by Rick Gekoski
Brian Masters, quoted by Anna Gekoski, Murder By Numbers: British Serial Sex Killers Since 1950
I don’t know what it is teenagers do in their bedrooms that requires they be in there so frequently, and I’m not sure I want to know. Especially these days, when a typical teenage bedroom is like an electronic warehouse, with computers with wi-fi and broadband, the latest mobile phones, television, camcorders, whizzo speakers and all sorts of gadgets I can’t understand. Becoming instantly intimate with strangers in chat rooms, transmitting images of themselves over MySpace and YouTube – Broadcast Yourself! Be a Celebrity! – why do they feel so comfortable, so secure, in this electronic environment? Why can’t they just go upstairs and spritz over their books like we did?
It was bad enough twenty years ago, when Anna had access to none of the above, yet was still largely absent from ongoing family life, doing something or other in her bedroom. Talking on the phone incessantly, trying on skirts to see which was shortest, and blouses to confirm which could be seen through most comprehensively. But Barbara and I knew what she was mostly doing up there, and that was reading. We’d find her propped up in bed at any time of day or night, a paperback in her hands. We felt relieved, and proud of her: she read voraciously, at almost a book a day pace, so there was no need to worry about her time being used unproductively. This was reprehensibly naive of us, and dated from that period in which I felt that reading was, in some simple way, good for you.
Within a couple of years, I began my becoming less intelligent period, reading a thriller a day, and immediately passing them on to Anna. It was immense fun reading together, and discussing our favourites – Carl Hiaasen, Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, Harlan Coben, Lawrence Block, James Harvey – at least when we could remember them. We ingested books together like sharing meals, and remembered as little about most of them as of last Thursday’s breakfast. Cereal? Bacon and eggs? What does it matter?
I had purchased a flat in Primrose Hill in 1986, and opened it as an office for my new rare books business. I’d spend three nights a week there, and return home for long weekends, which was both a sensible business plan and a necessary marital one, because it was yet another period in which Barbara and I found each other’s constant presence abrading. I purchased the flat entirely on my own, using money from my father’s legacy – she never even came down to look at it – as a bolt hole into which I could escape for half the week. It initiated a period of great happiness and excitement for me, in my London incarnation, with the tricky marital negotiations of the weekends small price to pay, amply compensated by the chance to see the children. Bertie, then aged seven, didn’t like the look or smell of it.
‘Are you and mum separated?’ he asked me, when it became clear that I was going to be away half the time.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I prevaricated. ‘Separations are for people who only have one house. We have two, and we use them both. And I need to be in London for my business, don’t I?’
He was smart enough to see through this, and continued to seek reassurance.
‘Look, dad,’ he said, ‘I’m a simple boy and I like a simple answer. Are you separated or not?’
‘Not.’
He looked relieved, though not entirely satisfied. The ‘simple boy’ persona was, already, one of his life strategies. Of natively cheerful disposition, his way of dealing with discord was largely to deny it, which worked pretty well for him most of the time. Relentlessly positive in his selection of memories – an admirable quality – his account of his childhood has managed to blank out many of the problems of his parents’ marriage. If he was later to pay some price for this psychic vigilance, in occasional sleeplessness and need to recheck that the doors are locked, it seemed, on the whole, rather a good deal.
Anna took the opposite position. When I got home from London on Thursday evenings she wouldn’t talk to me, stayed in her room reading a book, her head turned away when I went upstairs to say hello. Reading was what she did when she was particularly angry; it is no wonder that she soon became addicted to thrillers and tales of serial killing.
She was often, sadly, a better reader of the state of our marriage, of how dangerously the tensions had risen, how fragile the emotional situation was, than Barbara and I were, and she had assumed from an early age the anxious role of watchdog and peace-maker. She knew what my regular absences meant: that Barbara and I were estranged, and that I had abandoned her. She glowered with that ingrowing rage that children who are powerless to halt the inevitable frequently feel, as their lives slowly morph into undesirable new forms.
