by F. G. Cottam
‘It’s somewhat worse than that, I’m afraid.’
The professor groaned. ‘You’re afraid,’ he said. He sat down.
‘What possessed you to take them to the Fischer house?’
‘Can you help me, Mr Seaton? Can you help any of us? You look like a priest. Like Central Casting’s idea of a priest, anyway. One of those rugged, brooding, defrocked priests who rekindles his faith in a rousing final reel.’
He’d been drinking, Seaton realised. Vodka, probably. He hadn’t noticed any liquor smell. He rose to go. This was useless. ‘I’m no priest, Professor Clarke.’
‘But you’re a Catholic.’
Seaton laughed before he could stop himself. ‘It’s no help.’
‘You’re alive. And you’ve been there. Haven’t you?’
Looking at the doomed man in front of him, Seaton said, ‘What possessed you to take those girls there?’
‘The invitation, of course,’ the professor said. ‘I took them because we were invited to go.’
Seaton took this in. ‘Can I ask who it was invited you?’
‘It was Peter Antrobus. A philosophy postgraduate. At least, he called himself that. But I imagine it was a false identity and his credentials every bit as bogus as those you showed me when you came in here.’
Seaton sat back down. ‘Tell me everything, professor. Start at the beginning. I want to know everything you do about Peter Antrobus. And you will tell me. Even drunk, I’d say you know enough about ethics to know you owe it to those girls.’ He glanced at his watch. He didn’t want to be crunching across the clumsy gravel of the university’s paths in the dark. He didn’t want to be anywhere near this place when night fell. He did not want to risk another encounter with the visitor in the spats. Outside, it was raining persistently out of low, blue-black cloud. But it was only just after two o’clock in the afternoon. Seaton sat back in his chair and the professor began to speak.
Five
The drive to Whitstable was almost due east, so he was chasing darkness as the sun declined, anaemic through cloud when it showed itself, in the mirrors of the Saab. A few miles east of Westerham he could have joined the M25, gambling on the weekend traffic to speed his journey as far as the Boxley exit. But he stayed on minor roads. The rain continued to fall and the software behind the instrument panel of the car offered no further, unwelcome surprises.
Whitstable offered Seaton the false promise of conviviality. The girl who had tried to kill herself was a nineteen-year-old called Sarah Mason. Both of her parents were dead. Her surviving next of kin was her brother, Nicholas, who was something in the military and had taken compassionate leave to help his sister recover. She was at the family home, Nicholas’s property now, one among a parade of Victorian houses built above the beach, called Wavecrest. Nick Mason was quite happy to see the trauma specialist from London. But not at home. The plan was that he would sound out Seaton while a qualified nurse monitored the condition of the girl. And the sounding out was to be done at the Pearson’s Arms, a gastropub famous for its seafood in a town famous for its seafood. Mason had hired three nurses, providing twenty-four-hour professional help for his sister.
‘What does he do in the military?’ Seaton had asked Covey.
‘I couldn’t find out,’ Covey said. ‘Which rather answers the question, I think.’
But Seaton’s mind, on the route to Whitstable, was not on crab or lobster, or even the cloak-and-dagger world of covert military operations. It was on the story professor Clarke had recounted in his sad little refuge from mildew and failing light. As he drove, he went over and over the professor’s story in his mind.
Peter Antrobus was a mature student of thirty-four who had applied to do a PhD in moral philosophy. He possessed a good first degree and the academic lubricant of independent wealth. Granting Antrobus his place required no bursaries or messy haggling over grants. By contrast, there was optimistic talk of an endowment from rich parents with money old enough to enable them to see the pursuit of abstract thought as more than just an expensive waste of their son’s time and career potential. The only problem was Peter’s absolute refusal to live in student quarters on the campus. Clarke openly admitted to Seaton that the main reason for this stipulation was financial. The university charged its students considerably more to live in than it cost to keep them. The policy was rigid and extremely profitable. Once Antrobus became aware of this, he offered a gift sum equal to a year’s accommodation charge to settle the matter. And settle the matter it did. He and his girlfriend moved into an old coach house at a crossroads about two miles north of the university.
