How the Dead Live (Factory 3) (2 page)

‘The most extraordinary feature that psychopaths present,’ the Home Office lecturer was saying, ‘is the painstaking effort they make to copy normal people.’ He looked happily at us. ‘They make a close study of us – you realize that.’

We shuffled our feet.

‘Yet the patient is unremittingly aware of his emptiness, and sees existence as an emptiness around him. He takes a scientific view of infinity. He continues to do so until he cracks; there’s no slack in insanity at all. This enables us to define the patient’s state. He insists on an explanation for living, and kills because he can’t find one.’ Absently he picked up his glass of water, gazed into it, and took a sip.

‘The rest of us ride the wave of life as a swimmer does, but the psychopath can’t do that. He’s obliged to think everything out first, because he can’t feel. He understands, from his close intellectual study of others, that he ought to be able to feel, but he doesn’t know what feeling or emotion means. He can’t
feel
feeling, he can only think, and this makes him clumsy compared to the general tide of life – to think you are swimming is not the same as to do it.

‘He is usually highly intelligent in a formal sense and because of his emotional inferiority is violently competitive.’

Nobody in the room said anything and the lecturer pleaded: ‘I’m trying to condense five to seven years’ study and experience into an hour and a half. Do ask questions.’ When there were no questions he said: ‘The psychopath cannot afford to accept defeat; his superiority, expressed in the number of deaths he has caused, is his one defence against the void inside, and therefore outside himself. The competitive effort that the sick individual makes is his
sickness. Simultaneously, though, it’s a despairing cry to be rescued from it. Therefore a killer will knife or save, protect or murder, apparently on a whim – but of course there is no such thing as a whim for anyone in his condition, only a trigger. Without being metaphysical – not the fashion in this country – he kills in the role of god or devil, driven by impulses that he can neither understand nor control. That is why his judgments are far more easily and swiftly arrived at than ours; the emotion must come out somewhere, explode sometime, usually in a fugue. The results are spectacular.’

A detective-sergeant behind me muttered to his neighbour: ‘Yes, and I wonder when the old geezer last found himself alone with one.’

I turned round and looked at the rows of sullen faces pointed upwards at the lecturer’s dais.

‘An absurd condition,’ said the lecturer, ’can only yield absurd results. Let’s consider the Nilsen case. He boasts of having murdered fifteen young men, cutting them up, forcing pieces of them down the lavatory in his flat, or else burning and burying them in the waste ground behind the building. He’s not concerned at having been caught. On the contrary, in his mind it was necessary for him to be caught and tried, so that he could explain to the nation from the dock how clever he had been. There was also the hunting instinct, because he had had sex with them all first. But then love means death to the psychopath. A whimsical touch, he had access to these penniless young men looking for work through his job with the DHSS. Recently, in jail, he was set upon and systematically beaten up by his fellow prisoners – but his nagging complaint to the authorities was not that he had had his face cut open, but that blood had got over his jeans that he had just washed and dried in time to go in punctually to tea.

‘I’m afraid that even those of us who have never committed murder are nevertheless guilty of it because we enjoy death at second hand, just as we enjoy watching a thriller on television.
After all, what’s the use of a newspaper to the general public if there’s not a single good murder in it? Of course,’ said the lecturer, ‘it must never happen to any of us.’

I knew what he meant all right. He was a pompous bore who couldn’t hold a gun straight or run up a flight of stairs with an armed lunatic waiting for him at the top, but he had done some thinking.

‘Or take Paolacci,’ said the lecturer. ‘A serious man, Fred always was serious, sharp to work at Ford’s; he’s now developed religious ideas and sits in his cell reading the Bible all day. Only a mediocre intelligence for a psychopath, though; I know, I’ve examined him. A good-looking man, he couldn’t abandon women because they fancied him. Nor could he stand the sight of them – he’s a homosexual. But he didn’t see how he could tell his workmates that; like all psychopaths, the greatest terror he could imagine was ridicule. This condition led to three female deaths, his wife, his mistress and his daughter aged ten; he ripped them up and ejaculated in their entrails, a psychotic gesture of despair which he was unable to explain then or since.’

