Dead Man Upright
Page 18
Jidney: ‘Everyone has to live. I know what poverty means. I grew up in it. The vision that “most people” have of the world is non-dimensional; they have no conception of depth, richness, colour, no idea of the elaborate ritual of pain and terror. The depression after the event is a small price to pay for self-fulfilment. I like to drink and talk to the victim for weeks, months, all night and all day. In some cases – with Daphne Hayhoe, for example – even the victim became fascinated with her destiny. As for hatred, it is co-equal with love; I experienced that with my mother. Before she became an alcoholic, which happened around the time I was born, neighbours told me she was a strict churchgoer, a member of the Lewisham Sisterhood Of Faith and yet, morally upright though she was, she could not leave her fanny alone as she forced me to witness. She also had to punish me for having witnessed it, but gradually I persuaded myself that I was disembodied so as to reduce the pain.’
Jones: ‘What factors influenced your choice of victim?’
Jidney: ‘Only women who were very prudish about sex really counted.’
Jones: ‘Were you generous with them? Financially, I mean. You had plenty of money. For instance, were you ever generous to Flora?’
Jidney: ‘I wish I could have just bought a nice coat as a surprise for my Flora.’
Crowdie: ‘Flora is dead.’
Jones (to Jidney): ‘That is not what I asked you.’
Jidney: ‘Flatter and spoil those who are about to die, pay them all the attentions of a lover – that’s only right – give them everything they want except the one thing they can’t have, myself, because it isn’t there.’
Jones: ‘Will you please try to answer the question.’
Jidney: ‘Well, no. I wouldn’t say generous. You see, as for money, I have always lived in a very quiet way. I was a businessman. Property.’
Jones: ‘So you are implying that you were mean with money.’
Jidney: ‘I want to be quite clear about this – Flora told me I had a most engaging personality, a kind word for everyone, a natural charm that many people couldn’t resist. The people who do resist me treat me as a joke because I have no sense of humour, of how I look from the outside. I despise such people; they are of no interest to me at all. They are not victim quality. I know my victims at once; the first glance exchanged, and there is the sacrificial message.’
Jones: ‘Were you ever aware that you were putting on an act with your victims?’
Jidney: ‘Not necessarily aware, no. Of course I am a natural actor. If I had had the training I should doubtless have been a great actor. I have a sense of ritual. The void, the black depression, the violence – that surfaces only on close acquaintance, but by then of course it’s too late. Until I have the victim in my power she must never see me as I am. So I suppose that, yes, I am an actor.’
Jones: ‘Tell me what were you thinking about last night.’
Jidney: ‘Last night I was looking at my penis. It was limp, flaccid; I was thinking it couldn’t be the same one that ejaculated as I struck, hard as an iron bar and pumping, pumping in an orgasm so total that it revealed and exalted me to the core of my being.’
25
Jidney: ‘I want you to read this.’
Jones (reading): ‘The only honesty in men is their recognition of the purpose they know to be in them and which a few of them refine and narrow down until it emerges fully. This can only happen once the seeker after control has learned to create the necessary situation and face the challenge. Mine is a nihilist purpose, so that honesty means the extent to which I express my disgust and hatred of the world; as in every sphere of self-affirmation and fulfilment this expression must be either ultimate, or nothing.’
Jones: ‘What do you feel about death? Is that nothing?’
Jidney: ‘Yes. To a nihilist, everything is nothing.’
Jones: ‘But you get a feeling of achievement from nothing.’
Jidney: ‘Yes. To procure a death requires planning, determination and courage.’
Jones: ‘I am referring to your own death.’
Jidney: ‘I never think about my own death. Perhaps I die with the others in some degree. I don’t know, I have never thought about that.’
Jones: ‘Please go on.’
Jidney: ‘To put someone to death requires energy and drive; you would be quite wrong to assume that killing is a simple matter. The hero, the lone commando running towards an enemy with a bomb, do you think that’s a simple matter? Yet what both I and the commando experience is the same challenge. Both are driven towards a seemingly impossible objective; mine is the mastery of hell.’
