by Baker, John
The thing about Geordie that no one recognized was that he was not vulnerable. He was one of the strongest people she had met in her life. He was too strong for his own good.
He’d softened up since they’d met, and he’d softened up considerably more since Echo had been born. Now Ralph was in danger of undoing all that, of sending the more human Geordie scurrying back to the crustaceous existence he knew so well.
Janet’s first thought was to visit Margaret and Trudy, a pair of working girls who had always been good friends. But Margaret would tell her again what shits men were and that she should let Geordie do his own worrying. Janet wasn’t in the mood for that message this morning. She wanted to get away from Ralph, to leave reality behind for a while.
After walking for half an hour she found herself close to the street where Angeles Falco lived. She’d been thinking what it must be like to be blind since the case had come up, and she’d wondered if Angeles had had much contact with babies, how she would be with Echo.
Geordie had said that Angeles was heavy with people who treated blindness in a sentimental way, that she’d torn a strip off Sam for patronizing her. If Geordie hadn’t said that, Janet would’ve rung earlier in the week and made an arrangement to go see her. She couldn’t help feeling that the woman must be in need of company since her sister had been murdered. Angeles was a virtual prisoner, under constant surveillance.
Rich, though. The real-estate value of the street with its individually designed houses would’ve kicked a hole in the capital of a Colombian drugs cartel. In the first drive was a new Ford Testosteroni bulging with technological gimmicks; the pear-shaped man gazing at it from his window bristled with an air of received pronunciation and right-wing ideologies.
There was a brass bell by the side of the front door. One of those bells you pull. It set up a tinkling sound inside the house. When the chimes faded away Janet thought she heard a sound from the other side of the door. The blind woman clearing her throat? Then nothing.
She made to pull the bell again, but as she did so there was the same sound. It was not someone clearing her throat.
Janet tried the door. It was locked.
She moved back to look at the upper windows of the house, but found nothing there. When she returned to the front door the sound had stopped. She had a vague memory, something she had read in a newspaper, about a woman who got an electric shock in her kitchen and went into a convulsion, ended up having a heart attack.
18
As she worked at the computer the Toreador’s song was in her mind, and she’d find herself humming it stridently, moving her shoulders with the rhythm. She wrote an e-mail to Felix, her escort of last night, thanking him for taking her to the opera. Felix was a piano tuner, gay with a permanent partner, and an old comrade in the arena of blind rights. He was also a musical connoisseur, and one who loved to share his knowledge and experience with Angeles. An arrangement which benefited them both.
After an hour’s work she went to the kitchen and found some peanuts for the birds. She opened the french window and took down the wire bird-feeder that hung from the guttering of the patio. It was almost empty. She placed it on the garden table and filled it to the brim.
There could be another freeze soon. She should empty the pool and put the covers on.
There was a strong wind blowing, whistling through the trees and around the eaves of the house, but it was not loud enough to obscure the movement of a loose brick. Angeles’ first thought was that the prowler from last night had returned, but she remembered that it was midmorning now, daylight. A man would not risk climbing over her wall at this time of day. A cat, then?
There was a neighbour with a neglected Persian, Tilly, who came looking for titbits from time to time. Angeles knelt on the tiles and extended a hand, rubbing finger and thumb in the direction from which the sound had come. ‘Here, Tilly,’ she said. ‘Here, girl.’ She pursed her lips and made a series of small kisses at the air.
She strained to hear. No cat approached. Slowly, Angeles got up from her kneeling position. Cats had very well-developed sense organs: ears, eyes, whiskers and noses. They would sit and watch their prey in utter stillness and silence, and pounce without mercy. They could leap a great distance, their mouths open, their claws extended. The victim stood little chance of escape.
‘Here, Tilly, Tilly.’ But there was no cat there. No sound.
She returned to the garden table, suddenly self-conscious, wondering what kind of figure she cut. A blind woman with the dust of the tiles on her knees. When she had been younger men had wanted to be close to her, she had felt their breath in trains and buses, and she had sensed how they turned to look at her on the street. People still turned to look at her on the street now, but it was because she was blind. Before it had been because she was a young woman.
She shook her head, moved the thoughts away from her. Why the self-consciousness? Because she may or may not have been observed by a cat?
There was an intake of breath from the direction of the nearest tree. Angeles turned her head towards the sound. It was not a cat, it was head-high. Animals don’t hold their breath, suddenly have to refill their lungs.
But all was quiet again. Her heart was pounding; her chest like a drum. Angeles tried not to make any swift or jerky movements. She took the wire bird-feeder and hung it on its peg. She turned again towards the sound and called quietly: ‘Tilly, is that you? Here, girl; here, Tilly.’
But there was no further sound. No maniac running across the garden to send her sprawling to the ground. And there was no Tilly.
She found herself hurrying towards the french window, stumbling in her haste. She stepped inside the house and closed the door behind her, reaching to turn the key in the lock. Her heart was beating thunderously now, her breathing was short, staccato, and a thin line of sweat had appeared at her hairline.
