Influence

by Chris Parker

  Over years of practise he had been amazed by the ever-increasing change and depth of his perception. He had become used to the way that, as soon as his silent observations ended, his brain would offer unbidden evaluation and judgements about the simple object, after which it would invariably tell him that there really was now nothing more to see. Marcus ignored it. He ignored it the way a bodybuilder ignores the screams of pain in broken-down muscles and forces out one more seemingly impossible repetition. He ignored it because it was an illusion. And, eventually, through the force of his will, Marcus made the greatest discovery. He discovered that there was always more to see.

  Insight could not be fathomed.

  There was always another layer, a deeper level. And the deeper Marcus travelled into his subject the more he found the silence and stillness from which his journey had begun. And the more he felt detached from the object of his study. Even when they were people.

  There were still people he loved, obviously. Although he occasionally wondered if his notion and sense of love was at all the same as that of others.

  Now, as had happened several times in the past, his best friend had asked him to observe a film. He wanted Marcus to see those things that were below the surface. He wanted him to provide an insight.

  There was only one answer that Marcus could give. It was the answer he always gave when those few people with whom he shared his life asked for his help.

  ‘Of course I will.’

  20.

  Three nights and four very busy days had passed since Peter Jones had been called to the murder of the man who had been scalped and had the top half of his head cut off.

  In that time much had happened and very little was proving of immediate use in identifying the person responsible. Peter had been pulled off his other cases by D. S. Michael Briggs, and told to focus solely on the crime that was already being referred to by officers as the work of the ‘Boiled Egg Killer’. When his most experienced Detective Sergeant had insisted that this was a case that just had to be cracked, Peter had raised an eyebrow and saved a smile for the security of his office.

  Those people who argued that some subjects were too serious, too sensitive or too important to be the source of humour had never spent their working day in a room transformed and dominated by death and bloody violence. And that, of course, was how it should be. He and his colleagues were paid to do that (and keep the much-needed dark humour amongst their own), so everyone else could be spared that aspect of human nature, so they could become righteously enraged whenever a social sensitivity was even slightly offended.

  Peter’s own team of two Detective Sergeants and eight Detective Constables had been strengthened by additional officers and they had all been working flat-out since the murder had been confirmed. It was an expected and a necessary part of the job.

  For the first three or four days after a crime all the possible evidence is still likely to be available, all the information still fresh in the minds of witnesses. With the passing of time, daily routines and new events filter the consciousness of all the non-professionals involved. The certainty with which witnesses share their accounts immediately after the crime is inexorably replaced with creeping and relentless doubt. The phrase that became increasingly common as the days passed, that Peter and his colleagues really didn’t want to hear at the beginning of a statement, was ‘I think’. If at a later stage that witness appeared in court, the phrase ‘I think’ was an open invitation for defence counsel to create and cast doubt over everything that followed.

  So the team had been focussed on door-to-door enquiries, learning everything they could about the victim, his lifestyle, family and friends, building up a picture of what he had been doing in the twenty four hours leading up to his death, keen to find anyone who might have had a motive to kill him. They had also contacted the Research Department at the Police Staff College to see if someone else had been killed in the same, or even a very similar way, anywhere in the world. An unsolved crime with the same modus operandi in Poland, for example, would immediately have had Peter and the team searching for any Polish connection to the victim. So far, though, there had been nothing forthcoming. This was, it appeared, a unique crime.

  ‘Although I’m not going to tell you what it makes it so different,’ Peter said to Marcus as he prepared to play the film of the crime scene. ‘You know how this works.’

  ‘Yes. The only way you feel that you can trust my insight is if you’ve given me nothing to go on in the first place.’ Marcus smiled and glanced across at Nic who was sitting silently in an armchair, a glass of Rioja held absent-mindedly in one hand. ‘Your policeman-partner is always so cautious when he shows me one of his grisly films.’

  ‘It’s not caution,’ Peter replied quickly. ‘It’s necessity. Just because you are the best doesn’t mean you’ll be right every time. Besides, if I tell you things it’s likely to create a bias, to lead you into interpreting things in a certain way.’

  ‘It’s Nic who can’t resist you,’ Marcus’s smile widened. ‘I’m used to letting what you say fall on deaf ears. Anyway, let’s get on with it. Let’s see what your murder victim has got to tell me.’

  The film began with a view of the street. It showed the parallel lines of terraced houses before an obvious and professionally clumsy edit switched the focus to the door of number fifteen. A few seconds later and the view shifted again as the cameraman entered the lounge and filmed a steady panorama, a circle-sweep of the room, high to low and back again.

  Marcus watched in silence, blinking once as every new scene presented itself. Occasionally his nostrils flared. His head cocked to one side briefly as he looked at the black, leather settee. When the scene shifted to the dining room and the dead body, seated and tied, Marcus straightened slightly. It looked to Nic, who was watching him rather than the film, that a ripple of energy, a discernible current, travelled up the consultant’s spine and was breathed out towards the screen.

  The camera showed the body from every angle, from distance and from close up. It showed the room in its entirety. It was graphic, sterile reportage; a life reduced to a poorly made silent film, devoid of emotion or explanation. Nic found it impossible to watch. Marcus stared, his pupils dilated, still as a big cat implacable in its strength.

  The final scene showed the post mortem and Marcus visibly lost interest. Peter, though, pointedly let the film run to its conclusion. Only then did he switch it off and turn very deliberately to face his friend.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Better than the man in the chair.’

  Peter smirked. When first confronted with a violent scene of crime Marcus had immediately adopted the policeman’s dark humour; Peter couldn’t help but wonder how deliberately he had done so.

  ‘What did you see?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Time running out. Only I don’t know what that means yet. There was something about the rooms that spoke of some sort of countdown, a deadline fast approaching. The only food in that house, for several days at least, will have been cheap takeaways. The DVDs hadn’t been touched for a similar period of time. That suggests that the victim had something else on his mind. And it would have to be something really significant, because your man would have watched them daily under normal circumstances. I doubt he has any family living nearby, but those people who saw him on a regular basis – I’m guessing you would find most of them in the local pub – will have noticed the increasing sense of nervousness about him recently. He hasn’t got a girlfriend, and won’t have had for years, but there will be a woman, or more probably a teenage girl, still at school I suspect, who he will have been pestering. Find her and you might get some more insights.’

  ‘What about the state of the body?’

  ‘Aaah, now that’s where we learn something about your killer rather than your victim.’

  ‘Which is?’

  Marcus sipped at his wine. The urgency
in Peter’s voice made the Spanish red taste even better.

  ‘Stop playing games!’ Peter leaned forward, his hands clasped as if in prayer.

  ‘It looks as if the victim was tied up so that he could be tortured, which would then suggest that he had some information the killer wanted. That part at least is true. The torture and interrogation element is not. Whatever it was that caused the victim to be so stressed for the last few days of his life, whatever he was expecting to happen, it wasn’t this. And it certainly wasn’t this killer. In all probability the victim didn’t know the man who killed him – and I’m certain it was a man. However the killer definitely chose him, which doesn’t mean, of course, that there was any preceding social connection between the two of them. I’d guess that the killer picked him for some other reason, because he fitted some sort of predefined criteria. I just don’t know what that is yet.’

  ‘What else do you know?’

  ‘Why he killed him. In one important sense at least, I know the killer’s motive.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘He was searching for something.’

  ‘You mean drugs or money?

  ‘No, nothing like that at all.’ Marcus drank again. ‘Something…something very different.’ He frowned. ‘I know where he was looking, I just don’t know why.’

  ‘Where was he looking?’

  ‘Inside.’ Marcus’s smile lacked humour. ‘That’s why he removed the top of the head. For whatever reason, your killer was looking inside the victim’s brain.’

  21.

  Anne-Marie Wells had always believed that there were two types of expert. The first type was the researcher and consultant. The person who studied a topic, making it their life’s mission to get to know more, to be the first to learn something new, to be able to talk and write about their subject with the authority and, often, in the language, that marked them out as being different from the crowd. Whenever they applied their knowledge they did so in a remote, self-contained fashion. Their role, essentially, was to be the expert.

