by Liz Jensen
For Clare Blatchford Rees
An inspiration
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar . . .
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither
Can in a moment travel thither
And see the children sport upon the shore
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Also Available by Liz Jensen
PROLOGUE
Mass hysterical outbreaks rarely have identifiable inceptions, but the date I recall most vividly is Sunday 16th September, when a young child in butterfly pyjamas slaughtered her grandmother with a nail-gun to the neck. The attack took place in a family living-room in a leafy Harrogate cul-de-sac, the kind where no one drops litter and you can still hear birdsong.
Three shots. Three half-inch bolts of steel. The jugular didn’t stand a chance.
No reason, no warning.
The little girl’s father was the first on the scene. Hearing a blunt vocal noise – the woman had tried to scream – he rushed in to find her haemorrhaging on the sofa, while the kid sat staring at the wall in a trance that resembled open-eyed sleep. When the others joined him and saw the blood, they all had the same thought: a terrible accident.
But it was a mistake to think that, because a few seconds later the child jolted awake and grabbed the tool again. Before anyone realised her intention, she’d put it to her father’s face and fired.
Eyes are delicate, so no chance there either. He was fortunate it wasn’t worse.
A lightweight pump-action Black & Decker. One murder, one blinding. Two minutes. No accident.
She can’t have been the first. But I’ll call her Child One.
At the time of the assault, she had just turned seven.
Is violence contagious? By what mechanism does a series of apparently random events start cohering into a narrative of cause and effect? Can there be such a thing as psychic occupation?
For me, these became pressing questions.
The day the news broke, I’d just flown in from Taiwan. In the car park of Glasgow airport I blinked in the sunshine. After the pressurised heat of downtown Taipei, the air shuddered with freshness. While my plane was touching down, the little girl was preparing her weapon. By the time I’d cleared customs, she’d executed the attack. And as I drove towards the coast and the ferry, skirting the sprawling edges of grey Scottish towns, two police officers were contemplating a crime scene which they later described as ‘the most distressing and perverted’ of their careers.
I lived, at the time, on the island of Arran, in a landscape that flitted unpredictably between light and dark: shafts of sunlight, charcoal clouds, sudden rainbows, the pale featherings of fog on scrub, the pewter glint of the Atlantic. I’d rented a stone cottage on the eastern coast straight after my split with Kaitlin: ideal for someone who cherishes his solitude and needs only appear at Head Office on the rare occasion. It was dark and low-ceilinged. The front door opened on to a flank of scrubland a short walk from the shore: in the middle distance lay the rhomboid outline of a black granite rock and a cluster of hawthorns, side-swiped by wind. I could watch the rotating blades of the wind turbines on the horizon for hours. At the back of the cottage, by an abandoned vegetable patch, lay some rusted tractor parts and an enamel bathtub on brick supports which a previous tenant had turned into a crude pond. When I cleared away the chickweed, I found a pale goldfish. Once in a while I’d empty the toaster and feed it crumbs.
‘Here, Mr Fish, Mr Fish, Mr Fish!’ I’d say. Strange to hear a human voice, in that empty place.
There are certain fixtures in my life which constitute a kind of home. The antique optometrist’s charts in Cyrillic, Hindi, Chinese and Arabic that Professor Whybray bequeathed me when he retired; my paint catalogues, foreign-language dictionaries and folk-tale compendiums; some of the mathematical diagrams and origami models I’ve constructed across the years, and a cardboard dinosaur Freddy made at primary school. Good shelving is important. I have that too. I’m a creature of habit. After three days in Taiwan working flat out on the sabotage case, it was comforting to be surrounded by what I cherish. Fortress Hesketh, Kaitlin used to call me. Entry forbidden. If she had a point – and yes, the general consensus was that she had – then my self-containment wasn’t something I had a mind to fix.
I had one day to write up the Taipei investigation, and explain the anomaly of Sunny Chen. That’s what was preoccupying me as I unpacked my suitcase. Five identical shirts, ditto boxer shorts, two pairs of trousers, wash-bag, Chinese dictionary, electronics. I put on a wash, then flipped on the TV to catch the midday news. Growth figures up for the third consecutive season; the UN warns of ‘catastrophe within a generation’ if birth rates fail to drop; severe weather alert as Hurricane Veronica heads for the West coast. But it was the domestic atrocity that snared me. My exhaustion lent the report the drifting, sub-oceanic quality of a nightmare.
The little girl’s grandparents were on their regular weekly visit to her home. The distraught family insisted that nobody had done anything to antagonise the child. Neither on that Sunday or any other day. When she woke that morning, she was in good spirits, according to her mother. She had even recounted a dream about ‘walking around in a beautiful white desert that sparkled’. It looked like Heaven, she said.
The TV showed a semi-detached house in a Harrogate suburb. The reporter demonstrating how a small hand might clasp and operate a nail-gun of this type. A psychologist struggling to hypothesise why such a young child would turn on people she loved. An elderly neighbour declaring the family to be ‘perfectly ordinary’ and giving the detail about the pyjamas. Her own granddaughter had a similar pair. From Marks and Spencer, she said. ‘With blue butterflies on.’
