“How on earth will I be able to identify the killer?”
D’Cruz, who was sitting next to me, whispered, “The hairs on your balls will bristle, big fella.”
“Do not worry,” Quincy assured me. “When the time comes you will know.”
BECAUSE QUINCY HAD to keep what he called his “psychosensitive antennae” alert, dinner at the Al-Misris’ home ended at exactly ten, and I woke early the following morning. It was a Monday. Through the thin walls of our flat I could hear Ma pottering around. Dusting, moving furniture about and occasionally turning on the vacuum cleaner. It was eight days after Vanita’s death and she was very much with me.
She sat naked on the edge of my bed and crooned to me. I was in a state of high sexual excitement and, to make matters worse, my bladder was full. I should have slipped into the toilet and relieved myself, perhaps doubly, but I enjoyed the condition I was in. I toyed with the idea of listening to the tape Leela had given me. Maybe, if I listened to my beloved singing bajans, I would fall asleep again and dream of making love to her. The seance was over and there was no need to avoid the emission of semen. I was just drifting off when the commotion in our living-room woke me.
Ma’s voice was raised and she seemed to be weeping. I heard Oscar’s voice and that of a third person. The man’s voice was familiar but not one that I could immediately identify. I became fully awake when I did. It was D’Cruz. I dressed quickly.
The trio were at the dining table drinking coffee. There was the usual bottle of brandy beside Oscar’s cup. I did not realise till cups were re-filled that D’Cruz too liked a little brandy in his coffee.
“I was drinking with the law till early this morning and I thought it was a good idea to ask him home,” Oscar explained as I entered the room.
“I didn’t know you two knew each other,” I remarked, keeping down the note of disapproval in my voice.
“Every cop of my vintage knows the great Oscar Wellington Wu.” D’Cruz sounded drunk, which may have been why I had a problem identifying his voice.
“And the inspector, good policeman that he is, knows where the said Oscar Wellington Wu goes to ground.”
D’Cruz had apparently traced Oscar to an all-night coffee-shop in Toa Payoh. I hated this sprawling mass of concrete. It was the first of our “new towns” but was now sufficiently old to contain dark establishments in which sinister men sat drinking till the small hours of the morning.
“Been asking hither and thither, old chap,” said Oscar in my direction, “but didn’t get the tiniest whisper of what these killings are about.”
“As I have been trying to tell you all night, Oscar, these are not one of your gangland slayings of the sixties.” The inspector looked terribly tired. He had obviously gone in search of Oscar as soon as he left Jafri’s home. “I am also sure that this is not the work of a madman who kills instead of fu…” he looked apologetically at Ma “…instead of sexually assaulting his victims.”
“I’m in agreement with you on that score,” said Oscar. He looked at me. “Yes, I’ve heard all about the pundit from California. The hostelries I favour may be humble but they are possessed of,” he smiled, “you may say possessed by, television.”
I disliked Quincy but had to admit that a serial killer on the rampage was, as yet, the only logical way of linking the five murders we had on our hands. “I can’t say that I like the little squirt any more than you do, but there could be a grain of truth in what he says.”
D’Cruz turned bleary but contemptuous eyes on me. “If you believe that that pint-sized freak is anything more than a conman, you need to have your head examined.” I was riled by his contempt. “You can say what you want about Quincy, but you seem to have no theories of your own. What for instance do you propose to do? Right now, I mean.”
He looked around him wearily. “Right now, I’m going home to bed. The missus will be awfully worried about my staying up all night.”
“And you, young man,” said Ma, taking Oscar’s hand, “are going to have a good hot bath before I put you to bed myself.” The tears in the corners of her eyes were quite dried.
They needed to be alone. I showered quickly and rushed off to work.
Mondays are bad days at Nats. This one was worse than most. There was a minor ’flu epidemic in town and many of the preset girls claimed to have symptoms of the disease. They had done so after they had clocked in, thereby ensuring themselves a day’s pay whether or not they were sent off sick. In addition, several girls were genuinely down with the ’flu and there was a real possibility of our not being able to meet our commitments. It was company policy not to use staff who were in any way infectious and Loong was in a quandary as to who to retain and who to send off work.
