by David Wilson
“You have? What do you know of my work?” she asked, sceptically.
“You’re still working on this profiling stuff. I don’t have much faith in it myself.”
“Is that so? Why not?”
“When was the last time you heard a profiler admit that they got it completely wrong? You hear about these celebrity profilers all the time, but what they do is mostly common sense, and all they ever discuss are their successes. It helps sell their next book, but you never hear them tell you they screwed up. Too many have too much invested in their own careers, if you ask me.” He smiled.
“Well,” interrupted Munro, “I can see you two are going to get along.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kate.
“You and DI Knight are to work together on this case. Brains and brawn. You might be able to work out how Lomas got the equipment to cut the hole in the fence, and more importantly where the fuck he’s gone now he’s out of Greenbank.” Munro slammed his fist on the desk and his empty coffee mug clattered to the floor but didn’t break.
Kate was startled by Munro’s sudden anger. He seemed to be a walking a tightrope between civility and completely losing it. Knight took his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms.
“Apologies,” said Munro.
“No sweat,” said Knight.
“There’s a lot of talk, a lot of round-the-houses theorizing. The guy’s a monster, we need to catch him before he carries out another of his ritual murders to compensate for his neglected childhood, or jealousy of his sister, or because he lost at Trivial Pursuit or some other bullshit reason. Maybe he’s just evil, the spawn of the devil, ever thought of that?” Munro retrieved his coffee mug, placing it next to the small photo of his daughter Morag, where he liked it to be. In the photo he was carrying his sleeping child. He remembered that day, it was summer, they were walking through fields, she was about four, wielding a stick and thrashing at any plant above her head height, which was nearly everything, muttering, “Go away, leave my daddy alone,” and shrieking with laughter, a little ball of energy cutting the world down to size. After a while she was exhausted so Munro carried her home as she slept on his shoulder.
Kate felt guilty that she, more than anyone else, hadn’t seen Lomas’ escape coming. There hadn’t even been a hint of it in anything he had said to her during their many therapy sessions. She shivered. He had enormous self-esteem and confidence in the power and control he could exercise over women. He excited her professional curiosity and something more she couldn’t name that frightened her. She recalled that time she took it too far. Why is the human species so complicated she wondered. She knew she had to atone by helping Knight whether she liked it or not.
Munro looked up. “Ok you two, start forming a plan of action. I don’t care if it involves reading tea leaves, just bring him back.”
Knight looked awkward and then asked: “Governor Munro, can I have a word in private?”
Kate left the office feeling a wave of unease, eyes boring into her back.
“Ok,” said Knight. “So you’re pairing me up with a bint who, rumour has it, is shagging the bad guy and quite possibly helped him escape. Some conflict of interest here wouldn’t you say? I prefer my cases to be cleaner than this.”
“First off, watch your language, no woman around here is a ‘bint’, understand?” replied Munro. “Leave that sexist bullshit back in the locker room. Secondly, you want clean, go work for a car wash company.”
Knight didn’t expect Munro to be a pushover but he wanted to test him. Sexism wasn’t his style either, but he was checking out the lie of the land. Prisons weren’t known for their PC. Kate was smart, he’d heard about her, he’d also heard that she was easy on the eye, and, despite himself, he had to agree.
“So is she? And the escape?” said Knight.
“She swears blind she’s not, never has, purely professional. Knew nothing about the escape.”
“Do you believe her?”
“I’m not sure, so watch your step, stranger things have happened.”
Knight felt his heartbeat rise to his throat. This could get complicated.
Chapter Seven
It was late afternoon and already dark. An oily sheen seemed to smear the roads after the recent downpour and the streetlights were haloed with mist as if steaming on a low boil. There were always people, criss-crossing, striding with purpose, meandering, not looking where they were going, entering private spaces. The Big Issue seller depressed her, forcing her to look away, a pinprick of guilt, turning her for that moment into someone ill-mannered, aloof, uncaring. She’d looked on the Big Issue website, tried to remember the names of the sellers working in Oxford, give them some dignity: Caroline Hepworth, outside St Aldates Road Post Office, I lost my job as a sales manager at an insurance company, I was homeless three months later; Alex Grant, outside M&S, Queen Street, The biggest challenge to me is coping with my schizophrenia. You win, you lose; you give, you take. Crime was one of her particular fascinations. She scoured the stats – street-level crime and antisocial behaviour in Oxford city this month – from the Home Office: all crime and ASB – 278; burglary – 14; robbery – 3; violent crime – 44; on or near shopping centre, by Burger King: one count each of antisocial behaviour, violent crime, shoplifting, other crime. She imagined connections, considered lives coming off the rails.
She passed the Randolph Hotel and crossed Beaumont Street to get to the Ashmolean Museum before it closed in half an hour. She’d read in the Oxford Mail that the police were reinvestigating unsolved murders in the city over the last fifty years. There was twenty-three-year-old Beverley Dunkley, whose decomposed body was found in the Grove deer park near Magdalen College in October 1983. She had been strangled and her body lay undiscovered for three months; Anne Ormiston who was five months pregnant when she was brutally stabbed to death at her home in Church Cowley Road. Her daughter found her when she came home from school. The murderers are still at large.
