This is the
question the killers of Tom Willows and George Knightly also asked
themselves. It is the only question you are ever going to ask
yourself if you are planning to clinically remove someone from
their lair. If you don't care whom you kill, you can join the army.
If you do care, your options are more complex, tighter. You have no
leeway. You cannot afford any mistakes, any bad luck, any loose
words or even thoughts. You have to be perfect, and none of us is
that over a protracted period. So, the window of opportunity is
short, and ideally you need a fall guy, someone whom people will
believe guilty before they ever consider you. I am currently that
fall guy, aren't I, Inspector? But I shall continue to behave as a
lady, which will buy us time until we stumble across the
truth.
If I am the
fall guy, who is the murderer?
* *
*
I have a
theory, and it is an excellent one, that most human illness is an
exaggeration of what is the normal healthy pattern of
things.
So, for
instance, cancer is a growth of the cells at a speed that they
should not be growing. Our cells are always multiplying - that is
the basis of our life. We would be soon dead if they didn't.
Similarly, we are soon dead if they grow too much. To understand
this, is also to understand how we best cure ourselves. It is not
through the application of the venomous and incendiary duo of
chemotherapy and radiotherapy. They are not only extremely
unpleasant to undergo, they also destroy our immune systems and
risk unbalancing our bodies further. We address our cancers by
training our bodies through our minds and our immune systems to put
themselves back on track, to return to their healthy pace of
growth. This is what we never learnt for Louise's sake when she was
alive. She took the full brunt of the medical profession's
hyper-technophilia. She suffered, she deteriorated, she died. Her
surgeon expressed surprise and regret, and no doubt proceeded to
apply the same dark-age potions to others, expressing further
surprise and regret in each's turn. To understand cancer's
relationship with the body is also to understand that cancer does
not spread beyond the immediate tumour. It erupts in more than one
place independently of the existing tumour, yet dependently on the
cancerous and unbalanced states of our bodies.
I have known
people who have had the most advanced states of cancer, medically
documented, who suddenly leapt off their death beds having shed all
trace of their illness. I have known people who simply ignored it
and it went away. The body can cure cancer more easily than many
other illnesses because it is a disease generated by the body
itself, albeit in the presence of external catalysts.
Take paranoia.
If we did not become afraid in the presence of extreme danger, we
would mostly not last long. Fear, flight or fight, is a healthy
reaction to a life-threatening situation. However, to fear anything
and everything, and to believe anything and everything is out to
get us twenty-four hours in a day is not healthy.
Schizophrenia
is similar. Our mind's ability to disaggregate and deconstruct
ideas, to hold a series of thoughts, concepts and hypotheses in
different parts of the brain simultaneously, and in competition
with each other, is valuable in that it helps us view a situation
from all sides, directly, laterally and metaphysically. It is
partly why human beings are so clever. However, for the high-wire
trick to work, we have also to be able to encompass these different
thoughts within a common mesh, to link and gather them all up
again. Schizophrenia is where the tight-rope walker falls off the
high-wire, where the mesh breaks under extreme stress, and each
thought tumbles away into the weightless, gravity-free void all on
its own, independent of, and unrelated to, any other
thought.
The mere
phrase “manic depression” tends to suggest that it is an
overwrought form of depression. Things go well for us, and we are
happy and elated. Things go badly, and we are sad and mildly
depressed. When we are on a high, we cannot continue climbing
forever. We have, at some point, to settle back into stasis, so a
high will ultimately be followed by a low, as in the weather. Mild
depression is a sensible and salutary reaction to fluctuations in
our environment, contributing to the richness of our emotional
landscape. Manic depression, is a Stuker-dive down, without ever
stopping, a roller-coaster plunge into the eternal
abyss.
And now to the
bit I wanted to tell you about: sex again, I am afraid, and if you
are Frank you will say “Heck! Has a fortnight gone by already? Is
it duty night again?” I am afraid so, Frank. Buckle up, and get on
down.
OK, would it
be totally absurd of me to suggest that some men, and even the
majority of them, get just a touch turned on by the sight of a
beautiful naked girl coming towards them, there for the picking? My
guess is that you would recognise that as normal enough. And if the
man is fifty and the girl sixteen, is that still a reasonably
normal reaction? Hell, yes, you say, especially if she is sixteen,
and especially if you are a man of fifty. Big businessman, whopping
great ego seeking inflation, teenage blonde trophy escort, the
lemon tart. And if she were fifteen, with all the outward
appearance of being twenty, and knowing thirty? Rape, we all shout
at once, at least statutory rape. What a difference a day makes, as
the song goes. And if he is sixteen, and he knows that she is
fifteen? Technically statutory rape, we reply, but who is ever
going to prosecute them? And if he is fifty, and she is ten? Gross
perversion, prison, special section, the worst of criminals. Why?
Because it is unheard of for a man to fancy a pretty young girl?
No, because it is an entirely normal, healthy and indeed necessary
urge taken to an extreme.
You have to
feel sorry for paedophiles, don't you? No we don't, you say, eyes
bulging, spit escaping from your lips. They are vile, predatory
creatures, who abuse the innocence of our daughters and ruin their
lives forever.
And that I
grant you. Paedophiles do untold damage to those who are only
starting out in life, to be destabilised forever by the experience.
They should control their urges simply because of the damage they
know they do, especially when they continue on to strangle their
victim. Looking at Dr. Berringer, and knowing that he has sexually
attacked, and frequently raped, nearly a score of under-age girls,
with terrible consequences, what can you observe about him? He is a
highly-respected doctor with a suave, sophisticated and educated
manner; someone you would not suspect of harbouring demonic
passions, never mind giving full rein to them in a relentlessly
predatory stalking of the younger girls of the village. Is he
emotionally vulnerable? He certainly gives not the slightest hint
of it. Is he unbalanced? Almost certainly. Why is that? Well,
partly, because he witnessed his own father sexually abusing his
sisters. At one time it was quite common for the elder daughter to
step in to satisfy her father's appetites while her mother was
indisposed either through illness or childbirth. It may have been a
highly undesirable and damaging state of affairs, but it was so
usual as not even to constitute an extreme.
