by Lynne Truss
‘Shot in the head?’ repeated the governor, when she related the story. They were seated in his dark, monumental office, either side of his vast mahogany desk.
‘Jah,’ she said matter-of-factly. She mimed pulling a trigger next to her ear. ‘Beng-beng.’ And then, for clarification, she mimed an explosion of brains and eyeballs.
‘I see, yes.’ The governor was taken aback but reminded himself that he had hoped for relief from monotony, and here it certainly was.
She shrugged. Her eyes twinkled. ‘But to be fair, Mr Crystal deserve this.’
‘Yes?’
‘He was ein Schweinhund. There are many days I want to shoot him myself!’ Was this woman joking? It was hard to tell. ‘Und zo smelly!’ She waved a hand in front of her face at the memory of A. S. Crystal’s toxic body odour. ‘Ach, mein Gott.’
The governor observed Miss Sibert with interest. In her mid-forties, at a guess, she was refreshingly brisk, rather comical, and strangely attractive. Rosy face, flat lace-up shoes, battered leather briefcase, blonde hair braided and pinned up, a mauve silk square neatly pinned to her high-buttoned blouse. She brought impressive letters of introduction, and a dog-eared black-and-white photograph of herself as a dreamy young woman in a town garden, sitting beside a snowy-haired old man in a bath chair, whom she identified as ‘dear, dear Sigmund!’ There was little doubt in the governor’s mind that she was precisely what she claimed to be. There was also little doubt in his mind that he had never met anyone remotely like her before.
By way of fair exchange, the governor showed her the grisly scene-of-crime photographs in Geoffrey Chaucer’s file. In all three cases the ‘scene of crime’ was of course divided between the site of the assault and then the dingy scullery where he enacted the head-boiling. The governor’s motives in showing her these pictures were twofold: first, he thought it important that Miss Sibert understand the kind of violence Chaucer was capable of; second, he had always derived pleasure from observing a woman’s confusion when exposed to something disgusting. (He thought no one had guessed this secret perversion of his, but it was in fact the principal reason his wife had left him.)
Disappointingly, Miss Sibert scarcely batted an eye when confronted with images of violent bloodshed.
‘Where is this picture taken, please?’ She indicated the site of Assault One: a grand, high-ceilinged room full of tables and chairs in disarray with a magnificent floor of black-and-white chequerboard tiles, marred slightly by the ugly corpse of a headless police constable slumped on it.
‘Show me,’ said the governor. ‘Oh, yes. That was a Lyons’ Corner House in London. At Sloane Square. The policeman just happened to come in. He ordered cheese on toast and a cup of tea from one of the nippies, and Chaucer went berserk.’
‘How did he … ?’ Pulling a face, she mimed the act of concentrated sawing, and blood spurting.
‘Oh. On that occasion, he happened to have a sharpened saw within reach.’
‘I see.’
She flicked through the others, and was about to return them when she was evidently struck by a thought. Lightly resting her hand on the pictures, she eyed him suggestively. ‘We play cards for these, Herr Governor?’
‘Of course not!’ Shocked, he snatched back the pictures and replaced them in the file. Play cards for them? His heart was beating fast. It was a long time since he had felt so alive.
‘So … ’ He coughed, and steadied himself. ‘So you think you might be able to recover Chaucer’s reasons for committing his terrible crimes, Miss Sibert?’
‘I do. Jah. Easy like off log falling.’
‘And what is the desired effect of this?’
‘That his mind will be liberated, Herr Governor!’
‘But his body will still be under lock and key?’
‘Of course! But when he understand why he commit these crimes, he will be heppy.’
‘And you, Miss Sibert, will have a case study that might make your name?’
‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘Natürlich.’
‘Aren’t you afraid to spend time with such a man?’
‘Me?’ She laughed. ‘Nein, nein!’ Dimples appeared in her cheeks when she was amused like this, and the governor liked it. Her eyes twinkled again. ‘But perhaps this man should be little afraid of me.’
