Ploughing Potter’s Field

Then one day, just another unremarkable Wednesday, she came to brief me on some job or other. At the end she asked me out. As simple as that, just went staight ahead and asked. Unbelievable – but true.

We married in nineteen-eighty – me twenty-two; her twenty-three; two young kids standing at the altar, backs to the world of temptation and drudgery which lay waiting outside the church.

We agreed I would move to another agency, figuring working and living with one another wouldn’t necessarily make the ideal platform for a successful relationship. But perhaps we hadn’t fully thought it through. Trouble was, we still worked in the same business, only now we were professional rivals. Then disaster – in April 1987, my agency lost a major bit of business to hers. Jemimah was on the pitch team. Word soon got round. I was suspected of leaking details by a paranoid management reeling from the loss of a major blue-chip account. I was history shortly after, summoned by a phone call to a meeting with the smiling executive where a lukewarm pot of coffee, my P45 and a derisory payoff were the only things on the table.

I felt numb, made completely impotent by the decision. Not that the drop in money affected J and I in the slightest – in a bizarre irony, she’d been promoted to the board of her agency as a result of winning the business I’d been unfairly suspected of losing. We were richer than we’d ever been.

At first we were cool about it, spending the redundancy and planning a heavy freelance career from the ruins of my Filofax. One or two jobs rolled in, charity from old pals, giving Adrian the odd hundred quid here or there. But I grew to hate every minute of it. My heart wasn’t in it; I couldn’t bear to think of Jemimah leaving for work, while I sat upstairs in the heavy silence, de-roled, emasculated.

Like an idiot, I began to drink heavily, from the moment J left for the station until she returned, often finding me bombed on the sofa, useless. Days, time, dates, all became irrelevant as I woke each day with the sole aim to hit the whisky hard, dull the pain of failure. A never-ending supply of child-minders and nannies looked after Juliet and Guy, our two children, while I set about following a self-indulgent path to oblivion. It was crazy – a very dark and stupid time. I did things of which I’m still not proud, which even now I can’t fully explain or understand – but perhaps this is born out of a reluctance to do so.

There are some parts of all of us, I now recognize, which are graphically revealed in a crisis, and need one hell of a lot of honesty to accept. Even now, I have problems with the swiftness of my metamorphosis from happy-go-lucky copywriter to unstable drunk. I shudder at the ease with which I was unravelled.

Then came the move to Essex. Jemimah took charge and issued the ultimatum. She’d had enough. The family was moving from London. I could go with them, or stay and drink myself to death, but without her money or support. I was devastated, and in the selfish way alcoholics have, grew to hate her for making me choose.

Friends began calling less often, nervous of my unpredictable behaviour. Letters from estate agents began arriving. I was sleeping in the spare room when I could be bothered to get off the sofa. I had nothing in my life but alcohol.

One afternoon, Jemimah arrived back to tell me she’d exchanged on a place near Chelmsford. We had a God Almighty argument. And I hit her.

To this day, I hate myself for that drunken blow. She reeled back, shock and pain writ large on her reddening face. Juliet, our eldest, began to cry. I stormed out, spent two nights with a former colleague who persuaded me to get help. Thank God he did.

The message was stark. I was an alcoholic. Always would be. In less than six months I’d gone from a bloke who could have a couple of pints and leave, to someone who couldn’t face the day unless he had three large whiskys to take the edge off it. The only solution was to deny myself the solution. Either that or lose everything.

There were others there, that night. Broken individuals with similar tales, some spanning many years – but always at the heart, I felt, was a reluctance to look inside and face a particular truth which the alcohol blurred. I didn’t have the strength to face mine, preferring instead to soak up the group support, start the road to abstinence, persuade Jemimah that I recognized the problem, had taken steps to tackle it, was convinced I would beat it.

God love her – she tentatively agreed to ‘take me back’. I began the painful process of working out what I wanted to ‘do’ with the rest of my life, finally realizing what a privileged position I was in. I could start again, a new life, new friends, new interests, a phoenix rising from the ruins of my own self-destruction. And after a few weeks settling into our new home I was off the sauce, had joined a local gym and, more importantly, had the answer to my new direction.

