Читать книгу Ploughing Potter’s Field - Phil Lovesey - Страница 7

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘I felt like he was unpicking me.’

‘He probably was.’

‘Any chance you could open the window?’

Two hours after my first encounter with Rattigan, Dr Stephen ‘Fancy’ Clancy sat in his college room pulling heavily on a slim panatella cigar. I had the beginnings of a headache, made worse by the exhaled fumes swirling within the confines of the chaotic little boxroom which laughably passed as his office.

I remembered vividly as a psychology undergrad, a mature student, thirty-two, clutching a photocopy of the Essex University humanities building floorplan, walking the humming corridors, searching for his room, buzzing with clichéd expectations of its high ceiling mounted on elegantly windowed walls groaning with dust-laden volumes offering valuable historical insights into the hidden workings of the mind. I expected a pickled brain in a bell jar at least.

But Fancy’s ‘office’ was a toilet, even by his own admission. Blind always down, desklamp permanently burning – his attempt, he explained jovially when we first shook hands, to, ‘Tardis my hutch into a tolerable space.’

He’d smiled, and I’d responded. I liked him. Still do. I began a friendship with my tutor that often included him coming over to my place for supper, or Jemimah and I visiting him and his wife Sheila in their Tudor house in Roxwell. In retrospect, I believe that the minimal differences in our ages helped forge the friendship – although at times, his devotion to the long lunch put it under certain strains. He drank – I didn’t. Not any more.

‘Sounds as if you found the trip out to Oakwood heavy going,’ the tall, permanently tanned tutor surmised. ‘From what you’re saying, Rattigan appears ready to go, and you’re the odds-on favourite stalling at the first fence.’

‘He frightened me. Really. I felt exposed.’

‘Good.’

‘Good?’

‘Adrian, he’s a convicted killer. You aren’t up there to become best buddies with the man.’

‘I just thought …’ But I was tired, the words failed me.

‘You thought you’d walk in there, and he’d spiritedly comply with your every wish, utterly in awe of your academic prowess.’

‘He called me a pedantic little twat. I felt like punching him.’

Fancy suppressed a smile. ‘He’s simply having some fun with you. Don’t get so involved. He wants to see you again, so the job’s done. He called you a few names, so what? Christ’s sake, Adrian, you’re a bloody good student. You have a keen interest in the malfunctioning mind. You wanted to meet him the moment you read the file. Positively salivating at the prospect this time yesterday.’

‘That was different,’ I wearily protested. ‘That was yesterday. I just expected something different. Less challenging. He hates me. I must have spoken to him for no more than ten minutes at the most. Came out shaking like a bloody leaf. God knows how I’m going to get through an hour of it.’

Fancy sighed. ‘Look, Adrian. No one’s expecting you to unravel the man. It isn’t possible. He’s a psychopath. You know bloody well he operates beyond the conventional norms of any coded moral behaviour. Just go there, ask your questions, ignore the insults, get out. Business done. And remember, it’s an exercise, invaluable work experience.’

He inhaled on the cigar again, a fairly pointless gesture. The tiny dishevelled room was so full of smoke, all he really needed to do was breathe in. I figured he’d unintentionally shared hundreds of cigars with me and countless other psychology students over the years.

‘I felt hopelessly unprepared,’ I admitted. ‘They just more or less left me with him.’

‘Like one of his victims?’ Fancy stood, turned his back and flipped his fingers through the yellowed Venetian blind, absorbed in the flow of laughing undergraduates passing beneath his window. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Adrian. How you’re out there, dealing with a real case. Your pivotal thesis study-piece. That I wasn’t there in the room, that I didn’t see the look in his eyes, feel the threat of his rhetoric. But you shouldn’t have been there, either. Not Adrian Rawlings. Like I warned you and warned you, you should’ve left him in Doc Allen’s office.’ He turned suddenly. ‘How is the old sod, anyway?’

‘Allen? Sent his best regards. Caustic man, isn’t he?’

Fancy smiled. ‘Same old Neil Allen. Good, reliable, jaundiced Neil Allen. Which is exactly my point.’

‘Oh?’

Fancy sat, and looked for one moment as if he was going to try to put both feet up on the cluttered desk. He opted for leaning back in the swivel chair, hands wrapped around the back of his head. A single plume of dark-blue smoke rose from his cigar, and I momentarily wondered if he might set fire to his hair.

‘Neil Allen conforms to all our expectations of him. Slightly bitter, hard-working, reliable, professionally unexceptional, and altogether notionally sane. An all-around good egg. Plays off a seven handicap, you know. Excellent long putter.’

I nodded as if I followed golf.