They had then drunk a small glass of sherry together, to seal the deal, but she couldn’t stay long because a taxi was waiting. And after she’d gone the governor locked his door, sat back down at his enormous desk, put his head in his hands, and succumbed to such a tidal wave of loneliness that he seriously thought about taking his own life.
And so the daily Geoffrey Chaucer sessions began – always with an armed guard present, of course, because even if the governor was an emotional ticking bomb, he wasn’t an idiot. Every weekday afternoon Miss Sibert arrived by taxi from the station at 2.18 p.m., rang the bell, submitted to a search, and was admitted to a large, cell-like room lit only by a skylight, with a table and chairs that were bolted to the floor. She was permitted a notebook and pencil (and the pencil was checked at the end of the session, for obvious reasons). For a couple of minutes, she sat alone, gathering her thoughts. It was always chilly in this room, and intimidatingly quiet. And then, at 2.30, a heavy door was unlocked, and Chaucer was brought in, manacled. Every day she tried not to shudder, but she could never help it. When he walked in, a gust of chill air came in with him, like a blast of reality.
Chaucer, at twenty-seven, was a slender man but tall and broad-shouldered. He had exactly the right physique, funnily enough, for a policeman. He even had a prominent jaw, ideal for a secure helmet strap. What struck everyone most on first meeting him, however, was the intensity of his unblinking gaze. He seemed to look right through you.
‘What do you want?’ he said, at the first meeting with the psychologist. His voice was low and gravelly, his manner challenging without being aggressive. Despite the manacles and the fact that he was a psychiatric hospital inmate unlikely ever to taste freedom again, he exuded such a sense of power that the term Übermensch came unbidden to Miss Sibert’s mind – although, to be fair, it was more likely to occur to her than to most people, given that she was a lifelong German speaker.
‘I come to talk,’ she said. Instinctively, she reached up a hand to clutch at her silk scarf, but it wasn’t there. The guards had removed it, for fear it should be used by Chaucer to strangle her. They had also taken the belt from her waist and the laces from her shoes, and extracted all thirty-seven pins from her hairdo. When the interviews were over each day, it took her a full fifteen minutes just to reassemble herself.
‘You’re scared,’ he said, that first day.
‘Jah,’ she admitted. ‘Also I am cold. But I am please to meet you, and I think I can help.’
‘No, you can’t.’
Bravely, she looked him in the eye. ‘Mr Chow-tza, you kill three men. Three policemen. Yes?’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘Yet you say you commit these murders in a kind of trance? And you have no knowledge of what pulls trigger in your mind?’
‘That’s right. I just went mad.’
‘No one just goes mad, Mr Chow-tza!’
He shrugged. ‘I did.’
‘I help you. We bring it beck. You trust me. Whatever it was making you do this thing, together we bring it beck.’
It may be remembered that when Miss Sibert was working with the notably odoriferous critic A. S. Crystal earlier in the year, her motives were mixed. The unfortunate smelly man was keen to recollect details of a bank robbery during which he had been trussed up and hooded; ostensibly Miss Sibert was helping him write a memoir, and had used her Freudian insights to open his eyes to many additional aspects of his personal history – for example, pointing out that when his dear old mother served him consoling oxtail soup in his convalescence, it was symbolic of castration.
But she was playing a double game. Twitten’s investigations led him to the shocking discovery that,
all along, Miss Sibert had been in the secret employ of the dastardly Terence Chambers. When Twitten found out the truth, he was quite upset.
‘Good heavens,’ he exclaimed to Mrs Groynes. ‘So Miss Sibert was a plant?’
So, to be clear, we should assume that Miss Sibert’s current interest in the multiple-murderer Geoffrey Chaucer is not purely academic. For all her bona-fide connections to the father of psychoanalysis, and her genuine devotion to her therapeutic calling, she probably has an ulterior motive for attempting to locate this homicidal maniac’s secret trigger.
He is, after all, a walking human powder-keg.
In the right hands, with the right target, such a man could be very, very useful.
