Influence

by Chris Parker

  Peter Jones knew the importance of keeping the reality of his work out of the public eye. Much of what he said and did was based on a need-to-know basis. Sometimes he even applied that rule when talking to senior officers. He always applied it to the general public, the people who paid him to detect.

  Peter wiped the rain from his face. To his left the steady stream of traffic continued its way into the city centre. He ignored it.

  It ignored him.

  Peter took one deliberate breath and set off towards the possible storm.

  11.

  The address was a late nineteenth century terraced house in one of the few city side roads that had not been converted into offices or shops. The street was a community in miniature. At its best, it was a city village. At its worst, just a collection of properties in which people did whatever was necessary to survive without any thought for those around them. In all likelihood, the truth of the street was somewhere in-between: a mixture of people with their own motives, experiences and expectations. Some of whom hoped to move on, some who lived only for today. And one who wasn’t even going to do that.

  The death had occurred inside number fifteen. Or, to be more accurate, all that Peter knew for certain right now was that the dead body was inside number fifteen; that didn’t mean that the death had necessarily taken place there.

  The ambulance parked outside and the uniformed police officer standing by the door marked out the house. As Peter approached he was aware of faces peering through windows that were already bright with Christmas decorations. He could see the ambulance crew waiting patiently for instruction inside their vehicle.

  The officer straightened slightly as Peter neared.

  ‘Sir.’

  Peter nodded briefly. ‘What we have we got?’

  ‘Male. Presumed dead. In the dining room taped to a chair.’

  Peter stepped inside, straight into the lounge. He saw it all in a second. He allowed himself a few seconds more for the interpretation, the learning, to sift into his consciousness.

  A black, leather two-piece sofa and a matching armchair faced an enormous flat screen television standing between the fireplace and the front window. Between them these three pieces dominated the room. Several piles of dvds were stacked beneath the window sill. A calendar with pictures of naked women was hanging above the mantelpiece. Miss November had extremely large, false breasts and her legs spread. The look on her face was no doubt meant to show a mixture of willingness and gratitude for the interest being shown in her deliberately produced body. It was meant to say, ‘This is for you, boys. And thank you for wanting to look at me, wanting to do things to me.’ The look didn’t reach her eyes though.

  Peter flared his nostrils. The room smelt most obviously of alcohol and stale curry. Behind that it smelt of something else. It was something that Peter couldn’t put a single word to. It was the smell that existed somewhere between machismo and despair. Peter put both of his hands into his jacket pocket and walked through into the dining room.

  He was greeted by two sets of eyes. The ones he noticed first were grey, glazed and as dull, despite the secrets they held, as only the eyes of the dead can be. The others belonged to the second, younger police officer. They were filled with unspeakable fear. It was obvious why. The carpet immediately underneath and around the body was soaked in blood. There was blood too on the wall to the right of the body and on the ceiling. Peter’s instinctive assessment was that at least one artery, but in all probability several, had been cut.

  More horrific still, the victim had been scalped and the top part of his skull, the cranium, had been removed and placed on the carpet. The young officer was struggling to keep his eyes off the dead man’s exposed brain. He looked at the Detective Chief Inspector with welcome relief. He was clearly struggling to keep the contents of his stomach down.

  Presumed dead? Peter felt his face become the professional mask behind which he performed best. God bless police protocol.

  ‘You haven’t touched anything, have you?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘And you haven’t been any closer to the body?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Good lad.’

  Peter was sure that the older officer on the door had managed the young constable’s behaviour. The only way you could develop junior talent was by giving responsibility. The risk, though, in doing that was that an officer made a mistake and a crime scene was ruined. It was another of one of those unspoken truths: police officers, just like any other professionals, could only improve by being given opportunities to practice and develop their skills. Unfortunately, their most productive training ground was a crime scene. Junior officers had to be trusted. And they had to be left alone. If you wanted to progress you had to learn how to deal with increasingly unpleasant situations. In Peter’s experience, you learned best by watching how far more experienced colleagues behaved and by then being trusted to do it yourself.

  He stepped past the uniformed officer, making sure that he stayed at least two metres away from the body; making sure that he avoided contaminating the information in front of him.

  He was looking at the dead body of a male, probably in his mid-thirties. He looked to be just less than six feet tall and he was not carrying any excess body weight. He was wearing black jeans, a white tee shirt and a black leather waistcoat. On his left forearm there was a simple, dark blue tattoo of a crucifix. It was simple cheap rather than simple refined. His wrists, ankles and chest were strapped with brown heavy-duty tape to a tall-backed wooden chair. His crotch bulged against the cheap fabric of his jeans. His mouth hung open and his tongue showed, resting against his lower lip. His eyes looked nowhere and said nothing.

  One thing Peter Jones did know for sure, though, was that this man hadn’t strapped himself into the chair. Someone else had done that. And they had killed him here.

