Engleby (46 page)

I knew what Mark had ‘done’ out there, why he was in Longdale, because he told me. It was serious and inexplicable, but not barbaric. I never knew what crime Gerry had committed and it didn’t seem to be important to our friendship. Does that sound pious? Maybe. I admit that I was not above a little frisson when I sat next to a celebrated disemboweller. I’m only human.

People think that men like me can only be released by the Home Secretary. In fact, the power resides with a mental health tribunal, which reviews my case every three years, or every year if I ask it to. The politicians can’t legally overrule the tribunal.

In spring 2001, with the backing of Dr Turner, I applied for a conditional discharge. It was thought that with some support, I could, without endangering others, live a reasonably normal life in what is termed ‘the community’ – i.e. non-community, or world at large.

What windy joy, as Milton might have put it, had I that day conceived, hopeful of my delivery . . .

The judge at the tribunal looked set to give me the green light until at the last minute the Home Office expert witness came up with some particularly compelling and ghoulish evidence in my case, backed by some general statistics about reoffending. The judge, visibly appalled, decided that discretion was the better part . . .

Jennifer Turner had the difficult task of breaking the news to me.

‘They aren’t required to go into the detail behind the decision, Michael.’

‘But we know what the reasons are.’

‘Believe me, I find this as vexing – almost as vexing as you do.’

‘I’m a patient in a hospital who is better but can’t go home because the public wouldn’t like it.’

‘Public opinion may well be a factor. It was a famous case.’

‘I know. I remember.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘it looks as though the Home Office is now arguing that a hospital shall be deemed a prison. Why did we go through all that diminished responsibility nonsense?’

Dr Turner looked as though she might explode. Then she did. ‘Dear God, how do you think it makes me feel?’

I ended up consoling her, like Carlyle with Mill. ‘It’s all right, Jennifer, I know it’s not your fault . . .’

But the whole experience set me back a bit. They put me on a high dose of antidepressants and I gained a lot more weight. For the best part of two years I didn’t really get out of my room. I just sat there watching a small television that Stellings had sent me. Thank God for television, for
Countdown
and the regional news.

Julie came to see me once when I was in prison on remand. She told me how our mother had died of cancer.

We were in the prison visiting room, either side of a table, under the eyes of the warders and a couple of social workers.

‘She said to send you her love, Mike.’

‘Thanks. Was it painful at the end?’

‘Not too bad. She had the drugs. She was in the Sunset Room in the end. In the hospital.’

I nodded. ‘Do you feel all right, Jules? Do you feel lonely?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘It’s just you and me now. Of the old gang. And since they may never let me out, it’s really just you.’

Julie looked down at her hands, which she was clenching on the table.

‘Did Mum know I was pleading guilty?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did she think?’

‘She said she didn’t know you any more. She said that once she felt you were a part of her. When you were a baby and that. That you were her own flesh and blood. Like you know, really, her own flesh, like—’

‘I know what she meant.’

‘But she said she thought that little boy had died, or got lost somewhere on the way.’

I was holding the edge of the table.

‘She said if she was to meet you now she wouldn’t know you.’

I swallowed. ‘I understand. She’s right, of course. She’s right in more ways than she could understand.’

‘I’m sorry, Mike.’

‘You’re not to blame.’

I thought for a bit. ‘Julie, I don’t think you should come and see me any more, wherever they send me. Send me a card on my birthday, that’s all. For the rest of the time, you should put me out of your mind.’

I hoped she wouldn’t remember the card. A kitty in a basket every April from here to the crack of doom. God.

She was biting her lip, still looking down.

I smiled. ‘Got a boyfriend, Jules?’

‘Yup.’

‘Marry him. Be happy. Have babies.’

She kept nodding, dumbly.

‘You’ll be all right, Julie.’

‘Oh, Mike.’

After I’d got over the disappointment of not being released, I felt that I’d gained a new perspective on my life and its events. Having not written a word in the 1990s, I began to pick up my pen again and jot down the odd thought. I found that I had a certain clarity.

Baynes, for instance. I had clear recall and a consistent point of view on all that. I didn’t plan to kill him, but I did plan to hurt him badly; I wanted to break his legs. I knew he spent hours practising his goal-kicking on a distant pitch. In his final term he had no lesson to rush back to (he had a ‘private study’ period) so could carry on till it was dark. I simply doubled back from the food shop where I’d gone after my own rugby game and waited for him. The bridge over the stream that divided two large areas of playing fields was concrete with scaffolding poles for handrails. Nearby, I’d noticed lumps of loose concrete, roughly mixed, full of pebbles, and a length of rusted broken pole. I hid beneath the bridge until I heard his studs clattering towards me. I caught him from behind with the pole and he went down. I lifted the pole and brought it down with all my might across his tibia. I heard it crack. I dragged him to the edge of the bridge and rubbed the wound on the back of his head into the rough edge of the concrete. Then I chucked the weapons into the stream and jogged back to the main school. He was groaning as I left and I knew it wouldn’t be long till he was found. Dr Benbow would have examined him in his usual perfunctory manner when he was brought in, implying that he was wasting everyone’s time. The leg was cleanly broken and he was well enough to take his Oxford exams a few weeks later. What I didn’t know at the time was how hard I had hit his head. In fact, I hit it more than once, and it gave me pleasure to do so. I didn’t mention it at the time in what Dr Exley called my ‘journal/narrative’ in case it was seen by someone.

The case of Gudrun Abendroth is more complicated. My time in Longdale has enabled me, as I said, to recall the Baynes incident clearly. I even feel a degree of remorse for his orphaned children, even though in my view they’re better off without him. Fräulein Abendroth, though, is a different matter.