Strange, what makes people cry.
I wondered what kind of blue. Celestial, Frosted Steel Aquamarine, Inky Pool, Luna? I could name you thirty-eight off the top of my head.
As a boy, I read everything I could lay my hands on, regardless of its function: dishwasher instruction manuals, TV schedules, the works of Dostoyevsky, lists of cereal ingredients, my mother’s Cosmopolitan, fishing magazines, porn. But mostly I devoured comics featuring a panoply of onomatopoeic words deployed to render specific sounds. A blow to the jaw would be BAM, while an arrow loosed from a bow might be ZOOOSHHH. A regular gun would typically go BANG. But a nail-gun’s sound is shallower, and features a distinctive click. I would spell it SCHTUUKH.
Plato suggested that the realm we inhabit after death is the same territory we lived in before birth: a fusion of time and space that encompasses both pre- and post-existence. Ever since the High Energy Research Organisation in Japan confirmed the results of CERN’s experiments in which
neutrinos travelled faster than light, it has struck me that Plato was closer to the mark than anyone could have imagined. Not least Einstein, whose notion of special relativity had been violated. The fact that a unified theory of physics had come within our grasp for the first time in human history was something I came to reflect on much later, in relation to Child One’s attack and the others that followed. But perception is personal. In the early days, some saw the atrocity as a symptom of a spoiled generation’s ‘pathological’ craving for attention in a world in which the future of mankind, through its own mismanagement, appeared blasted. I’d seen no evidence of this myself, in my observations of Freddy and his entourage. On a point of style, I also considered the interpretation to be unduly masochistic. As an anthropologist I read the phenomenon more as a sick fairy tale, a parable of dysfunctional times. None of us got it right. The message was written in letters too big to read, letters that could only be deciphered from a vast distance or an unusual angle. We were as good as blind. This, by the way, is a figurative expression. Unlike many on the spectrum, I can deploy those.
The nail-gun murder struck me with particular force because Child One was Freddy’s age: seven. Having made the association, I couldn’t help picturing my stepson aiming his catapult at another human being and letting fly.
Who is Freddy’s chosen target, in this image?
It doesn’t put me in a good light, but I’ll say it anyway, because it’s the truth: his mother, Kaitlin.
I see Freddy, with his curly black hair and pixie face, take aim and fire at her heart – zoooshhh – and I hear her cry of shock.
One of my chief coping mechanisms, in mental emergencies, involves origami: I carry an imaginary sheaf of delicate rice paper in my head, in a range of shades, to fold into classical shapes. When the image of Freddy shooting Kaitlin first reared up I swiftly folded eleven of the Japanese cranes known as ozuru, but I couldn’t banish it. Kaitlin used to call me, affectionately, an ‘incurable materialist’. Later, this changed to ‘a robot made of meat’. This is unfair. I’m not a machine. I feel things. I just register them differently. The story of the pyjama-clad killer and the unwelcome images it inspired rocked my equilibrium.
After she confessed to her affair, and its excruciating nature, and the lies (‘white lies’, she insisted) that she’d told to cover it, Kaitlin and I stuck it out for a while, at her insistence. This involved a form of mental torture known as relationship counselling.
What do you most admire about Kaitlin, Hesketh?
Kaitlin, can you identify what attracted you to Hesketh when you first met?
As well as being irrelevant to the issue in hand, it was purposeless. There are certain things I am not cut out to do. Fieldwork, my mentor Professor Whybray always told me, was ‘very probably’ one of them. Sharing my life with a woman, I’d long suspected, was another. The fact that my first and only attempt had ended in failure confirmed it definitively. I would not be trying again. I moved away from London and the home Kaitlin still shared with Freddy. I have always been fascinated by islands, both linguistically and because of the social-Darwinian speculations they invite, so Arran suited me perfectly. That said, I saw few people: the cottage stood alone, five miles from the nearest village, in a landscape of sea and heather, boulders and sheep. Here, with the capital far behind me, I took strategic command of myself by developing a ritualised schedule of work and half-hour walks, began work on an ambitious origami mollusc project, and trained myself to think of Kaitlin in the past tense. But nothing could fill the vacuum left by the boy.
‘Look at me properly. In the eye,’ Kaitlin used to say, at the climax of a fight, or sex.
It was a kind of taunt. She knew I couldn’t. That I’d simply turn my face away or shut my eyes tighter.
When she got me, she got the things I was, including the elements of my personality she deemed defective. She got the package called Hesketh Lock and all that it contained. Where was the logic in wanting me to be someone other than myself?
Freddy never did that. He’d never heard of Asperger’s syndrome. And if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. He accepted me from the start. To him I was Hesketh.
Just Hesketh.