Peter and his companion were both thin and pale and shared the same dark-blond hair. They both favoured a black wardrobe and, to the professor’s inexpert eye, their clothes seemed stylish and expensive. He only ever saw Marthe with Peter, which was natural enough. Once, only once, he was invited to spend an evening in their company at the coach house. The couple chain-smoked and drank absinthe and ate almost nothing of the cold cuts that comprised the meal they had prepared. It was February and the coach house was uncomfortably cold. What made the evening even more of an ordeal, Clarke said, was their very public lasciviousness. They may have looked like brother and sister, but they could not keep their hands or their mouths off one another. They’d put music on, he said, and these fitful little dances would develop into the sort of necking sessions more commonly associated with adolescents in a darkened cinema.
‘Their behaviour that evening was inappropriate, to say the least.’
‘What kind of music?’
The professor looked thoughtful. ‘Anachronistic, given their ages.’
‘Be specific,’ Seaton said.
‘Piano music. Rags.’
‘Was the coach house sited close to water?’
The professor thought about this. ‘No rivers or streams, no.’
‘No water, then.’
‘No running water,’ he said. ‘There was a pond.’
Seaton nodded.
‘What relevance has this?’
‘Please go on, professor. I’m sorry I interrupted.’
What fascinated Clarke about Peter Antrobus was his attitude towards morality. The ethics professor said Antrobus approached the subject the way a bright toddler might approach a live hand grenade. He was full of curiosity about it, but he was entirely lacking in preconceptions or fear. It was as though he had never been exposed to the codes that govern and inhibit human behaviour. It was as though he had never been hurt and forced to learn the compassionate lesson of pain.
‘As though he’d never been born,’ Seaton said to himself, at the wheel of the Saab, chasing darkness on the road to Whitstable, putting his foot down now, driving faster.
Antrobus produced a speculative essay about the contagious nature of evil. But it was not the expected stuff about demagoguery, about the charismatic leaders able to stir their followers into acts of casual atrocity in the name of religious or political commitment. There was no mention of persecution or pogroms. Instead, Antrobus argued compellingly that particular locations could infect individual people with what society termed evil. He called these people random victims of contagion. He referred to specific addresses. He mentioned a tenement in Chicago. He talked about a Venice palazzo. The atmosphere at a remote ski lodge in the Austrian Tyrol was evoked in a way that sent a shudder through Clarke when he read the description of the events Antrobus said had taken place there. Two locations in Britain were included in the essay’s litany of malevolent addresses. One was a Glasgow slum dwelling. The other, of course, was the Fischer house.
‘You’d have been better off in the slum,’ Seaton told Clarke. But the stricken look on the professor’s face rightly suggested the time for such levity was long past.
Clarke had Antrobus read the essay aloud to his ethics seminar group, where it caused great excitement. And it was there, in the discussion that followed, that he admitted that Fischer had been a second cousin to his father and th
at the trust responsible for the property might be persuaded to open it up.
‘For a weekend,’ Antrobus said. ‘In the interests of enlightened philosophical debate.’
‘You described Antrobus as a stranger to morality.’
‘He was,’ the professor told Seaton.
‘Then how did he define this evil he talked about?’
‘In conventional terms. Peter understood badness well enough. He understood the concept and in his essay he listed vivid examples of some of its manifestations. It’s just that he never seemed remotely disapproving of it.’
‘How would you say he was affected by it?’
‘I don’t think he was.’
‘So he was never shocked or disgusted by the evil events and actions he described.’
The professor appeared to think about this. ‘He was far less engaged emotionally by it all than that.’
‘Intrigued?’
‘Entertained,’ the professor said. He put his head in his hands. ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, God.’ He was sober now. The memory of Peter Antrobus had sobered him.
It took months before arrangements for the Fischer house visit were complete. There was no real urgency. It was not as if the house and its history were a part of the curriculum undertaken by Clarke’s ethics group. It was more of an adventure for the students. But when they researched in preparation for the visit, when they read the history of the house and accounts of the life of the man who had lived there, they became very curious to see if there was any substance to the claims being made by his young relative. The house certainly possessed sufficiently gruesome credentials to qualify as a test location for the theory put forward by Antrobus.
And it was hard not to see the visit as something of a coup. Several newspaper journalists and television programme makers had tried and failed to gain access to the house. So far as Professor Clarke could discover, it had been closed for more than fifty years. Neglected for that length of time, in such a remote location, the house would have deteriorated into ruin, Clarke was sure. But Antrobus was adamant. The Fischer house was not just securely guarded. It was scrupulously maintained.
‘I take it you believe in evil, Professor Clarke.’
‘I’m an ethicist. It’s never been a subject that lends itself to definitive interpretation, to the black and white of easy answers, because even if you accept its existence, evil is still very difficult to define.’
Seaton nodded.
‘How we think about evil depends to a very great extent on what we as individuals can assimilate emotionally. It has always been more convenient to think of Hitler, for example, as mad rather than bad because of the sheer magnitude of his crimes. It’s somehow an easier option for us. It’s tempting to think because it’s more comfortable to contemplate than the alternative.’
Seaton nodded.
‘It also depends upon the prevailing mood of the times. In the nineteen sixties, I would have bet money that the murders and mutilations committed by the Yorkshire Ripper would have been regarded as atrocities carried out by a man driven to his crimes by insanity. But he was caught and tried in the early Thatcherite years by a judiciary determined to hold him to account for what he’d done. Thatcher’s government believed in the power and vote-winning popularity of public retribution. Do you remember the early nineteen eighties? Vengeance was the prevailing imperative among those who prosecuted the law. The Ripper was duly judged to be sane and convicted of multiple counts of murder. But he is still in Broadmoor rather than Belmarsh, Mr Seaton. And if you read the transcripts of the trial today, there is no doubt that Peter Sutcliffe was deeply and incurably insane.’
Seaton remembered the early 1980s, all right. They didn’t remind him of the Ripper trial, or Thatcherism either. He’d been in London. He’d been a junior reporter on a local London newspaper. His brother had been a student, on the painting course at St Martin’s School of Art, with a shared studio on the fifth floor of the Charing Cross Road building that led to the rooftop by a fire escape. He remembered long afternoons on that roof during the early months of a scorching summer a dozen years ago, spent drinking Italian wine bought in Soho. He recalled evenings with girls studying fashion, which travelled from the Cambridge pub to the Soho Brasserie to Le Beat Route or Club Left or the Wag Club. He remembered ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’ on the jukebox upstairs at the Cambridge. He remembered reading about the Ripper trial and the Falklands War and the simmer of industrial dissent in the pits of North Yorkshire. He recalled vividly enough the red banner outside County Hall, flagging the unemployment figure to taunt the government sitting in the House of Commons, opposite. He’d attended Pogues gigs in Kilburn on St Patrick’s Day and followed Liverpool’s epic form in Europe and the league. But he hadn’t analysed the moral imperatives of Thatcherism. He’d been far too busy having a good time. Ethics had been a subject unknown to him. But then he’d been blissfully ignorant about black magic in those days, too.
Clarke cleared his throat and above him, the strip light in his office flickered and briefly threatened life. He pushed his glasses back against the bridge of his nose and Seaton saw that his hand was shaking. It was hard not to feel pity for him. He was seeking solace in the relative certainty of what he had studied, what he thought he knew. But soon he would have to leave the sure footing of familiar territory. He would have to wander into the darkness again, eventually.
‘Society believes in the notion of places as evil, I think. And the authorities act in a way that perpetuates this superstition. So Ten Rillington Place was demolished after Christie was caught and convicted and hanged. It is almost as though we believe retribution can be exacted against bricks and mortar. Which, of course, it can’t. And, by contrast, tourists pay to get into the Tower of London to gawk at instruments of torture.’
