Isolation - a heart-stopping thriller, Shutter Island meets Memento

by Neil Randall

  The gravity of his words went some way to refocusing my mind.

  “So, coupled with the fact that you can’t verify your whereabouts at the time of each murder, we’re back to square one.”

  “But I swear to you, I haven’t got anything to do with the murders. You said yourself there’s nothing that can link me to the crime scenes. I—”

  “Not quite.” Watson pushed a photograph across the tabletop. “We found this at your flat.”

  It was a picture of the wooden box Liz had bought from Portobello Road Market.

  “Your girlfriend told us that she purchased the item in the days following the first killings. But don’t you think it’s a little strange, a little too coincidental, that the box, when tested, showed D.N.A. traces of the dead girls from the hotel room?”

  I tried to look shocked, even though I was already in possession of this information.

  “In your absence, we spoke to Miss Green. Her story regarding the box doesn’t check out at all. So, we’re going to have to go back to the very beginning and work our way forward, all the way through to your whereabouts this morning, in the hours after Gideon Forbes-Powers alleges that you attacked him, and the time you turned yourself in at the station.”

  In excruciating detail, we covered ground we’d already covered two or three times before: where was I on the night of the hotel room murders, the photograph at the office, the phones calls, the diary entries, the letters. Throughout, imperceptibly at first, but mounting in degrees following each question, I realised that I was now very much a genuine suspect in the killings. The tone of the policemen’s voices had changed, hardened. There were no polite thank yours, no let ups, just an avalanche of questions.

  “On your personal computer,” said Kendrick, “in your browsing history, we found links to many sites relating to the Native American legend of the horned owl. In particular, detailed diagrams of the bird in question, diagrams matching the markings on each murder victim.”

  “I’m sure you did. But if you checked the dates of those internet searches, you’d see that they were all conducted after the first set of killings.”

  The way both policemen stiffened in their chairs told me that this fact had been duly noted, that I’d just picked a gapping hole in their flimsy theory about me being the killer. Still, there were more questions, tenuous, probing, accusatory in nature, the same things repeated time and again, like skilful traps, lain to snare me, to get me to trip myself up. But things which only made me feel sharper of mind, wary, careful of every word that exited my mouth.

  “That brings us on to this morning,” said Watson. “Undeniably – well, a young man had to have his left arm amputated from the shoulder – some kind of altercation took place in Mrs Forbes-Powers’ basement. To all intents and purposes, it looked like a freakish accident involving the dumb waiter. However, as we mentioned before, Gideon Forbes–Powers alleges that you and he were lovers, that you argued heatedly over some literary work, and that in the ensuing argument, you lodged his arm into the aforementioned appliance, with the full intention of seriously injuring him.”

  “That’s not true! I was locked up down there against my will. Seeing the dumb waiter as my only hope of escape, I crawled inside hoping to get out via the kitchen. In trying to stop me, Gideon’s arm got trapped. When Mrs Forbes-Powers came down to rescue him, I made a run for it.”

  “Still,” said Kendrick, “that doesn’t account for your whereabouts afterwards. If you’d have been kidnapped like you claim, surely you’d have headed straight for the police station.”

  I hesitated before answering. In the car back from the farmhouse, Bannister had told me that both he and Michelle’s parents would back up my story, that they would produce the diary entries they’d previously withheld, that, in short, they’d do anything they could to verify my claims.

  Therefore, I told the policemen exactly what had happened.

  “Okay, okay,” said Watson. “We’ll talk to Mr Bannister and the missing woman’s parents, to confirm this part of your story. But, in the circumstances, you could all be in a lot of trouble – absconding from the scene of a crime, withholding vital information.”

  There was a long silence.

  “For now,” said Kendrick, “let’s review the facts as you’ve presented them to us. Let’s look at what you’re asking us to believe: a man with a history of mental illness walks into a police station one morning saying he’s got information regarding a brutal killing, a photograph sent to his workplace, marked for his attention. Only the photograph has been mysteriously stolen overnight. He claims to have received anonymous phone calls regarding one of the prime suspects. Then the therapist of his former counselling group is found murdered in the exact same grisly fashion as the first two victims. This man then goes missing for two whole days. An antique box with traces of the original victims’ blood is found at his flat, along with related links on his computer. While he’s away, the prime suspect is also found brutally murdered. And then this innocent man turns up at the police station claiming to have been abducted, locked away by an O.A.P. in a basement with her homosexual son, who he may or may not have been having a physical relationship with. And now, to cap everything off, he tells us that he didn’t come straight to the police station to report his kidnapping because a private detective, who’s not actually a private detective but a member of a vigilante group fighting for the rights of victims of domestic abuse, just happened to be passing the house when he escaped, and took him to meet with the missing girl’s parents, to discuss another set of fictitious diary entries.”

  I put my head in my hands. Having the facts relayed in such plain, sober, matter-of-fact tones made me realise how preposterous my story sounded.