During the move to Chelmsford, I’d rediscovered an old hoard of crime magazines I’d collected as a youngster, sensational articles offering a tabloid insight into the minds and motives of the evil perpetrators. Rereading them, I found myself fascinated by both the crimes and criminals, wondering what lay at the heart of the human psyche. It seemed incredible to me that humanity, universally acknowledged as an exploratory creature, could put a man on the moon without ever having fully explored his mind.

What shapes the most deviant individuals – brain dysfunction, environmental factors, the past, or perhaps a fatal cocktail of all three? Or is it simply that some of us are born with a terrifying predilection for evil?

The questions fought for space in my mind, as I began to realize I was developing an obsession with human psychology. I began subscribing to modern crime mags, immersing myself in the twisted worlds of current-day serial killers and psychopaths, child-murderers, Satanists and worse. And yet it seemed to me that the more I ‘discovered’ the less I actually knew. Each publication was merely concerned with sensational grisly details to ensure higher sales. Indeed, sometimes I found myself wondering about the appetite for such bloodthirsty material, speculating that perhaps we hadn’t actually evolved all that much since thousands turned up to witness a handful of Christians thrown to hungry lions.

But I too, was hooked. I may have tried to cloak my interest in academic terms, convincing myself I had superior motives for buying the glossy mags and tabloids, but the result was the same, I paid my money – I participated in the voyeuristic merchandising of insanity and pain.

Then one day – a breakthrough. Waiting in Chelmsford Central Library to check out another volume dedicated to the ongoing mystery of Jack the Ripper, I began leafing through a local prospectus. The University of Essex offered a reasonably well-thought-of degree in psychology. Perhaps this was a start then, a move in the right direction. After talking it over with Jemimah, we agreed I should apply. She was still happy enough working at the agency, and provided I really was serious about it, she’d fund my enthusiasm. I was taken on as a mature student the following September.

I worked harder than I’d ever done, couldn’t get enough of the subject, eating up theories, devouring vast textbooks, ingesting all that was said in every lecture and tutorial. I was motivated, sober, deliriously happy with my second shot at life.

Former friends visiting the Rawlingses’ Essex retreat for dinner would often make the mistake of complimenting me on my willpower, watching as I drank mineral water while they knocked back the hard stuff. I was always quick to correct them. It had nothing to do with willpower – fear was the key. I’d already teetered at the edge of my sanity once, nothing would persuade me to do so again. Or so I thought at the time.

Three years later, the BA (hons) became an MA, with Dr Clancy telling me I had the talent to ride it all the way to PhD in forensic psychiatry if I wanted to.

I dedicated myself to finding a thesis subject. There was so much to choose from, but eventually decided to settle on the media’s easy obsession with ‘evil’, and the damage it caused to proper psychological investigation. I worked hard. Cases like the Wests’, Dunblane and numerous others seemed to spring from quiet suburban backwaters almost every month as I toiled away on my researches. And as each horrifying case broke, I found myself ever more on the ‘side’ of the perpetrators, rationalizing that there had to be some concrete reasons why they’d done whatever they’d been accused of. Concrete beyond the media’s constant assertion that they were simply ‘evil’, anyway.

Next I learnt that the Home Office had agreed to partially fund a series of PhD students through their thesis years if they participated in a national data-gathering exercise for a brand-new law-enforcement initiative identifying behavioural characteristics of incarcerated psychopaths.

Or, as Fancy put it, they’d stump up a few readies if I agreed to ask a nutter some personal questions. The programme had been up and running for a few years, and research gathered had apparently proved invaluable in lobbying the relevant parties for a change in the judicial understanding of random violence.

‘Bugger it, Adrian,’ Fancy’d said by way of explanation. ‘You only have to look at the States to see what a balls-up they’re making of it. Defence attorneys are pressing for the admission of “the crime gene” in order to get their psychos out of the death chamber. Like the murdering sods are somehow born to kill, genetically programmed, so it’s not their fault. Preposterous!’

‘And you say what?’ I replied. ‘That every lunatic is morally responsible for the actions he commits?’

‘We’re not that far, Adrian. We need more data. Will you do it? It’s bang up your street, nature of evil and all that.’

My thesis, the magnum opus – The acceptance of Evil as a resultant supernatural force actively prohibits positive psycho-social studies into the internal and external factors influencing random, unmotivated violence’ by Adrian Rawlings (soon to be) PhD.