‘Most of them Victorian forgeries,’ Seaton said.
‘Tourists travel to Auschwitz. Where nothing needs to be faked. Where you cannot exaggerate the horrors.’ The professor smiled. ‘And I’m told the Lubyanka has become very popular with visitors to Moscow. The black Lubyanka, where you’d think the very walls might sweat with fear and weep with remembered torment.’
‘So you don’t believe personally that a place can be malevolent?’
The professor’s smile was brave and ghastly in the cold flare of light from the Coleman lantern. ‘I didn’t, Mr Seaton. I didn’t. But, to be frank with you? My opinion changed during my visit to the Fischer house.’
That visit had finally taken place early in October, at the end of the long vacation, at the very beginning of Michaelmas term. Clarke’s quartet of students still wore their summer tans from travel jobs and holidays abroad. A couple of the girls, God help them, wore sunglasses perched by habit in the sun-bleached highlights of their summer hair. They gathered in the college car park carrying overnight bags and borrowed camcorders and an air of anticipation close to excitement. Clarke had found the keys to the house, along with a map and other instructions, in an envelope in his pigeonhole.
Antrobus had not yet returned to the university. He was in Germany studying transcripts of the trial of Peter Kürten, the madman and cannibal more luridly known to history as the Vampire of Düsseldorf. There was a cell under a Düsseldorf police station were Kürten had been briefly incarcerated. The cell had survived Nazism, survived intact the firestorm of the Allied bombing raids towards the end of the war. And Antrobus had apparently arranged to visit it. Kürten had first murdered at the age of five, drowning two school friends in a deliberate act comprehensible at the time only as a tragic accident. Antrobus claimed to be intrigued by the man who had begun his long killing career as an infant. But he had done everything he could, despite his absence, to facilitate the visit to the Fischer house. His instructions were detailed, thoughtful.
‘Solicitous,’ Clarke said, as rain spattered, like fistfuls of vindictive grit, thrown against his office windows. And Seaton shivered at the tone the professor’s voice had taken on.
Professor Clarke’s ethics seminar group comprised three English second-year undergraduates. There was Sarah Mason from Whitstable. Rebecca Mortimer came from Southport, on the Lancashire coast. And the dead girl, the girl who had died, was Rachel Beal. Rachel had been born and buried in Hull, in the bleak and wind-blasted northeast of England, where her body lay now in one of the plots of the cemetery surrounding the church she had worshipped in as a child.
The fourth member of the student group was an American woman called Ellen Paulus. At twenty-six, Ellen, like Antrobus, was a mature student. She was also an exchange student. She had gone on the visit to the Fischer house at the very outset of her planned year of study at the university in Surrey. She was studying psychology and parapsychology on a four-year course conducted by the well-respected college she had enrolled at in Vermont. For some vague reason he couldn’t readily identify, Paulus struck Seaton as a familiar name. Then he had it. Paulus was the name of the Werhmacht field marshal who surrendered at the siege of Stalingrad. Hitler had been mystified, outraged, at his failure to kill himself. ‘What’s a death?’ the baffled Führer had asked himself out loud. What’s a death indeed, Seaton thought, who considered the question far more contingent, much more complicated. Whatever, Ellen Paulus could not be held responsible for her surname. Lots of Americans had Germanic surnames. And he had a feeling the woman would need all the sympathy she could get.
‘Let’s cut to the chase, professor.’
Clarke opened a desk drawer and took out a bottle of Polish vodka. It was the overproof stuff and it was two-thirds empty. He unscrewed the cap and took a brazen swig. Light from the Coleman lantern flashed on the lenses of his glasses as he tilted back his head to open his throat. He coughed.
Back in the period of the Ripper trial, Seaton had smuggled a bottle of the same stuff into the Screen on the Green in Islington with a St Martin’s graphics student named Claire who’d worn her hair in a peroxide beaver tail. They’d drunk most of it, watching a terrible soft-porn movie called Tattoo. He was quite surprised that the professor was still conscious.