Dead Man Upright

by Derek Raymond

  ‘What it is,’ said the letter, ‘it’s God and Satan fighting it out. It’s each other’s throats they’re after; it’s their battle, and the best thing we can do is leave them to it. You don’t want to know why they’re in there together, do you? No. You lock the door on them and let them scrap.

  ‘And that’s all you know, Detective, and all you need to know – except one mid-afternoon I remember when I was young, there were the two of us coming away from the pub together, we had plenty of bottles, music on full in the pad, bare floorboards, wallpaper peeling off, no curtains to block off the street, the drink, the sudden wrong word, the swift rip of the bra coming off. My fury that I couldn’t enter her, suddenly I’d got her down, then the unending moment when the tip of the knife’s a millimetre your side of her grunting belly – irresponsible! The responsibility comes afterwards, if it can find you. But by then it’s done, and what you get as a pay-off is cheap relief – it’s good and evil that bank the real profits of her slithering about in her blood. Then later you’re aware of the gore all over your dick and you look down quite waggish and tell it you was well out of order there, son, and then when the blood’s dried on you go and lie down on the bed and pick the little crusts off.

  ‘People never really go into the killer’s state of mind. They only think they do – I reckon it’s because they’re too frightened of what they might find buried in themselves if they really got in there. Frightened they couldn’t get out again. So they do it the easy way, waste their time trying to assess a killer by their own standards, it’s just childish, you can’t catch the moon in a butterfly net. They’re up against interchangeable man, the gregarious loner, the man with another man to go with him who’s got to be disguised as a normal man, because he’s not that abnormal that he wants to get caught. All those old prats you see at a safe distance on the box putting the moral point of view about murder, priests and so on, they ought to spend a night with me alone in a room. There’d be no violence – old men and bores don’t turn me on – but we could have a talk, and they’d be singing a very different tune in the morning.

  ‘People ought to see a serial killer when he’s in between times – he’s as safe as a parked car! You could drink a pint with him, you could share a room with him!

  ‘A killer wouldn’t mind being normal – he’s a hyena that would rather be just a man in an armchair, and he can give a good imitation of one, too. If he’s living with others he does his share of the housework and washing-up. Nine days out of ten he’s just someone walking up to the off-licence for beer and cigarettes – people can’t seem to get it through their heads that even if a man’s a killer he’s still got to find a place to live, pay the rent, get a job, buy clothes, go out and get pissed; he feels up, he feels down the same as a normal john. When he feels good he gets up, gets dressed and goes out; when he doesn’t he just sits in his sunny room, contemplating the quiet dust of hell.’

  ‘Do you believe that bit?’ I asked Jones.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact I do. No one can be in the state of turmoil necessary to kill twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘The bad part for me,’ the letter continued, ‘is that when I kill I take all my pleasure at once and then I’ve nothing left for afters. I can’t take things slowly when I’m active. Using a camera to get the pleasure back doesn’t really work either, any more than the keepsakes do. Often I watch the films and I think, sod it, I might as well be watching Mickey Mouse. Even admiring the left-overs in the tins doesn’t really work; dead body-parts aren’t interested in fighting back. The dead don’t care any more what you do, so you wind up feeling frustrated, like someone’s standing there watching you with their hands in their pockets laughing, while you’re just going through the motions. What’s even worse, you know that any minute the fantasy’ll be over and then there’ll be nothing left to do but go through the whole thing again.’

  ‘He’s making a better job of himself now,’ said Jones.

  ‘He’s certainly graphic,’ said Stevenson. ‘I’ve read plenty of killers’ writing, but I’ve never heard anything as clear as that.’

  ‘That’s just what makes him so interesting for our purposes,’ Jones said. ‘When we’ve finished the whole lot will go onto a computer; it’ll be analysed, filed and added to all the rest of what we’ve got. Mind, he’s not typical. Very few of them go on killing into old age like that.’

