Mindgame

by Anthony Horowitz

FARQUHAR: On the left or the right?

  PLIMPTON: The right.

  FARQUHAR: You seem very familiar with the contents of my desk, Nurse Plimpton.

  PLIMPTON: Yes. I try to be.

  FARQUHAR: Third drawer down.

  PLIMPTON: On the left.

  FARQHUAR leans down behind the desk. At that moment, PLIMPTON’s whole manner changes. She produces a folded note and urgently waves it at STYLER. He responds with puzzlement and is about to come over and take it when FARQUHAR suddenly looks up, suspicious.

  FARQUHAR: I can’t find it.

  PLIMPTON: It should be there.

  FARQUHAR: But it isn’t.

  PLIMPTON: Did you move it?

  FARQUHAR: I never even saw it.

  PLIMPTON: Perhaps it went into the second drawer.

  FARQUHAR: On the left?

  PLIMPTON: On the right.

  FARQUHAR leans down again and at that moment, PLIMPTON slips the note to STYLER who hides it. But right then FARQUHAR pops up again, this time holding the ashtray. He is immediately suspicious.

  FARQUHAR: Nurse Plimpton?

  PLIMPTON: Yes, Dr Farquhar?

  FARQUHAR: Is there something I should know?

  PLIMPTON: No, Dr Farquhar.

  A pause. FARQUHAR is still suspicious.

  FARQUHAR: A sandwich and a cup of tea.

  PLIMPTON: Right away, Dr Farquhar.

  PLIMPTON glances one last time at STYLER, trying to warn him with her eyes. Then she goes. Note: as she opens the door we see that the corridor outside the door has changed colour from the time when she walked in. FARQUHAR hands over the ashtray.

  FARQUHAR: A souvenir of Torquay.

  STYLER: Torquay?

  FARQUHAR: Yes. I can’t actually remember ever going there. It can’t be much of a souvenir.

  STYLER: I suppose not.

  FARQUHAR: Have you ever been to Torquay, Mr Styler?

  STYLER: No.

  FARQUHAR: You’re not trying to hide something from me, are you?

  STYLER: I’ve never been to Torquay.

  FARQUHAR: I’m talking about Nurse Plimpton. (Pause.) Just between you and me, Mr Styler, that woman’s begun to worry me. That’s the trouble with working with the criminally insane. Your perception gets twisted. You have no sense of what’s real any more. No sense of anything. Maybe it’s time she considered another career. What do you think?

  STYLER: I don’t know…

  FARQUHAR: Why don’t you tell me what’s in that note she gave you?

  STYLER: What note?

  FARQUHAR: She gave you a note.

  STYLER: She seemed to be afraid of you.

  FARQUHAR: She’s afraid of everything. Heights. Insects. The dark. Her own shadow. The note, please…

  STYLER: Are you saying she’s sick?

  FARQUHAR: I’m saying she’s overworked. (Pause.) Mr Styler, I’m trying to co-operate with you. But I can assure you that unless you give me that note, the note that Nurse Plimpton gave you after she so clumsily diverted my attention with that ashtray, your book contract and your serialisation and your BBC television series will have less chance of realisation than an afternoon of strip poker with the Queen Mum.

  A long pause. STYLER produces the folded note.

  STYLER: She wanted me to read it.

  FARQUHAR: And I don’t.

  STYLER: Why not?

  FARQUHAR: I’m her employer.

  STYLER: ‘The master of Fairfields’.

  FARQUHAR: Exactly.

  STYLER hands over the note.

  Thank you.

  STYLER: Are you going to read it?

  FARQUHAR: Maybe.

  STYLER: I’d be interested to know what it says.

  FARQUHAR: It’s almost certainly irrelevant.

  STYLER: Even so…

  FARQUHAR opens the note and quickly reads it. He smiles.

  FARQUHAR: I was right. It’s nothing.

  STYLER: You read it?

  FARQUHAR: Yes.

  STYLER: Without your reading glasses?

  FARQUHAR: She has large handwriting.

  STYLER: So can I see it?

  FARQUHAR: No.

  FARQUHAR picks up the lighter and sets fire to the note. It burns in his hand.

  STYLER: What are you doing?

  FARQUHAR: What do you think?

  STYLER: But why?

  FARQUHAR: Call it an act of spontaneity. Spontaneous combustion.

  STYLER: I don’t understand you. I don’t understand any of this.

