The Wisdom of Psychopaths (24 page)

It’s a similar story when it comes to heart rate and skin conductance. In fact, in the case of the latter, I actually eclipse Andy’s reading.

“Does that mean it’s official?” I ask Nick, as we scrutinize the figures. “Can I legitimately claim to be cooler than Andy McNab?”

He shrugs. “I suppose,” he says. “For now, anyway. But you’d better make the most of it while you can. You’ve got a quarter of an hour. Max.”

I shake my head. Already I sense the magic wearing off. The electromagnetic sorcery starting to wane. I feel, for instance, considerably more married than I did a bit earlier—and considerably less inclined to go up to Nick’s research assistant and ask her out for a drink. Instead, I go with Nick—to the student bar—and beat my previous best on Gran Turismo
⁴
out of sight. I floor it all the way round. But so what—it’s only a game, isn’t it?

“I wouldn’t want to be with you in a real car at the moment,” says Nick. “You’re definitely still a bit ballsy.”

It feels great. Not quite as good as before, perhaps, when we were in the lab. Not quite as … I don’t know … “impregnable.” But up there, for sure. Life seems full of possibility, my psychological horizons much broader. Why shouldn’t I piss off to Glasgow this weekend for my buddy’s stag party, instead of dragging myself over to Dublin to help my wife put her mother in a nursing home? Why not just do the opposite of what I normally would—and to hell with what people think? I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? This time next year, this time next week even, it would all be forgotten. Who Dares Wins, right?

I take a couple of quid from the table next to ours—left as a tip, but who’s going to know?—and try my luck on another couple of machines. I get to $100,000 on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” but crash and burn because I refuse to go 50-50. You couldn’t have staged it better if you’d tried. I’m positive
American Psycho
is set in L.A., and nonchalantly push the button despite Nick’s reservations.

It’s New York.

“I thought you’d at least get that one,” he laughs.

Then things start to change—pretty quickly, as it happens. Gran Turismo the second time around is a disappointment. I’m suddenly more cautious, and finish way down the field. Not only that, I notice a security camera in the corner and think about the tip I’ve just pocketed. To be on the safe side, I decide to pay it back.

Nick looks at his watch. I know what’s coming—he doesn’t need to tell me.

“Still cooler than McNab?”

I smile, and swig my beer. Psychopaths. They never stick around for long. As soon as the party’s over, they’re moving on to the next one—with scant regard for the future, and even less for the past.

And this one—the one, I guess, that was
me
for twenty minutes—was no exception. He’d had his fun. And got a free drink out of it. But now that the experiment was history, he was suddenly on his way, hitting the road and heading out of town.

Hopefully, quite some distance away.

I certainly didn’t want him showing up in the hotel bar later, where I was meeting Andy. They’d either get on great. Or wouldn’t get on at all.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know which was scarier.

The joke is that it’s harder to get into Broadmoor than out. But it isn’t. A joke, that is.

“Got anything sharp?” the woman at reception barks as I deposit the entire contents of my briefcase—laptop, phone, pens, yes, my trusty Glock 17 pistol—into a Plexiglas-fronted locker in the entrance hall.

“Only my wit,” I reply, parodying Oscar Wilde’s onetime comment to a U.S. customs official.

The receptionist isn’t a fan. Either of me or, it appears, of Oscar.

“It’s not that sharp, Sonny,” she shoots back. “Now place the index finger of your right hand here and look up at the camera.”

Once you pass through border control at Broadmoor, you’re immediately ushered into a tiny security airlock, a temporary glasswalled holding cell between reception and the hospital building proper, while the person you’re visiting gets buzzed by reception and makes their way over to meet you.

It’s an unnerving, claustrophobic wait. As I flip through the magazines, I remind myself why I’m here—an e-mail I’d received
after launching the Great British Psychopath Survey. The survey is unique: the first of its kind to assess the prevalence of psychopathic traits within an entire national workforce.
Participants were directed onto my website, where they completed the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale and were then given their score. But that wasn’t all. They also entered their employment details. What would turn out to be the U.K.’s most psychopathic profession? I wanted to know. And, for that matter, its least? The results, revealed below, certainly make interesting reading—especially if you’re partial to a sermon or two on a Sunday.

But a couple of weeks later the following appeared in my in-box, from one of the survey’s respondents. He’s a barrister by trade—indeed, one of the U.K.’s finest—who’d posted a score that certainly got my attention. Yet, to him, it was nothing unusual. No big deal whatsoever:

“I realized from quite early on in my childhood that I saw things differently from other people,” he wrote. “But, more often than not, it’s helped me in my life. Psychopathy (if that’s what you want to call it) is like a medicine for modern times. If you take it in moderation it can prove extremely beneficial. It can alleviate a lot of existential ailments that we would otherwise fall victim to because our fragile psychological immune systems just aren’t up to the job of protecting
us. But if you take too much of it, if you overdose on it, then there can, as is the case with all medicines, be some rather unpleasant side effects.”

The e-mail had got me thinking. Might this eminent criminal defense lawyer have a point? Was psychopathy a “medicine for modern times”? Could taking it in moderation, twiddling those dials a little to the right on our respective psychopath mixing desks—at certain times, in certain specific contexts—actually be good for us?