To put it simply: I still don’t know if I killed her or not; and that single fact, that not-knowing, is what persuades me – more than Baynes, more even than Jen – that Longdale is the right place for me. I followed a woman who looked like her from a Graham Parker gig to a house in Tournay Road. That much I wrote at the time. I have subsequently remembered for sure that I went back there on at least one occasion. I followed her. She went to a pub called the Cock on North End Road and I lurked at the other end of the bar, watching her. But why would I want to kill her when I didn’t even know her?

If I did, I must be like Peter Sutcliffe or someone, but I don’t think I am. Or perhaps I did get to know her, albeit briefly. And in that space of time, perhaps she posed a threat to the ‘integrity’ of my ‘narcissistic self’ so great that violence was my only self-defence.

The Exley theory, however, can’t really be stretched to include amnesia on my part: he was rather strict on that point. ‘snapshot’ memory, including partial forgetfulness, he could live with, but a complete blank he thought suspect. I suppose the only way Exley could be brought onside is if we beefed up the theory of ‘pathological defences’ so much that they annexed the memory function. It seems a bit far-fetched, though, doesn’t it?

So, I’m inclined to acquit myself.

On the other hand, it smells a bit. Who else might have killed her? And the killer had what the Roman plods of Fulham called a modus operandi similar to mine: several blows to cranium; no sexual interference; deep grave.

But if I did kill her, yet can’t remember doing so (compare Sutcliffe’s detailed recall of his victims in court), how many more might there be?

At this time, I just don’t know; and there are some things in the past that may have happened and some that may not have happened. But the reality of their happening or not happening
then
has no weight
now
.

Until we can navigate in time, I’m not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

Back live, as they still say.

I remember that conversation with Stellings in the Indian restaurant in which he – insanely, I thought – predicted the imminent end of the Cold War, the sex war, apartheid and so on.

He was right, though, wasn’t he? He might have added architecture too, which was then embedded in a desperate impasse. Either you built ‘modern’ – witless rectangular towers with metal-framed windows in which people rushed to kill themselves – or you built mock-Palladian (itself a classical pastiche). The two camps detested one another with pitiless venom. Now I look in the papers and I see buildings of light and air, glass and steel and uncovered brick. They look really nice. (I wonder if I’ll ever be free to go inside one.)

Suggesting, back then, that using strong materials and good design might be a way forward would have earned you contempt from both the Legomen and the Pasticheurs. Like the way all British politicians are Social Democrats now, but back then holding such beliefs was derided as ‘having no policies’.

(Don’t you love politicians? I think what I like best is their sublimely self-serving insistence that their ‘private life’ is nothing whatever to do with their ‘public life’. So that the decision to shaft their secretary over the conference table five minutes before the cabinet meeting or to spend the night face down in a bathhouse cubicle taking on all comers is reached by a different person, or a different brain, from the one who, a few minutes later, decides to vote for family tax credits or the death penalty. God, if only!)

Anyway, these changes in society look all right to me, though of course in most ways things haven’t changed at all. I remember my student questions.

‘Got a cure for the common cold yet? Have you? Thought not. How’s your 2003 world, then? A few wars? Some genocide? Some terrorism? Drugs? Abuse of children? High crime rate? Materialistic obsessions? More cars? Blah-blah pop music? Vulgar newspapers? Porn? Still wearing jeans?’

Stellings’s specific optimism was right, but so was my less hopeful overview.

And other things are worse than even I foresaw.

For instance: my country recently invaded another country.

That’s not something anyone could have foreseen. Invading other countries was what Hitler or Kaiser Wilhelm or the kamikaze Japanese did.

Not
invading other countries: that was our thing. It more or less defined who we were. America likewise. Obviously there were those CIA things (Guatemala, Iran and so on) but they were unofficial: when we begged the American government to join us in our European World War Two, prim Mr Roosevelt said No: the US has not been attacked, so it wouldn’t be proper. Then the Japanese bombed them at Pearl Harbor and it was OK.

This Blair guy, though. My age, Oxford-educated, looks and sounds quite reasonable. You’d have thought that he’d understand his own country’s recent past, wouldn’t you? Apparently not. They sent inspectors to find weapons and the inspectors came back empty-handed; they sent spies, and the spies returned with nothing.

Never mind, said Mr Blair, I don’t care: if we can’t find the weapons then he must be hiding them, and in half an hour or so he could attack us. We must get him first.

My old friend Peter Mandelson came on the radio. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘saddam’s got a supermarket.’ He pronounced it ‘shoopermarket’. ‘saddam’s got a shoopermarket selling deadly weapons. We must invade.’ Peter had seemed rather a sophisticated man, I thought, when I’d met him during that General Election. Why was he now talking this crap about a giant Asda in Tikrit?

The funny thing was that almost no one outside Westminster believed it. For instance, no one in Longdale believed it.

‘Paranoid’ Pete Smith on my corridor never thought we’d find hidden weapons, yet Paranoid is someone who rolls an orange under his bed each night to check there’s no one there.

Johnnie Johnston wouldn’t give the time of day to that ‘intelligence’ dossier, and Johnnie is a man who believes his own thoughts are controlled by the BBC Radio 4 long-wave transmitter at Redruth.

Not much has happened in Longdale in the last seventeen years. There have been some improvements in the kitchen – twice a week you can hold it down – and in the gardens and the workshops.

I am no longer under the control of Dr Braithwaite (retired) or Dr Turner (moved on, alas). My ‘case officer’ (sounds like M16, but it isn’t) is now Dr Vidushi Sen, a severe young woman in her first senior appointment in the exciting world of Special Hospitals. She has more than her fair share of old lags like me, poor thing; the senior doctors bag the newer patients because there’s more hope of an outcome.