  FARQUHAR: Nurse Plimpton is a fine woman. She’s been here as long as I have. So can you really blame me if I try to protect her from her own worst imaginings. She needs help.

  STYLER: What did she write?

  FARQUHAR: You really want to know?

  STYLER: Yes.

  FARQUHAR: She thought she knew you.

  STYLER: What?

  FARQUHAR: She thought you were someone else.

  STYLER: I don’t understand.

  FARQUHAR: Nurse Plimpton thought she recognised you as someone who in fact you aren’t. She was accusing you of being an imposter.

  STYLER: That’s ridiculous.

  FARQUHAR: Exactly…

  At that moment, there is an explosive alarm. A bell rings and lights flash on and off in the room. The alarm is so loud it’s shocking.

  STYLER: What now?

  FARQUHAR: I don’t know.

  With the alarms still screaming, FARQUHAR picks up the telephone on the desk and punches a number.

  (Shouting into the telephone.) This is Farquhar. Can you tell me what’s happening? I said…can you tell me what’s happened? (Pause.) It’s a false alarm. Repeat! False alarm!

  The bells stop.

  (Into the telephone.) Thank you. My security clearance is twenty-nine. My labrador’s name is Reginald.

  FARQUHAR hangs up.

  STYLER: What was that all about?

  FARQUHAR: Stupid of me.

  STYLER: What?

  FARQUHAR: Burning the paper. I forgot that we have a very sophisticated smoke detector installed here. It set off the alarm…

  STYLER: Will the fire brigade come?

  FARQUHAR: No. You heard me give the security clearance. My ID number and a seemingly irrelevant personal detail but one that only I would know. So now they know it’s a false alarm. Let’s talk about Easterman.

  STYLER: Actually, you know, I am beginning to feel a little uneasy. There’s something about this place. It doesn’t feel quite right.

  FARQUHAR: I’ve treated you badly.

  STYLER: Well…

  FARQUHAR: I’m tired, I admit it. I was annoyed you were here. But now that you are here, why don’t you tell me a little more about yourself, your work. Tell me about your books. Did you bring them with you?

  STYLER: No.

  FARQUHAR: A shame. But you were saying there were two of them. Bloodbath and…

  STYLER: Serial Chiller. Actually, I wrote other books too.

  FARQUHAR: Also ‘True Crime’?

  STYLER: No. My first two books were quite different. They were about my mother.

  FARQUHAR: Should I read something into that?

  STYLER: Only that I had a very happy childhood and that I admired her. My father died when I was quite young and I was an only child. I was brought up in the north.

  FARQUHAR: You don’t have an accent.

  STYLER: I suppose I lost it after I moved to London. My mother died when I was twenty-one…

  FARQUHAR: I’m sorry. Was it illness?

  STYLER: (Hesitant.) No.

  FARQUHAR: An accident, then?

  STYLER: Yes. It was very sudden. But anyway, she’d always encouraged me to write. She was a great believer in my abilities. So after she died, I decided to write about her.

  FARQUHAR: A biography?

  STYLER: Not exactly. She was a very ordinary person, not someone you could write a book about. But she was a wonderful cook. So I wrote a book called My Mother’s Table which was a collectio
n of her favourite recipes interspersed with anecdotes about her life. It was a bit like The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. I suppose you don’t remember that.

  FARQUHAR: Yes.

  STYLER: You do.

  FARQUHAR: I don’t.

  STYLER: Well, it had the same success, so the publishers asked me to write a sequel. So I came up with My Mother’s Garden which was really the same thing again but this time about her garden…tips on how to get the best out of your flowers and shrubs. That sort of thing. My mother spent a lot of time in the garden. It was nice to remember her that way.

  FARQUHAR: It seems you made quite a killing out of your mother.

  STYLER: The second book did almost as well as the first, it’s true.

  FARQUHAR: And you were still living in the same house? ‘In the north’?

  STYLER: No, after she died I moved to London. I got married and bought a house in Vauxhall, near Victoria Station.

  FARQUHAR: You’re married?

  STYLER: Separated.

  FARQUHAR: Any children?

  STYLER: No.

  FARQUHAR: And what did your wife do? Was she also a writer?

  STYLER: No. She was a vet.

  FARQUHAR: So tell me. Was your next book about her? My Wife’s Pussy Cat ? Hints on animal care interspersed with anecdotes from a marital breakdown?