So I agreed, both trepidacious and excited. Here was a chance to actually step inside a secure mental institution, converse with an inmate, form some kind of temporary relationship, perhaps even finally come to terms with what lured me to the analysis of violence in the first place.

It had been bothering me for some time, silently, something I tried my best to suppress, keep from friends and family. But late at night, while I worked in the gloom of a computer screen, it was always there, a warning keen to be heard and analysed, a fear which had wound its way effortlessly into my psyche, mocking my attempts to reinvent myself over the last ten years.

Maybe longer. The longer I worked at trying to understand the human mind, the more I began to analyse my own. I was finally beginning to have some understanding of my own inadequacies. The reason I had drunk so passionately was a good deal greater than simply hitting my thirties, redundant and shit-scared. No – it was for far simpler, far darker reasons. The more I drank, the less I needed to answer the real questions gently swelling and beginning their way up from deep down inside. Questions I’d buried from childhood and adolescence. Questions which the redundancy had thrown up, and which I feared would never go away.

Fancy duly put my name forward to Dr Neil Allen at HMP Oakwood High Security Mental Hospital, and after a short submission on my part detailing my willingness to compile relevant data regarding antisocial behaviour disorders, I was duly accepted and funded.

‘Game on!’ Fancy had beamed when telling me the good news. ‘A year from now and I’ll be calling the man “Doctor”.’

Fancy rang late the following Thursday night.

‘He’s gone for it, Adrian.’

‘Rattigan?’ I answered nervously.

‘Wants to see you tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Shit! So soon?’

‘Told you he would. They all do.’

‘Jesus. Tomorrow?’

‘Don’t worry. Pop into the uni. on the way. See me before ten. I’ll give you all you need to know. And Adrian?’ His voice was deadly serious. ‘Remember, you get in, you do this, you get out. You’re the boss. It only becomes a game when you agree to play it.’

‘But there’s so much about him that …’

‘Shouldn’t concern you, Adrian.’

I heard what he said, understood his warning, yet knew following the advice would be difficult, if nigh on impossible.

I was an idealistic mature student with a head full of theories and expectations. Rattigan fascinated me for one reason alone. He claimed to have killed for no other motive than his own self-satisfaction. He’d had ‘fun’ dispensing slow death.

Why couldn’t I heed all the warnings and simply accept this? What drove me to rationalize his monstrous act within my own understanding? Personal ambition? A desire to be recognized as a great forensic psychologist?

Or something else entirely?

It wasn’t that Rattigan held the answers, I did. But at the time, I was too scared to face the questions.

To date, neuropsychological studies of offenders have been blighted by small samples, lack of controls and an emphasis on institutionalized populations. However, results from such studies indicate that both poor language skills and impairment of the regulative functions controlled by the frontal lobes are consistent factors in the analysis of sociopathic antibehavioural disorders.

At present, it is almost impossible to gauge whether either factor is the result of developmental damage or neurological failure, and more work needs to be done in order to understand the complex correlation between the two.

However, current thinking suggests that many forms of sociopathic and psychotic behaviours can possibly be explained by the ineffectiveness of the subject’s ‘inner voice’, or learned morality, to temper violent outbursts.

Put simply – they appear to do what they want, to whom they like, as and when mood takes them.

Dr Neil Allen

(The Roots of Psychopathy)

4

Three-thirty, Oakwood High Security Mental Hospital, Cambridgeshire, RECREATION SIX.

The same three players, Rattigan, Denton and myself.

I reached into my briefcase, brought out some papers, two packs of Rothmans and a micro-cassette recorder.

Then turned to Rattigan. ‘There’s one or two things I’m obliged to explain regarding your participation in the programme.’

‘Can’t wait.’ Rattigan was already unwrapping one of the blue and white boxes.

I cleared my throat, anxious to get the script right. ‘Now that you’ve officially consented to my visits, I’ll be asking you a series of questions prepared by various agencies in order to gain a greater understanding of antisocial behavioural disorders. In addition to this, I’ll also be asking some questions I’ve formulated myself in order to help with my own studies in the field of forensic psychiatry.’

‘Blah, blah, fucking blah.’

I placed the micro-cassette on the middle of the table. ‘Are you aware of what this is?’

