by Shaun Hutson
'What do you think would happen if we did?' Dexter asked.
Lacey shook his head agitatedly looking first at one doctor then the other. He licked his lips and tried to swallow but his throat was too dry.
'Roger,' Dexter repeated. 'What do you think would happen if we took the watches away? Do you know?'
Lacey shook his head even more vigorously.
'Did your wife take the watches away from you?' the doctor asked.
'Yes.'
'Is that why you killed her?'
'Yes.'
'So what do you think is going to happen if we take them away now? Can you tell me?'
'There have to be some survivors,' said Lacey fal-teringly.
'Survivors from what?' Dexter wanted to know.
'The war. When the war comes, everyone will die except those who are prepared.'
'Like you?'
'Yes.' He smiled.
'Why do you keep semen in the back of these watches, Roger?'
'They will be the survivors. They will grow. When the time comes.' He chuckled at his own pun. 'The time will come.' He began masturbating again. 'Every male discharge contains approximately two hundred million sperm. I have created enough to re-populate the world after the war. From each of them a person will grow.'
Dexter replaced the watch and got to his feet. Followed by Colston he headed for the door.
Behind them Lacey quickened the speed of his strokes, his breathing now harsher.
On the other side of the locked door Dexter pulled off the surgical gloves and shoved them into his pocket.
'How did he kill his wife? Stabbed her, didn't he?' the doctor mused.
Colston nodded.
'Apparently the police found traces of semen in every wound. All twenty-eight of them.' Colston looked through the observation slit to see Lacey reach his climax, thick white fluid pumping from his penis onto his hand. The doctor watched as the patient tried to scoop it up, desperate not to waste any of the precious ejaculate. He snapped the slide across and looked at Dexter.
'Do you think he's ready to be moved?' he asked.
'Not yet,' the other man proclaimed. 'Even though he killed his wife he didn't and still doesn't display any latent homicidal or psychopathic tendencies.'
Dexter shook his head. 'He's not right for us.'
They moved further down the corridor, past other cells.
Past a young woman who had systematically torn out every finger and toe-nail to prevent dirt settling unseen on her body. (The interns called her Lady Macbeth.) Past a man in his early thirties who had killed both his mother and father with a garden fork because they refused to attend the baptism of his half-caste daughter. He had covered their bodies in axle grease to 'blacken' them, anxious that they should know what it felt like to be 'coloured'.
Dexter looked in on the man, checking his name. Colin Wells.
'Does he have any family?' the doctor wanted to know.
'A sister,' Colston informed him.
'What about his wife?'
'She ran away after the killing of his parents, took the baby with her.'
'Where's the sister?'
'She lives nearby. She still visits occasionally.'
'Damn,' murmured Dexter under his breath.
There were two doors left.
Dexter crossed to the first of them and peered inside.
The occupant was kneeling in the centre of the room wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. His body was thin and wasted, his face pallid. He was bald except for some snow-white hair over his ears. Even the hair on his chest and the thick strands that curled from his nostrils were as white as milk.
Thomas Walsh had been institutionalised for nearly thirty of his seventy-three years.
As he heard the key turn in the lock he turned, still kneeling, to face his visitors.
Dexter and Colston watched as he rose imperiously then pressed his palms together, touched his fingertips to his chin and bowed.
'Good morning, Tom,' said Dexter, peering around the room.
Hardly an inch of the wall was untouched, barely a fraction of the white paint showing through the mass of scribblings which had been completed with crayon, marker pen. Even blood.
The pattern was uniform, duplicated hundreds, thousands of times over and over again on the walls.
It looked like two musical notes joined together but the lines were harsher, drawn with quick flourishes.
It meant power.
Tom Walsh had been captured by the Japanese in Burma in 1940, forced for five years to work on the infamous Burma Railway, subject to the whims of brutal guards, starved and tortured. He had returned to England after the war a broken man both physically and mentally. Ten years in and out of hospital being treated for diseases he had picked up in the Malaysian jungles had seen his mental state deteriorate even further, his hatred of the Japanese grow ever stronger.
He'd been working in a car factory when a Japanese delegation had visited one day back in 1958.
Tom had managed to kill two of them and blind another with a soldering iron before he was stopped.
He'd been committed. He was the asylum's oldest patient.
Dexter exchanged a few words with him, then watched as he bowed ceremoniously when the two doctors left.
That left the last cell.
'I can check it if you like,' Colston said quietly.
Dexter thought a moment and shook his head. He took a step towards the final door, fumbling with his keys, his mouth dry. He didn't look through the observation slot first.
As he lifted the key to the lock, his hand was shaking.
FIFTEEN
The lift doors slid open with a muted whirr and DI Frank Gregson stepped out into the corridor.
He moved quickly but unhurriedly, his footsteps rattling out a tempo in the quiet corridor. At such a late hour every noise seemed amplified, too. Not that New Scotland Yard was run by the clock. Crime and criminals didn't hold regular hours, murderers didn't clock on and off.
By God, my dear Holmes, I should say not.