I sat up when Paolacci was mentioned, because it was I who had made the arrest. He had told me, after his confession, that he was much more frightened of what his mates would think than he was of killing.

Lord Longford was having a patient and unctuous time with Fred, and might get him paroled some day so that he could start up all over again.

Who has the least humour or common sense, a killer or a prison visitor? It’s such a close race that I’ve never been able to decide on the loser.

‘The psychopath,’ said the lecturer, ‘is someone who has been murdered in his feeling, or still-born, only he’s not died. That’s why his major problem is continuing to live. He is on a precipice, and determined that everyone should join him there so that the entire human race can fall with him. He has no sense of home, no sense of love. With the psychopath the death of the other affords him the
same satisfaction that our possession of a living person would do.’ I remembered my own murdering wife.

‘Murder gives the patient both relief and satisfaction; he avoids both shame and guilt through his conviction that he is either God or Satan; killing is his own upside-down version of being in love. His hatred, where love should be, also accounts for his contempt; the patient cannot understand, cannot conceive, why people should be sad about the dead. He takes it as a weakness to be incapable of taking human life; his own tendency is to boast, even moralize over his victims, and why not? since the difference between good and evil is invisible to him.’

The forty-odd detectives that were his audience looked at each other and one of them said: ‘I’d make it fucking plain to the cunt over at the Factory.’

The lecturer coughed over the interruption and told us what we all knew the hard way: ‘You can tell these people’s illness, even when they’re not on trigger—’

(‘It’s not an illness,’ said the same detective half aloud, ‘these people are straight maniacs even if they’re sober; the treatment for any kind of nut is a boot to crack it with, it’s him or you.’)

‘Kindly don’t anticipate me,’ said the lecturer. ‘When he is not on trigger, as I was saying, his condition becomes apparent through little manias which normal people find irritating in the extreme – for instance, his neatness and precision in banal matters. The way he arranges his pyjamas under his pillow. The sexual act to be performed just so. A glass to be washed twice at the sink, never once. The painstaking cleaning of a knife, the washing of underwear in a classically obsessive manner, silence in the presence of others and apartness, or else pedantic speeches that have no bearing on other conversation.’ He stopped. ‘Now this is the moment to put questions,’ he said, ‘do please ask some.’ Again no one did, and it was plain to me that the lecturer couldn’t understand why. Yet the answer was simple. We were all brooding on our own experience in this domain; we had plenty of it.

‘Very well,’ said the lecturer, gazing at us through his bifocals,
‘we’ve already seen on film earlier in this course how inadvisable it is to disturb the patient in his manic routines; this provokes stupefying outbursts which can be alarming even to the physician in charge.’

Never mind the victim, I thought.

‘Yet leave the psychopath to run his own course,’ said the lecturer, ‘and he can be most difficult to spot.’

I felt like saying that if he were easier to spot there would be less need either for us or for his lecture, but I managed to restrain myself. All the same I reflected on what I and everyone else in this lecture hall had undergone. (‘Now it’s all right, son, just put the knife down now, that’s right, give it to me, that’s it, take it easy, yes, it’s all right, you’ve topped her and I know you’re sorry, are you ready with that straitjacket, George? That’s it, just come on downstairs, why don’t you take my arm, we’re here to help you’ – knowing that if for no reason it went the other way …)

The lecturer echoed my thinking: ‘The psychopath generally kills anyone who has seen him as he is.’

‘We’d almost do better not to spot him then, wouldn’t we?’ I said. ‘Then we’d all live to draw our pensions.’ I was fed up with him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the lecturer. ‘I’m afraid I don’t get the reference.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ muttered the detective who had spoken before. I had placed him now; he worked in Camberwell, his name was Stevenson.

‘I’ll put it plainer,’ I said. ‘All you do is diagnose these people. We have to go in and nick them.’

‘I wonder if I could take your name?’ said the lecturer.

‘Certainly,’ I said, ‘if you feel you could replace me. And you’d feel the nip in your wages even if you could, which I doubt.’