Panic signs, she thought. The whole idea of the prowler, the thought that she was being watched, what had happened to her sister, Isabel. All of these events had conspired to undermine her confidence. Even her laugh, when she saw herself panicking over a cat in the garden, was tinged with hysteria.
The french window opened by itself while she still had her hand on the key.
Angeles parted her lips to scream but two strong hands drove into her chest, pushing her over backwards, knocking the breath from her lungs. Her head struck the leg of the table and when she tried to claw her way upright a sense of nausea and a series of convulsions overcame her.
For a short period she may have lapsed into unconsciousness, but her will was reactivated by the sense of the man’s hands at her throat. She squirmed away from his touch and he grabbed the front of her blouse. She heard and felt it rip and wondered briefly if there was a possibility of reasoning with him.
But the man was standing astride her now, his hands with their long fingers striving for a grip around her throat. He made no sound. He was here with one, single, fanatical purpose.
Angeles kicked out. If she was going to die, and there was no doubt that that was what he had in mind for her, then she was going to inflict as much damage as possible on her attacker. She heard him gasp as her foot connected with his groin. He knelt astride her now, and she managed to pull his fingers towards her mouth. It felt like a thumb between her teeth. She bit down, hard, hoping to sever it from his hand, but he pulled it free.
She had found blood, though; the tang of it was in her mouth. She reached up to where she thought his face must be, clawing with her fingers, hoping to take out his eyes, to even up the stakes a little. She continued for as long as she could, while his grip around her throat deprived her body of the oxygen it needed to function.
She stuck two of her fingers up his nostrils, hoping to yank his nose off his face, but before she found the strength something inside her relaxed, gave up the struggle. I’m dead, she thought. I’ve been killed by someone and I don’t even know who he is. There was a far-away sound of knocking and a high-pitched f
emale voice, like something in a dream or an opera. One of her last thoughts was of the birds. Glad she’d got around to filling their feeder. Then there was the death-rattle, way down in her throat, below the relentless grip of the hands that cut off her life.
19
JD watched the house from his car. The street was quiet and he had his notebook on the steering wheel. He wished he’d brought the current chapter of his novel to edit, but that was sitting on his desk at home.
He’d come across an odd couple in the post office yesterday and, while watching the blind woman’s house, he was keen to get them down on paper. They were around forty, she in a wheelchair, obese, her hair uncombed; he was skinny, unshaven for two or three days and he wore cross-trainers, one of which had a sole that gaped like a slack mouth.
The woman held the telephone while her mate fed cash into the box and dialled. JD noticed that their faces were encrusted with dirt. When the woman put the telephone to her ear she exposed layers of sweat-rings under her arm. The material looked brittle, as though someone had been painting it.
He moved closer, hoping to overhear the conversation. He took an application for Income Bonds from a container on the wall and posed as an investor. This is what you had to do if you were a writer, spy on people, watch them and record the way they looked, how they interacted with each other and the world. They thought they were safe, their privacy intact: but they were wrong.
‘Your dad sends his love,’ the woman said into the mouthpiece. The man nodded his head in approval. ‘He’s all right. He’s gonna mend the fence later. Maybe tomorrow.’ The man shuffled his feet.
‘When d’you think you’ll get through again?’ She listened to a long explanation at the other end of the line, nodding from time to time.
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I hear what you’re saying. We’ll see you when we see you.’ The man shook his head. He pursed his lips and frowned.
‘The bloody neighbours have been at it again,’ said the woman. ‘Why, complaining about the smell. First it was the house, they said the house was stinking. Now they say it’s us, our personal hygiene. Cheeky buggers. Somebody’s coming down from the council, see if it’s right, if we smell. We’re going to Woolies after this, get some perfume. Just in case.’
They’d talked a couple of minutes more, until they had nothing left to say. Language had dried up like rain under a hot sun. The woman handed the telephone to the man, who hung it up. Then, without a word passing between them, he’d turned the wheelchair around and pushed her out into the street. JD waited for nearly half a minute before he took in a deep breath of air, and it was still redolent with their spoor.
He didn’t have a specific use for these characters. He collected anything and everything he saw. It was a habit now, something he did without thinking. The woman in the wheelchair and her skinny mate would not be used in his current novel. They may never be used at all. They were an insurance policy. One day he might need them, and if they weren’t immortalized on paper, he’d carry them as vague ghosts in his mind. What captured the woman for him were the layers of sweat-rings under her arm. The smell was important, but it was something else. He hadn’t described the smell in his notes because it could have been anything - sour, sweet, musk or a mixture of aromas. But the sweat-rings were exact; they encapsulated the woman’s character.
He saw a woman with a pram enter the street, but he didn’t see that it was Janet. In the order of his universe Janet was not in his mind. Deep within his unconscious, or subconscious, Janet was at home with Geordie and their baby.
He checked his watch and noted the time. He was about to write that a woman with a pram had entered the street, but an inner man prompted him to look at her again.