What Miss Sibert soon discovered, to her confusion, was that Chaucer’s traumatic memories were not in fact buried. He just possessed no sense of proportion about them. To an unusual degree, he was dissociated from normal feelings; he had no mechanism for sorting life events in order of magnitude or significance. In an early session he described to Miss Sibert how his own father – a successful accountant employed by criminals during the war – was shot dead by police when he foolishly resisted arrest. But when Miss Sibert claimed this as a breakthrough (‘You have classic reason to hate policeman!’), he shook his head and disagreed.
‘Father shouldn’t have drawn a gun,’ he said flatly. ‘There was blood everywhere and Mother wouldn’t stop screaming, so they hit her and knocked her out. It was all his fault. What’s the weather like today?’
It was an unusual problem. He had no happy memories; no unhappy memories. It was all the same to him. Just once, when Miss Sibert was exhausted, and was asking him routine questions about his early life, had he briefly shown a flutter of agitation.
‘Did you play cards with your parents?’
‘Yes.’
Miss Sibert made a weary note. ‘Was this enjoyable?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Did you play Snep?’
He frowned. ‘Oh, you mean Snap. Yes, we played Snap.’
‘Heppy Femilies?’
‘Yes.’
‘Chess?’
There was silence. Miss Sibert looked up, queryingly. ‘Did you play chess, Mr Chow-tza?’ she asked again.
‘Yes.’ But Chaucer’s face had clouded. Miss Sibert continued with her questions, but made a note later about his interesting reaction to the word ‘chess’. It stood out in contrast to the way he had reacted (with a simple, flat ‘yes’) to questions about whether he thought killing was a bad thing, and whether, in childhood, he had entertained incestuous fantasies about his mother.
But it would be fair to say that progress was slow until the day of Miss Sibert’s fifth session, when she was ushered into the governor’s office by a grim-faced medical assistant.
‘But why?’ she asked. ‘What is happening? Is it Mr Chow-tza? Is he unwell? Please Gott he is not dead.’
‘Ah, Miss Sibert,’ said the governor gravely. ‘Do sit down.’
The office smelled so strongly of male cologne that it made her eyes water. A vase of garish flowers stood on the desk. Whatever was going on, Herr Governor had evidently been looking forward to seeing her.
‘I’m afraid there has been an incident,’ he said, when they were both seated. ‘Chaucer attacked a guard this morning.’
Miss Sibert’s eyes widened. ‘He attacks guard?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry to say, he did. So I’ve decided—’
He stopped, confused. A highly inappropriate smile had appeared on Miss Sibert’s face, as she closed her eyes and nodded.
‘Gut,’ she said. ‘Gut, gut, gut, gut.’
‘Did you just say good in German, Miss Sibert?’
‘Jah. Why not? It is breakthrough.’
‘He hurt a guard! The poor fellow’s in the infirmary.’
She waved it away, as a trivial concern. ‘Herr Governor, the important thing is—’
But he didn’t want to hear about the important thing. He stood up. He paced up and down. He had made a decision. ‘I’m afraid I must suspend your visits to Chaucer forthwith.’
‘What? But why? Herr Governor—’
‘For one thing, I feel that it isn’t safe for you to spend time with him.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘It’s a security issue.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘And for another thing—’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s all your fault!’
‘What? What did I do?’
‘You’ve stirred things up! I should have known you would! You’ve stirred him up, and you’ve stirred up … ’ He tried not to say what was in his heart. ‘In fact, look, you’ve stirred things up generally! I mean, for me! You’ve stirred me up! Unpinning your hair! Letting it dangle like that! For God’s sake, I’m only human! You’ve got to stop coming here!’
Miss Sibert cast a pitying look at the man. He was very distraught. ‘Herr Governor,’ she began gently.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Please.’
‘I blame you for this.’
‘I don’t understand, Herr Governor.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Miss Sibert,’ he wailed, sitting back down at his desk. ‘For pity’s sake, call me Gerald !’
The cry hung in the air for a while, and then she reached across his desk and gently touched his hand. He didn’t move it. ‘Herr Gerald, then.’
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry. My wife … ’ His chin wobbled, in anguish.
‘I know.’ She smiled at him encouragingly, and then realised this was the wrong expression, so changed it to one of extreme sympathy. ‘I know,’ she said sadly.
‘She’s gone!’