  “Finally.” Watson slipped some papers out of another file. “At the murder scene, we found a strange document amongst Jeffrey Fuller’s final possessions, what appeared to be a novel or memoir of some kind. In the hours since his body was discovered, we’ve had our creative writing people evaluate the manuscript. Here are their initial findings, a basic outline of the plot.”

  He handed me the papers.

  The Therapist’s Dialectics

  Basic Outline of Plot

  Two men, both highly unstable, delusion mental patients, are locked inside a padded cell. This, as the reader soon discovers, is part of an advanced form of treatment – ultimate transference, as it is referred to later in the text. Each morning, a therapist, a senior, all-powerful figure, like a minor deity, enters the padded cell and schools the patients in techniques to ease the psychic blockages which are holding them back in life. At length, he relays his philosophical worldview, in the form of wordy epigrams, all of which have some relation to their mental problems. To help them relax, to become more responsive to the programme, various injections and potent medications are administered. The patients are then encouraged to discuss their backgrounds, past problems, their fractious relationships with their parents, how they always felt starved of genuine affection, which led to serious self-esteem issues in later life, where they could never initiate any kind of intimate relationship. They are encouraged to shout and scream, to help release any negative energy. After this outpouring is over, the patients are then instructed to show each other a little affection. At first, this consists of hugging and kissing at an appointed hour, when waking, after taking their meals, when turning off the lights to sleep at night. As the treatment progresses, so does the required level of intimacy. Now they are forced to kiss with open mouths, to strip each other of their clothes, to caress and fondle each other’s genitals, to perform mutual masturbation, oral sex. All of which ultimately leads to penetrative intercourse, the giver and receiver determined by the dynamic of their developing relationship. After initial resistance, each patient comes to rely on the other. The intimate moments they share, the warmth, the companionship, not to mention the blissful physical release that accompanies ejaculation, become special, a fundamental feature of their existence
. In short, they seem to fall in love with each other.

  I couldn’t believe it. I almost dropped the papers to the floor. The plot was almost identical to The Magister’s Analects, only the backdrop, characters and situation had been altered.

  “Is something wrong, Mr Barrowman? Does this story ring any bells with you? And by that I mean, did, to the best of your knowledge, Dr Rabie encourage his patients to become involved physically. Did part of his therapy revolve around sexual relations, like the characters described in the story?”

  “No, no,” I said, not knowing how to even go about explaining the connection between Gideon’s and Fuller’s manuscripts. “That’s ridiculous. And it’s, erm…been a long day, a long week. I’m really tired, out on my feet.”

  “Understood.” Watson gathered up some papers from the desk and slipped them into files. “We’ll call it a day now. You will, however, be kept in a cell here overnight. Not only do we feel this is the safest place for you at the moment, but we’ll need to talk to you again, first thing tomorrow morning.”

  I was too weary to argue, but not weary enough to refrain from asking a couple of questions that had been burning away at me ever since I sat down in the interview room.

  “Before you go. What’s happened to Liz? Presumably, you’ve questioned her in detail.”

  “That’s correct. And we’ll be speaking to her again in due course, maybe after her next voluntary shift at The Samaritans.”

  “But is she all right?”

  “As all right as can be expected,” Kendrick answered this time. “She is, understandably, very concerned about your welfare and–”

  “When can I see her, then?”

  “You can’t,” said Watson. “Not for the time being. With so much uncertainty surrounding your claims re: the wooden box, it would be imprudent to allow you to confer in any way.” Both men got to their feet. “Until tomorrow, then, Mr Barrowman. Have a bite to eat. Rest up. We’ve still got plenty more to get through.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  That night, in an ugly holding cell, I had the strangest, most unsettling of dreams. In this dream, I saw myself in the same interview room I’d been questioned in earlier. Only now, I was a policeman interrogating Bannister.

  “Okay, Mr Bannister, now we know you weren’t completely truthful with us, we’re going to have to go back to the very beginning and work our way forward, from the moment your ex-wife starting assaulting you, through to your first meeting with Miss Rouse, involvement with the Horned Owl Society, and your ultimate investigations into her disappearance.”

  “Right. I see.” He lowered his eyes. “Only it’s not the easiest thing to talk about. Me: the big macho man, former special ops, a soldier who’d seen more than his fair share of action, being unable to control his wife at home. But that’s exactly how it was. For the life of me, I don’t know what went wrong with our marriage. When we first met, Irene was a very feisty, headstrong character, but I liked that about her. It showed she had what it takes to be a forces wife. The first few years were a bit hectic. We moved around a lot, were posted all over Europe. But, like I said, Irene didn’t seem to mind this nomadic lifestyle. She made friends easily, didn’t get too attached to people or places, or too down in the dumps during my long absences away on tours of duty.

  “The first time she hit me, and it was no mere slap but a brutal, full-bloodied punch to the nose, I didn’t know how to react. The argument had been so trivial, so commonplace, I can’t even remember what it was about. Now, looking back, I suppose she was testing me out, testing the boundaries, how far she could push things. Perhaps she even saw it as some kind of twisted challenge, to dominate a man of my profession. Whatever was behind it, it caused a violent haemorrhage in our relationship, one neither of us could stem.

