The Travelling Man by Matt Drabble

to need, and with Granton’s meager crime rate it gave him perfect access and opportunity to study.
    He had studied psychology as part of his underpinning structure, but he hadn’t needed the course to tell him just what drove his passion.
    His mother had been unfortunately typical of her surroundings and upbringing. No matter how far you tried to run, you could never escape your genes. His mother had liked a drink a little too much and liked to boost her flagging self-esteem in all the wrong ways. Tom had never known his father and his mother had never spoken of him. They were a two person self-contained unit but his mother wasn’t opposed to the frequent company of strangers, come the dark lonely hours of a Friday night.
    Tom had never seen the man’s face or even heard his voice. His mother had tucked him into bed on Friday evening before she’d headed out and he had woken up early on Saturday morning to a strange coppery smell in the air and the buzzing of flies.
    The police had come after a neighbor had spotted the then 8 year old Tom wandering aimlessly around on his front lawn looking confused. The investigation had turned up nothing of note at first. The huge cops with their broad chests and large handguns had stomped through the crime scene without care, dismissing his mother as yet another drunken slut who picked up the wrong guy. It was only when the detective had arrived that everything took on a more intellectual approach.
    The young Tom had watched as the methodical man had pulled on a pair of gloves and begun combing the scene for clues. This man was slender and thoughtful and far removed from the large noisy beat cops. It was the detective that had discovered a tiny trace amount of white powder on the kitchen floor. A study of the talc had found it to be common in the use of specific surgical gloves. Within a month, the detective had traced the doctor responsible not only for his mother’s death but that of three other similar women. Tom had been hugely impressed by the carefully constructed thought processes of the officer even at his own tender age and a seed was planted. A seed that said brains would always win out over brawn, and for a boy growing up willowy in a world that worshipped size and strength, it was a promise of a bright future and a calling. 
    ----------
    Ellie Wheeler made sure that Grandma was asleep before she flipped the page over in her sketchbook and set to work on her real project. The front pages were all full of butterflies and unicorns, the usual sort of thing that adults were happy to see a child of 11 drawing. The latter pages were dark and disturbing and she didn’t want her mother or grandma thinking that there was something wrong with her, or at least something other than the Leukemia. She knew that they both worried about her and she couldn’t blame them. She tried to mask her tiredness as much as possible but the aggressive bouts of chemotherapy had been brutal. She may have only been 11 but she understood that these things did not come cheap.
    Her eyes lowered to her work and her hands, as ever, drifted across the pristine white surface of the paper with a mind of their own. Soon the snowy white landscape was filled with dark and twisted images drawn in black charcoal. Her thoughts were clear as she worked; small beads of sweat tickled her forehead as they ran free from her long blonde hair, but she didn’t notice.
    She didn’t know where her images came from but it had only taken one viewing from her mother’s watchful glare for talk of therapists to enter the conversation. Ellie knew that she wasn’t deranged in any way; she just had a dark side in stark contrast to her sunny outward disposition.
       Her eyes closed as her hand raced with increasing energy and voracious appetite. The man’s face began to take on shape, emerging from the page shrouded in darkness with vicious stabbing lines as her gentle hand clenched into a fist around the pencil. Gouging and