Engleby. Part 24

They gave me drugs, though I think only because it made them feel they were doing something medical. Some of these drugs made my tongue swell up. Some gave me blurred vision and a shaking hand. Most of them made me feel disorientated and afraid. All of them made me feel thirsty.

Inside my room, I was allowed newspapers, books and a radio. After a good deal of paperwork and letters to my bank, I had access to money of my own with which to buy these things. In general, the experience was better than being on remand in prison, because I did get to leave the room for three or four hours a day; I could go to the toilet, use the showers, walk to the dining room and so on. The staff were not dressed as gaolers but as nurses, though I was told that for some reason they belonged to the Prison Officers' a.s.sociation. I didn't get beaten up, though there were plenty of extremely unstable-looking men that I stayed clear of.

I didn't like the dormitory (noises from the psychotics, smells, bad hygiene), but on balance I'd say Longdale was also better than Chatfield, down there in the valley. No Baynes, Wingate or Hood. The only thing that nagged at me, even at the start, was the question of how long I'd be there. While a prison term was daunting, it was finite; but the doctors at Longdale were free to review and renew my detention indefinitely.

They say that if we knew the hour and place of our death, we could not go on living. Not knowing when my release might be, if ever, posed similar questions. Or to be precise, just one question: Why bother to go on?

The trial, incidentally, was something of a triumph for my team. Because I'd pleaded guilty to manslaughter, there was no identification issue and the DNA match wasn't questioned. Two shrinks for the defence and two for the Crown a.s.serted that I was bonkers, but the judge, as Exley predicted, would not accept their opinion without putting it to a jury. Exley let me see the report of the prison medical officer, for the prosecution. It was written scribbled, actually, in blue ballpoint on a standard form available from Her Majesty's Stationery Office. This is what it said.

1. 1. Information to establish a persistent disorder or disability of mind. Information to establish a persistent disorder or disability of mind. His father died young and abused him. He was abused at school and abused others. He is a long term drug user and thief. His father died young and abused him. He was abused at school and abused others. He is a long term drug user and thief. 2. 2. Information to establish that the disorder or disability of mind results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the patient. Information to establish that the disorder or disability of mind results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the patient. He killed a young woman and claims to have killed a youth. He may have killed another woman. He shows no remorse and does not understand the seriousness of his actions. He killed a young woman and claims to have killed a youth. He may have killed another woman. He shows no remorse and does not understand the seriousness of his actions. 3. 3. Information to establish that the disorder or disability of mind requires or is susceptible to medical treatment. Information to establish that the disorder or disability of mind requires or is susceptible to medical treatment. He is a loner and introvert, cannot establish relations.h.i.+ps with females and has contempt for other males in an antisocial and rather dangerous way. There is a likelihood he may respond to therapy in a structured situation. He is a loner and introvert, cannot establish relations.h.i.+ps with females and has contempt for other males in an antisocial and rather dangerous way. There is a likelihood he may respond to therapy in a structured situation. 4. 4. Reasons for the conclusion that the disorder or disability of mind is of a nature or degree which warrants the detention of the patient in hospital for medical treatment. Reasons for the conclusion that the disorder or disability of mind is of a nature or degree which warrants the detention of the patient in hospital for medical treatment. He suffers from personality disorder and does not express remorse about his offences. In my view he is a potentially dangerous man and I shall recommend a Restriction Order under the Mental Health Act be ordered by the court. He suffers from personality disorder and does not express remorse about his offences. In my view he is a potentially dangerous man and I shall recommend a Restriction Order under the Mental Health Act be ordered by the court.

That's it! Exley told me that many of them are even shorter. As for the pathetic circularity of the argument he's mad because he sinned, he may get better because he's mad that too, Julian told me, is standard.

Ah, what a piece of work is a Man... The glory that was Engleby, the incomparable complexity of the human mind in all its glittering and bewildering beauty reduced to half a dozen non sequiturs in blue Bic on an HMSO form...

The trial itself, on the other hand, was entirely thrilling.