Janet crossed over the street to Angeles Falco’s house. She walked up the drive and rang the front doorbell. She waited for half a minute before knocking on the door. JD couldn’t think why Janet would be calling on the blind woman. Did they know each other? He couldn’t imagine that they were friends. Two women from different sides of the tracks.
Janet backed away from the door and peered at the bedroom windows. Then she moved forward again and banged on the door with both fists. She seemed to be calling through the letterbox. She stood back and raised her arms as if she was waving. Then she grabbed Echo’s pram and shoved it ahead of her down the side of the house and around to the rear entrance.
JD wondered if he should follow her. But it would mean breaking his cover.
She pushed the pram around the side of the house. There was a wooden gate but it wasn’t locked. When she got to the rear of the house there was a movement in the garden, but it must have been a cat or bird, something disappearing at the level of the garden wall.
The back door was locked, but a patio door stood wide open. She stuck her head inside and called out a friendly ‘hello’.
No reply.
Spooky feeling. The silence stretched itself into a taut line. Felt like it would snap.
She put the brake on the pram and stepped inside. Stood for a moment and listened intently. There was a ticking sound in another room, through towards the front of the house. Not a clock, something else. Heating controls or some kind of alarm system? Apart from that the house was silent.
Janet took another step inside. There was a small occasional table, which had been overturned. A heavy plant pot was broken; peat and the remains of a Christmas rose were spilled on the carpet.
There were three chairs but Angeles Falco’s inert body was spread-eagled behind the sofa. Janet fell to her knees by the side of her. She felt her own body go into a convulsion, heard again the same sounds she had heard at the front door, only this time they were coming from her own throat.
Janet thought there must be something she could do but she was overwhelmed by a plethora of images, one piled on top of the others. Resuscitation. The movement at the back wall, it wasn’t a cat. Ralph doing the moon-walk. Two sisters, both killed. The terrible silence that death leaves behind.
Another movement. The patio door being opened further and the dark figure of a man silhouetted against the glass. He looked from side to side and moved across the room towards them at speed. Janet tried to scream as he reached out for her, scrambled back against the wall and scurried forward on her hands and knees, must get to her child, must look to Echo and keep her safe.
‘Get an ambulance.’
She stopped at the patio door. She looked back towards the voice. JD was leaning over the quiet body of the blind woman. He had tilted back her head and was giving her mouth-to-mouth, blowing the contents of his lungs into her. He paused momentarily, glanced over at Janet.
‘Get an ambulance. Use the phone.’ He’d taken over. He was giving orders.
He placed both of his hands on Angeles’ chest and pushed down, once, twice. He kept going. The mouth, the chest, the mouth, the chest. Janet rushed through to the hall and dialled for an ambulance. Then she called Sam.
‘Is she dead or alive?’ Sam asked down the wire.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought she was dead, but JD’s working on her.’
20
There are currently 110,000 men living in England who have been convicted of sexual offences against children. This is not a generally known fact. The Home Office knows it, because it was one of their studies that threw up the figures. And I know it, of course, because I am a psychologist and informed about such things. That I am a currently unemployed psychologist doesn’t alter the truth. I qualified and I have clinical and field experience.
My ex-colleagues, of course, know that my employers felt it just to remove me from my post to avert a scandal. What is not generally known is that my research project was actually producing original and valuable data. And if I was so wrong in my treatment of the boys, why was I given such a huge sum of money to resign?
Your question is this: will these sex offenders commit more crimes against the innocent? I don’t want to lie to you. The answer is that m
any of them will. Because although they have been convicted of sexual offences against children, and although many of them have served terms of imprisonment, they have not been cured.
Which brings me, neatly, to one of my pet subjects: is there such a thing as ‘cure’ for offenders like these? And the answer is no, at least not in the conventional sense. There is though, even in my liberal profession, a growing consensus that these people can be ‘cured’ in a number of different ways. We are beginning to look again at a range of tertiary preventions, including selective incapacitation, the use of boot camps, and keeping high-rate serious and chronic offenders out of circulation altogether.
Psychology is the art of observation, and observation is about watching people. All psychologists watch people, but not all psychologists see. Let me rephrase the last part of that sentence. Psychologists, like people in other professions, actually see what they expect to see.
This is best illustrated by the experience of eye-witness testimony. Because eye-witnesses can be 100 per cent sure about what they have seen and at the same time 100 per cent wrong. There was an experiment carried out on television in the eighties where viewers were shown a film of a mugging, and then asked to pick the offender from an identity parade of six men. Remember that they had just seen the offender commit the crime in front of their eyes. A couple of thousand people responded, but only 14 per cent of them picked the right man. With six possibilities to choose from, a random guess would produce a correct result by 16.67 Per cent. So in this example eye-witness testimony produced a result which was worse than a random guess.
There has been an enormous amount of research on eye-witness testimony, and it all tends to show that people remember faces poorly and that they don’t recall details from memory, but from stereotypes of what they think criminals look like.