  ‘There was Fish,’ said Crowdie

  ‘Yes,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘Yes, there was Albert Hamilton Fish.’

  ‘People always try to put themselves in the place of the killer,’ the letter went on. ‘It’s a waste of time, they never get it right because they have to try and deduce it. They imagine that because they see killing as a nightmare, the killer thinks it’s a nightmare, too; he doesn’t, of course. Killing’s an explosion like any other, and when it’s over you just feel sad and empty, and there’s nothing to be done but wait till next time, till you can say, Go on, son, get up to the West End, go trolling the bars, make your opportunity like everyone else.

  ‘You never think any differently. You feel bad sometimes – but then who doesn’t feel bad about some of the things he does sometimes? That’s not going to make a scrap of difference, or anyway not for long – feeling bad never does. Even when you’re sitting on a bus or in the pub or going up to pay the gas bill your mind’s always going to be running on women, it’s a pattern; the only difference is that sometimes your hatred of women is loaded, sometimes it isn’t, it’s a mood – we all get moods. But when you do feel put down, or remember how you’ve been manipulated by a woman, taken advantage of, especially when you’ve been drinking, then you feel yourself being loaded. It’s exhilarating, that is; it’s like being a gun and feeling a clip of ammunition going into your butt; you’re a weapon come alive. The woman you pick doesn’t have to be the one that insulted you – with me it’s my mother, so it couldn’t be, she’s dead; but it might be someone who reminds you of her, that helps.

  ‘Although in extreme cases where you’ve got to act, pretty well any woman who turns up might have to do, depending on the urge – but usually you can choose, and that means you’re making progress, emerging, beginning to show your power, growing up.’

  ‘There’s a bit more at the end on the last page,’ I said to Jones, ‘but none of the end part’s really very interesting.’

  23

  Before going over to the prison to see Jidney, the four of us met in Poland Street in room 202, which was Stevenson’s office.

  ‘I don’t want Jidney to hear this in front of you,’ said Dr Jones. ‘On the other hand, I think it’s advisable that you hear it, it’s bound to come up.’ He rummaged in his briefcase and found an audio cassette. ‘This was with the rest of Jidney’s belongings at Thoroughgood Road,’ he explained. He went over to the tape recorder while the rest of us found ourselves chairs. He said: ‘This was how Daphne Hayhoe died.’

  The tape was Jidney talking to himself.

  ‘I told you right away why you had to go, Daphne. It’s for the same reason that the others had to, so that I can have you to myself without any impurities; once it’s over there cannot possibly be any unexpected disappointments. Then, all being well, I’ll be able to make this great painting of you that we discussed. You may be right in arguing that part of me doesn’t understand what it’s doing, Daphne – what you really mean is that the part of me that wants you to be like me is dead. But it’s got to the point where I would only find you increasingly dull if you went on living, so that we shall have to have each other the only way we can.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said.

  ‘I remember the other night, at the same time as we had that discussion, we discussed one or two practical details regarding Carat Investments, after which I told you I couldn’t wait any more. “We’ve talked long enough now,” I said, “we’ve discussed everything important.”

  ‘Where
upon you said you knew there was no escape.

  ‘Do you remember that, Daphne? You really surprised me when you said that. One minute you were saying you loved me, that you understood, having made your will, left me the houses, opened Carat Investments for me and repeated you wanted to die rather than leave me and because of your parents’ suicide – and now the next thing I suddenly get is this rubbish about there being no escape.

  ‘You said that you would have talked to me about it further if we had had time, but that if I couldn’t control myself and hold back any longer, well then you could see I had no choice. I remember every single word of that. I told you I didn’t mean to use excessive force, but even so you said: “I shall still die, Ronald, and now, at the last moment, I’m not sure I want to. Isn’t there any other way?”

  ‘Well of course there wasn’t, Daphne.’

  ‘The bastard’s proud of himself!’ Stevenson shouted.