Although the prosecution made much of the fact that I'd lived a 'normal' life and had managed to function in a well-paid job, Harvey called an embarra.s.sing number of witnesses to attest to how weird I was. He also put me on the stand and made me go through what had happened. I didn't try to appear deranged, but it was difficult to make the truth sound less than odd.

When his turn came, Julian Exley fluently outlined his position under Harvey's prompting, but didn't take well to being bullied by the prosecution counsel, a nasty piece of work called Tindall. I sensed that what Tindall wanted to get over was that anything short of locking me up in Parkhurst sine die sine die would show improper regard for the gravity of the crime and insufficient sympathy for Jennifer and her family. He made several references to something called 'section 47' a sort of safety net that means the prisoner can later be transferred from prison to hospital if the shrinks so decide. He offered this as an ideal solution: show your revulsion for the crime by refusing the plea and get him sent to Parkhurst; don't get bogged down in dodgy psychiatry, just let the experts sort it out later. This, I think, was what they did with Sutcliffe, and it looked like a worryingly attractive compromise. would show improper regard for the gravity of the crime and insufficient sympathy for Jennifer and her family. He made several references to something called 'section 47' a sort of safety net that means the prisoner can later be transferred from prison to hospital if the shrinks so decide. He offered this as an ideal solution: show your revulsion for the crime by refusing the plea and get him sent to Parkhurst; don't get bogged down in dodgy psychiatry, just let the experts sort it out later. This, I think, was what they did with Sutcliffe, and it looked like a worryingly attractive compromise.

The technicality of the plea, however, meant that for the most part Tindall was obliged to attack Exley's evidence, which he did on two flanks: both that the diagnosis itself was woolly nonsense (one saw his point) and, second, that even if which was not admitted there was something to it, then it still would not have substantially substantially (he liked that word) diminished my responsibility. (he liked that word) diminished my responsibility.

We all agreed that the key issue was the degree to which my judgement had been impaired by my mental condition. Tindall argued that the measure of this was as much moral as medical and that psychiatrists had no special expertise here any more than his lords.h.i.+p or the jury. It was a matter of common sense and 'gut' feeling. Exley ceded some ground but maintained his profession had 'a contribution' to make.

Harvey counter-attacked with a tremendous quote he'd dug up from the Court of Appeal where the senior judge had spoken of 'a state of mind so different from that of ordinary human beings that the reasonable man would term it abnormal... [affecting] the ability to exercise willpower to control physical acts, in accordance with rational judgement'. He made great play of the jury being 'reasonable men and women'; though of course this was essentially a completely non-technical point of the old circular variety: he must have been out of his mind to have done such a thing.

But it went well for him. His style was collegiate and constructive; he enlisted the a.s.sistance of his lords.h.i.+p and the jury and me as though solving a tricky cryptic crossword, all help gratefully received.

But Tindall was not finished. He returned to attack the whole 'personality disorder' category. Schizophrenics are mad all the time; but people not suffering from mental illness e.g. me only get into Special Hospitals if they do something terrible. The murder is the thing that allows admission to take place. Then he found his logic leading to something really terrifying: if psychopathy was really a mental abnormality, why were there no psychopaths being treated in normal NHS hospitals?

There was a nasty silence while we all let this sink in. 'Well, Dr Exley, I put it to you. How many psychopaths receive treatment before before they commit a crime? Is psychopathy in effect no more than a fancy term for wickedness?' they commit a crime? Is psychopathy in effect no more than a fancy term for wickedness?'

Exley didn't have the figures, naturally enough, for non-criminal psychopaths in the civil NHS (b.u.g.g.e.r all, one suspected) and he floundered for a bit.

The judge, however, seemed to be of the view that this line of questioning had come too late in the day; we had moved on from categories into degree of impairment. Harvey made some more commonsense appeals to the 'reasonable' man and recalled Exley, who had recovered sufficiently to marshal his arguments in such a way as to suggest that they were too subtle for Tindall to understand, but were well within the grasp of the jury and of his lords.h.i.+p. He was good; after a wobble, he was really good. So was Harvey, who was very alert a bulky man fast on his feet and quick to see which way the judge was leaning. Exley offered to go into the biochemistry of personality formation, including genetics, but the judge looked appalled at the idea. He'd had enough. And where he directed, the jury followed.

I was shocked by how quickly I adapted to the inst.i.tution. I learned to build my day round small highlights. The cup of tea at seven: strong, hot and fresh because my dormitory was near the kitchen block. If I drank it quickly and timed my call properly, the auxiliary would stop on her way out and refill my cup. The sense of triumph lasted most of the morning. Or the Nescafe at nine. I used to be fussy about espresso and filter and cappuccino and all that. But the single spoon of standard Nescaff from a catering tin dissolved in hot-ish water was something for which I began to salivate from eight-thirty onwards.

The food, unfortunately, smelt of death and madness, that hospital reek I remembered from breakfast at Park Prewett. NHS hospitals are perhaps the last places in England where they think people eat boiled carrots, gravy and steamed pudding every day for lunch. Tinned pears with custard? Where do they even find this stuff? Perhaps the menu was set down by Mr Beveridge in 1948 and has yet to be reviewed. Luckily you can buy other things from the food shop; together with the pills, they made me put on weight. I gained almost two stone in my first year.

I was under the charge of a bluff psychiatrist called Braithwaite, who'd been to visit me in prison to see whether I'd be 'suitable' for transfer to Longdale. He believed in active intervention in his patients' lives. He didn't want a legion of the lost of pale, violent men adrift in time; he wanted to make them better and move them on, preferably back into the world in which they had transgressed.

This was a laudable aim, I thought, consistent with the function of a hospital. In practice, what it meant was trying lots of different drugs pink pills, blue pills, white pills even for patients like me whose condition responded little to chemicals.

It also meant, about once a week, talking to Braithwaite or one of his a.s.sistants, generally a woman called Turner, about how I felt.

Not that great, usually: suffering from the side effects of the 'medication'. I wish they wouldn't rely on that genteel term, incidentally; I wish they'd call them drugs or pills.

Generally, I must say, they didn't go in for euphemism. Dr Turner (first name Jennifer, alas) was typical. She didn't blush or blink when she used the word 'murder' to me in our private consultations. There was something of the schoolmarm in her that made me feel as though I'd been caught for nothing more than smoking in the bushes; she was also quite pretty, though when I asked about her husband and/or home life I received a severely frosty response. She was going to treat me, but she didn't want or have to like me, that was what she implied, and I thought that that was fair enough.

I really did like her, though. She was an excellent person, so direct and practical. It's just a pity that the instruments she had at her disposal drugs and chat were so blunt. What Dr Turner needed was a way of reshaping the geography of my mind. She needed to s.h.i.+ft the tectonic plates, reform the rifts and flood the valley. To do this, she needed to master time so that she and I could move about in it, not be the slaves of the h.o.m.o sap delusion that it runs in a straight line.

She couldn't do this, unfortunately, so we were left with pills and talk and occupational therapy viz., gardening, 'crafts' and painting. There were other things to do, but I wasn't 'ready' for them yet.

I was also sent to see psychologists, and this was preferable because one wasn't always being brought up against the evidence of how pointless it all was. Your psychologist likes nothing more than a 'test', and in the early days I was forever answering questions, ticking boxes, Y or N, or on a scale of one to...

One day I was asked to sit in a chair with an electrode attached to me for a test called 'penile plethysmography'. A nervous young woman in a white coat, possibly a student or trainee, then showed me photographs of women with no clothes on from various top-shelf magazines. The idea was to measure the degree of arousal and from that deduce... Deduce what? Whether I preferred blondes to brunettes, white girls to black, Men Only Men Only to to Mayfair Mayfair? They could have just asked.

I was anxious not to give the wrong impression, not to feel a flicker for the wrong picture a flicker maybe delayed from a previous one. I didn't want to find myself paired up at some grim hospital social with Lizzie 'The Hatchet' Rockwell from the women's wing because I'd inadvertently twitched at the picture that most resembled her.

From what I know, it's true to say that in real life people frequently desire and have vigorous affairs with someone who is not at all their usual type. And what does a psychologist deduce from that?

In the event, the presence of the young woman in the white coat with the clipboard was so inhibiting that I pretty much flatlined.

In those early days, s.e.x was very far from my mind. I think that l.u.s.t is to some extent an expression of optimism: breed because life's good, let's have more of it.

That was really not my att.i.tude when I first came inside Longdale. After seventeen years, I have regained a certain spark and pugnacity, I think. But it took me time, and I must admit that I felt pretty low for the first... Well, perhaps two or three years.

To be confronted with what sane society made of me: it took some digesting. I dragged it off to my lair and tried to swallow it, slowly, over a long period. (My lair eventually became a private room, rather than a dormitory, a little like my cubicle at Chatfield. I also in due course acquired what was called a 'parole card', which allowed me to wander pretty much where I wanted in the grounds.) I was helped in the digestion process by a couple of the other patients. Gerry was about twenty years older than I was and came from a farming family in Somerset. He had cropped whiteish hair and a practical, muscular air to the way he went about his business. I didn't in any way think of him as a 'father' figure, but I saw that he had managed to make a reasonable life for himself in this place (he'd been here for ten years already) by treating it as normal, something like school or national service which he had in fact done, fighting briefly in Korea. Gerry was well informed about British history, albeit in a patchy, autodidactic way. Every morning he read the Daily Telegraph Daily Telegraph right through, smoothing each page out neatly on the table. He was good with his hands and made intricate though useless gadgets (pipe racks and so on) in the woodwork room. He sought me out quite early on and it was only after a bit that I understood, slightly to my embarra.s.sment, that he was hoping to learn from me. He had been at the local grammar school, but he hadn't been to university after national service because he was needed on the farm. We began each day by discussing what was in the papers over a cigarette in the day room, and I began to know what kind of thing made him laugh and to search it out. right through, smoothing each page out neatly on the table. He was good with his hands and made intricate though useless gadgets (pipe racks and so on) in the woodwork room. He sought me out quite early on and it was only after a bit that I understood, slightly to my embarra.s.sment, that he was hoping to learn from me. He had been at the local grammar school, but he hadn't been to university after national service because he was needed on the farm. We began each day by discussing what was in the papers over a cigarette in the day room, and I began to know what kind of thing made him laugh and to search it out.

Mark was younger and not, on the surface, as well sorted out as Gerry. He wore clothes that were a little too smart, and his hair was always neat. His intelligence was tightly wound and his views were expressed in syntactically flawless sentences (which is not, whatever Enoch Powell may have thought, the same thing as being eloquent). Mark was handsome, I'd suppose you'd say, and his clear brown eyes seldom blinked. What I grew to like about him (and it took time) was that he viewed life as a colossal, cosmic joke. Although he had periods of depression which took him out of circulation for a while, he made me laugh more than anyone I've ever known, more than Stellings or Jen or Julie or Ralph Richardson or Jeffrey Archer. I pined for Mark when he was off the ward in a black-dog spell and I think I helped him when he came back.

I knew what Mark had 'done' out there, why he was in Longdale, because he told me. It was serious and inexplicable, but not barbaric. I never knew what crime Gerry had committed and it didn't seem to be important to our friends.h.i.+p. Does that sound pious? Maybe. I admit that I was not above a little frisson when I sat next to a celebrated disemboweller. I'm only human.

People think that men like me can only be released by the Home Secretary. In fact, the power resides with a mental health tribunal, which reviews my case every three years, or every year if I ask it to. The politicians can't legally overrule the tribunal.

In spring 2001, with the backing of Dr Turner, I applied for a conditional discharge. It was thought that with some support, I could, without endangering others, live a reasonably normal life in what is termed 'the community' i.e. non-community, or world at large.

What windy joy, as Milton might have put it, had I that day conceived, hopeful of my delivery...

The judge at the tribunal looked set to give me the green light until at the last minute the Home Office expert witness came up with some particularly compelling and ghoulish evidence in my case, backed by some general statistics about reoffending. The judge, visibly appalled, decided that discretion was the better part...

Jennifer Turner had the difficult task of breaking the news to me.

'They aren't required to go into the detail behind the decision, Michael.'

'But we know what the reasons are.'

'Believe me, I find this as vexing almost as vexing as you do.'

'I'm a patient in a hospital who is better but can't go home because the public wouldn't like it.'

'Public opinion may well be a factor. It was a famous case.'

'I know. I remember.'

'I'm sorry.'

'But,' I said, 'it looks as though the Home Office is now arguing that a hospital shall be deemed a prison. Why did we go through all that diminished responsibility nonsense?'

Dr Turner looked as though she might explode. Then she did. 'Dear G.o.d, how do you think it makes me feel?'

I ended up consoling her, like Carlyle with Mill. 'It's all right, Jennifer, I know it's not your fault...'

But the whole experience set me back a bit. They put me on a high dose of antidepressants and I gained a lot more weight. For the best part of two years I didn't really get out of my room. I just sat there watching a small television that Stellings had sent me. Thank G.o.d for television, for Countdown Countdown and the regional news. and the regional news.

Julie came to see me once when I was in prison on remand. She told me how our mother had died of cancer.

We were in the prison visiting room, either side of a table, under the eyes of the warders and a couple of social workers.

'She said to send you her love, Mike.'

'Thanks. Was it painful at the end?'

'Not too bad. She had the drugs. She was in the Sunset Room in the end. In the hospital.'

I nodded. 'Do you feel all right, Jules? Do you feel lonely?'

'I'm all right.'

'It's just you and me now. Of the old gang. And since they may never let me out, it's really just you.'

Julie looked down at her hands, which she was clenching on the table.

'Did Mum know I was pleading guilty?'

'Yes.'

'And what did she think?'

'She said she didn't know you any more. She said that once she felt you were a part of her. When you were a baby and that. That you were her own flesh and blood. Like you know, really, her own flesh, like-'

'I know what she meant.'

'But she said she thought that little boy had died, or got lost somewhere on the way.'

I was holding the edge of the table.

'She said if she was to meet you now she wouldn't know you.'

I swallowed. 'I understand. She's right, of course. She's right in more ways than she could understand.'

'I'm sorry, Mike.'

'You're not to blame.'

I thought for a bit. 'Julie, I don't think you should come and see me any more, wherever they send me. Send me a card on my birthday, that's all. For the rest of the time, you should put me out of your mind.'

I hoped she wouldn't remember the card. A kitty in a basket every April from here to the crack of doom. G.o.d.

She was biting her lip, still looking down.

I smiled. 'Got a boyfriend, Jules?'

'Yup.'

'Marry him. Be happy. Have babies.'

She kept nodding, dumbly.

'You'll be all right, Julie.'

'Oh, Mike.'

After I'd got over the disappointment of not being released, I felt that I'd gained a new perspective on my life and its events. Having not written a word in the 1990s, I began to pick up my pen again and jot down the odd thought. I found that I had a certain clarity.

Baynes, for instance. I had clear recall and a consistent point of view on all that. I didn't plan to kill him, but I did plan to hurt him badly; I wanted to break his legs. I knew he spent hours practising his goal-kicking on a distant pitch. In his final term he had no lesson to rush back to (he had a 'private study' period) so could carry on till it was dark. I simply doubled back from the food shop where I'd gone after my own rugby game and waited for him. The bridge over the stream that divided two large areas of playing fields was concrete with scaffolding poles for handrails. Nearby, I'd noticed lumps of loose concrete, roughly mixed, full of pebbles, and a length of rusted broken pole. I hid beneath the bridge until I heard his studs clattering towards me. I caught him from behind with the pole and he went down. I lifted the pole and brought it down with all my might across his tibia. I heard it crack. I dragged him to the edge of the bridge and rubbed the wound on the back of his head into the rough edge of the concrete. Then I chucked the weapons into the stream and jogged back to the main school. He was groaning as I left and I knew it wouldn't be long till he was found. Dr Benbow would have examined him in his usual perfunctory manner when he was brought in, implying that he was wasting everyone's time. The leg was cleanly broken and he was well enough to take his Oxford exams a few weeks later. What I didn't know at the time was how hard I had hit his head. In fact, I hit it more than once, and it gave me pleasure to do so. I didn't mention it at the time in what Dr Exley called my 'journal/narrative' in case it was seen by someone.

The case of Gudrun Abendroth is more complicated. My time in Longdale has enabled me, as I said, to recall the Baynes incident clearly. I even feel a degree of remorse for his orphaned children, even though in my view they're better off without him. Fraulein Abendroth, though, is a different matter.

To put it simply: I still don't know if I killed her or not; and that single fact, that not-knowing, is what persuades me more than Baynes, more even than Jen that Longdale is the right place for me. I followed a woman who looked like her from a Graham Parker gig to a house in Tournay Road. That much I wrote at the time. I have subsequently remembered for sure that I went back there on at least one occasion. I followed her. She went to a pub called the c.o.c.k on North End Road and I lurked at the other end of the bar, watching her. But why would I want to kill her when I didn't even know her?

If I did, I must be like Peter Sutcliffe or someone, but I don't think I am. Or perhaps I did get to know her, albeit briefly. And in that s.p.a.ce of time, perhaps she posed a threat to the 'integrity' of my 'narcissistic self' so great that violence was my only self-defence.

The Exley theory, however, can't really be stretched to include amnesia on my part: he was rather strict on that point. 'snapshot' memory, including partial forgetfulness, he could live with, but a complete blank he thought suspect. I suppose the only way Exley could be brought onside is if we beefed up the theory of 'pathological defences' so much that they annexed the memory function. It seems a bit far-fetched, though, doesn't it?

So, I'm inclined to acquit myself.

On the other hand, it smells a bit. Who else might have killed her? And the killer had what the Roman plods of Fulham called a modus operandi similar to mine: several blows to cranium; no s.e.xual interference; deep grave.

But if I did kill her, yet can't remember doing so (compare Sutcliffe's detailed recall of his victims in court), how many more might there be?

At this time, I just don't know; and there are some things in the past that may have happened and some that may not have happened. But the reality of their happening or not happening then then has no weight has no weight now now.

Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

Back live, as they still say.

I remember that conversation with Stellings in the Indian restaurant in which he insanely, I thought predicted the imminent end of the Cold War, the s.e.x war, apartheid and so on.

He was right, though, wasn't he? He might have added architecture too, which was then embedded in a desperate impa.s.se. Either you built 'modern' witless rectangular towers with metal-framed windows in which people rushed to kill themselves or you built mock-Palladian (itself a cla.s.sical pastiche). The two camps detested one another with pitiless venom. Now I look in the papers and I see buildings of light and air, gla.s.s and steel and uncovered brick. They look really nice. (I wonder if I'll ever be free to go inside one.) Suggesting, back then, that using strong materials and good design might be a way forward would have earned you contempt from both the Legomen and the Pasticheurs. Like the way all British politicians are Social Democrats now, but back then holding such beliefs was derided as 'having no policies'.

(Don't you love politicians? I think what I like best is their sublimely self-serving insistence that their 'private life' is nothing whatever to do with their 'public life'. So that the decision to shaft their secretary over the conference table five minutes before the cabinet meeting or to spend the night face down in a bathhouse cubicle taking on all comers is reached by a different person, or a different brain, from the one who, a few minutes later, decides to vote for family tax credits or the death penalty. G.o.d, if only!) Anyway, these changes in society look all right to me, though of course in most ways things haven't changed at all. I remember my student questions.

'Got a cure for the common cold yet? Have you? Thought not. How's your 2003 world, then? A few wars? Some genocide? Some terrorism? Drugs? Abuse of children? High crime rate? Materialistic obsessions? More cars? Blah-blah pop music? Vulgar newspapers? p.o.r.n? Still wearing jeans?'

Stellings's specific optimism was right, but so was my less hopeful overview.