Gregson found the door to the pathology labs locked, as he'd expected, but he had a key and let himself in, walking through the outer lab into the autopsy room itself. He paused in the doorway, recoiling slightly from the pungent odour of chemicals and death that greeted him like a long-lost friend. Reaching round he slapped at the panel of switches. Seconds later, the room was bathed in cold white light as the banks of fluorescents in the ceiling cast their luminosity over the dissecting tables. The light was reflected in their polished, stainless steel surfaces and Gregson caught a glimpse of his own distorted image in one as he passed.
The tables were empty, their occupants removed and stored in the cabinets that lined the walls. So many puzzles lay within those boxes. So many unanswered questions.
Gregson stood looking at them for a moment, the silence inside the lab quite overpowering. It was like a living organism, so complete it was almost palpable. It surrounded him. He felt as if it were penetrating his very pores, seeping into his bloodstream and circulating around his body.
He could hear the thud of his own heart in the solitude and its pace quickened as he found the locker he sought. He slid it out.
The body was covered by the familiar plastic sheet and the DI pulled it back to reveal the charred corpse beneath.
He stood gazing, for what seemed like an eternity, at the crushed skull, the wisps of hair that still clung to the blackened remains of the scalp. The scorched bones still covered, in places, by burned flesh.
He reached out and touched what was left of the face.
A piece of black flesh came away on his fingertip. He looked at it for a moment then rubbed it away between his index finger and thumb. It crumbled like ash.
He looked at the body once more, his forehead deeply lined.
When he spoke, his gaze never leaving the charred body, his words echoed around the silent laboratory:
'Who are you?'
SIXT
EEN
15 APRIL 1977
The new patient was due to arrive in a week.
At present he was still under guard inside Wandsworth, but according to the letters Dexter held in his hand - one from the Governor of that prison, the other rubber-stamped by the Home Secretary - he was to be receiving into his care a man by the name of Howard Townly.
Townly had, over a period of two months, kidnapped, tortured and finally murdered two men and three women, all of whom he had picked up while they were hitching lifts. He had made home movies of their deaths, replaying the videos over and over again for his enjoyment.
Townly was thirty-six.
About the right age.
Dexter checked through his notes on the man and saw that he had been unmarried. He was an only child.
This looked hopeful.
His mother had given evidence on his behalf during the trial.
Dexter shook his head.
No good.
Dexter sat back in his seat, massaging the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He had the psychological evaluation of Townly before him, too. The police psychiatrist who had interviewed him had noted that the man had tendencies towards schizophrenia, paranoid delusions and sociopathic leanings. A hopeless case? That was probably the reason he was being sent to Bishopsgate. The institution, which Dexter had been in charge of for the past eleven years, had over three hundred patients within its antiquated walls. They ranged from those who visited on a daily basis through to the voluntarily committed, graduating to the criminally insane. In fact almost a third of the inmates were of that latter category. Prisons, unable to cope with them, shunted them off to Bishopsgate, Broadmoor or Rampton. Dexter often wondered if this was a genuine attempt to put them in the hands of those better equipped to deal with their mental instability or merely a way of relieving the pressure on an already overcrowded prison system which sometimes packed men three to a cell.
Perhaps the very fact that these men were insane had ensured they at least enjoyed a little more privacy for the period of their incarceration.
Insane.
It was a word he heard nearly every working day. One which he had been hearing for as long as he could remember in connection with the wildly aberrant behaviour and attitudes of some of his wards. What the hell was insanity? And who had the right to define it as such?
Dexter had come to see, with some individuals he'd treated, that insanity was not a disintegration of the mind but rather a re-building. Madness was sometimes displayed in a startling clarity of thought which apparently 'normal' mortals could never hope to understand. There was a relentless logicality to the way a madman thought. That madness sometimes proved to be so single-minded, so obsessively consuming, that Dexter found himself not fearing or hating these murderers he had charge of but admiring them.
Ted Bundy, an American mass-murderer convicted of killing more than twenty young women, was once quoted as saying 'What's one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?' When war, usually started and controlled by supposedly sane men, took the lives of millions, Dexter found it easy to subscribe to Bundy's observation. Who was madder, the solitary individual who killed a dozen for his own reasons? Or the soldier, trained to kill hundreds in the name of a cause he could not even understand?
His philosophical musings were interrupted by a knock on his office door.
'Come in,' he called.
Colston practically stumbled in, his face drained of colour.
'What's wrong?' Dexter asked, noticing his colleague's expression.
'One of the patients,' Colston said agitatedly. 'You must come now.'
'Is it that important?'
'It's in Ward 5.'
Dexter was on his feet in a second. He and Colston moved with great haste along the corridors, Dexter almost breaking into a run as they drew closer. His mind was in turmoil, ideas and visions flooding through it like a raging torrent through a broken dam. He didn't even think to ask Colston what had happened.
Ward 5.
He swallowed hard.
They turned a corner and came upon two interns standing beside a heavy steel door. It was firmly locked and secured.
The entrance to Ward 5.
The ward was in the East Wing of the institution and accessible only to half a dozen interns, Colston and Dexter himself. The two doctors watched as one of the interns, Baker, unlocked the door and stepped back to allow them through. He and another man called Bradley followed.