‘Yes. This I hear.’
‘She ran off with the gardener!’
‘I know. Everyone talk of it. They laugh, ha-ha. But I tell them it is not funny.’
‘I just can’t describe how it makes me feel.’
‘No?’ She seemed faintly amused. Could he really not put it into words? ‘Well, perhaps I help, Herr Governor,’ she said kindly. ‘After all, it is standard in such a case. You feel emasculated, jah?’ Her tone was sympathetic, but the terminology was so blunt that he could only gape at her.
‘What? No!’ Emasculated ? ‘That’s not it, no, no, good grief, no.’
‘But yes, yes. This is normal. You feel as if your penis, he is gone?’
‘My—? Oh, my God, no!’
‘But you are right to feel this, Herr Gerald. Don’t deny. This gardener fellow, he reach into your trousers. He reach down, and he snep off penis – snep! ’
She waited a few seconds for him to absorb this.
‘But, Herr Gerald, we must set aside such feelings. They are standard reflex only and not of interest. But this attack by Mr Chow-tza! This is positive sign. It is breakthrough and we must pounce.’
‘What do you mean, pounce?’ If the governor couldn’t quite concentrate, it was understandable. The image of George the Gardener walking up to him, thrusting a manly arm down the front of his trousers and, with an expert upward twist, pulling up a carrot, was one that would surely recur in nightmares for the miserable remainder of his life.
‘Pounce! Take advantage! Learn! For example, at what time of day is this attack?’
The governor took a deep breath. ‘At – er, at exactly seven o’clock in the morning. The guard remembered hearing the clock chime.’
‘And what is guard doing? Does he provoke Mr Chow-tza in some way?’
‘Hardly! He was doing a crossword!’
‘Really?’
‘He was stuck on a clue, so he asked Chaucer to have a look at it. Poor old Timkins just showed him the grid in the newspaper, and Chaucer looked at it for about thirty seconds without saying anything, and then one of the female cleaners came up to ask a question—’
‘You have females here?’ she queried. ‘Is this wise, Herr Gerald?’
‘Well, to be honest, I thought I’
d try it because they’re so much better at cleaning! And usually there’s no interaction with the patients. But I’m regretting it now, because Timkins offended this woman in some way and the next thing he was on the ground with Chaucer getting ready to kick him in the head! Luckily another guard intervened, but Chaucer didn’t calm down for an hour or more. He flipped, Miss Sibert. They all saw it. He flipped because of a damned crossword.’
‘Mein Gott.’ Miss Sibert held her head at an angle as she considered what she’d just heard.
The governor rose to his feet. He looked serious. ‘What’s your first name, Miss Sibert? I know it begins with a C. Is it Charlotte? Christine? Clara? Cherry? Clementine? Please tell me.’
She ignored the question. Her mind was racing. ‘You show me crime pictures again, Herr Gerald. I must see them. Quickly!’
He opened his desk drawer. ‘Here.’
Together they pored over the photographs, ignoring the headless corpses, looking for something else. It was Miss Sibert who found it.
‘It is the pattern,’ she breathed excitedly. ‘Do you see? The floor! Schachbrett – black and white! Like crossword puzzle! Like chessboard! Yes!’
She selected another picture. ‘Und here!’ She showed him an Art Deco room, with black-and-white striped wallpaper. In a third was a man dressed as a monochrome harlequin. She flung herself back in her seat, flushed with success. She had cracked it!
The governor wrinkled his nose. ‘You’re saying the man just has to see a black-and-white pattern to go mad? But that can’t be it, Miss Sibert. We see those patterns every day. Those floors are everywhere. If that’s all it takes, he would have killed hundreds of people. Oh, please.’ He leaned close to her. ‘You look magnificent at this moment, with your porcelain cheeks flushed like a Dresden shepherdess! Please let me kiss you.’
She waved him away and sat up properly. It wasn’t unusual for men to throw themselves at her, and of course she completely understood the attraction (because it was Freudian). But she wasn’t going to let this man’s pathetic advances obstruct an important train of thought. She was getting close to cracking the mystery of Chaucer’s manic episodes.