On a Friday morning she still hadn’t entirely forgiven me, but she was genuinely glad that I was home, and we would meet over the neutral ground of the kitchen table before she went to school. I’d give her a huge hug, and she would respond tentatively at first, firming up the pressure as the seconds went by. It was an immense relief to me each time, and heartbreaking.
‘I’m glad to be home, chicken,’ I’d say. She loved being called ‘chicken’, a nickname that dated back to her infancy, when I made up stories of a family of chicken-midgets who lived in my beard. She was one of them, and was happy psychically to remain so in some small part of herself. It was a process fraught with regressive possibility, which made it necessary that she develop at some point a strong alter ego to counterbalance this ongoing childhood persona.
I don’t think it was on my recommendation that Anna first read Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, which was published in 1989. It wasn’t the sort of thriller I much like. I think I read it at her suggestion, rather than she on mine. I hope this is right, because I would feel guilty having introduced her to such contagious material. There was my little chicken, filling her head with horrible images. Not like those from normal thrillers, which are usually sanitized by genre, for The Silence of the Lambs insistently reinforces and recommends its grisly core images of cannibalism, kidnapping and murder, gloats over them. Assuming one is susceptible, how is one to get that out of one’s head?
The novel is based on an absurd premise, which sadly never quite becomes laughable – a serial killer is kidnapping fat girls to harvest them for their hides, which he wears as special party outfits – and features the chillingly memorable Hannibal Lecter, incarcerated for multiple murders and acts of cannibalism, restrained in his cell, masked, and kept at more than arm’s length by his warders, who fear for their lives if he gets his teeth on them. Dr Lecter, ironically and alas, is psychiatry’s most brilliant interpreter of the fantasies and procedures of serial killers of the most pathological sort. So it is to him that the FBI turns when they are stumped by the murders of one ‘Buffalo Bill’, as the newspapers have christened him, whose victims have begun to show up as eviscerated corpses in a series of watery sites. Surely, reasons Jack Crawford, Section Chief of the FBI’s Behavioural Science unit (that deals with serial killers), Dr Lecter might have some insight into the crimes which the Bureau’s vaunted VICAP profiling system is not helping to explain? But it’s a remote possibility – even if he does know something, Lecter is unlikely to do more than play with his interrogators – and Crawford, whose adored wife Bella is dying of cancer, has neither the time nor the energy to pursue the lead. He sends Clarice Starling instead.
It is a sign of how little hope he has invested in the line of thought. Though she (like Anna) has degrees in criminology and psychology, as well as having worked in a mental health centre, Starling is only a first-year Quantico trainee, and palpably no match for Lecter. Nobody is. Crawford sends her anyway, prompted by an unspoken desire to test her and to further her career, and on a hunch that Lecter might speak to an attractive (and naive) young woman more openly than he would to a more seasoned operative. Anyway, there’s nothing to be lost, and Starling is keen.
The book then plays itself out predictably. Starling and Lecter form an odd mutual attachment, more murders take place, Lecter offers some ambiguous clues, and then escapes from gaol, Starling ends up in deathly ba
ttle with the killer, almost loses her life, but emerges, heroic and triumphant, having rescued the most recent hostage on the very morning on which she was to be flayed. Recovering from her ordeal, she receives a letter from Dr Lecter, predicting that this will be the first of many such experiences for her: ‘Because it’s the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.’
Identification with the victim is the key: the heroine is saving herself, and will need continually to do so. You can see how a girl might be moved by such an image. Anna was not then, never has been, an extroverted person. She has a bruised tender heart, conducts her meditations inwardly, comes slowly and undemonstratively to her conclusions. So it was quite impossible to assess or to measure the effect that the figure of Clarice Starling was having on her inner world. (A starling was a curiously appropriate bird, having Anna’s own dark plumage and relative shortness of stature.) She contracted Clarice Starling much more violently than I had, at the same age, caught Holden Caulfield. But in Anna’s case, aside from acknowledging that she thought both the book and film of The Silence of the Lambs ‘pretty good’, one had no idea what subtle transformation she was undergoing inwardly.