Jones: ‘You are getting excited.’
Jidney: ‘It is exciting. People become so used to their everyday selves that their interior behaviour, until it is criticised from outside, seems natural to them whatever it is. Man is aware that he transcends himself only at supreme moments – moments in which he is carrying out actions that he knew he was born to execute, and I suppose the difference between myself and others is that the others never plan for a supreme moment.’
Jones: ‘I would like to hear more about that.’
Jidney: ‘Yes, I have a statement to make there – no experience can acquire any dimension unless it is absolute. Therefore it is meaningless to ask me whether I was aware of the nature of what I was doing while I was killing; the question is absurd. Not only was I aware of it, I was supremely aware of it; in fact I was aware of it from a height so great that my awareness amounted to absence. Nor is it any use your asking me whether I think that what I did was wrong. I don’t think in terms of right or wrong. I think only of the inevitable. I act only in response to the irresistible. I do not make solemnly-graded judgments about life or death with pursed lips; what is the point, when everybody knows that both are irreversible and inevitable? That is why I confessed willingly when I was caught, and have never complained about my capture; it was the sacrifice exacted by triumph. If my sentence were to be death, even a painful one, I should accept it without a shrug; I have no argument with the inevitable. I accept what has in any case always been a part of me; I even welcome it, just as my victims did. That is my view on capital punishment. My life is irrelevant; what matters is that I should remain alive for as long as my doing so is a means of continually asserting my power.
‘This is where the serial killer differs from murderers of any other type, and it explains why I describe myself, not as a monster as you do, but in the way I saw my victims, and as I see myself – a negative martyr. As for remorse, which you spoke of before, I know what remorse is supposed to mean, but I have no idea what it is. It is outside my terms of the absolute; if I cannot experience a feeling absolutely, then I cannot experience it at all.’
Jones: ‘Have you any further comment you would like to make about feeling remorse, or not feeling it?’
Jidney: ‘Yes, I think I have said, the nearest I can get to remorse is perhaps sometimes missing someone whom I caused to disappear. But what some observers – prison visitors, would-be penal reformers and some killers, too, who parody it simply to help an interrogator prove his own theories in return for easier living conditions – what they take to be remorse is in fact no more than the occasional lucid period, moments of terror when the killer temporarily realises the gulf that separates him from other men. But this mood is no more than the normal result of any catharsis – a feeling of bemusement and emptiness, of anticlimax after long drawn-out preparation, of the struggle against the yielding to desire (which increases it), the result of the physical infliction of death itself.’
Jones: ‘Does the fact that the general public hold you in abhorrence make any impression on you?’
Jidney: ‘Certainly not. I am not immune from natural enemies – nobody is – and my own adversaries are those whose role is to procure justice for the weak, such as these other gentlemen here, and those who share their views. But for
the man who exists only for the supreme moment the weak have no meaning – nothing besides that moment has any meaning. The killer is a primitive, which is why he is hunted and brought down. But I would also point out that he instinctively knows his pursuers’ tactics – and that is why I have existed amongst you undetected for so long.’
Jones: ‘You are proud of yourself then, of your instinct, your prowess, your stature.’
Jidney: ‘Of course I am. I am a very affirmative person. By the way, I should like to add a remark concerning some quite wrong opinions I have heard regarding killers of my type. Firstly, they are not stupid. I myself am of above average intelligence; I am certainly capable of appreciating the difference between profit and loss and of running a business, as you know. Secondly, they are political. I would assert that there is no such thing as a socialist killer because, short of death, concepts such as equality, let alone liberty or fraternity, do not exist for the believer in the inevitable. Therefore every serial killer is a fascist. In other words, fascism is not a belief; it is a course of action natural to the wild beast, rooted in primitive nature, which the killer too not only accepts but welcomes.’
Jones (to us): ‘Who was that Frenchman who wrote “tous les criminels sont des jésuites?”’
26
We were at lunch, and Stevenson had been reading Dr Jones’ notes. ‘What does he mean here by the aura phase?’ he said to me. ‘Christ, you need a whole new dictionary here.’