It was an interesting possibility. And moreover, it made a lot of intuitive sense. Let’s take a look at those dials for a moment: ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness (living in the moment), and action. Who wouldn’t, at certain points in their lives, benefit from kicking one or two of them up a notch? What was important was being able to turn them back down.

I decided to put the theory to the test—not quite to destruction, but it was sure as hell going to be close. I had a visit to several hospitals coming up, to interview some colleagues. But what if I went on the wards? What if, as well as meeting the doctors, I talked with some of the patients? Presented them with problems from normal, everyday life, the usual stuff we moan about at happy hour, and see what their take on it was? See what suggestions they happened to come up with? Up until now, it had seemed like a good idea.

“Professor Dutton?” My train of thought is broken and I look up to see a blond guy in his mid-thirties peering round the door at me. “Hi, I’m Richard Blake—one of the team leaders at
the Paddock Centre. Welcome to Broadmoor! Shall I take you over?”

As we weigh anchor and begin charting our course deeper and deeper into the mazy, medicinal bowels of the hospital, through a series of interconnecting corridors and no-man’s-land antechambers just like the one we started out from—“security air bubbles,” as Richard calls them: the golden rule in Broadmoor is never open any door in front of you before first making sure that the one behind is locked—he tells me, in a little bit more detail, about where we’re going.

The Paddock Centre is an enclosed, highly specialized personality-disorder directorate comprising six twelve-bedded wards. Around
20 percent of the patients housed there at any one time are what you might call “pure” psychopaths, and these are confined to two dedicated wards specifically assigned to their treatment and continual assessment: the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) wards. The rest present with so-called cluster disorders: clinically significant psychopathic traits (as evidenced by moderately high PCL-R scores) accompanied by the presence of core supplementary traits typically associated with other certifiable personality disorders—borderline, paranoid, and narcissistic, for example. Or, alternatively, traits more indicative of primary psychotic symptomatology, delusions and hallucinations being the obvious cases in point.

Suddenly reality dawns. This is no drop-in center for the mocha-sipping worried well I’m about to enter. This is the lair, the conscienceless inner sanctum, of the Chianti-swilling unworried unwell—the preserve of some of the most sinister neurochemistry in the business, where brain states, quite literally, can teeter on a knife-edge. The Yorkshire Ripper is in here. So is the Stockwell Strangler. It’s one of the most dangerous buildings on earth.

“Er, I am going to be all right, aren’t I, Richard?” I squeak as we suddenly emerge to the right of a large open-air enclosure, topped off with some distinctly uncooperative razor wire.

He grins. “You’ll be fine,” he says. “Actually, trouble on the DSPD wards is relatively rare. Psychopathic violence is predominantly instrumental, a direct means to a specific end. Which means, in an environment like this, that it’s largely preventable. And, in the event that something does kick off, easily contained. It’s on the psychotic wards that things are less predictable.

“In fact, even when compared with other personality disorders, psychopaths are easier to deal with. For some reason, they tend to respond better to daily activities than, say, borderlines or paranoids. Maybe it’s because of their low boredom threshold: they like to keep themselves amused.

“Besides,” he adds, with just the merest hint of reproach, “it’s a bit late to turn back now, isn’t it?”

“We are the evil elite,” says Danny as he slams in his second goal for Chelsea, a belter of a header from right smack on the edge of the six-yard area. “Don’t glamorize us. But, at the same time, don’t go the other way and start dehumanizing us, either.”

He shoots me a glance from behind his Nintendo Wii. Things are going well both on and off the field. Chelsea are up 2–0 against Manchester United—and I’m sitting watching, in the company of a bunch of psychopaths, feet up on a table, in the corner of one of Broadmoor’s ultra-sequestered DSPD wards.

The vibe on the ward isn’t what I’m expecting. My first impression is of an extremely well-appointed college dormitory. All blond, clean-shaven wood. Voluminous, freshly squeezed light. And mathematically defibrillated space. There’s even a pool table, I notice. Which, today, unfortunately—it would’ve been nice to have clawed back my train fare—has a sheet over it.

Larry, a gray, bewhiskered, roly-poly kind of guy, who, in a Fair Isle sweater and beige stretch slacks, looks like everyone’s favorite uncle—except that if you were planning on going out for the evening you’d be better off hiring Herod as a babysitter—takes a shine to me. He’s had enough of the soccer.

“You know,” he says, as he shakes my hand and silently impales me on his somnolent, moonlit stare, “they say I’m one of the most dangerous men in Broadmoor. Can you believe that? But I promise you I won’t kill you. Here, let me show you around.”

Larry escorts me to the far end of the ward, where we stop to take a peek inside his room. It’s the same, pretty much, as any other single-occupancy room you might find in a hospital, though with a few more creature comforts. Like a computer, for instance. And desk space. And a raft of books and papers on the bed.

Sensing, perhaps, my inchoate curiosity, he draws a little closer. “I’ve been in for twenty years,” he sibilates in my ear. “That’s a hell of a lot of time to, er …”—he clears his throat, and smiles conspiratorially—“…  have on your hands. Are you with me?”

Next station down is the garden: a sunken gray-bricked patio affair about the size, give or take, of a tennis court, interspersed with benches and conifers. Verdict: “Gets a bit samey after two decades.”

Fair enough. We then venture over to the opposite side of the ward—the layout of the place is symmetrical: six rooms on one side, six on the other, separated, in the middle, by a well-vacuumed ash-gray meridian—and drop in on Jamie.