Anthropology is a science which requires you to observe your fellow men and women, their traditions and their beliefs, as you would members of another species. The impulse to fabulate is a natural response to a confusing and contradictory world. Grasping this helped me to unlock the thought systems of my fellow men, and move on from the state of frustrated bafflement that dogged my childhood and teenage years. I grew adept at sketching mental flow charts to track the repercussions of real events as well as hypothetical scenarios. Tracing narrative patterns through the overlapping circles of Venn diagrams – still my tool of choice – revealed to me the endless interconnectedness of human imagination and memory. Armed with these templates, I worked on adapting my behaviour. Under Professor Whybray’s tutelage, I learned to mimic and then assimilate some of the behaviours I observed. I was not the first: others had exploited their apparent disadvantage with great success, he told me – most notably an internationally celebrated Professor of Behavioural Psychology. But apparently I still lack some of the ‘normal social graces’. Men like Ashok, my boss at Phipps & Wexman, tend to take me as they find me. Women are different. They see a tall, dark, well-built man with strongly delineated features, and this classic combination triggers something at cellular level: a biological imperative. When they discover my personality is at odds with what they wishfully intuit from my ‘handsomeness’, their disappointment is boundless. It’s often accompanied by a disturbing rage.
Ashok once said to me, ‘We’re all liars, bud. It’s human nature.’
No, I thought. He’s wrong. Through a quirk of DNA, I am not part of that ‘we’. I can get obsessive about things. Or sidetracked. I can appear brutal too, I’m told.
But I know right from wrong. And I revere the truth.
So you will at least find in me an honest narrator.
In the days that followed the Harrogate attack, the little girl in blue butterfly pyjamas still refused to speak.
GIRL WHO DREAMED OF HEAVEN –
AND MADE HELL
SICK CHERUB’S SHOTS OF HATE
What happened next to the child whose dream about a sparkling white desert gave birth to such lurid headlines? Speculating on the possibilities and their variables, I pictured the family moving to another part of the country, or even abroad, to start a new life. The child would accompany them, if the father could still bear to be around her. If not, they’d install her in a secure home. I’ll admit that I considered the case to be as unique as it was isolated: a thing of its own and of itself. I am a natural joiner of dots, and I saw no dots to join.
And then came the distressing phone call about Sunny Chen, which sent my thoughts hurtling back to Taiwan. And because of the drastic nature of what followed, Child One was relegated to the back of my mind.
CHAPTER 1
The phenomenon known as the fairy ring is caused by fungal spore pods spreading outwards like a water ripple around a biologically dead zone. In European legend, they represent the gateway to the fairy world, a parallel universe with its own laws and time-scales. The rings are evidence of dark forces: demons, shooting stars, lightning strikes.
Jump into one and bad luck will befall you.
From the air, Taipei is like a fairy ring: a city built in a crater encircled by mountains.
It was early morning when my plane touched down, but the day’s heat was already rising. I’d spent the flight from Manchester to Taipei listening to audio lessons on headphones to brush up on my Mandarin. When the last one came to an end, I pressed play and started again from the beginning. I once attended an intensive language course in Shanghai, hoping to refine elements of my PhD. Linguistically, I am more of a reader than a speaker, so inevitably it was the ideograms that excited me most. I’d copy pages of Chinese characters and use the dictionary to make transla
tions.
The effort on the plane paid off. My taxi driver understood me when I gave him directions. The air shimmered invigoratingly, reminding me of TV static.
I dislike change of any kind. But paradoxically, something in me – a kind of information-hunger – seeks and requires it. If sharks stop moving, they die. Kaitlin once said my brain was like that. We drove past suburban tower blocks stacked like grubby sugar cubes; flat-screen billboards and rotating hoardings that advertised toothpaste, nappies, kung-fu movies, mobile phones. All this alongside glimpses of an older order: street hawkers selling tofu, lychees, starfruit, sweets, caged chickens and cigarettes beneath tattered frangipanis and jacarandas. Violet bougainvillea frothed over fences, and potted orchids swayed in the breeze. Even with sunglasses on, the intense light drilled into my retinas. Here and there, on street corners or in doorways and temple entrances, thin trails of incense smoke drifted up from offerings to the dead: fruit, sweets, paper money. For the Chinese, September is Ghost Month. The spirits of the dead pour out from Hell, demanding food and appeasement, and wreaking havoc.
I inhaled the foreignness.
Fraud is a business like any other. Anthropologically speaking, it involves the meeting, co-operation and communication of tribes. The space between sharp practice and corporate fraud is the delicate territory Phipps & Wexman regularly treads. As Ashok tells clients in his presentations: ‘After a catastrophic PR shock, our job is to ensure nothing like that ever happens again anywhere on your global team, because it won’t need to. Phipps & Wexman has the best investigative brains in the business. And we have the success stories to prove it. Sanwell, the Go Corporation, Quattro, GTTL, Klein and Mason: all companies whose reputations have been definitively recast by our profile makeovers.’ I have heard this speech eighteen and a quarter times. I even feature in it. (‘Hesketh Lock, our cross-culture specialist, who has analysed sabotage patterns from Indonesia to Iceland.’) Ashok has that easy American way with audiences. ‘Nobody at Phipps & Wexman claims to be saving the world,’ he continues, ‘but we’re sure as hell pouring oil on its troubled waters.’ It always stimulates the clients, this notion that we’re healers. Shamans, even. It was the brainchild of Stephanie Mulligan, a behavioural psychologist with whom I have an excruciating history.