Grief goes unrestrained.
She’d reached the hangover stage in her first term at university. She was exhausted by parties, the derangement of freshers’ week, buffeted by the hierarchies of new friendships, the brutal learning curve like a physical assault. She was visiting the Ashmolean because it was free, and warm, and she could sit in front of William Blake’s painting The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides and be still, recompose, the silence loosening nerves as taut as piano wire.
She liked university, it was a chance to escape reality, to try new personas. The guys were hot for it but awkward as if they’d discovered new limbs and hadn’t learnt how to use them. It was always her or a girlfriend who ended up dragging a paralytic male student back to his room and dump him on his bed. In their vulnerability she considered doing to them what they would no doubt attempt on a drunken comatose female student. She’d read about it. Some guy recently was given a five-year prison sentence. She should get even with the guys, play them at their game, leave one or two of them scarred. Perhaps she was a bit weird, perverse. She was drawn to the dark, the moral abyss her parents had protected her from all her life. She liked music by bands no one had heard of, Death Metal or Grindcore; she loved their names: Napalm Death, Anal Cunt, Carcass, Cannibal Corpse, Necrophagist; their “fuck you” to the mainstream. Oxford with its folksy respectability was lame and stultifying, she wanted more.
Suddenly there were footsteps behind her and she started as if a knife had entered her ribs. It was a man, there was no one else in the room, and he came up alongside her and looked at the Blake. There was a musty smell about him and his head was shaven, maybe a wino finding some warmth. There was something glinting in his hand, a blade of some sort, and he raised it slowly to his mouth. He started licking it, his tongue pink and bulbous and exaggerated, like a lizard testing the air, sensing the invisible currents of fear. It was a spoon, the guy was licking a metal spoon. She rose from the bench, lightheaded with a surging, gorging panic and stumbled from the gal
lery. Outside she breathed deeply and wondered how weak her nerves were, how easily the calm she sought was shattered. There was that guy she read about, the serial killer, Bobby Lomas, the college killer or something, terrorized the unis, student applications plummeted for a few years after he was caught, the stench of death around every corner. But he’d been banged up for ages and she didn’t believe in negative vibes, that violence fed off itself and where there was murder, murder was sure to return. She hummed a tune and silently mouthed the lyrics to Five Nails through the Neck from Kill by Cannibal Corpse.
She crossed St Giles’ and walked up Magdalen Street East. She was going out tonight, on her own; she had a craving for “real”. She wanted some drugs – perhaps she could score some coke, lift her spirits, restore her self-confidence, plug her back into the pulse-beat. She thought about her father and his straight life, his adherence to norms and expectations, his desperate, despairing ambition. A prison governor for God’s sake. She wondered whether she should have sent him that text about being flashed at, she thought he’d find it amusing, but on second thoughts it may have unnerved him. She hated the thought of him being upset. Fathers, the great protectors, but you always let us go, your hand slipping from ours, leaving us to the wild dogs.
She found the pub and shouldered open the heavy door, nearly tripped but held firm. There was a fire, its heat much too strong and there were three men who all looked up as she entered. She ordered a pint of Kronenbourg, selected a table and waited.
Chapter Eight
The hole in the fence and Lomas’ escape were the talk of the prison. That afternoon, on every wing, staff and prisoners huddled together in corners gossiping about what they had heard, or thought they had heard. Tension was high. Rumours started to fly. No one said anything publicly, but most suspected that Lomas had been planning this for ages, and that he had been playing Kate along while all the time plotting his escape. Perhaps he’d been able to get access to the fence on his way to and from her office? Perhaps she’d helped him? A few staff – and just as many prisoners – eyed her with some suspicion as she ventured onto D wing, and it was difficult to get therapy started again. Everyone seemed lethargic and confused, an escape went against everything the prisoners were trying to achieve and it took considerable persuasion by Kate to get the prisoners back into their groups.
Greenbank was a therapeutic community, a “TC”, and prisoners who were sent there had volunteered to go to the jail, where instead of learning a trade, as they might do in other prisons, they agreed to participate in therapy. Therapy took place in groups; each wing held sixty prisoners and there were seven small groups of about eight, which, at the end of each day, would all join together in one, grand, wing community meeting which would include all the staff members, as well as the prisoners.
When asked what this therapy consisted of Kate would reply that it was “talking therapy”. The prisoners would describe their life story, their crimes, and their relationships, while trying to see any patterns in their past that could explain why they had behaved as they had done. “Gaining insight”, Kate called it, and it afforded her some understanding of how, and in what circumstances, people killed. But that was only the first part of the therapeutic process.
“It isn’t enough to create an insightful murderer,” Kate would explain to visitors, “but rather someone who understands why he murdered, the circumstances in his life that preceded that murder, and crucially how he has to behave so that he never murders again. First we break them down, then we build them back up so that they can look at the future in a different, crime-free way.”