Dr. Berringer
is fully aware that what he does is entirely immoral in that
society condemns it, and his victims suffer from it. Indeed, he is
the first to condemn paedophilia himself, loud and long, demanding
castration and the death penalty for anyone caught indulging in it.
“It is disgusting!” he snorts to his friends. “We should lock them
up and throw away the keys!” Whether this is before or after
castration, and before or after the death penalty is less
evident.
At least he
does not kill the girls. George Knightly did that, directly or
indirectly, without Dr. Berringer's prior knowledge or approval. He
was a great mopper-up, was George. A very angry man, with some very
strange fetishist practices of his own, most of which he kept in
his head, sublimated beneath the daily grind of financial
audits.
* *
*
Sally Willows
is magnificent. She has an enormous mane of straggly auburn hair,
the flashing eyes of a Latino, and the directness of the knife that
slices through butter.
It is no
wonder that Henry Spence, and not a few of his contemporaries, were
(and maybe still are) smitten by her. Dr. Berringer tried it on
once with her when she was thirteen. Unluckily for him. She gave
him an almighty belt across the head with a piece of broken piping
that happened to be lying close by when he approached her, and
subsequently used her abundant charms to persuade an underworld
type to give her a revolver (yes, the Ruger) that she proceeded to
carry round with her in her handbag. Dr. Berringer, never one to
take a hint unless it was backed by military force, tried it on
with Sally a second time a few months later. She shot him through
the testicles, and told him that the other half of his brain would
get it next time.
Today, though,
she is magnificence saddened. She is examining Tom lying in his
coffin, his scars barely disguised, wondering how she had strayed
so far from her once-adored brother.
It was never a
deliberate act of separation. She had moved away from the village
because there was a wider world elsewhere, and they both gradually
became caught up in their own separate activities. They phoned each
other at least once a month, and even wrote to each other
occasionally, but they have rarely actually seen each other over
the last five years, and if Tom is seeing Sally too, it is not from
this life.
Sally stands
there with two tears dwelling in her eyes. They periodically
interfere with her viewing of Tom. Inwardly, she swears
revenge.
“
Thank you,
Henry,” she says to Henry. “You are so sweet,” and she sweeps off
to visit the one woman of the village who can help her - Brenda.
The villagers observe that she went straight to the pub after
leaving the funeral parlour to get a stiff drink, thereby adding
several shots of presumed vodka to her pure fruit juice.
After last
orders, and the shepherding of the final rams remaining in the bar,
Brenda and Sally sit in a corner and speak to each other earnestly
for nearly an hour. Sally learns some critical information with
which she returns home to Tom's house (and now hers) to
ponder.
* *
*
The people of
Hanburgh attend both the funerals of Tom Willows and of George
Knightly. At Tom's funeral, everyone has a story to tell about him,
most of them risqué and otherwise good-natured. It is a spontaneous
celebration of his life. The vicar, Simon Stanley, stands up and
says “It is the wish of Tom's family that we rather celebrate his
life than mourn his death.” That stops everyone talking, and buries
some of the better stories. Watching Sally, the determined set to
her face, and the thunder cloud of sorrow in her eyes, I would
guess that revenge is far higher up her list of
priorities.
We suffer the
same exhortation at George's funeral the next day. Sadly, there are
no stories to tell about him that match the manner of his death.
There is great speculation. Was he murdered, or was he accidentally
strangled as part of a near-death experiment to heighten sexual
ecstasy? The notion of George in sexual ecstasy is so absurd that
the idea catches on as an extended joke. There are fewer people at
George's funeral than at Tom's, and the weather has turned cold and
wet overnight.
The chilling
sight is that of Mary Knightly. I hate her with all my passion, I
want her destroyed, yet for once I also empathise with her. She
looks already destroyed, lost among the rain and the people. She
has truly lost a friend and ally that she rarely treated well, who
nevertheless adored her. Now she realises what she will miss, and
it has ripped her whole chest away. When she recovers her strength,
she too will seek revenge with an unholy passion. Today she is
bereft, down in the grave with George, holding him for the last
time on this earth.
You,
Inspector, parade the fringes of both funerals, watching for clues,
listening for stray comments. You recognise that your work is to
feed off cadavers and stray pickings. When you visualise yourself,
it is as a vulture, hovering over the scene of the crime, poking
your head intrusively through the windows seeking new
flesh.
Currently you
are concerned as much for the future as for the past. There is
something going on in this village that threatens to be the source
of extreme and continued violence. Hanburgh is becoming Sicily.
There are interlocking vendettas and broken lives, sharp as jagged
glass.
Looking round,
Brenda is sympathetic, especially to those related to, or who have
had relations with, Tom, which accounts for a significant
proportion of the funeral party. Sally Willows is uncontrollably
angry. Mary Knightly is devastated. Frank is nonchalant, but my
Mary is agitated. Sam and Tony are floating above it all, more
intimate with each other than usual. Brian and Kate, who have
brought along their four children, are playing families. I am
watchful. Henry and Hilary are circulating. Simon Stanley presides
and hovers.
What
next?
* *
*
This,
Inspector, is a story I was told directly by Charlie, the fiancée
of Tom Becker, Henry's assistant in the funeral parlour. I wasn't
there at the time (otherwise I would not need to rely on Charlie's
account). It goes something like this: