by David Wilson
Kate made eye contact for the first time since Knight had entered the room. “I did not help Bobby Lomas escape. I am just as outraged by his escape as anyone else. I feel a complete and utter fool.”
“And the other?”
“No.”
“No what? As in never did, couldn’t conceive of it, never crossed my mind to whisper sugary bullshit in his ear?” He rose from his chair.
“Back off, sit down Mr Policeman,” said Kate, raising her voice. “The world is a much more complicated place than you seem to appreciate, it’s not as simple as waving your fists, kicking at problems.”
Knight sat down. “Give me some clues then.”
“You’re a smart cookie, Detective Inspector, you’re just impulsive, too much aggressive front like most men, solve the problem as quickly as possible, here’s a handy solution, hammer, nail, job done. I don’t take you as a wife-beater, although you could become one. You’re single but unhappy with that, you crave affection, but the horrors of the job have shrunk that to a fraction of what you need. You crave trust, your world makes no sense without it. You’re desperate to put broken things back together again. You’re not a bad guy.”
“Fuck off,” he said and broke into a smile. Knight felt he’d been taken to the cleaners but, at the same time, perhaps some dirt had been washed off.
“Hear me out,” said Kate. “Lomas is not an inherently evil guy, he’s intellectualized his crimes into a theory of life, in my view, like performance art. What he’s done is appalling and antisocial and if the death penalty existed he would have fried several times over. But he has a fine and penetrating mind, he’s incredibly well read and will attempt to trap you in his web of learning, his promised land of new horizons, wide open vistas of emotional experience. I needed to get closer to him, that’s all, to stop him playing games with me.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing that even you, I imagine, haven’t done in the school playground.”
Knight shifted uneasily; the woman was beginning to freak him out.
“Please, just tell me.”
“I kissed him.”
“You kissed a God-knows-how-many-murders-he’s-committed-in-his-time serial killer?”
“He hasn’t offended in over thirty years.”
Knight considered the ramifications of what she’d told him and found himself wondering what that kiss felt like.
“So you loved him and left him?” he said, trying to hide the bitterness of experience.
Kate looked away. Her heart was heavy. She tried to understand how it happened, how her professional ambitions and emotions collided, how she gave in under the weight of the impact, the falling forward onto his lips, the long fall. She was right about the DI, he was no fool.
“I gave him hope, then took it away.” Her eyes misted, and the sorrow rose and choked her, not for any one individual but for the world’s crushing of gentleness, the sweetness of innocence, always so unprotected. It aroused her anger but also her helplessness. “It may have triggered a crisis, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking long and hard about it. He could have left the prison as a two fingers to what we’re trying to achieve here, our reconstruction, he may go back to his old ways and do harm. I’m so sorry.”
Knight pulled a tissue from the box on the table in front of them and handed it to her. He’d been in therapy sessions on a number of occasions himself and knew that tears sprung at the slightest prompting, marriages crumbling, confidence shattered, a soul in a thousand pieces.
“It’s ok,” he said. He had to work with this. He had an instinct for bullshit and although there were layers about her he wasn’t sure he could fathom, he chose to believe her. These psychotherapists were fruitcakes, monkeying around with your head. One thing he knew for certain was that you could never know the truth about anything. It was unlikely Kate was involved with Lomas in any deeper way than she’d confessed; that she was in league with him on some crazy mission of retribution, getting even with the world in a mad spree of killing, surely seemed impossible.
“We’ll keep this to ourselves,” he said. “At least we’ve got something to work on.”
Chapter Nine
The cuts were superficial. He’d worn his shirt long-sleeved. His chest had stopped bleeding after a while and a douse of cold water had cleaned him up. He didn’t have the guts. He had to assess his options, no point in rushing into things. Kill or be killed, an endless cycle. The leopard on the Serengeti murders the unsuspecting gazelle, cold-blooded, no emotion. He’d done some bad things but that was decades ago. This place had softened him, made him easy prey. Kate Crowther and her insane theories, nothing like the real world. She’d never felt the point of a switchblade, seen it slide between the ribs. Does a lamb bleat when it’s struck by a snake? That and this, this and that, round the fucking houses, talking, talking, until there’s nothing left but shit for brains. He was guilty, guilty as sin, always would be. The four horsemen, now there’s two coming for him.
“All right McCabe?” It was Jim Dabell. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, you all right mate?”
“I’m good.” He nodded hard, trying to clear his head.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, look, what’s happening?”
“No news,” said Dabell. “Wooldridge’s shot his gob off on TV about it all, silly fucker, he’ll cop the heat on this one if he’s not careful, they’ll take away his pension. Shame, I always liked him. Lomas eh? The philosopher, must have had a brainwave, or a death wish. How well did you know him?”
“Enough, like the rest.”
“You heard he was fucking that bird Crowther?”
“Not a chance.”
“What do you know?”
“Leave it.” said McCabe and he sauntered off.
“Hey is that blood on your shirt?”
“Shaving.” McCabe waved his hand dismissively as if he was swatting a swarm of midges that were plaguing his eyes and mouth.