It was all a matter of trust. And trust was breaking down.
A few of the more seasoned prisoners had started to construct their own versions of reality. Lomas had escaped, they reasoned, but he’d be found soon enough – no one could hide forever, especially an infamous serial killer – and then what would happen? He wasn’t going to be given a second chance at Greenbank, so he’d spend the rest of his life suspended in time, submerged in a dispersal, one eye always looking behind him watching for the first punk that wanted to make a name for himself by taking him out. It was the nearest equivalent to being buried alive. Some suggested that the escape had been a put-up job. Munro was known as a hardliner, and all that Lomas had done was help him make a case to close the prison down, or make the regime tougher.
*
After groups had finished, Kate returned to her office where she paced up and down, trying to work out what she had missed in her sessions with Lomas. How could she have been so stupid? She thought back to her discussion with Munro about convicted killers telling interviewers what they wanted to hear. Was that what Lomas had done to her? That’s not what it seemed like at the time; the sessions were too deep and painful for him. But perhaps what everyone was saying was right. Perhaps she had got too close, and yes there were moments, but she saw it all as part of the process of dismantling and reconstruction. The line between psychologist and prisoner, about “them” and “us”, is as thin as a razor blade and sometime you don’t see it or feel it until a cut has been made. Her mind flashed back to a case she was involved in where random women were approached from behind and slashed across the face, or their throats were cut by a man with a knife. They never saw it coming; there were never any witnesses. A laborious piecing together of CCTV footage finally identified him and he was arrested. Had she missed vital clues as to what he was up to, his stealth and strategy, his creeping up behind her? Bastard. Devious, clever, manipulating, misogynistic bastard.
And now her reputation was in tatters. That cop Knight looking at her like she was Rose West. Men are so quick to judge women, and find them guilty.
She sat down in the large armchair that dominated her room, and looked at the postcards of Rome, Florence and Venice that she had stuck to her wall. Happy moments of solace. She reached into the drawer of her desk, and pulled out a memory stick labelled “Lomas”, pushed it into the USB of her computer, and waited for his voice to emerge.
Kate sensed that she was going to cry, and had to fight back the tears as the tape played on. Pretty soon she had blocked out his voice, and she was no longer listening to Lomas – how he would have hated her for that. There was a knock on her door.
“Dr Crowther, are you there?” It was DI Knight. She’d been expecting his visit.
Kate blew her nose, and coughed to hide the sound.
“Just a minute,” she said, and rose to let him in.
“Come in. Please have a seat.” She motioned to Knight to sit where Lomas had once sat. The prisoner’s chair was furthest away from the door to allow the staff member to exit quickly if there were any signs of trouble. Over the years Kate had learned never to wear a necklace, or earrings. She had seen an ear that’d had an earring wrenched out of it. It was not a pretty sight. Between the two armchairs was a small table with a box of tissues placed on it.
“Have you come to gloat?” she asked.
Knight remained silent. He steepled his arms and started twiddling his thumbs. He looked around the office. He sat with his legs wide, occupying big space like a commuter on the London underground, the sort that drove Kate mad.
“Is this where Lomas would sit?” he asked.
Kate nodded.
Knight seemed to drift off into some kind of private reverie. Then he said, “Dr Crowther, I admire what you’re trying to achieve, but this time you’ve seriously fucked up.”
Kate felt the dreaded rush of blood to her face as she reddened.
“That’s completely unfair and you can leave my office now if you’re going to use language like that.”
“Rumour has it, how can I put this delicately,” said Knight, “that you have been, as Shakespeare would say, ‘making the beast with two backs’ with this fugitive serial killer Bobby Lomas, that in the course of your professional engagement with him as his therapist, you breached the divide between work and play and broke the agreement of trust you had established with your cli
ent and this institution, that you may have facilitated his escape, and as he is now at loose to commit further atrocities. If he does so you will be culpable of assisting him in his crimes and, in addition, you will be guilty as an accessory to his crimes which may, very likely, involve murder.” Knight went in hard, hoping to knock her off balance, like a rugby prop forward in the first few minutes of the game.
Kate felt herself losing control, and breathed deeply. Her heart beat so loudly she could hardly hear herself think. She thought she was going to faint but pulled back, through force of will, as she always eventually managed to do when things threatened to fall apart.
“It’s bollocks,” she said quietly.
Knight waited for her to continue, but she remained silent.
“Which aspect is bollocks?” he said.
“All of it.”
Knight studied her. Blonde hair, delicate mouth, smooth skin around the eyes and cheeks, her flush fading, her eyes looking away. She was a peach, no wonder twisted old men opened up their hearts to her. Forgive me for I have sinned. Her legs were crossed, wound round each other in a tight clinch. He wanted to shock her out of her complacency, her ivy-league attitude that the world existed for her amusement, beat some sense into her. He felt his fingers tingle and curl, fists forming. Too often he’d been here, and more so than ever nowadays, a jet stream of rage following.
“Care to elaborate?” he felt like Sherlock Holmes.