  STYLER: No. Although actually it was partly inspired by her, by our relationship. I’d always wanted to write fiction so I wrote a sort of tragic love story. It was called Blaming Jane.

  FARQUHAR: That was her name?

  STYLER: No. (Pause.) No. This was fiction. It was only very loosely based on my experience although one of the characters was a vet. Anyway, to be honest the reviews were less than lukewarm but it became a best-seller and in fact last year we sold the option to Hollywood.

  FARQUHAR: They’re going to make a film out of it?

  STYLER: Yes. I understand Quentin Tarantino’s interested. There’s a team of script-writers working on a new draft even as we speak. Apparently it still isn’t violent enough.

  FARQUHAR: But it is violent?

  STYLER: The book is about a woman who pushes a man to violence, yes. He kills her. But that’s not the point. The book isn’t about violence. It isn’t even about blame. It’s about understanding. I’ll send you a copy, Dr Farquhar. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

  FARQUHAR: It seems to me you’ve pursued an unusual career, Mr Styler. From cookery and gardening to fiction and then…

  STYLER: Chikatilo.

  FARQUHAR: So what happened?

  STYLER: He did. I just got interested.

  FARQUHAR: In what? In murder? In torture? Or in cannibalism? All three featured fairly prominently in his career.

  STYLER: I was thinking about writing a story, a novel set in Russia. This was the end of the eighties…the start of 1990. And then I saw this story in the newspapers…

  FARQUHAR: Andrei Chikatilo had kidnapped young boys and girls in the woods outside Rostov. He tied them up, sexually abused them, tortured them — sometimes removing their eyes — stabbed them many times and then ate them. He had a liking for liver, I understand. The human liver. Something he had in common with Easterman, incidentally. They were both happy eaters.

  STYLER: Yes. (Pause.) I was interested in the idea of a serial killer in Russia. The police investigation. The killings adding up. In fact, the more I read about it, the more I thought it had all the makings of a real airport blockbuster.

  FARQUHAR: I suppose it depends which airport you go to.

  STYLER: Anyway, in the end I realised there was no need to add fiction to what had happened. So I wrote it as True Crime and sold more copies than anything I’d ever written before.

  FARQUHAR: But I still find myself wondering what sort of readers would interest themselves in a sexually deranged schoolteacher from the Ukraine. Hormonally challenged teenagers perhaps. Or the sort of ghouls who like to watch multiple pile-ups on the M25.

  STYLER: The book sold half a million copies. You think they were all ghouls and teenagers?

  FARQUHAR: And their friends.

  STYLER: I think you’re being a little…high-minded, if you don’t mind my saying so, Dr Farquhar. Every writer from Chaucer to Milton and Shakespeare has been attracted to evil. Think of Iago. Lucifer. Moriarty. Darth Vadar. We’re attracted by these figures because they’re part of us. That’s the truth of it. They’re the dark, unspoken part of our own psyche and we need them because they help us live something out, if only vicariously and we thank them for it. Look at Jack the Ripper. Every child in the world grows up knowing about Jack the Ripper. Tourists come to London just to go on Jack the Ripper walks. And do you know how many books there are about him, how many films? There have even been Jack the Ripper musicals! And this was a man who stabbed women in the womb. Who cut their throats so savagely that he nearly decapitated them. Who dragged out their entrails and probably took pieces home as souvenirs. But you tell me this. Is Jack a villain or a hero? Is he your sinner or your saint? Maybe the answer…maybe the answer is that he’s neither. Maybe he’s something else, something we don’t quite understand. But it isn’t revulsion we feel when we hear his name even though it should be. It isn’t loathing. It’s a sort of excitement.

  FARQUHAR: Was it excitement you felt when you were writing about Chikatilo?

  STYLER: (A pause.) I suppose I would have liked to have met him. I wrote to the Russian authorities but by the time anyone even replied to my letter they’d already shot him.

  FARQUHAR: And now you want to meet Easterman?

  STYLER: (With a sense of foreboding.) Is he really here, in this building?

  FARQUHAR: Yes.

  STYLER: It’s strange to think that he could be just a few metres away from where we are now.

  FARQUHAR: He could be closer.

  STYLER: Has he changed very much?

  FARQUHAR: In what way?

  STYLER: Well. (Pause.) His appearance…

  FARQUHAR: (Interested that this should be the first question.) His appearance.

  STYLER: How he looks.

  FARQUHAR: He was twenty-three when he was brought here. For ten years he wouldn’t even leave his cell, ten years without seeing the sun. Gradually we managed to coax him out, into the grounds, into therapy but it took another two or three years before he’d even agree to speak.

  STYLER: He was ashamed of what he’d done.

  FARQUHAR: Not at all. He seemed to be unaware of it, though secretly I think he was rather proud. As you rightly said, he’s been here for twenty-nine years now. Half his life. He must be about the same age as me. I doubt if you’d recognise him.

  STYLER: I’ve only seen a few photographs of him.

  FARQUHAR: Most of them were destroyed when he burned down his house.

  STYLER: There was one taken by an aunt. He must have been about eleven years old. Slim. Fair hair. Blue eyes. Dressed all in white. He was a very beautiful boy, I thought. The face of an angel.

  FARQUHAR: Was that what drew you to him? His looks?

  STYLER: No. Of course not. But on the other hand, I knew it would give a commercial edge to the book. Most of the serial killers are so depressingly ugly. Chikatilo bald and wild-eyed. Dennis Nilsen every inch the minor clerk that he actually was. The Wests, hideous. Myra Hindley either dowdy or satanic. Easterman was different to all of them. But you know as well as I do that it wasn’t just his looks.

  FARQUHAR: You said you did research?

  STYLER: Of course.

  FARQUHAR: I’d be interested to know what you found. Your take on Easterman.

  STYLER: Why?

  FARQUHAR: What are we, Mr Styler, but what other people perceive of us?

  A pause.

  STYLER: Easterman was every mother’s dream of a perfect son. Healthy, good-looking, athletic, intelligent. He went to a local grammar school. The family lived in Yorkshire.

  FARQUHAR: In York.

  STYLER: Yes.

  FARQUHAR: Was that
near you?

  STYLER: Yes. It was, as a matter of fact.

  FARQUHAR: But you never met him?

  STYLER: (Hesitant.) No. (Pause.) When he was sixteen, his father died.

  FARQUHAR: He killed his father. On a wine-tasting holiday at the Chateau Mavillion in France.

  STYLER: No. His father died in a car accident.

  FARQUHAR: Easterman was driving the car. He reversed it over his father.

  STYLER: Accidentally.

  FARQUHAR: Twice.

  STYLER: That never came out in the trial.

  FARQUHAR: Since Easterman refused to speak at all during the time of his trial, a great deal didn’t come out.

  STYLER: Well, however he really died, after the death of his father Easterman lived with his mother, in York. According to his neighbours he was a completely trouble-free teenager.

  FARQUHAR: He killed the neighbours.

  STYLER: He only killed one of them.

  FARQUHAR: Ah yes. Mrs Barlow.

  STYLER: (Pause.) Yes. That was her name. (Pause.) But you’ve jumped ahead of me. The bulk of his killings took place in the eighteen months between age twenty-one and his arrest at the age of twenty-three. He actually killed his mother on the morning of his twenty-first birthday.

  FARQUHAR: That’s right. When her head was found it was still covered in gift-wrap.

  STYLER: He buried her in the garden and went on living in the house. It makes you think a little of Hitchcock, doesn’t it.

  FARQUHAR: No.

  STYLER: The Bates Motel? His next victim was his girlfriend, Jane Plimpton. (Realising.) Nurse Plimpton! That’s where I’d heard it before!

  FARQUHAR: Where is Nurse Plimpton? She seems to be taking a devil of a long time with your sandwich.

  STYLER: She’s not related?

  FARQUHAR: I hardly think so.

  STYLER: Well, anyway, at this time Easterman was running the family wine shop in Bootham Gate — just in the shadow of York Minster by some horrible irony. What nobody knew was that he had adapted some of the cellars, the ones furthest under ground, to his own horrendous end.

  FARQUHAR: He had turned them into a torture chamber?

  STYLER: Yes. He picked up hitch-hikers, some of them students at the university. He drugged them and took them down there. And then he played with them.

  A dozen victims. Maybe more. I don’t suppose you want me to go into the details.

  FARQUHAR: You want to save them for your book?

  STYLER: Well, it was the usual thing. Sexual humiliation. Torture. Rape. For each one of them a long, drawn-out death. He cut up the bodies when he’d finished with them. Some of them he took home in pieces and buried in his mother’s garden. Of course he kept souvenirs. He also cannibalised some of the corpses. He liked to eat…