Ploughing Potter’s Field

‘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?

3

Someone once remarked that I had a certain stillness in my eyes. And that no matter how much my face animated itself around them, it was as if they were disconnected from the surrounding expression.

The description unnerved me, partly because I was trying my best to bed the girl in question and now knew she found me to be somewhat strange and disconnected, but also because it was something I’d noticed myself as an adolescent counting spots in front of the mirror.

Another contemporary way back had told me that if you stared hard enough at your reflection, you’d find the devil grinning back. I tried – and found nothing. Just the stillness.

Others too, have sometimes remarked on my eyes. Sad, they’ve been called, empty, even vacant. I began to study eyes, staring intently with my own duff specimens at others, determined to learn their tricks, syphon some of their vitality. I became expert at eye-widening shock, practised arching my eyebrows for various different studied effects. But however I tried to mask the lifelessness, it remained.

Although to be fair, this optical handicap had its advantages. While some thought I was weird, an equal number were intrigued, or took pity, determined to unlock the secrets behind my flat, staring irises. And to a certain extent, I played along with their games, inventing a variety of instant tragic pasts to gain their sympathy, friendship, sexual favours, or all three. I was in my late teens, insecure, fuelled by hormones, so I can forgive myself for the deception.

But the eyes have stuck. Still as vacant today as when I first perceived them. But now I have knowledge. I know they weren’t always this way. They saw something which denied them their vigour. Then spent thirty years colluding with my subconscious to deny me the memory.

And when I began speaking to Rattigan, the lid to Pandora’s box began to lift a little. His taunts of ‘Fat-boy’ were the catalyst, taking me back to my schooldays, when I was frequently bullied over my weight – which I only very recently recognized was another complex psychological mechanism I’d constructed in order to forget.

For me, the term ‘hindsight’ is the cruellest of puns, but I’m forced to admit it played its part. For the first time in my life, I can really ‘see’, trace the causes of who I was, who I am now, and what happened in between. I see now what I saw then, and realize why the life drained from my eyes.

To begin at the beginning, I nearly killed my own mother before I’d even drawn breath.

Rawlings family legend has it that on the seventh of March 1958, I caused a twenty-two-hour labour, a badly administered epidural and thirty-seven stitches on the poor woman during my sweating, straining way into the world. Something about my head being too big, her feet too small, though I can’t say for certain. Mum and Dad are both dead now, and even though I was present at the birth of both of my own children, I’m still woefully ignorant of the precise biological processes which place a mother’s life in danger as she dilates, contracts and finally bears another life.

More of my mother. Gwendoline Sullivan was much younger than my father, theirs being the almost clichéd match between smitten secretary and stoical boss. She was twenty-three when she married George Rawlings – he a handsomely mature forty-two. And from what I remember, it was that most rare of combinations, a marriage which seemed to truly work. That she loved him utterly, I am totally convinced. Many’s the time I remember to this day the looks she gave, meals she tenderly prepared, dresses she wore in order to please him.

We lived in Swindon. Dad still worked as boss of a small firm of accountants where he had effortlessly wooed his future wife, while Mum stayed put to look after his son. At the time I felt the almost daily trips to his office to take his sandwiches for lunch were surely just another fine example of my parents’ devotion to each other. It was only later that I wondered if Mum was truly happy playing housewife while Dad went to work with his new secretary. Not that anything untoward ever happened, I’m sure. Dad simply wasn’t the type, but I think Mum must have had her suspicions.

Unfortunately, I inherited my mother’s physical genes. Dad stood well over six foot, Mum barely managing to break the five-foot barrier in high heels. I was chubby, too, having none of Dad’s lean wiry physique, and of course, after the birth episode, was destined to be an only child. Sometimes, in the darker moments, I’d lie awake wondering if my loneliness was appropriate punishment for the distress I’d unwittingly caused my mother.

However, any hopes my father had that he’d somehow sired the future heavyweight champion soon withered away as I fell victim to numerous childhood ailments. But, as most fathers do. Dad looked straight through my chubby pallid scrawn, convinced I had the makings of a professional footballer. He’d tried out for Swindon Town as a youngster, and wouldn’t accept I hadn’t inherited his own magic left foot. Most Saturday afternoons would find us at the local ground, me struggling to see above a sea of heads at the exotic green turf beyond.

They were the best of times, made better when my dad would lift me confidently on to his broad shoulders to catch key moments of the game. I’d sit there, elevated, giving my own childish commentary to the action, hands clinging to his ears and thinning hair, feeling him sway slightly if Town scored, bonded.

Often, he’d carry me aloft as we walked back home, weaving through thousands of jubilant or disgruntled fans, nodding at friends – feeling literally ‘on top of the world’.