He insisted that I should decide between the girls who were ill and those who were malingering. I protested that I was not a doctor but this did not impress the supervisor.
“Keeping our products hygienic is your job, Menon,” he snapped, “and I will consider it negligence if you do not comply with my orders.”
Feeling awfully foolish, I went down the line of giggling girls, feeling their brows and taking their pulses. When I came to Anita Chew she turned her eyes upwards and said, “There has been another case of food poisoning and I wasn’t on duty when that tray went out, so you’d better tell that bum boy to look elsewhere if he needs someone to blame.” I was relieved. The episode with Symons had not caused her to lose her spirit.
I had no sooner pronounced the whole row fit when the public address system summoned me to the manager’s office.
“There’s been a further case of food poisoning, HK. If this gets to the ears of our competitors, we might as well close Nats down, for all the business we will get.”
“Have you looked at the duty schedules to see who might be responsible this time?”
“I thought that was your business,” he retorted. “The flight crews’ reports have been on your desk from early this morning.”
“I know,” I lied. “And there is no common factor. Certainly the girl Anita Chew cannot be held responsible. She wasn’t on duty when these trays went out.”
He fussed about the papers on his desk, rearranging them into several neat piles. I was sure that Symons had not summoned me to his office to discuss food poisoning. After a bit, he said, “You know that business I mentioned about the meat tenders?” He tipped his head and looked at me sideways. “About there being loose talk about preferences in awarding them?”
“Yes,” I said as nonchalantly as I could.
“No need to worry about it any more. I had a word with our Chairman. He assures me that he has been more than impressed with my impartiality and will stake his reputation on it.” He smiled confidently. “Perhaps you will be so good as to convey this piece of news to your inspector friend.” His smile widened. “I believe he drops in to see you from time to time.”
I rushed back to my office. I remembered that I had forgotten to tell the inspector about any hanky-panky that Symons and Loong might have been up to in the selection of meat tenders. I was about to call him when the phone on my desk rang. It was Jafri. He wanted me to go immediately to a government-run psychiatric clinic on the outskirts of town.
“What’s so urgent, Jafri?”
“Dr Sio and his team have sifted through a whole mass of data and come up with a couple of hot possibilities.”
I didn’t look forward to meeting Quincy again and said, “I might have difficulty getting off work…”
“If you have any problems on that score, I’ll get the DCP to call your manager and get you time off.”
“No need, Jafri. I’ll be there in an hour.”
The computer print-out informed me that Lenny Drigo was a compulsive masturbater. This habit was noted when he was in infant school. It continued throughout his school life and became really awkward when he reached puberty and began ejaculating. An added inconvenience was that Lenny preferred to masturbate with his genitals exposed.
/> In infancy his mother, who was unmarried, had beaten him severely to discourage the habit. She had also tied his hands behind his back and taped a plastic cup round his genitals. None of this stopped Lenny. He had managed to free himself and carried on as before.
The anonymous author of the print-out believed that Lenny was open about his affliction because he had not, as a child, been given clear moral directives about sexual conduct. The fact that he was illegitimate indicated that his mother too was without any socio-sexual values, and that this aspect of his personality had been genetically transmitted.
As he grew older, lack of restraint became outright exhibitionism and he had been arrested several times for indecent exposure. He had also been charged once with assaulting a minor. The female in question had, on further investigation, proved to be a thirty-five-year-old midget, and witnesses had come forward to testify that they had seen her fondling Lenny’s genitals in a crowded bus. He had also been arrested on one occasion because the crotch of his trousers was blood-stained. Laboratory tests proved the blood was not human but bovine, and Lenny later confessed to liking to wrap a piece of raw steak around his penis.
