Dead Man Upright Read online

  When I got indoors I tried to watch the late film on the box, then gave up, went into the kitchen and got a can of lager out of the fridge. I sat at the table with it under the fluorescent light, but all I could think about was Cross’s six women in eighteen months and his nightmares until I couldn’t concentrate any more and went to bed.

  I dreamed I was driving through a country where I had never been before, slowing up to read a board outside a town too far off to see yet; two roads forked in front of me, one bending off to the left to skirt the town, the other running straight towards it. With some difficulty, because the letters were scaling and faded, I read on the board:

  JER. Pop: 1704. Alt: 7 feet.

  ‘Stranger! If you are of no Value to this Town, Drive On.

  Stay, and you have 1 Week to prove Yourself.

  Signed: The Town.’

  I got out of the car, slamming the door; the sound was swallowed up in the silent, suffocating heat. I could just guess at the town, a low black smudge on the horizon. I went back to the car and got the map out, something I should have done a hundred and fifty miles back when I must have taken a wrong route off the expressway. I identified a bigger place I had driven through about an hour before as Flensberg, but there was no sign of any town called Jer. There was no left fork on the map either, just the main road that ran emptily on across the plain, parallel with the sea.

  The land was nothing but salt flats scattered with a stubble of grass that spread away across grey sand; on my right the leaden water ended where it met the sky. Seaward there wasn’t a boat, not even a wave. On the shore there was nothing, either – a lip of shale, bearded with esparto, reached to the ripples at the beach’s edge and lapped at it like an animal too sick to drink. Inland it was the same. Not a hill, not a slope even – just bentweed that stretched levelly to the skyline.

  I didn’t care for what the sign had said, but I had had enough of driving; I had been driving all day, and the car, a clapped-out Ford, looked fed up too. I started walking. I walked past the sign hammered into the ground on its wooden post beside the road and continued on for about two hundred yards; then my attention was caught by a distant movement, and I stopped.

  Half a mile off a drab-coloured block, moving in a regular, rippling manner, finally resolved itself, the size of figurines at that distance, as a group of moving men. I went back to the car and found a pair of fieldglasses; I got them into focus, then perched my elbows on the scorching roof of the car to steady myself.

  A hundred young men were marching with military precision across country northward towards the town, each with his left hand balancing a boulder on his head. Out at each corner a single man carrying a truncheon loped at an easy double, while a fifth marched out ahead at the front of the group. These were the only unburdened men; the rocks carried by all the others shimmered now and then when the sunlight caught them glittering on veins of quartz. Every man was dressed in overalls the same drab colour as the ground and held his swaying rock on a head shaven bald, the structure of each skull gleaming through its sweat.

  As I watched, one man stumbled and let his burden fall; immediately the leader out on the flank nearest to him ran back along the ranks and hit him a smashing blow across the neck. The stricken man collapsed; whereupon, as if nothing had happened, without faltering in their pace to avoid him or even varying their rhythm of march, the others passed over him, the flankmen moving around them in their easy way, until the whole squad, growing smaller and smaller in the distance, disappeared into the haze.

  I focused the glasses on the body. It lay motionless on its knees and elbows as it had fallen with its head gleaming in the sun, its forehead pressed into the ground, its rock nearby.

  I reckoned the distance between us at three hundred yards, but he looked so close through the glasses that it was as if I were standing beside him. One side of his face was towards me, the part of his mouth that I could see fixed in a grim smile. I swept the area. Now that the squad had vanished there was apparently not a living thing in sight, and I stared at the body while I wondered what to do. The man was dead; it was none of my affair; I had no business with this town.

  Only my argument didn’t convince me, so I reached into the car for my gun. I thought for a moment, then got a second magazine out and dropped it in my pocket.

  I wiped the sweat off my face, crossed the road and started walking towards the body, knowing it was a stupid thing to do. I had no cover, while their people could be dug in anywhere. I didn’t know what the citizens meant by values, either, but somehow I didn’t think an inquisitive nature was one of them.