‘Frank Rattigan, on the other hand, has a personality seemingly designed to tease, humiliate and ritually mentally abuse the likes of those sent to gain access to it. But I’m afraid we might be crediting him with powers of which we have no proof. We suspect he revels in some kind of game with you. Whereas the reality is more soundly rooted in the explanation that he’s completely insane. Crackers, utterly bonkers. We can’t judge him by our standards and suspicions. Remember, it only becomes a game, old friend, if you agree to play it.’

I sighed, rapidly decoding the waffle. Rattigan’s nuts – don’t make him a clever nutter. ‘Maybe.’

‘We’ve all been there, Adrian. He’s your chance to prove a hundred little theories you’ve secretly developed as a BA/MA student. Just don’t rely on a loony, that’s all.’ He smiled, extinguishing the cigar at last.

I was reluctant to admit it, but there was more than a grain of truth in what he said. Rattigan was my chance, I’d felt it as soon as Fancy’d handed me his file. A real-life case study – a mine of horror and chaos waiting for my ordered explanation – my ground-breaking thesis. But we all think like that, don’t we? We all want to make some sort of contribution, be the first to spot the obvious, develop it, redefine it, have it historically credited to our good selves. It’s called making your mark. It’s a base drive. Animal.

‘He’s bored,’ Fancy announced. ‘And the more you rise to the bait, the more he’ll taunt and tease. Just stick to the script, get the thesis done and forget all about him.’

‘What if I can’t?’

‘Can’t?’

‘What if he calls my wife when I’m out?’

‘He won’t. He’ll be pulled from the interviewing process and his cigarettes and privileges will be withdrawn. Remember this is probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to Rattigan in years. He’s going to stretch it out as long as he can. Next time remember you’re the one in charge. You can end it just as soon as he can. He’ll soon toe the line. The interviews are about the only thing that give him a little bit of temporary status in the hospital.’

‘How are they chosen?’

He stifled a yawn. ‘Oh it’s terribly top secret stuff, dear boy. Committee, proposers, seconders, Home Office types, specialists, the law, a whole plethora of …’

‘I’m being serious.’

‘OK. Basically, once a year, Neil Allen and I try to pair off a PhD student and an inmate.’

‘And did you pick Rattigan for me? I mean specifically for me?’

Fancy smiled. ‘You flatter yourself, Adrian. You suspect we, the sinister conspiratorial authorities, are at some sort of a loss to unlock the dark secrets of his mind. You see us labouring into the night, shaking our heads in weary defeat. Until … until … someone mentions Rawlings! Rawlings is the man for the Rattigan job!’

‘Piss off,’ I laughed, enjoying the energy of Fancy’s pantomime. ‘I just, you know …’

‘Neil Allen sends me a few files on selected members of his client group. I sift through them, pass the occasional one on to students I feel would benefit from the experience. It’s really that simple. Like I said, just stick to the script.’ He stood and squeezed past me to unhook his coat from the back of the door. ‘Hopefully you’ll get another set of letters after your name, after which you may be some sporadic use sat before a police computer compiling some godawful national nutter database, with which to recognize psychotic characteristics at any number of crime scenes.’ His coat was on and buttoned. ‘Now,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘They’re open. Buy me a drink and anaesthetize me before my undergrad lecture this afternoon.’

‘… and during subsequent testing and further detailed psychoanalysis, the subject retained a continuing indifference to the crime of which he is currently accused.

‘Indeed, throughout my investigations the subject proved himself an able communicator and was well acquainted with the potential outcome of his present situation. His thoughts and opinions were mostly ordered, and he showed little reticence in mentally revisiting the crime scene.

‘However, the prolonged ferocity of the attack itself, the abnormal levels of violence perpetrated on the victim point to a mental psychosis borne out by the subsequent psychological analysis.

‘Again and again the subject was confronted with the possibility that his attack was sexually motivated, which he vehemently denied in all instances. His previous encounters with women (if they are to be believed) appear to have taken the pattern of occasional congress with prostitutes.

‘The random nature of the crime of which he is accused also points to one of a number of currently understood sociopathic disorders. According to the subject, in no way did he “choose” his victim. Indeed, the very word “victim” seems entirely alien to him. By his own admission:

‘“She was there. So I did her. Could’ve been any fucker.”

‘Throughout all four interviews with the subject, he repeatedly denied any former involvement with the victim, or that any kind of selection procedure was used.

‘A look through his previous criminal record and associated life history reveals …’

‘So are you going to tell me, or not?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Adrian!’

‘What? Christ! I’m sorry.’ Ten before midnight the same day. The bedroom. I turned to my wife. ‘You’re right. I’m miles away.’ I put down Rattigan’s file on the linen-fresh duvet.