There was no way Lomas was into Crowther, no way at all, thought McCabe, unless he played around, home and away, left, right, in, out, in, out, shake it all about. The fucker, for one brief moment he had it all, there was hope, meaning, a centre, the spinning had stopped, no more talking. The firm, pale, white of a thigh, the skin smooth and curved, intact. Why did Lomas run? He started weeping uncontrollably, heaving, swallowing the sound of something breaking. He was too soft.
Maybe he should turn back and brain Dabell, stove his head in with a fire extinguisher. He’d get put in max; not his style. Nothing was going to release the iron claw that was gripping his heart; it struck without warning, pulverising the soft tissue, squeezing the life out of him.
He closed the door to his cell. From his bedside drawer he pulled out the folder and started leafing through the cuttings. Total paranoia is just total awareness; a long time ago being crazy meant something, nowadays everybody’s crazy; living is what scares me, dying is easy. McCabe had listed as many quotes as he could find, he wrote them down in longhand in an old school exercise book; he thought about what the words meant, tried to divine their essence, their secret messages, had done so many times. Charles Manson was a philosopher, a deep thinker, a joker, those eyes in ’64, with his wild hair, dark tache and beard, an easy rider prankster, an extra in a Brando movie, and now close-cropped, grey beard, with a swastika tattooed between his eyes, the eyes, they still have that snake-head glare, venomous, hard, staring from the depths of hell. How did he match it, look like that? Did he practise in the mirror, or did he need no practise at all? There was the same long-distance shimmer of death like the far-away horizon of a desert.
Be sure to wear flowers in our hair. The darkest hour, we know now, is just before dawn. Our pathetic attempts at innocence died with Manson and his family.
McCabe studied Sharon Tate’s autopsy file, August 10, 1969, Sharon Tate Polansky, #69-8796. The unembalmed body is that of a 26-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female, weighing 13
6 pounds, measuring 66 inches in length. Her hair is blond and eyes are brown. Total stab wounds… 16, penetrating heart, lungs and liver causing massive haemorrhage.
She lay on her side, feet apart, her left arm holding her chest, trying to staunch the blood, her right arm over her head, like she was doing the front crawl, swimming in a pool of blood.
Susan Atkins said later that she tasted Tate’s blood and found it to be “warm and sticky”.
“How can it not be right if it’s done with love?” Atkins said. “I don’t know how many times I stabbed. I felt nothing, I felt absolutely nothing for her. She begged for her life and for the life of her baby. There was no turning back.”
McCabe imagined the knife, a simple swing of the arm, a bruising punch but no pain, and then again and again, the body screaming for the fatal blow, number two or three or four. A coward’s way out, forced through the exit. His was going to be the other way, the ultimate act of himself, a clean getaway. There are things more loathsome than death.
He knotted up a sheet. He tested his weight. He had to do it well. This time.
Chapter Ten
“So, what do you want from me?” asked Kate. She balled the tissue in her fist. What a schmuck she thought. Crying was a positive release, but not in front of a guy she hardly knew, in a position of authority.
“I understand you have recordings of sessions with Lomas,” said Knight, “and I thought we could listen to them together and maybe find some clues as to where he might be, and how he escaped.”
Kate was hardly in a position to argue, but she couldn’t resist having a go.
“I thought you didn’t believe in offender profiling?”
“I don’t,” he said bluntly, “but I’ll work with anyone who can help me stop a crime, and prevent someone becoming a victim. What do you say?”
Kate didn’t answer immediately. At first Lomas had been hesitant about allowing the sessions to be recorded. Kate had explained that using the recorder allowed her to concentrate on what he was saying, as opposed to frantically noting down his comments, or attempting to memorize them, so that she could transcribe them later. It allowed her to fully concentrate on him. She remembered that he had liked this explanation.
She had promised that the recordings would never be made public, although they would form the basis of her research project. He would be “anonymized”, she had assured him. On one occasion she had even described the technique of grounded theorizing, which was her method of analyzing what he had said by coding his comments, and looking for hidden patterns and meanings in his speech. Lomas had smiled in that way he did and called it “being anatomized”.
“You and me,” Lomas had said. “Partners in crime. I’m the serial killer, you’re the psycho killer. Qu’est-ce que c’est? You’d better run, run away.”
Kate scrolled through the voice recording on her computer. “Listen to this,” she said. Lomas’ voice emerged, almost as if he were in the room:
“I don’t know why it is. It can be a look, or the way that she laughs. Perhaps a gesture, but she gets my attention. My imagination goes into overdrive, it’s a trip, a magical mystery, a fantasy.”
This corresponded with serial killer expert Professor House’s research about what he had called the “killing process”. Based on the interviews that House had conducted in America, he had suggested that there is a five-stage process that serial killers go through: fantasy, stalking, abduction, killing, and finally the disposal of the victim’s body. Lomas continued:
“Planning is the key. You can’t just rush into these things. I knew all the student bars in town, and would be careful not to be seen too often in any one of them, but regularly change the places that I would pick them up. I’d sit and watch, and wait for my turn to come. They were young and single and so men hit on them all the time. It was hardly unusual when I did that too, and because I was slightly older than the average student, in other words I wasn’t half-pissed most of the time, and so could carry on a conversation, they’d start talking to me. And you know, they would trust me. In all honesty I didn’t have to work too hard. It was almost as if they wanted to believe everything I was telling them.”