He looked at the black plastic box for a few seconds. ‘It’s a penguin, isn’t it? A tiny penguin with a lemon up its arse, watching Pinocchio in a large block of flats in West Croydon.’

‘Each meeting will be recorded for subsequent transcription and analysis on this tape recorder.’

At which point Rattigan lit up. ‘Just shows how wrong you can be, eh?’

I switched on the machine, relief flooding over me when I realized the damn thing was working properly. Next I reached for a green sheet of A4 headed ‘Analysis of Institutionalized Offenders – History, Profiling and Sociopathic Behaviour Traits’, and began working my way through the answer boxes.

‘Name?’

‘King of Sweden.’

I put down Francis James Rattigan. ‘Age?’

He exhaled violently. ‘You’ve got my details! Go to the fucking governor’s office and sort this shit out!’

‘Age?’ I repeated, unmoved.

‘Hundred and seven.’

I put down the pen. ‘Frank.’

‘Adrian?’

‘Refusal to cooperate will be taken as reluctance to comply with the programme.’ I was surprisingly cool, amazed the corporate bullshit came so easily. I’d done what Fancy had told me to the last time, left Adrian Rawlings in Dr Allen’s office, waiting for collection.

‘F602 GPW.’

The combination seemed familiar, but I hadn’t asked him for his number yet. ‘Age?’ I repeated, keeping up the show.

‘F602 GPW.’ His eyes scanned my face intently. ‘Yours, innit? Your motor. Dark-green Vauxhall Cavalier. GB sticker on the back. Go anywhere pleasant?’

The penny dropped. I tried not to appear unnerved. ‘I don’t see that’s relevant, Frank.’

‘Bollocks, you’re crapping yourself. Can see it, can read faces, fear. Your fucking wheels. I got your wheels. How much longer before I get your phone, fat-boy? How much longer before I’m ringing your missus up while you’re hard at work in the nuthouse, eh?’

‘Age?’

He smiled, then sighed. ‘Fifty-seven. Born twenty-eighth of March, nineteen-forty.’

I filled in the form, inwardly cursing its designers. Rattigan was right, why the bloody hell wasn’t this done before the interviews took place? And how in God’s name had he got my numberplate? The pen shook slightly. I wanted answers to these ludicrous questions, but knew the cassette was recording my performance as well as his. For some reason I couldn’t bear to have Fancy listening to an actual recording of a balls-up. Stick to the script. Stick to the bloody script.

‘Offence?’

‘Whose?’

‘Yours,’ I replied, staring at the little box, awaiting his response.

‘I chopped up some tart who should’ve known better.’

‘Better?’ I’d deviated here, drifted from the protocol, suddenly anxious to press him for more about the murder of Helen Lewis.

‘What goes around, comes around, sweetie.’

‘Meaning?’

‘She deserved it. We all deserve to die. Just got to want it badly enough.’

‘So what had she done to deserve it?’

‘More a case of what she hadn’t done.’

‘Which was?’

Rattigan looked deep into my eyes, held it for at least three seconds too long. I felt dissected, invaded, just as much his study as he was mine. When he spoke, the voice was ice-cold, devoid of feeling. Yet he smiled throughout. ‘I’d tell you, but I don’t reckon you’ve got the balls for it.’

‘Try me.’

‘Fighting talk. Like that. Always loved a tear-up. Bit of a pro in my own way.’ He paused, squinting slightly, as if the act of conversation was suddenly a leaden effort. ‘Know what I learnt from geezers who talked tough?’

I supplied the obvious answer. ‘They weren’t really all that tough inside?’

Another squint as he struggled to impart whatever ran through his ruined mind. ‘I’m mad, right? One of them psycho-whatnots. Done all the fucking tests a million times. Take more drugs in a day than the Rolling fucking Stones in a month. But that’s only ’cause I can see through people, like they’re fucking transparent or something. Just like I’m looking at you now. Trying to get all chummy with me. Talking like mates. I don’t have to tell you fuck-all if I don’t want to.’

‘So let’s just stick to the questions on the form, then, eh?’

But he wasn’t through. ‘Know why I hate wankers like you?’

‘I feel sure you’re about to tell me.’

He feigned a slow handclap. ‘You’re unnatural. Fucking freak. Should be dead.’

I struggled to grasp the concept.