He gave me a grey look, the colour of the sea when the sun leaves it. ‘You’re a most insolent man,’ he said.

‘I’m not insolent,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got scrap-metal in me. Just cut the guff and try to be realistic.’

The lecturer was a visiting professor in psychiatry and about my own age. He dealt in his specialized way with every top security prison and hospital in the country. I couldn’t stand the patronizing bastard, and I knew I wasn’t the only one in the room. He constantly gave evidence at murder trials as to the prisoner’s state but, unlike me, never seemed to find anything wrong with the system nor bother about the victim, only the killer. He had been called into more courtrooms than he could probably count, and it brought him a good income; evil apparently didn’t mark him at all. These lectures, of which this one was mercifully the last, was the anticlimax of a refresher course occasionally ordained by the Home Office for long-service detectives of whom I, as a sergeant at A14, was far and away the most junior in rank – in fact, I couldn’t think why I had ever been included in it.

The lecturer was scooping up his notes. ‘Those of you,’ he proclaimed modestly without looking anywhere near me or Stevenson, ‘who want to know more on this subject can do no better than read my paper which appeared last August as a thickish volume, entitled
Psychopaths and the World They Live In.
’

‘What about the world we live in?’ said Stevenson.

The lecturer immediately glanced at his gold watch and said: ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a lunch.’

‘I reckon he’s afraid of no such thing,’ I said, and we all went downstairs after him out into the street and had the pleasure of watching him being whirled away in a Mercedes whose chauffeur looked as if he had been hanging about for a long time.

I had to have lunch too, so I went to the Clipper pub in Little Titchfield Street where I knew a few people, mostly waiters, cab- and lorry-drivers; there I was free to sit daydreaming like any man, eating my banger, scooping up my peas with a knife and drinking beer.

Only my daydreams weren’t pleasant. I wasn’t thinking of a naked woman with a big bum and no brains; nor of winning the pools or getting tickets for Saturday’s match. I was back at my Earlsfield flat the night before last, watching television. On it I had watched the funeral of a fellow officer; he had been killed in the dark and in the back. He hadn’t been putting wheel-clamps on anyone, but had been called out to help other officers save a life in a drunken shooting matter in a flat. He had cornered this artist, but then the triggers had been pulled and it had gone the other way for Ken.

And so I bad-dreamed while I ate; he had joined the others. I’d already seen enough of them – Macintosh, Foden, Frank Ballard paralysed; now this boy Ken Hales was dead.

The funeral was stiff with uniforms and held in the church of the Essex village, Sudbury not far, where Hales had grown up. What made the experience all the stranger for me was that I recognized so many of the faces in the congregation from times long before I ever joined Unexplained Deaths. My word, some of them looked grand now – there were chief inspectors, superintendents, even a commander among those who bore the coffin, and most of them were my junior in age. In the church everyone was motionless throughout the service, his cap on the pew in front of him while the priest intoned, Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of
our dear brother Kenneth here departed, and later, when they were round the raw clods of earth at the graveside: Earth to earth … ashes … dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection … Christ … who shall change our vile body unto his glorious body, according to his mighty working.

But I could only remember the dead man as a promising three-quarter in police rugby matches – big, strong, young, a man you never would have thought could go down, a fair man too, a good detective and no brute. An item on the news – a risky career wound up, a widow in black with three kids huddled round her white-faced.

I’ve known hard villains all right – a tiny handful of them are fun to be with, adventurers more; I don’t mean the morons, cowards and assassins. I remember one of them saying to me a week before he was shot down in Whitechapel while he was out on bail: I don’t see it matters a fuck whether you live thirty years or seventy, I’ve pulled a million’s worth of strokes and spent the lot on myself, women and clubs, and I regret nothing, darling. I said you know there are people after you, and he said yes and I know who they are too, and I don’t give a monkey’s. I’ll be thirty-six tomorrow, so why don’t we split a bottle? Two, I said, and ride hard, keep riding, the way you thieve you take real risks and you’re no killer, nor are you a grass.