Yourself with Boss in the middle. Boss – that’s your target. The small man in the pink shirt.

You’re all in the long meeting room, around an oval oak table. He’s seated at one end, jacket thrown casually over his shoulders, at the ready. You sit opposite him, smile at him, think of how little he knows of what’s going on in your head. He has everything ready: his file of meeting papers neat on his right; the secretary sitting up close on his left. He drums his fingers on the table, looks at his watch and waits for people to arrive. All the time your brain is working on the plan. For him, the hours, the days and nights you shared are long forgotten, as if it they never happened.

Step 2 – select your termination method. Here it gets serious. Shooting is the ‘timeless classic’. The weapon choices are small-calibre handgun, shotgun or high-powered rifle. Stabbing is painful but gives the target time to think about things before their life comes to an unpleasant end. Strangling is suitable for females and small or weak males: has the advantage that it doesn’t involve blood-letting. Spilt blood terrifies you and has done for as long as you remember. Burning has no appeal – not keen on incendiary options at all. You scroll to the NEW option that’s just been added to the menu. It’s MELTING and involves ‘total body immersion in hydrofluoric acid’. The body is totally liquefied and results in the target becoming the subject of a missing person case. Neat.

He has written comments on the papers in front of him. The writing is small, neat, controlled, wormy: Where is the auditor’s cert? Should we not get legal opinion? Is there compliance with the guidelines? Are these conditions standard? You are mesmerised by the small, tight handwriting of the man in the pink shirt; driven to distraction you are. You wait for things to hot up, for his knuckles to go white, for the rage to build, for the finger tapping on the table to quicken, the drumming of small, neat, manicured fingers. The tension builds in your head. You’re thinking of the options – the extermination options. You’re thinking about the ‘classic method’. You want it to be neat and quick.

You first saw a gun up close in a cafe off Barcelona’s Place de Catalonia. That day had started out well but would dip and rise like the waves and curves of the facades of the buildings of the ‘hallucinogenic Gaudi’, Barcelona’s favourite son. His Casa Battlo brimmed with blues, mauves and greens, with images of octopus and star-fish. It reminded you of the house with wobbly windows in the Hansel and Gretel story. That pair knew all about incendiary terminations. Straight lines were not Gaudi’s thing at all. No, the man was into curves and arcs and soaring shapes inspired by his native Tarragona. Poor Antoni met his end when run over by a train in central Barcelona in 1926. Was it accidental? Was he pushed?  When they found him, all he carried was a handful of currants and peanuts in his coat pocket.

What will the small man in the pink shirt have in his pocket when they find him?

You ate in a tapas bar off the Place de Catalonia. You ate fried anchovies, goat’s cheese and salad. You drank a large glass of cava. The bar was packed. You put your bag on the ground close to your feet. You drank too much cava. The crowd jostled and pushed. Then, there was a man beside you showing a police identification card. He held up your bag in his other hand. He gestured towards the door where his colleague pointed a gun at the culprit. The police had pursued him. He was caught in the act. It was the first real gun you saw. It looked elegant. You were glad there was no shooting. You don’t like the look of blood.

Next day you visited Gaudi’s unfinished cathedral, the Sagrada Familia. You were in need of purification. You raised your head to the giant spires that looked like they were licking heaven. It’s said that Gaudi was inspired by the mountain peaks of Montserrat – the holy mountain.  You raised your head to the tangled sculpture masses of Catalonian fruit and plants. You had no thoughts of guns or blood or termination options.

That day you were pure.

Nowadays you are different, fascinated by termination methods. Take the growth of copycat killings – like the two school massacres in Finland. It seems that the two incidents may have been connected; the two killers may have been in contact. They bought their guns in the same city. The locals cannot believe this could happen in their sleepy town. They think it’s a dream. They lay flowers under a Finnish flag flying at half mast. Matti was a happy normal guy – nothing special about him. He was quiet, almost invisible you could say.

But Matti Saari hated the human race. He left notes saying that he hated, that he was motivated by hate. He went on a 90-minute shooting spree. He wore black, dressed in a ski mask. He was a man obsessed – obsessed with guns, obsessed with hate.

He used a .22 calibre Walther automatic pistol. He can be seen firing shots on a posted YouTube video. Alongside the clip he posted a message: Whole life is war and whole life is pain. How could this happen in a sleepy town in western Finland? How could this place harbour such a disturbed mind?

Guns were his hobby, guns and computers and sex and beer. He was a silent young man, his school principal said. He was a young man with two faces.

He telephoned a friend during the shooting. He told him he had just shot ten people. He was calling to say goodbye; he was going to kill himself; he wanted to be cremated. After he shot them he set fire to the classroom. He wanted to burn all the bodies beyond recognition. He hated everything about the human race.

Not you, you don’t hate the human race. You’re not into hatred. You just want one person removed from the face of the earth, the person who could have guaranteed your happiness, made your life whole.