He had, according to the single-page print-out, other psychopathological tendencies besides the ones detailed. There were a series of arrests for shoplifting and petty theft and one for inducing a minor to commit a crime, the crime in question being to hide a bottle of liquor Lenny had lifted from a supermarket. I reached the end of the sheet and put it down.
“You will see…” Quincy frowned with the effort of remembering my name. “You will see, How Kum, that we find in this dossier the exact kind of personality the serial killer we are looking for will have.”
We were seated in a large, air-conditioned room. It was tastefully decorated and comfortably furnished. Quite different from the room in which D’Cruz had interrogated me but somehow more frightening. Dr Lum, whose room it was, had on his desk a stack of volumes and an impressive looking computer. This endlessly produced patterns of amazing complexity on a colour screen.
The psychiatrist, noticing my interest, said, “The way subjects interpret the patterns on the monitor clearly indicates to us the direction their disease is taking. We study them on a bi-weekly basis.”
“How would a normal person interpret these patterns?” I asked.
“I don’t see what that has got to do with the scientific study of psychiatric disease,” he retorted.
Quincy butted in. “We are not here to investigate you, How Kum, but to get your impressions of the suspects.”
“Suspects?” I asked. I had only one computer print-out in my hand. “Are there several?”
“For the moment, only two have been identified. I want you to soak up Lenny’s vibrations first. Let them tell you whether or not he is the killer. Relax,” he shouted, leaping from his chair and briskly massaging my shoulder. “Your extrasensory perceptive psyche cannot work if you are tense. To make things simpler, we won’t clutter your head up with data about the second subject till you have formed an impression of Lenny.”
“How have you connected this Lenny Drigo with these crimes?”
Quincy looked puzzled. “Isn’t that obvious from the psychobiosocial dossier we have complied?”
“I think, Dr Sio,” said Jafri helpfully, “that How Kum is still unfamiliar with modern criminological methods. He wants to know about motive, opportunity and that sort of thing.”
“I see.” Quincy laughed and punched his palm several times. “No need for that kind of detection today. We have,” he indicated the print-out, “pieced together the man’s complete inner make-up. It is clear that he has a powerful and perverse sex drive, that he is congenitally a criminal and will therefore express his uncontrollable sexuality in criminal ways.”
“But none of the victims were sexually assaulted,” I protested.
“I repeat that killing, to this kind of person, is essentially a sexual act. Once aroused by proximity to sexual activity they reach a point of no return…and kill.” He turned to look at Jafri who was drinking in his every word. “One of the most important features of the case and one,” he nodded sagely, “not noticed by your police force, was that the victims were killed during or shortly after they had been sexually active.” He stared at me. “Our friend here had completed intercourse when his partner was stabbed. Esther had semen of a man, though not the man she was with, in her vagina at the time of her death. The two lesbians were undoubtedly indulging in cunnilingus when they were attacked.”
I asked, “So you think that the killer was a peeping Tom driven to some kind of sexual frenzy by watching others making love?”
Quincy’s eyebrows showed that he didn’t quite approve my use of non-technical terms. “I guess that’s the way that a nonscientific person would put it.”
“How then, do you account for the fact that in my own case and that of Esther Wong, the murders were committed long after sexual activity was over?”
“Good question,” he shouted, leaping from his chair and bowing in my direction. “You assume that the build-up of stimuli was visual. It would be correct to say so in some instances. However, in most cases the stimulus is not visual.”
Jafri looked at me peevishly. “Can’t you remember what the doctor told us about the limbic system?”
I shook my head and Quincy said, “I explained how serial killers have disorders of the limbic system. This links together the hypothalamus, the hippocampal gyrus and the olfactory tracts, thereby controlling both our emotion and hormonal responses.” He nodded severely at me. “I explained, at dinner the other evening, that the system is basically one of smell, which is the main trigger of sexual attraction and reaction.”
The smell of Vanita’s body suddenly came back to me. It was strong, overpoweringly so. It could not have originated in the atmosphere of Dr Lum’s room which was deodorised and air-conditioned. It must have somehow burned its way into my limbic system.