‘It means he’s living in a dream world. Don’t worry, I had to ask Jones too.’
‘Of course he’s living in a dream world,’ said Stevenson, ‘and that’s why seventeen dead women tell us how dangerous the bastard is.’ He passed Jones’ sheets back to me. ‘As for his mind, it feels more like looking inside Christie’s kitchen cupboard to me. Do you really take all this sitting and listening to him seriously?’
‘You bet I do,’ I said, ‘it’s science summing up instincts that you and I have had for years. And at last it’s official – we’re going to give psychological profiling a chance. Don’t you see what Jones’ interviews with Jidney are for? It’s so that in a few years’ time we’ll have files on convicted serial killers that spot common factors in all of them right across the board, so that in the end we’ll be able to nail them almost as soon as they get off the ground. We’re a long way off still, but at least we’ve stopped being childish, we’re finally admitting that we’re ready to learn – but we are still learners, we can’t afford to give ourselves airs. But once we’ve learned the rules I’ll bet we’ll be good at it. With a bit of luck it’ll tell us how many madmen there are running about the country convinced they’re the fucking prince of darkness and killing the way we light a cigarette – and maybe by decoding and entering their world we’ll stop any more wretched women being butchered.’
‘You’re coming on like some kind of radar,’ Stevenson said.
‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘new tricks for the street. It evens up the odds a little, and I heard Cruddie saying you’re on the next course too, so you’d better get reading.’
‘Buy you a pint first.’
‘Why not?’ I said, ‘I reckon we’ve earned it. Why don’t we go up to The Sicilian Defence – judging by this case you seem to get all sorts in there.’
‘It’s quite a paradox, really,’ Jidney told Dr Jones the same afternoon. ‘The less normal you are, the more normal you have to be.’
I told Jidney that nine bodies, including those of Flora and Daphne Hayhoe, had been found so far, either in the vault or buried in other graves near it, most of them with their genitals missing.
‘You’ve some way further to go yet,’ said Jidney, giving me an arch look. I thought it was one of the most frightful expressions I had ever seen on a face.
I managed to keep calm. ‘Ann Meredith,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you tell us about her last hours on earth?’
So he started telling us – quite easily, calmly, as if he’d been to see an average movie the night before and was giving us the plot line. Ann hadn’t understood right away, he said; when she did, he described her face, whiter than a wall when the shock penetrated, wobbling and weaving in the middle of the floor, her knees caving in under her.
‘What?’ she had asked him. ‘When?’
‘I told her what I told most of them,’ said Jidney, ‘that it depended on her really. But I remember I added as I often do, Why not now?’ He pulled out his prick in front of her, which was her first sight of it, seized her by the back of her neck (‘got her by the love-curls’) and forced her head down on it.
‘I want you to eat me now,’ he said, repeating it to us the same way through his teeth as he must have said it to her. ‘Make me come, and then I’ll make up my mind whether to keep you alive or not. The more pleasure you give me, the better your chances.’
‘I can’t, I can’t,’ said Jidney, mimicking her voice, and I don’t know how I didn’t get up and hit him. He broke off to tell us: ‘I don’t think she believed I was going to let her live, she was too bright.’ He went on: ‘So I told her, you’ve got ten minutes to be the goddess of love.’ Suddenly he was beside himself. His eyes, which were always flat, lit up suddenly like the rest of his face, triumphant; he was right back in it, plunging through that moment. ‘Come on, I told her, do it. If you make my big man here droop, you die, so let’s have less talk and more action, your tongue’s got other work. Fucking women. Enjoy it, and make me enjoy it – I’m big enough, aren’t I? Hey, aren’t I big?’
Later, in a different mood, he said: ‘If I could remember what I’d done, of course, it might have been different. I might never have been able to do it.’
‘But you managed it all right,’ said Cruddie.
‘All right, well, as you proved I did it then I must have done it.’ He added after a moment, ‘I have to admit it’s amazing how much of my behaviour seems to have escaped my observation.’