She didn’t either. Just as a tourist returning from an obscure land may contract a disease but not have the first outbreak for a number of years, so too Anna was unaware of harbouring a dangerous virus, caught like some sort of avian flu. There were occasional clues, but too easily misinterpreted. A few years after first reading The Silence of the Lambs, when she had started at York University, she went to Paris with her boyfriend (later her estimable and loving husband) Steve Broome, and he bought her a baseball cap as a souvenir. It wasn’t very Gallic. It was a simple French blue, to be sure, but it bore the white letters FBI on the front. She wore it like a uniform, proudly and incessantly. We all thought it was cute, this pretty, slight-figured girl in her FBI hat. We didn’t know she was serious.
Like me, and pretty much like my father, she’d gone to read English and philosophy at university, though she individuated herself a little, in family terms, by dropping the English within a few weeks.
‘I don’t understand the questions they keep asking,’ she said of her professors, ‘much less what would count as an answer to them.’ She felt happier with the hard edges of philosophy, which was less vague, less personal, based on argument rather than opinion. In those days Arts professors announced that their subjects should be pursued for ‘their own sakes’, though what English or philosophy were, such that they had a sake, was never divulged. Anna certainly didn’t want to teach – she was too diffident even to lead a seminar when requested to by her teachers – so I assumed she was simply educating herself, developing the tenor of her rather sharp analytical mind, and that vocational yearnings were not part of her short-term thinking.
It came as some surprise, then, towards the end of her final year, when she announced she was applying to do post-graduate work at Cambridge in criminology.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked incredulously, unaware of her identification with Agent Starling.
‘So that I can apply to Quantico, and train as a profiler.’
‘To the FBI? Like your hat?’
‘That’s where they do it.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘I could qualify. I’m an American citizen.’
I paused, to give this my full attention, and to take it seriously. We were about to define a turning point in her life. I thought for a while. She waited patiently.
‘What’re you, crazy?’
The next thing I knew, of course, was that I was helping her to fill out the application. We read the course description with care, and I was relieved to learn that what most criminologists did was to study the effects of street lighting on urban crime, to tabulate this, and provide a statistical model for that. Anna sneered. A criminologist studies crime, right? And the biggest and worst crime is murder, and the king of murderers is the serial killer, right? With this regal if peculiar line of thought, she began composing an essay describing her macabre interests, to accompany her application. Great! Given that ninety-five per cent of candidates for the course were rejected, Anna was positioning herself nicely for a quick dismissal, after which she could pick from some sensible options, like buying shoes for Harvey Nichols (she’s addicted to shoes) or becoming an editor at a nice publishing house that does thrillers.
But she got in. She did well. She wrote her thesis on British serial sex killers. She revelled in Cambridge life, studied hard, drank and partied a lot, had fun. The year seemed over in a flash, and to have delayed the inevitable. No, she was not going to become a profiler – the very thought of the training as an FBI agent was a sufficient deterrent – and the question what to do next? arose once again. A PhD based on more of the same? No, I was unprepared to fund it. Doctorates are for people who want – or at least are willing – to teach.
Giles Gordon, who adored Anna, came up with the answer. Why not extend her MPhil thesis into a book? It was a sexy topic, and she was a sexy girl, and the combination of the two, he recognized, would be distinctly saleable.
‘I can’t write a book!’ said Anna. ‘I’m not that good a writer, and I don’t have enough confidence.’
Giles smiled reassuringly.
‘It’s a terrific idea,’ he said, ‘starting with the childhood of a serial killer and seeing how and why they develop. Just do them, one at a time, like a series of essays. Don’t think: book. You’ll be fine.’