Jemimah Rawlings opted for tact, starting again. ‘I’ve waited all evening, Adrian. A word or two would be nice. You know, a brief description for the woman who’s had to bite her tongue every night for the last God knows how many weeks as you read about the secret freak you finally met today?’

‘It’s not secret, J. Just want to spare you some of the gorier stuff, that’s all.’

‘How noble.’ She went back to her reading, wearing the slightly-stung-but-indifferent expression which I always found strangely attractive. Her short pointed brown bob perfectly framed the frowning profile doing its best to ignore me. I remembered the first time I’d set eyes on her high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes. She had the look of an Eastern European, a Hungarian noblewoman, perhaps, smuggled across hazardous borders to escape Communist authorities. A pity to have the romantic illusion shattered, then, when I learnt she’d spent most of her life in Catford.

I rubbed my eyes. ‘Want to know what he said?’

‘Look, if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I can wait for His Master’s Voice.’

‘He said I didn’t look academic enough.’

She put down the book. ‘Well, you don’t.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Academics are supposed to look bookish and pale. You look more like a rugby player. Healthier, more well-rounded.’

I was grateful for the compliment.

‘Besides,’ she added. ‘I thought this Rattigan man was insane.’

‘Apparently.’

‘So it shouldn’t bother you what he thinks, then, should it?’

I nodded, conceding the point.

‘And what about him, then? What did he look like?’

I thought for a second. ‘Sort of normal, I guess. Not a horn sticking out of his head in sight. Which made it worse, I suppose. Knowing what he’d confessed to, and looking like the average Joe.’

‘And are you going to see him again?’

‘If he agrees.’

‘You want to?’

I closed Rattigan’s file, placed it on my bedside table. ‘I thought I did. It’s different, though, in the flesh. I was almost looking forward to it in a way. There’s so much about his story that just doesn’t make any sense.’

‘But that’s the point, surely?’ Jemimah replied brightly. ‘If he’s crazy enough to do whatever he did, then surely the motive could be just as crazy?’

‘No one really knows what he did. We only have his word for it.’

Another frown crossed her face. ‘He killed a woman, didn’t he?’

I nodded, slightly uncomfortable with the question. I didn’t want Jemimah to go too heavily into the details which had so shocked me.

‘So they would have been able to examine the body then? Find out how he killed her?’

I shook my head. ‘There wasn’t really that much left to examine.’

‘Oh.’

‘Sorry. But you did ask.’

Eventually, she broke the silence. ‘I wish to God I knew what you find so fascinating about evil bastards like him.’

‘He’s not evil, J.’

‘What, you’re defending him, now?’

‘No. I’m …’ I sighed heavily. ‘Just tired, that’s all.’

She relaxed. ‘He really upset you, didn’t he?’

‘He wanted to know all about me, whether I was married, what you were like, did we have kids.’

‘And you told him?’

‘Didn’t have to. He got it out of me. I wasn’t concentrating, I suppose.’

I felt her disappointment.

‘I’m sorry, J.’

‘Look, Adrian, this criminal stuff. It’s your choice. Just don’t involve me in anything you think I can’t handle. Insanity scares me. I get nervous if I see a wino on the street. Jesus, life’s mad enough as it is. Just please, don’t go telling this man any more about me. He’s a killer, Adrian, and I don’t want him to know I even exist. Me or the kids.’

She rolled over and I cuddled into the small of her warm back. ‘It was a dumb mistake. Like I say, he just got it out of me.’

‘Which makes me wonder,’ she said quietly, switching out her bedside lamp. ‘What else is this man going to get out of you?’

But despite her worries Jemimah was asleep long before I was, leaving me alone with the distant roar of occasional traffic and a wandering mind stuck on the last thing she’d said. When I could stand it no longer, I got up, took the file downstairs, made myself a black coffee and began reading it again. There had to be a clue in there somewhere, a pointer, the beginnings of a possible motive. Even though I’d met the man, felt his open hostility, there was still no way I could simply accept his word that he’d done what he’d done ‘for fun’. Insane or otherwise, there was something else he was concealing, I felt sure of it.

And even if that motive made no rhyme or reason to anyone else except Rattigan, I determined that night to get it from him. ‘For fun’ just wasn’t good enough, even for the most sickening demented psychopath. I felt sure it was most probably sexual – he’d spent nearly three days torturing a girl to death, after all – now all I needed was to have the theory confirmed by the Beast himself, then track the psychiatric path which took him there. Which, at three in the morning, sitting in a near silent kitchen, finishing my third coffee, I figured shouldn’t take much time at all.

The pointers would be obvious, wouldn’t they?