At lunch in the prison officers’ canteen Jones asked me: ‘Are you finding any of this of value?’
I said we all were.
‘Don’t think I’m just scientifically pulling the wings off flies,’ said Jones, digging into his tinned steak and kidney pudding with gusto, ‘I have long wanted every suitable officer to understand the application of psychiatry to police work by watching it in action.’
27
‘Let’s talk about Judith Parkes,’ I said to Jidney. ‘Do you remember what happened to her? Do you know where she is now?’
‘She’s where I can always find her, in a quiet corner, where we can talk. It’s in a flowery place, an old church out in the country. But I haven’t been down there for years.’
‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten the map reference,’ Stevenson said.
Jidney said: ‘She must have changed a good deal by now.’
‘I think she got tired of waiting for you and left,’ I said. ‘I think she’s in the morgue.’
He looked confused. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘She’ll always be where we parted, I made sure of that.’
In the afternoon Jones started on a different tack. ‘I want to talk to you about your mother again.’
Jidney: ‘You mean before Boy moved in?’
Jones: ‘Yes.’
Jidney: ‘My mother – Ida we always called her, I don’t know why, her real name was Gertrude. She would say when she caught me killing things, “I’m going to punish you for your own good,” and then she’d hold my hand over the gas jet on the cooker. Afterwards she and Boy screwed and made me play games with them while I’d be thinking, I’ll give you two such a shock one day.’
Jones: ‘And your father?’
Jidney: ‘I never knew him. She kicked him out of the house before I could walk. Later on the neighbours told me she used to beat the shit out of him when he drank. Anyway, one day she just shrugged and told me he was dead. She was a very religious woman in public, very
sharp in her speech. She never went out with Boy in public. He used to come round to the back at night, or stay in the outdoor privy all day till it got dark. Reconciling the way she behaved to the neighbours, and then what she did indoors, and my skirts, hand in the gas flame – that caused a lot of problems – the bedroom stuff with her and Boy and then, in the street, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. I always had troubles there, when you could talk about what went on indoors, when you couldn’t; it was always hard fitting what the three of us did to what she told the neighbours – things to be talked about, things not to be talked about. If I came out with anything I shouldn’t, that was my skin flayed off when we got in. After she died I got talking to one of the neighbours and found out she was never known as Ida or Gertrude in the street – always as Mrs Jidney. Always.’
Jones: ‘So you always had to be on your best behaviour.’
Jidney: ‘That’s right, but she punished me anyway if she felt like it. That gave me a completely different face. Inside I was nothing like my face. I was the opposite of my face. I can behave well for a long while, it pays to behave well in jail. That’s where I learned to behave for years so that I could earn time off a sentence, so I worked out this system where I stored up what I called enough credits for being no bother until the day when I’d got enough credits and could lower the barriers and let rip, let the built-up pressure go bang like that and didn’t have to be no bother any more. I’m not nice, I hate being nice, I just pretend to be nice, and then I reward myself by doing what I really want.’
Jones: ‘Do the words good and evil really mean anything to you?’
Jidney: ‘That’s not what you’re talking about, is it? What you mean is, did I just run about like a maniac slaughtering women, not caring one way or the other, or did I work the odds out so as not to get caught? What we’re really talking about is being caught, isn’t it? Well of course I didn’t want to get caught – look around you in here, terrific, isn’t it? – but my problem there always was that I could never be sure what other people were going to find odd about me. It meant I had to be a good actor. It’s exhausting, though, trying to insure against everything, it’s like backing every horse in a race. Pulling the bet off time after time starts as a challenge but it gets harder as time goes on. I had to think my way into being normal, I had to say to myself: “As long as I think I’m normal I am normal.” I’m like a bomb, sometimes I’m unarmed, inert; there are times when I can get drunk, be alone with a woman, nothing funny’s going to happen . . . But if I get in a certain situation and there’s a trigger there, then things do happen, I get into overdrive, and then it all happens so fast. Even though people say that it physically takes the victim a long time to die, to me it doesn’t seem long at all.’