Over the next twelve months she read, did research, wrote letters to incarcerated serial killers, even consulted Hirschfeld’s Sexual Anomalies and Perversions to read the chapter on Sexual Murder. (I’d skipped that one.) In a further year she had finished a long book entitled Murder By Numbers, a study of British serial sex killers since 1950, which was published by André Deutsch, who had outbid Macmillan and Hodder for the rights. At exactly the same time I was selling – also through Giles – my book about Premiership football, Staying Up, and when Anna and I met, instead of swapping thrillers we would exchange chapters, and make encouraging comments.
But the enterprises were not comparable. I was hanging out with footballers Gordon Strachan, Gary MacAllister and Dion Dublin, and going to matches at Highbury and Anfield, while she was in the constant company, figuratively but harrowingly, of the Yorkshire Ripper, the Moors murderers, of Fred and Rose West, Dennis Nilsen and other predators and maniacs. It was radioactive material, con tagiously unstable and explosive, and (like Homer Simpson) she was ill-equipped to handle it safely. Every day, at her desk or away from it, with frightening assiduousness, Anna was thinking and dreaming about sadists who raped and slaughtered vulnerable young women: of people who wanted to murder her, she fitted the demographic perfectly. (Interestingly, the major readership of true crime books is women in their twenties and thirties.)
Barbara and I worried for her, fussed over her, offered cups of tea, homeopathic remedies, and counsel, but were reassured by her stoic engagement with her task. She was fascinated by the material, and if she identified with the victims it was partly in order to give them a voice, and hence a symbolic reprieve. She was the agent who could go into the darkness and emerge, if not with a rescued girl, at least with a story, a point of view, and a cause. As a writer she also rescued the part of herself that had always felt raw, exposed, and vulnerable: she became the Clarice Starling both of, and to, her own darkest imaginings.
She wrote with frightening intensity, propelled by a series of forces of which fear was probably the greatest. Writer’s fear: of not being good enough, of getting it wrong, writing badly, thinking slackly, opening herself to criticism. She was, after all, only twenty-two. Anxious on her behalf – my anxiety for her was psychological rather than intellectual – I attached myself to the emerging manuscript as if my presence could help to ward off the insidious forces with which she was grappling. She was writing every day about the murders of young women just like herself.
How could she avoid being dragged into an abyss of identification with her victims, however much she was employing her inner Clarice Starling on their (and her own) behalf? She was aware of the dangers, she maintained, but in control of them. What she wanted was help of an editorial not a psychological kind. Was her Introduction good enough? Did the prose flow? Was the chapter on the Wests reading all right? How could she frame a Conclusion?
I edited that manuscript, blue pencil in hand like a sabre, as if I could defend Anna from the demons that it both described and threatened to unleash. They attacked me, certainly enough, and unless I was ceaselessly vigilant my head would fill with terrible images. Surely hers would as well? I have always been anxious for her. From the moments I first held her after her birth, she has seemed to me so delicate a gift that she would always need constant, unobtrusive and benign watching over. She developed into a remarkably loving and fiercely loyal little girl, whose attachments to both people and objects were almost comical in their intensity. When she was four, she howled when our old sofa was sold, and attached herself to its legs so the removal men couldn’t take it from the house. In supermarkets she would insist that we buy the dented tins, so that they wouldn’t be left alone, sad and unwanted on the shelf.
When she was little I would take her to our Victoria Park playground, and she would insist on climbing the steps of the large slide, all seventeen of them, to a height of some twenty feet. As she reached the top, and her hands let go of the rail, she would teeter slightly, right herself, and prepare to sit down. Below her, on the paved tarmac, I would shuffle from left to right as she swayed, arms held out, hoping to catch her, in her fuzzy brown jacket, as she lost her balance and plummeted down, to smash herself against the ground. I could envisage her little body, twisted and broken as she landed, just on the wrong side of the slide, as I dived and failed to save her.