I felt a slight sympathy for what Quincy was saying. A sympathy which his next remark destroyed. “One has only to watch dogs drawn to a bitch in heat and copulating with her serially to understand the power of the sense of olfaction. There is, however, definite scientific work done to demonstrate the influence of smell on the hypothalamus.”
He paused. ‘The hypothalamus, as we all know, is the centre of the body’s endocrine functions and determines the timing of all sexual activity: the onset of puberty, the timing of ovulation, menstrual cycling, coital frequency, the occurrence of menopause. It has been shown, in a carefully controlled experiment on nuns, that ovulation, in these celibates, could be triggered off by the smell of semen which, unknown to them, had been smeared on their pillows. Now, if the smell of semen can make nuns ovulate, think what it can do to a psychobiosexually deranged killer. The first two of our killer’s victims would have had semen trickling out of their vaginas.”
“What about the two lesbians?” I asked. “It’s hardly likely that they would have had semen dripping out of their vaginas.”
Quincy was undisturbed. “Not semen, but vaginal secretions. This has a distinctive odour and has the identical effect as semen on certain psychopaths and disturbed limbic systems.”
He paused, having settled the argument to his satisfaction. “We must now come to the matter in hand. I am satisfied that we have established a watertight psychological case against Lenny Drigo. To keep this inquiry absolutely objective and scientific, we will not show you the data we have on our second subject. You make up your mind first as to whether or not you think Lenny is guilty.”
“And how will I make up my mind?”
“I’m going to bring Lenny into the room. Study him and see if he produces any feelings of revulsion or fear in you. You may speak to him if you wish but do not question him directly about the murders. I will, when the time is right, want to do that myself.”
“What if he asks me questions?”
“That is most unlikely,” Dr Lum assured me. “We have taken the
precaution of sedating him heavily with valium, so that he is of no danger to us. He is,” he added in explanation, “suspected of committing five murders.”
Before allowing Lenny into the room, Quincy reminded me, “Take note of any feelings of fear or revulsion the subject arouses in you.”
Lenny Drigo was a scrawny creature whose face was creased and pitted by acne. His hair looked as though he had cut it himself. Lenny shuffled in and took the chair that Dr Lum had placed in a far corner of the room. Even at a distance, it was clear that a strong ammoniacal odour clung to the man. It was the smell that one encounters in the lavatories of boys’ schools. Lenny sat with his legs widely apart. A hand which was deeply in his trouser pocket moved rhythmically. Dr Lum’s sedative, whatever else it did to Lenny, was no more successful than his mother’s efforts in eradicating a lifelong habit.
“Do you register any feelings of revulsion, fear or hatred for the subject?” Quincy asked in a voice loud enough for Lenny to hear.
I felt nothing but an overwhelming pity for the man. I shook my head.
Quincy directed his attentions to Lenny. “What feelings do you have for women?” he barked.
The hand in the pocket stopped moving momentarily and Lenny replied, “I don’t know, doctor.” He spoke in a very low voice.
“Denial of gender hostility is always indicative of ongoing psychosis,” Lum hissed.
“Why don’t you know?” Quincy was clearly not going to be put off by the subject’s evasiveness.
“I’ve never tried a woman, doctor,” said Lenny, the hand in his pocket beginning to move again.
“What would you like to stick into a woman?” asked Quincy.
“Into her mouth or where?” asked Lenny, clearly puzzled by the question.
“OK,” Quincy conceded. “What would you like to stick into her mouth?”
Lenny thought for a while, then smiled broadly when he felt he had worked out the correct answer to the doctor’s question and said, “An ice-lolly.”
“Transference to symbolic representation,” commented Lum, “is semiotically diagnostic.” I must have looked as puzzled as Lenny, and Lum explained. “The ice-lolly represents the penis and the act of sticking it into a woman’s mouth is symbolically one of degradation.”
Moonrise, Sunset Page 17