'Where?' Dexter said. 'Which cell?'
Colston led him past four doors, grey-painted and nondescript but for an observation slot and a small square hatch for pushing food through. Colston paused at the fifth and nodded towards Bradley, who unlocked the door and stepped back, allowing Dexter to enter the room.
The smell of excrement hit him immediately, but he was able to ignore the stench; his attention was rivetted to the body of the man slumped against the far wall of the cell.
He was in his thirties, Dexter knew, but a stranger would have found it impossible to guess at his age.
His face looked as though someone had been across it in all directions with a cheese-grater. His skin hung in bloodied ribbons from bones which were visible in places through the crimson mess. The front of the grey overall he wore was soaked with gore and, as Dexter moved closer to kneel beside the man, he noticed a thick, reddish-pink piece of matter lying in the man's lap. A glance at his open mouth revealed that the reddish-pink lump was the end of his tongue. He'd bitten through it, severing it. His teeth, visible because what remained of his shredded lips were stretched back in a rictus, were also coated with crimson. It looked as if he'd been using scarlet mouthwash. One eye, torn from its socket, dangled by the slender thread of the optic nerve. It rested neatly on his mangled cheek, the orb fixing Dexter in a sightless stare.
The doctor looked down at the man's hands and saw that the fingers were drenched with blood, strips of flesh, some two inches long, stuck beneath the nails. He had used his fingernails like claws on his own face, gouged his own eye from its socket.
Colston, standing in the doorway, was aware almost for the first time of the uncanny silence that reigned over the rest of the ward. It was as if the other occupants were in silent mourning.
'The same as the others,' he said quietly.
Dexter nodded and got to his feet, the expression on his face one not of sadness but of anger. He looked at Colston.
'I want a report on my desk by the morning,' he said. Then he looked back at the shredded features of the man, blood beginning to congeal in the wounds. 'We have to know.'
SEVENTEEN
He gripped the headboard and thrust harder into her, each motion of his hips accompanied by a grunt.
Ray Plummer smiled down at her as he penetrated her, gritting his teeth in concentration, his efforts enlivened when he saw the look of pleasure on Carol Jackson's face.
She gasped and raised her legs, hooking them around the small of his back, raising her buttocks to allow him deeper penetration. She began to rotate her hips gently, coaxing him towards the climax she knew was close.
Come on, for Christ's sake get it over with.
She moaned loudly, knowing that the sounds she made, coupled with the clenching of her vaginal muscles around his penis, would, as ever, bring him to climax quickly.
He was sweating profusely; as she ran her fingers up and down his back she felt their tips sliding through a sheen of perspiration.
Come on, Ray. You can't hold out much longer.
'That feels so good,' she cooed expertly. 'Do it faster.'
'Faster, slower,' he panted, trying to keep up his rhythm. 'Harder, softer. How do you want it?'
'All those ways,' she breathed.
Only just get a bloody move on and finish, will you?
She reached over and began to squeeze his testicles, stroking them gently, breathing ever more deeply, her exaggerated show of pleasure becoming more pronounced.
She felt him s
tiffen, felt his body tense.
'Oh yes,' she gasped with relief, knowing the time had arrived.
He thrust into her with one final, deep lunge and she felt his hot seed filling her, seeping from her vagina as he continued to pound away, his breath rasping in his throat.
She reached up to stroke his hair but he pushed her hand away, content that she should run her fingers up and down his back.
Get off me for Christ's sake.
He remained on top of her, his breathing gradually slowing.
'Jesus, that was good,' she gasped, her own breath coming in practised gasps.
He touched her cheek with his fingers and smiled a smile of accomplishment before finally rolling off her and lying exhausted on the bed, wiping perspiration from his forehead. Immediately she reached for the tissues beside the bed and began mopping up the warm fluid seeping from between her legs.
'Leave it,' he said breathlessly, watching as his semen trickled through her pubic hair.
She rolled onto her side and began stroking his chest.
'It's all right for you,' she said. 'You don't have to sleep in the wet patch.'
He laughed humourlessly.
'You should be used to it by now,' he muttered, holding her chin between his thumb and forefinger.
I've done it to you enough times.
She moved away from him slightly and laid her head on his chest, listening to his heart pounding, closing her eyes in relief that it was over for another night.
'Felt good, didn't it?' he said, his tone self-con-gratulatory.
'Yes,' she lied.
She could feel his semen oozing uncomfortably over her thighs but she tried to ignore it, knowing that he would be asleep soon. Then, as she usually did, she would slip out of bed while he was snoring like a fog-horn and take a shower. Wash it all away. For now she lay where she was, aware that he was twisting her long hair around his fingers. Occasionally he would tug a little too hard and she would wince but she said nothing, content to let him play his little games.
It was warm inside the flat. In contrast, her own place was like a fridge. All she had to keep her warm was a two-bar electric fire close to the bed. Plummer's penthouse apartment was fully central-heated. In the large sitting room he even had an open fireplace full of mock logs. She would often sit gazing into the gas flames late at night while he slept, tracing shapes in them, wondering if some of those shapes were the shape of her future.