  ‘I tried to explain the ritual aspect to you one last time. I remember your face clearly while I was talking to you, and I remember every word I said. “Imagine you are like me and that you have these waves of beauty beating over you,” I said, “spread out over a period of several months; finally they lead up to the climax that you and I are going to have now. If you were an artist – a poet, for instance, or a composer – you would understand right away that what I am talking about is creativity. When I get the urge to create – and I can feel it coming on weeks, months beforehand – I get up one morning and go out all over the city, meet people and draw inspiration from them. Then, having made my choice, I invite my new star home and get to know her, weaving her into an interior ritual of my own, developing an approach to her in exactly the same way an artist develops a feeling for his model.”

  ‘I said to you: “When I conceive, Daphne, which I often do, it’s always in an empty bed. I lie on my back gazing at the stark ceiling, waiting to be fertilised in bare rooms. Darkness is best – places with drawn blinds, neutral and absent with the smell of dust. My experience of women, of beauty, is too intense to be experienced directly; I have to dissect and absorb, and for me to be able to do that properly means that beauty has to be calm. For what is the definition of art? Art, Daphne, is the removal from beauty of every element that is random or unnecessary. To be eternal, beauty must be captured motionless. Nothing irritates me more than that refuge of the second-rate, for instance, the cinema. All those stupid people running about – Dürer or Van Gogh would have had a fit! No: any irresponsible, irrational movement is alien to beauty and detracts from it. The gravity of beauty is its quietness. Beauty is what life was the instant before you caught it. Beauty is a graven figure arrested in a moment of fire. Eternity never dies, Daphne; it remains in the mind forever, enabling the artist to express his act of love.”’

  Stevenson and I listened in a state as close to disbelief as we would probably ever get.

  ‘You said: “But I shall turn to dust, Ronald.”

  ‘ “Please understand, Daphne,” I said, “you were never much more important than dust even when you were alive; you were a vision in my mind.”’

  ‘How does he manage to talk about her in the past when she’s still there in front of him?’ said Crowdie.

  ‘You understood and said: “I have made my peace, Ronald.”

  ‘Our last moments were sad. It was death in slow motion, explained step by step; it was the first time I had explored this avenue so thoroughly, and the extraordinary restraint I had to exercise increased my pleasure enormously. I got her to undress and lie down on the floor, naked, whereupon I tied her up. Then a remarkable thing happened. As she was not in her first youth her singing voice was not very good, being cracked, and hoarse with fear, too, naturally, but as I came over to her with strangling wire and a great hard-on, she closed her eyes with wrinkled lids and sang out firmly:

  Christians, with a gladsome mind,

  Praise the Lord for He is kind,

  And His mercies shall endure,

  Ever faithful, ever sure.’

  The tape crawled off into silence. ‘It reads like a boring catalogue,’ said Cruddie, ‘until you realise it’s all true.’

  ‘You can’t expect a very boring man to make his life sound interesting,’ said Dr Jones.

  24

  The following are extracts from the notes of Dr Argyle Jones, made during a series of interviews with the accused:

  ‘My body’s growing old, and I can’t mend it,

  My life is leaving me, but I can’t end it.’

  Jidney claims he wrote these lines after the death of Judith Parkes during a period of depression – typical of the moods that he claims he endures after each episode, when he says he ‘shrieks in his darkness to be delivered’.

  Background: Jidney educated himself chiefly in jail. He is proud of his good looks, which his mother either ridiculed by forcing him to dress as a girl, or else denied in some other way; she was a child-beater and a child-hater. While serving previous sentences he gained a reputation both with staff and other prisoners for his painting and studies in art, in which he received a degree from the Open University – he also took elocution lessons from a public school detainee which have left him with an almost neutral accent. He expressed what he felt about his achievements in an early interview as follows: ‘I gradually came to feel that by expanding my interests I had acquired a new control over myself, and that the justification for everything I did had become clear. I could abandon various puerile habits, compulsive masturbation, for example, and rationalise my attitude to women through direct confrontation. I was now evolving in a self-affirmative situation.’