  Peter felt another surge of adrenaline squirt inside him. His professional face didn’t even twitch. Instead he reached into his pocket, took out his phone and called the control room. Within a couple of minutes he had notified the on-call Detective Superintendent and asked for a Home Office pathologist to attend the scene.

  Waiting was easy now.

  Game on.

  12.

  Marcus Kline wanted to make learning happen as quickly as possible. He believed that those who knew and taught were obliged to speed up the learning process for others. He felt that they should be impatient for change and intolerant of delay. He believed that teachers – helpers, healers, and counsellors, whatever label people wanted to use – should be committed to creating the speediest progress possible. After all, the rate of change always increased. Human understanding was growing faster than ever before. Even though it was true to say that most of that development was in the realm of technology, there was still an underbelly of increase in the study of the so-called soft arts: the nature and power of influence, the dynamics of human interaction, the power of the word and, beyond that, the role of the subconscious.

  Marcus Kline wanted to make sure that all of his employees developed their communication skills. He particularly wanted to speed up Simon’s progress. He believed that the young man had the potential to become outstanding in the field and he felt both an obligation and a desire to help him. The greatest challenge was in teaching him how to disassociate.

  ‘We learn best from experience,’ he said to Simon. ‘If we get a chance to think, feel and do, we are far more likely to develop quickly and appropriately than if we only hear, read or talk about a topic. That’s why I like to create opportunities for you to experience things first hand.’

  ‘Even if that means that I make an arse of myself?’ Simon scowled. ‘Any credibility I had with Dean Harrison has been taken away. Surely you could have provided the lesson without embarrassing me?’

  ‘Embarrassment isn’t real. It’s just an illusion created b
y the ego. If you truly want to be brilliant at understanding and influencing others, you’ve got to learn that. In our work there is no place for embarrassment, fear of failure or concern for how others regard us. When you put your work head on, your ego should fade and, by extension, so should any possibility of feeling embarrassed. We can’t really focus on someone else if even a small part of us is still thinking about ourselves. I’ve told you this before, Simon, if you want to associate with another fully you have to first disassociate from yourself.’

  ‘That’s easier said than done.’

  ‘Of course it is. That’s why there are so few people who can do it. That’s why we can charge so much.’ Marcus grinned. ‘That’s why clients like Dean Harrison are willing to be supportive.’

  ‘I still feel like I was being played rather than being taught.’

  ‘Get over it. You need to learn how to step away from your own unnecessary emotional responses as much as you do those of your clients. If you keep wearing your heart on your sleeve, it will come off in the wash. And, anyway, you haven’t been taught yet. You’ve had the experience. If you’re going to learn something from it, you need to spend time reviewing what happened and then you need to ask the right questions.’

  ‘OK.’ Simon sank back in his chair and closed his eyes. He remembered something that Marcus had said on his return to the office. It seemed like a good starting place for his enquiry. ‘I want to ask you about covert commands,’ he said. ‘You mentioned that you used these to make me call Dean even though it seemed that you were telling me not to. So, what I want to know is, what covert commands did you use and in what order?’

  Marcus tipped his head in acknowledgement of a good question, well formed. He reminded Simon of a well-known TV chef who always made a similar gesture when tasting food that impressed him.

  ‘As you know,’ Marcus began, ‘a covert command is an instruction that is not stated explicitly. It is embedded into a sentence and delivered through a subtle shift in pitch and tone of voice. If covert commands are delivered well the recipient gets the message without ever consciously realising that they have.’

  ‘Hence your Lao Tzu reference when we were talking? When you said that the best teachers are not even recognised, you were telling me precisely what you were doing – that you were influencing me without me knowing.’

  ‘Absolutely. Now, let me reveal precisely how I did it. And whether you can remember these lines or not, what I am going to share with you now is precisely what I said during our phone conversation. I’ll just put them altogether now, without your responses included. Ok?’

  Simon nodded.

  ‘Good. I said, quote: “You, however, are equally wrong in thinking that your straightforward honesty will be of great benefit to them, so don’t even think of pursuing that approach. You might be sure that it will work, but remember that I am right in these matters nine times out of ten…Whilst being obvious and straightforward is occasionally the best approach, I very much doubt that it is in this instance…Under no circumstances contact the client. Do you hear?”

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yes. Did you hear the covert commands this time?

  ‘Some of them I think.’ Simon frowned. ‘I definitely heard the way you emphasised certain phrases.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Marcus clapped his hands. ‘When I said, “Your straightforward honesty will be of great benefit to them” I stressed will be. When I said, “Don’t even think of pursuing that approach” I emphasised think of pursuing. In other words, I directed your attention towards that behaviour whilst seeming to request the opposite. Then I told you that you could be sure it will work. And when I said that being obvious and straightforward is only occasionally the best approach, I went on to stress it is in this instance. I followed that with the instruction to contact the client. Even my final comment, “Do you hear” was a command rather than a question; I lowered my inflection as I said it, which your subconscious would have recognised immediately as a direction. As you know, when we ask questions our inflection naturally goes up. When a Sergeant Major barks out an order, however, his tone goes down. We are conditioned to distinguish automatically between questions and commands – and you did. So, when I said “Do you hear” I was, in effect, telling your subconscious to recognise my commands.