My bedroom became a temple to the Town, covered in posters, programmes, scarves, away-ticket stubs and league tables. At the age of nine I knew no times-tables, but all of Swindon Town’s cup-winning teams by rote. Dad always put me to bed with tales of the ‘great’ games, vivid descriptions and I clung on to every word.

It was only in later life that my mother’s indifference to the Town began to make sense. I think she resented the hold it had on Dad, perhaps even saw me as a rival for his time and affection. But these are suppositions I can only make with hindsight. An attempt to understand why she appeared distant at times. Perhaps I was the son my father always wanted, which my mother dutifully supplied, who then took her place in his heart. Whatever – I’ll never know, they’re both long gone, and all I’m left with is a frustrating mix of unanswered speculation and distant memories.

I suppose my childhood split itself into two parts. The happy times up till the age of nine or so, then the confusing times after. Dad changed, became withdrawn, older, somehow more fragile. We didn’t go to matches any more, I went with friends, while he sat at home, listening to the radio. But it was no gradual slowing down, it simply happened one weekend, almost as if he’d been replaced by an apathetic, stooping doppelgänger during the night.

I continued following the often disastrous footballing antics of the Town for the rest of the season, returning home to give my indifferent dad an increasingly lacklustre match report, but to be honest, without his enthusiasm, my heart was in it even less than his. Down came the scarves, posters and wall-charts, up went Jane Fonda as Barbarella.

And I too, began to change. My weight ballooned, skin stretching under the constant ingestion of crisps and sweets. My eyes took on their now familiar stillness. I went from a slim young boy into a blob, cocooned from a terrible truth I hadn’t the will or maturity to deal with. The subconscious took over, remoulding me, distancing me from such things I hadn’t the developed intellect to face. And it’s only now, all these years later, as the terrible truth emerges blinking into the sunlight of my new reality, that the choices I have made, the things I’ve done, the hurt I’ve caused others all fit so hideously elegantly into place.

I didn’t eat three Mars Bars every day because I wanted to – it was because I needed to. The promised work, rest and play disguised a deeper, darker need – to forget. And the calories did their job, protecting me from the outside, wrapping me in comforting fat, giving me time to heal before I had the strength to go back and face what had so quickly and violently destroyed both my father’s and my own innocence.

But I digress. Back to the potted biography. Next it was eleven-plus, special tutoring and a place at the Boys’ Grammar. School caps, long lines of fragile little boys lugging briefcases designed for grown-ups, stuffed with battered text and exercise books. Eng. Lang., Eng. Lit., Geography, Art, French, German, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Latin, detention, the cane, school reports, fear, and football. I remember my dad extolling my laughably nonexistent sporting virtues at my interview as a huge ape in a Loughborough tracksuit sneered in anticipation of towel-whipping me in the showers. Which he did, many times.

As expected, I was average at just about everything, with the exception of sport. Here, I seemed to excel as an uncoordinated dunderhead, but being one of the widest, if not tallest, boys in my year, I was made substitute goalkeeper in the St Barts third team. I remember Dad would occasionally make a reluctant trip out to the school touchline, joining other rain-sodden parents jeering my efforts as the ball skidded past me into the back of the net. And always after, during the journey home, few words would pass between us, yet I sensed his disappointment. It was a world away from the distant days when he’d lift me on those once broad shoulders, now stooped and rounded by time.

Moving on, past A levels towards 1976, my first job – tea-boy in a provincial advertising agency. The name’s irrelevant, so was the job. Amazingly, I lost three stone, my virginity, discovered pot, the music of The Doors, Yes and Genesis. I wore flares and discovered a gift for mimicry and joke-telling which won me many friends my age, but few amongst the management. I had a weekly wage and all the brash confidence of youth. I was impregnable, bolstered by hormones and arrogance.

Then fired for skinning up in the toilets.

London beckoned, and I Dick Wittingtoned to its heady call, winding up as a junior copywriter in a ‘mainstream’ ad agency on Dean Street.

Jemimah Eliott arrived, full of my imagined Eastern European promise, our brand-new hotshot account handler. I wrote the copy for the ads she presented to the clients. I went to one or two of these presentations, watching her wage a professional charm offensive on our clients in order to bolster the agency’s profits. She was good, very good, young, attractive. I fancied her like mad, but thought I had no chance. But we used to laugh a lot together, swapping gossip and tall stories about the guys with their own parking spaces who were for ever offering to take her away for a ‘formative think-tank regarding agency strategy for the forthcoming new business pitch’ – adspeak for a quickie in a hotel on expenses.

The senior rejected suits had, of course, discovered the source of their failure to bed her. Jemimah Eliott was, in their hugely embittered opinions, obviously a muff-muncher, rabid dyke, prick-teaser. I remember nodding sagely, laughing inside at their broken egos.