  “Weeks passed without another incident or flare up. Then, just like the first time, almost completely out of the blue, she struck me time and again, pulled my hair, scratched my face, grabbed my genitalia until I literally had to beg for mercy. It was baffling – the way I let her assault me like that. Because as the violence worsened, I found it increasingly difficult to put up any kind of defence of myself. I don’t know why. Maybe I became resigned to my fate. Maybe I realised that I could never raise my hands to a woman, especially my own wife. Maybe Irene seized upon the fact, exploiting my innate sense of decency. That’s why the attacks became so violent and prolonged.

  “Things quickly escalated. It got to the point where I found it difficult to mask the black eyes, the split lips, the ugly gashes. I ran out of excuses: bumping into inanimate yet evidently vindictive objects, or trapping my hand in a car door.”

  Moving on, I asked Bannister how he’d met Michelle.

  “At a meeting for victims of domestic abuse. I—”

  “Wait.” I raised a hand, gesturing for him to stop talking. “This could be important, a point that needs clarifying. If you met Michelle at such a meeting, and if the diaries and letters are, as we now believe, false, this is another indication of the lengths she went to to play out the role of the victim, to convince herself that she had actually been abused by her former lover and parents.”

  “Exactly,” said Bannister. “Because of all the attendees, Michelle was the only one who didn’t break down and cry.”

  “Didn’t that in itself make you suspect that she was perhaps fabricating the story?”

  “No, no, not at all. In my experience, different people deal with different situations in different ways. Being so brave and articulate could just have been her own unique coping mechanism.”

  “Okay. That sounds fair enough. But how did you become friends? Did you just get talking after a meeting?”

  “More or less. In fact, it was Michelle who approached me, taking me aside, saying she felt great empathy, that it couldn’t have been easy for a man to get up and admit to all those things, and that if I wasn’t doing anything later, would I like to go and have a drink, so we could talk some more.”

  “And how long before she mentioned the Horned Owl Society?”

  “Not long. About thirty minutes. Aware of my military background, she said I’d be the ideal person to help get the organisation up and running.”

  “And what was your original mission statement?”

  “To name and shame abusers, to offer help and support to the victims – only with no, and Michelle couldn’t emphasise the point enough, violence. Already she’d compiled a pretty comprehensive database; the names and addresses of alleged or convicted abusers. That’s where I came in.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, with my training, the task of, for the want of a better expression putting the frighteners on someone, wasn’t particularly difficult.”

  “I see. But how far would you go, bearing in mind that the organisation was to remain non-violent.”

  “We’d start by sending the abuser a photo-shopped picture of themselves, faces bloodied and bruised, mirroring that of their victims. These we usually blew up to A3 size, just for impact. Along with the photograph, we’d include a copy of The Legend of the Horned Owl, a Native American fable about a child born with the mark of death hanging over him, and the lengths his father goes to protect him.”

  “To indicate a revenge motif?”

  “Exactly. Only the people we invariably targeted were of incredibly low intelligence, and this went right over their heads; it didn’t have the desired effect. Realising this, I started visiting their homes at night, with a mock-up owl, no more than a puppet on a pole, which I would bash into their bedroom windows, scaring the wretched abusers out of their minds.”

  “And at this stage, did that constitute the entire scope of your organisation’s objectives –campaigns of petty harassment?”

  “No, no. We put posters up in town centres, in shops, listing the abuser’s crimes. We put flyers through letter-boxes, warning local people. We made sure any abuser knew that we knew what they were all about. And in terms of results, we forced
these bastards with potential to abuse again out into the open.”

  I hesitated before asking my next, crucial question.

  “And during this period, I’m presuming you and Miss Rouse became close? You became lovers?”

  Bannister shook his head. “We could never be lovers, only companions.”

  “Why not?”

  Bannister gulped back some saliva. “Be – Because Irene, she took a knife to me one night, she cut me, between the legs, my – my…she physically emasculated me…”

  Loud bangs sounded against the cell door. I jolted upright just as the bright overhead lights came on, the key turned in the lock, and Kendrick and Watson came rushing in.

  “What?” I said, rubbing my eyes. “What is it?”

  “Does the name Scott Richmond mean anything to you?” Watson almost shouted.

  “Scott Richmond,” I repeated slowly, a vision of Liz’s psychotic ex-boyfriend rising to the forefront of my mind. “Yes it does. He, erm…used to go out with my girlfriend, Liz.”

  “Well, his body’s just been found in an industrial bin round the back of the main council building, close to your office, in fact.”

  “What?”

  “And that’s not all,” said Kendrick. “Disregarding the horrific injuries this man suffered prior to death, something had been shoved down his throat: a photograph of the original murder scene. Maybe the very same photograph sent to your office last week.”

  In a daze, I just sat there as they asked me question after question.

  “And you say Miss Green arranged for a few family friends, who may or may not be part of the criminal fraternity, to pay Mr Richmond a visit, to warn him off, to stop him from harassing you in the future?”