  I asked him to elaborate on why he feared women to the extent that he felt compelled to kill them.

  Jidney: ‘There is no question of my ever having been afraid of women.’

  (From Dr Jones’s notes): Jidney is a peculiar-looking, as well as a peculiar-sounding man. Jarring elements are evident which he managed to suppress while at liberty, but which strike the onlooker forcibly now. His speaking voice is out of character with his face, which relapses into savagery when he gets carried away and forgets that I am looking at him, particularly when he is recounting his childhood and youth; whereas when we are discussing his crimes he is almost always objective and offhand in a tone as expressionless as his eyes.

  He usually appears to stare through, not at me; when I return this look he remarks: ‘Oh, I see what’s got you excited – the famous flat look of the psychopath! But I can make my eyes dance, I can make them sparkle – watch.’ He then puts on an animated, expressive look, accompanying it with a smile which he manifestly takes to be natural. I believe he really thinks he has convinced me that his act is real. He says: ‘I see you are looking at my smile now. If you’d known the battle I had to be allowed a steel mirror in my cell; I could never have learned that smile without it.’ But he is incapable of any truly spontaneous gesture at all; everything he does or says is studied. All the same, he is very sensitive to my reactions to him; he carefully monitors every response I make.

  Overall, he reacts in the way I would expect of a patient whose intelligence has replaced his personality which, for as long as there is no trigger to activate it, is absent or asleep, dead.

  We went into the day’s interview.

  Jidney: ‘No one will ever know me. The view of me that others have in inapposite – what useful judgment can onlookers pass on me when they have never known my brand of love?’

  Jones: ‘Can you describe that love?’

  Jidney: ‘It involves the destruction of everything capable of love – of women in my case. Love equals manipulation. The death of one woman stands for the destruction of all women. If love equals punishment, then I exist to prove that hatred can punish also. The woman has the same symbolism here as that of the pascal lamb.’

  Jones: ‘That is one of your preferred images.’

  Jid
ney: ‘Yes, God is risen, but he has got out of bed in dark clothes.’

  Jones: ‘Do you feel now that your actions, these crimes that you have committed, were wrong?’

  Jidney: ‘Is it wrong to want to have a crap? What do you mean, wrong?’

  Jones: ‘I meant objectively wrong.’

  Jidney: ‘I can only be objective about situations. I can’t be objective about women. Applied to women, it depends if I am there. I don’t know what you mean by objectivity in this case.’

  Jones: ‘Yet you have claimed to have feelings of remorse.’

  Jidney: ‘You must have misunderstood. All I experience are feelings of extreme disappointment, feelings that it will go better next time.’

  Jones: ‘And has it ever?’

  Jidney: ‘No. Each time it’s simply a body, an object on a floor or lying in a chair. It has also become a liability, something that has to be moved. It is just an object like a table. All I have that lives are memories – of one person or another passing from life into death. Nothing else. I stop vibrating when the woman stops vibrating. Apart from the memories, apart from what is irreversibly over, I feel I have been blindly singled out.’

  Jones: ‘Singled out by whom?’

  Jidney: ‘By no one. By my drive to affirm. It’s always the same. I am a lone instrument of punishment, with recourse to no one.’

  Jones: ‘Is that a primarily sexual drive?’

  Jidney: ‘The sexual part of it is symbolic of majesty.’

  Jones: ‘You are being most articulate.’

  Jidney: ‘I have educated myself.’

  Jones: ‘Turning to another aspect, you had no hesitation in profiting financially from your victims.’

  Jidney: ‘Of course not. At school the master used to say: “Industry is what makes the wheels turn.” Gain is logical.’

  Jones: ‘And that was uppermost in your mind when you got Daphne Hayhoe to set up Carat Investments for you? After you had persuaded her and at least one other of your victims to make a will in your favour?’