“What a creep,” said Knight. “Deadpan, matter of fact, like he’s reading a recipe from a cook book.”
“He’d call himself a ‘reverse alchemist’,” said Kate. “Turning gold into base metal, young lives into early death, disrupting the laws of nature.”
“Yeah right,” said Knight. “He needs locking up.”
“That’s your job, Mr Enforcer.”
“Look,” said Knight. “I know it’s against standard procedure and I don’t want to make the prisoners any more paranoid than they already are, but show me around Greenbank. I need to get a feel for this place.”
Kate grabbed a cardigan that lay on a hook at the back of her door and left her office before Knight had a chance to rise from his seat.
By the time Knight caught up with her, they were making their way down the “M1” – the long, narrow corridor which connected the whole of Greenbank together as a unit. Off this corridor were the four wings of the prison, as well as the kitchen and staff mess area where the officers took their meals. At the bottom was a second corridor, which connected the M1 to the administration block, where Munro had his office, and to the gym and the education department.
Everything was so neatly laid out, systematic and planned, thought Knight, like Kate’s theories. A whiff of panic, toxic gas from an unsound mind and it could all blow, you’d have a prison riot on your hands. It would all come tumbling down.
The corridors were covered in institutional pinks and yellows, and posters exhorting the staff to “Work as Part of a Team – Together We Achieve So Much More”. There were also formal penal notices about organizational matters that committed Greenbank to being “Totally Opposed to Racism”. Knight noticed another that read: “HM Prison Service serves the public by keeping in custody those committed by the courts”, and understood just how embarrassed Munro must be about the escape. He thought about the therapeutic process as a sort of escape of the mind, unlocking doors to dark mental spaces, releasing angels or demons. Who could tell which would emerge until it was too late?
There were paintings by prisoners on the walls. Knight didn’t know much about art, but he recognized screams of anguish when he saw them so graphically displayed. Some were shocking in their portrayal of despair, artfully composed no doubt under the guidance of an art teacher, but the emotion was spilling out. He recalled a documentary he’d seen on TV about the artist Francis Bacon, all slabs of meat and purple innards, weird.
“Art must be popular,” said Knight, and Kate described how art therapy and psychodrama were crucial ways that therapists used to unlock the subconscious. There were hardly any tradecraft workshops at Greenbank because the prisoners concentrated on therapy, rather than learning a practical trade like metalwork, decorating or plumbing as they did in “the system”.
“Was Lomas into art?” asked Knight.
Kate sensed a trap. “He was into everything to do with the mind; art appreciation was just one of his many interests,” she said choosing her words carefully. “He knew his Picasso from his Pissaro.”
“And his Jack the Ripper from his Fred West.”
“Leave it out Detective Inspector, we’ve established he was category A, now he’s further down the alphabet, or was until he changed his mind. We need to work together on this.”
“I heard he liked to draw. Any examples of his work we could look at?”
Kate scanned the walls. “That one,” she pointed.
Knight examined it closely. “Decent, pencil, incredibly detailed, obsessive eye for every brick and angle. What’s the building?”
“The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. His favourite place; said it would be the first place he’d visit if he ever got out.”
Knight made a note on his iPhone, then punched in a speed dial number to the station. “Check it out, pronto,
Ashmolean Museum, it’s in Oxford. Ok, it’ll probably be closed this late, first thing in the morning then. Discreet, mind you.” He slipped his phone back into his pocket.
“What do you mean by ‘the system’?” he asked.
“It’s what everyone at Greenbank calls the rest of the prison system. It’s shorthand for saying that we are different; that we are unique.” Kate told him about local prisons which served the courts and housed mainly remand prisoners, and those serving very short sentences; she described open prisons, which didn’t have a security fence, and where the prisoners were all category Ds, and could be trusted not to run off. They were usually filled with assorted accountants, journalists and dodgy coppers. There was the high-security estate, which housed all the category As, where most of Greenbank’s population had come from; and finally she mentioned “training prisons” which were somewhere in between – holding category Cs, and which supposedly trained prisoners for freedom.”
“There are also different prisons for young people, called Young Offender Institutions, and for women. I’m sure you’ve visited many prisons in your time,” said Kate.
Knight nodded. He remembered visits to Woodhill and Long Lartin, which had been depressing experiences.
“What do you notice that’s different about Greenbank?” asked Kate.
Knight looked around. Desolation seeping through the walls like rising damp. The same as any other bang-up. The smell was the same – a mixture of rotting cabbage, floor cleaner, shit and body odour. He listened. You could hear a pin drop.
“It’s quiet. There’s no shouting?”
“Good.” Kate was patronizing him. “Because of therapeutic practice and despite the crimes committed by the people we lock up, we have the fewest violent incidents in the whole of the penal system. There are no staff assaults, no riots or hostages. There is no fear. We don’t even have a segregation unit.”
Knight was sceptical: “Is that because there is nothing to fight against, or be frightened of? They’ve got everything they want. They don’t even have to work.”