  When I reached the place I found the flies had got there first. I squatted down beside the body; when I pushed it, it rolled over and sprawled loosely onto its back, face upwards. Its eyes were open and turned up to show the whites, and that was what the flies were interested in. Their scouts were flying lazily round the sockets, also the nose, which had blood in it.

  I took the man’s head in my hands. The vertebrae in the neck made a grinding noise like a small gearbox not engaging when I moved it, and when I laid the head down it fell onto its left shoulder of its own accord at an angle that made me feel sick. I unbuttoned the top of his denims and placed my hand against the artery in his neck, then on his chest; there was no heartbeat, no pulse.

  I was thinking, I can’t just stand here with him and accept this situation when I felt the dream ending. I woke realising that the name of the town that the people had intended to write on the board beside the road was Jerusalem, only they had forgotten most of the word.

  I got up and made coffee. While I sat in the kitchen with it I watched a beetle crawling along the top edge of the radiator, hesitating on the blank metal face. It lost its footing now and then and paused to recover; I sat watching it for a long while. Finally it slipped again; this time it fell on the tiled floor in a terminal manner, feebly moving its antennae. It waved its many legs continually like blind old women bicycling upside down, its back making a dry tapping sound.

  I went over and put my foot on it; then I threw the dregs of my coffee into the sink, locked up the flat and left.

  6

  I had a problem waiting when I got to the Factory that I had forgotten all about – my name was down with forty others for a lecture by Dr Argyle Jones, the psychiatrist from the Home Office.

  The duty sergeant said: ‘He wants to see you alone first – you’d better get up there.’

  Dr Jones liked these confrontations; he called us in to see him individually from time to time and gave us the results of the checks he ran on us by order from upstairs.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘I’ve had your report.’ He smiled past me regretfully, as though he were listening to Mahler’s Fifth or seeing a vision. Then he gazed at me and shook his head. ‘You’re not even trying to deal with your aggression.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I need it with villains.’

  ‘Unfortunately it’s your colleagues you treat as villains.’

  ‘Some of them are,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got no sense of teamwork – you’ve been told that over and over.’

  ‘There’s no room for teamwork when you’re after a killer,’ I said. ‘The team arrives afterwards when hell’s cooled down.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘I’m running late. Anyway, your report’s gone upstairs; don’t be surprised if it backfires.’

  ‘As long as you didn’t recommend me for promotion,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll let you into a secret,’ said the lecturer, spinning round in his chair to pick up his papers, ‘I didn’t.’

  So, cutting the blag out, there was my report, and I went off to what was the briefing room before they added a new wing, which we now used as a lecture hall.

  I hadn’t liked these lectures to date – not because they didn’t interest me, but because I didn’t think they were what they said they we
re. They should have been extremely interesting, because they were designed to involve us in an embryonic new programme based on the American FBI procedure at NCAVC, the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime, which had in turn developed VICAP (the Violent Crime Apprehension Programme), a sophisticated computer programme for the profiling and identification of serial killers, the fastest-growing type of killer with us now. I was fascinated with the experiment and watched with close attention the progress of these brand new ideas which were working so well in the States through the archaic structures of the Home Office. That was what the lectures were supposed to be about, but we suspected that, although they were ostensibly an exchange of views between the psychiatrist and ourselves, they were in fact a means of putting us all under the microscope whether we opened our yap or not.

  I found a chair somewhere in the middle of the hall, and we waited while the lecturer put his glasses on and arranged his notes. When he was ready he said: ‘Well, good morning, gentlemen.’ Here he paused, disconcerted, and added: ‘But we have a lady present.’

  We had indeed – superfit Detective-Sergeant Andrewes (‘Where are the other sisters?’ Stevenson muttered), the Metropolitan Police champion for the womens’ hundred metres. Cruddie reckoned she could beat a squad car on red alert out of Poland Street car park, and shreds of evidence we had put together indicated that Charlie Bowman fancied her rotten.

  The lecturer continued: ‘Well, apart from the new-comers, the rest of you probably remember me from our last session here together some time ago.’

  Some time ago or not, his audience remembered him fine.

  ‘I am going to talk about serial killers today,’ the lecturer began, ‘I’m going to try to make a very complex and dangerous form of insanity intelligible. You will probably wonder why you find yourselves compelled to waste time listening to me when you’ve got better things to do, but let me see if I can engage your professional attention all the same in the time we have.’

  Somebody coughed and Stevenson lit a Westminster.

  The lecturer continued: ‘Because of the violence and terror that he has experienced in life, beginning with his childhood, the serial killer cannot conceive of life, whether his own or someone else’s, as being anything but violent and terrifying. In his psychic climate, no experience is valid unless it is absolute; secondly, even in his own eyes he is an insoluble algebraic expression, a problem in which there are insufficient knowns for him to evaluate the unknowns. He is deficient in memory, insight, and positive values; and as a result cannot quantify himself, cannot judge either the appropriateness or the scale of his reactions, and is anaesthetised to experiences to which he cannot relate – in other words, he cannot relate to any experience that does not bear a negative value. The experience that this type of sufferer dreads above all is the natural autonomy of the other, because he sees everything except nothing (to put this in the form of a paradox) as being beyond his control. He is unique in his control of nothing; therefore his attitude to everything is hostile, threatening, and flat.

  ‘In negative terms, though, the serial killer is remarkably consistent and logical. If the need to destroy is his sole driving force, then he must evidently be devoid of morality; for although he may be aware of morality, his condition dictates that he cannot afford, for reasons of his own precarious self-preservation, ever to acknowledge it. The reason why the courts have difficulty in pronouncing him mad rests, of course, on that crucial word ‘afford’, because intellectually the killer understands the meaning of the veto on killing perfectly well, even if he is indifferent to it. He is left then with the choice, when directly challenged by positive existence, either to destroy it or himself; for he can neither face a challenge on equal terms nor ignore it. In short, since he cannot ignore himself he is obliged to destroy anybody who might pass judgment on him; there is no middle ground.’

  I started to listen; either the speaker had grown up since his last lecture or I had. I noticed Stevenson didn’t look as restless as usual either, though he was still murdering the stub of one Westminster filter after another.

  The lecturer said: ‘I was talking to a killer coming up for sentence on four murder charges and two of rape the other day, and during the course of our evaluation interview he told me: “I dreamed I was hollow and fell. I made a horrible noise falling.” I asked him at one point: “Why did you always kill women?” And he answered: “Well, to prove I wasn’t one, of course!” “And did you succeed in proving it?” I asked. He said no. He said he had been reading the Bible a lot since he had arrived in prison and realised that he had been born spiritually disfigured. He said he had always been a girl with balls dressed up as a man, so that the manly thing for a girl with a penis to do was to kill women. He said it was that or suicide, and that his method of coping with his unusual sexuality was to dress up and dance in front of a mirror with an officer’s cap on his head, spending hours like that before changing and going out to kill. He offered his victim only his “good” profile when he struck; his “bad” profile must never be seen because there was a corner of his smile that had no teeth (in fact he had all his teeth), otherwise he said his personality would collapse.’

  ‘I wish the geezer would get finished,’ someone in the audience muttered, ‘I’ve got an embezzlement case on.’

  The psychiatrist gazed at him. ‘I know you’re with the Serious Fraud Office,’ he said to the interrupter, ‘but I think you ought to realise that the serial killer is the psychic version of a fraud – also that you never know what you’re going to get in your work. One minute you’re into ledgers; the next whoever you’re investigating pulls a gun on you. It’s happened. Are there any questions?’

  There were not.

  Dr Argyle Jones continued: ‘In talking about the serial killer we are talking about compulsion. Compulsion has nothing to do with courage. Courage means summoning up the nerve to do something you would rather not do; whereas in a state of compulsion the sufferer (because the serial killer is a sufferer) commits his murders in a dreamlike state, as though he himself were not really committing it at all. Morale in our case means screwing oneself up to do something; morale in the killer’s case means living with what he’s done, which he does by managing to forget it. Just as the child who wets his bed knows that he is responsible for having done so when he wakes up but wishes to avoid punishment, so the killer is aware of what he has done once he has quitted the sleepwalker’s state which engulfs him during the commission of the act – but he avoids the responsibility that he cannot consciously accept by blaming the crime on a mythical other which inhabits him.’

  He paused to sneeze; he did it stylishly, as if it were a trick he had learned in front of a mirror. Then he pointed at me. ‘This sergeant,’ he said, ‘was confronted with the most bestial case of serial killing in recent British criminal history. I am referring to the Suarez-Carstairs murders, and I have had this officer describe to me how the killer finally revealed himself as archaic, indeed as an archetype of hatred and evil, a face that he had never before shown except to his victims. Yet Spavento had been running around uncaught for thirty-eight years. I have a comment to add to that.’ He coughed, searched in his notes and said: ‘An American colleague states, I quote: “It is easy to lose track of a serial killer, because he has developed an uncanny knack of becoming invisible and fading into the background. He has . . . learned how to appear and disappear with as little fanfare as possible.”’ He looked round the room, took a sip of water and said: ‘Archaeology used to be a hobby of mine when I was a post-graduate student; I found that the difference between ancient and modern society was that in the former people looked startlingly different from one another, whereas in the latter they look startlingly alike – which doesn’t make your work any easier, does it?’

  ‘We do catch some of them,’ somebody said.

  ‘How many times did the police have the Yorkshire Ripper through their hands?’ the lectu
rer asked.

  ‘Nine,’ said Stevenson.

  ‘Exactly. The American experience is that the appearance of complete normality in an individual is no reason whatever for eliminating him as a suspect in a serial killing inquiry – apparent normality is the killer’s major asset. But once a psychopath always a psychopath – there is no purging his traumas, no cure; he will only add to his record of horror if he can.’ He continued: ‘Indeed, he must add to it, because the violence he does to the helpless is his admission, repeated over and over, that he himself is helpless.’

  I found myself thinking about Ann Meredith. If Cross were indeed what Firth thought he was, then she was certainly helpless.

  ‘Well?’ said the lecturer. No one said anything. He looked down the hall and said to a man sitting at the back: ‘How long have you been a detective?’

  ‘Twelve years.’

  ‘How many killers have you helped to catch in that length of time?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘We can’t go on like that,’ said the lecturer.

  Crowdie said: ‘If they’re so helpless, perhaps you could explain why they try so hard not to be caught?’

  ‘They don’t try hard,’ said the psychiatrist, ‘we only think they do. We think their random choice of victim is a stroke of diabolical cunning, whereas in fact the killer selects that particular victim in response to an uncontrollable impulse. While he is in the process of killing, for instance, he doesn’t think about being caught at all – he is in a different world, a state that puts him completely beyond practical considerations like that. He’s like ourselves in that respect – I shouldn’t think there are many people in this room, for instance, who would wonder if they ought to be putting the kettle on while they were having an orgasm with the girl they were crazily in love with. All the killer can hope is that the planning he did beforehand, during his aura and trolling stages, while he’s still able to plan and weigh up chances, will be enough to save him. I repeat – long-running serial killers, the ones with ten, twenty, thirty deaths behind them, are intelligent people. They’re often businessmen, musicians, actors, lawyers, skilled artisans, policemen even. But their intelligence is crippled by their compulsion. Are there any questions? Do please ask questions. Do I see any hands going up?’