He enlightened me. ‘Only the strong survive, fat-boy. Little gits like you have to lock people like me up, ’cause you can’t handle us. But you’re all fascinated. You poke us about, prod us, ask us shit – always trying to “understand”. And you ain’t never going to find any answers. We’re always going to be out there. Taking what we want. Doing what we want. That’s what we’re here for. To pass on our genes, or whatever. Fuck ourselves a stronger human race. Science is dead. Drugs won’t hold us for ever.’

I wrenched myself from his sneering gaze, turning to Denton, who sat bored by the wall. He’d heard it all before, a thousand times, maybe.

I let a few seconds’ silence pass. ‘Is that what you were trying to do to Helen Lewis, Frank? Build a stronger human race? Trying to have sex with her?’

He laughed. ‘Tinpot theory. Ain’t you done no fucking homework? Last thing on earth I wanted to do was fuck the bitch.’

‘Yet you stripped her, tortured her?’

‘Which turns you on, right? ’Cause that’s the only connection your fat little filthy mind can make, isn’t it? Just ’cause she was naked, I had sex with her, right? But that’s your interpretation, you sick piece of shit.’

‘So tell me yours.’

‘Fuck off.’

Deadlock. There was little to do but recommence the preset questions. ‘Ward?’

And in an instant the demeanour changed. His tone calmed, and we talked like old friends. I didn’t know which face frightened me more, the angry Beast, or the good-buddy Frank. ‘You see, Adrian,’ he grinned and winked at me. A shiver coursed down my spine. ‘Reckon they’re taking the piss out of both of us. We already know all these answers.’

I found myself apologetic, unravelling in my naivety. Why in God’s name wasn’t Denton being more assertive, shutting Rattigan up, making him toe the line? ‘Dr Allen and the team prepare your questions,’ I said. ‘I’m just the poor fool designated to ask them. I don’t even see them until I arrive. That’s how it works.’

‘You’re crap at this.’ A two-beat pause. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘I’m …’ I shot what must have been an obvious look of desperation at Denton.

‘I find it insulting,’ Rattigan added threateningly.

‘I’m sorry about that …’

‘It’s making me feel demeaned, like some fucking performing seal. And I don’t like feeling demeaned, Adrian. I really don’t. It just pisses me off, and I do things.’

Suddenly, here it was – a break, a slip, a crack of a chance. I was on it in an instant. ‘Like what, Frank?’

He smiled, and I hesitantly returned it, knowing he was drawing me in, but somehow powerless to resist. ‘Like with the lady, fat-boy. Now we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we? Your turn.’

‘So you felt demeaned … when you …?’

‘Oh, I felt lots of stuff.’ His fat head nodded slowly. ‘Pretty as a picture, she was. Pretty as a fucking picture.’

My throat was bone-dry as I struggled to control the delivery of my next question. ‘That demeaned you? Her beauty?’

A slight twitch above his left eyebrow. ‘What are you implying?’

‘That perhaps you felt threatened by it in some way?’

‘That I’m ugly?’ He sounded ugly, too. Instantly loud and dense. His eyes narrowed to pig-slits, and his bottom jaw gaped ludicrously.

‘I’m not saying anything, I’m …’

He turned to Denton, standing and pocketing the cigarettes. ‘Take me back to the unit. I don’t have to take this shit from an arsehole like him.’

Denton stood, quickly moving between Rattigan and myself. ‘Calm down.’

‘Will I bollocks! This cunt’s a wind-up artist!’

Somehow, through my fear came another feeling – stronger, more urgent. Anger. I’d been bloody set up, I was certain of it. I sat seething, staring at the floor and shaking my head. It simply wasn’t my fault, none of it was. The whole session had got off to a terrible start with the set questions. But I didn’t decide those, Allen and his unseen cronies did. Yet I was the poor mug asking them, getting sworn at and intimidated into the bargain.

I felt Rattigan move past me. ‘I’m not a cunt, Frank,’ I said quietly.

But he simply left the room, Denton half a pace behind, leaving me with a well of hatred I hadn’t felt in years, and a conscience struggling to pull myself from his hostility.

But I also knew full well his anger was born from my delving. Questions I’d asked had rattled the ice-cool facade. His response, his anger at me, was explainable, understandable, logical, rational. Sane, almost. He didn’t want me poking, prying. Tough – I was going to upset him a lot more in future.