  Simon nodded thoughtfully. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There were a few bits and pieces. I gave you scope to doubt me which, given that you were already convinced you were right, made it all the more easy for you to do your own thing.’

  ‘To do my own thing, that was really not my own thing.’

  ‘It was your idea in the first place. You went first on this occasion and I just piggy-backed the ride.’

  Simon lapsed into silence again. A moment later he said, ‘When you told me that you were right nine times out of ten and that you very much doubted that I was right, you were encouraging me to take action?’

  ‘Absolutely. And last, but by no means least, the phrase “no circumstances contact the client” was another instruction to the deep well of your subconscious. The word ‘no’ is a homonym. It is a word that can be spelt in different ways and have different meanings but that always sounds the same. I spoke the phrase as an instruction, so your subconscious had to make an instantaneous decision about which type of the word ‘no’, it was hearing. Given my inflection, it had to conclude that it was ‘know’, relating to knowledge, as opposed to ‘no’ meaning ‘you can’t’ or ‘don’t’.

  ‘So you were really telling me to know the circumstances in which I should phone Dean? And you had already helped me establish those circumstances…’

  ‘Indeed. Make sense.’

  Simon chuckled. ‘I’ve got the point. Your inflection lowered just then, so you weren’t asking me if it all made sense, you were telling me to make sense of it all. That was another covert command.’

  ‘And this time you heard it. I think you can call that progress.’

  Simon’s smile broadened. ‘I still don’t fully understand how your mind is able to compute all of this whilst still holding a conversation.’

  ‘It’s called practice. Practice and…’ Marcus glanced down at his desk. He paused briefly, just long enough to grow Simon’s curiosity. The young man leaned forwards and Marcus continued, his voice just a fraction quieter than before, his gaze low, ‘…And a willingness to take responsibility for achieving the best possible outcomes. As I’ve said to you before, we have to be more alert, our senses have to be brighter, than those around us. Remember, being a so-called communication expert – a master of influence – is not a job that someone does, or a role they occasionally play; it is who they are as a human being. It’s a twenty- four-seven commitment.’

  ‘No time off for good behaviour?’

  Now that would be criminal,’ Marcus said, lightening the mood. ‘And we don’t want to be criminals now, do we? We’re the good guys, remember?’

  13.

  Three Scenes of Crime officers arrived just a few minutes after Peter. All three were covered head-to-toe in white suits, with gloves on their hands, what looked like plastic bags on their feet, and masks on their faces. Peter watched as one took photos whilst another filmed the entire scene. It was vital that everything, including the carpet, was recorded, bagged and removed if necessary, and made available in pristine condition for future examination. A mistake at this stage of the process, whether it was the result of inattention leading to the missing of a detail, negligence that caused the contamination of evidence, or inappropriate haste that meant a procedure wasn’t followed properly, could prove to be crucial at a later date.

  Peter was standing next to the senior of the three officers. His name was Barry Long. They had worked together on numerous occasions. Barry was capable and efficient and, like most team leaders, he preferred to be in charge. Peter understood that tendency and respected Barry’s skill.
Ultimately, though, he was the operations manager on this case. Whilst his Detective Superintendent had overall control, he, Peter, was the man on the ground that had to lead and manage the practical process.

  ‘Watertight as a duck’s arse, Jonah,’ Barry murmured. ‘That’s how this is going to be.’

  Peter very deliberately raised an eyebrow. ‘Is a duck’s arse actually watertight? Doesn’t water just go up it, swirl around like a natural bidet and then run back out again?’

  ‘Might do. To be fair I’m not an expert on arses. I am good at making sure nothing escapes us though.’

  Peter grinned. ‘That’s all we need Barry.’

  The officer with the camera was squatting down next to the corpse taking photos of the detached cranium and the bloody scalp. For a second everyone’s attention focused on the body parts.

  ‘Makes you wonder what the hell was going on here,’ Barry said. ‘It can’t have been meant as torture. You don’t scalp somebody in an attempt to make them talk.’

  ‘Maybe the perpetrator was looking to see if he was hiding something in his head.’ The photographer suggested, grim-voiced.

  ‘Or perhaps,’ the other Scenes of Crime officer proposed, ‘we’re after a trainee hairdresser who just had a very bad home visit.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s just someone who likes boiled eggs in the morning,’ the first officer countered, mimicking slicing the top off a boiled egg with the edge of his right hand.

  Peter smiled along with the others. There were two essential questions he needed to answer. One, who had done this? Secondly, why? A good detective knew how to manage questions. Question asking and evidence gathering were the cornerstones of great detecting. The skill in the former lay in knowing how best to construct questions and when precisely to ask them. Timing was everything. And this wasn’t the right time to ask any questions. The focus now was on evidence gathering. So Peter said nothing.