  And then there was the second type, the person who knew all about something because they actually experienced it. They might never think, or talk, of themselves as an expert – usually because they were too busy living the thing, whatever the thing was – but they had a practical understanding, a sense of connection, an emotional bond, that was the very opposite of that sought by the researcher.

  Academics and surgeons were the most obvious examples of the first type of expert, whilst great artists, performers and sportsmen and women were examples of the second. As a photographer Anne-Marie had always felt that she existed somewhere between the two, combining elements of both. She believed she was all the more rounded as a human being because of this. As a photographer she had a technical expertise and a professional eye capable of seeing a story in a single frame, of knowing how to use or manage light and create perspective. Yet she also sought to connect with her subject, to understand their world, to see the situation through their eyes, to feel and reflect their emotional state.

  In recent months Anne-Marie had become an amateur-expert in another, very specific subject. Secretly using the Internet to find out everything she could about the topic that had increasingly filled her mind. She had learnt facts and figures, statistics and possibilities, signs and symptoms. She had forced herself to read every article and every forum. She had experienced for the first time in her life how words on a screen could invade your mind and body, creating feelings of dread and nausea, daring you to come back tomorrow and read some more.

  Anne-Marie had forced herself to read more. She had read the same pages dozens of times searching for a new interpretation, looking for even the tiniest glimmer of hope. Some nights – some wonderful nights – she had gone to bed believing that she had found it, only to re-read the pages the next day and see nothing but a cold, clinical reality.

  And she had told no one of either her study or, more importantly, her reasons for it. Why she had decided to keep it a secret from Marcus she wasn’t at all sure. She did know, however, that it felt completely the right thing to do. Even in the dark, loneliness of night when he slept beside her, when she had found herself gripping the duvet in the way, she imagined, that a person terrified of falling gripped the cliff edge, even then she maintained her silence. And she would maintain it, she knew, for some time yet.

  The expert Anne-Marie had met had belonged to the first type. He was detached, detailed and technically thorough. She had been obliged to ask him on three separate occasions to explain himself more simply. She had ordered him to look her in the eyes when he spoke. Ultimately he had told her nothing about the illness that she had not already learnt. The difference, though, was that he had real expertise and, even more powerfully from Anne-Marie’s perspective, he had the pictures to prove that what he was saying was, indeed, true.

  Anne-Marie had ovarian cancer. And it was at an advanced stage.

  Ovarian cancer is the fifth most common cancer in women and yet GPs on average tend to see only one case every five years. The reason for this is essentially two-fold. Firstly, many of the symptoms reflect other less threatening conditions and are therefore largely ignored. Secondly, cervical screening tests do not help detect the illness. If diagnosed at an early stage the chances of a positive outcome are good. However, as the consultant noted, too often the diagnosis was not reached until the cancer was in stage three or four, by which time it had spread into other parts of the abdomen. The problem, he explained, was that the symptoms were just so vague that neither the sufferer nor her GP recognised the risk soon enough. That, Anne-Marie had read, was why ovarian cancer was once referred to as the silent killer.

  ‘I am afraid that is the situation you now find yourself in,’ the consultant said finally. ‘You need to prepare yourself for surgery. I will only be absolutely certain how far the cancer has spread, once I have…once surgery is underway. You do need to understand, though, that I will most probably need to remove both of your ovaries, your fallopian tubes, your uterus and the omentum, a fatty layer of tissue within the abdomen. I might also need to remove the lymph nodes from your pelvis and abdomen.’

  Anne-Marie found herself nodding silently. There were no words in her mind, no thoughts, no questions. Not then. And since the meeting her mind still felt as if it was for the most part frozen.

  Three times since she had left the consultant’s office, Anne-Marie had screamed an undecipherable bellow that had been followed immediately by uncontrollable tears.

  Overall, however, she felt nothing other than the cold, deep, silent knowledge that her body had built a cancer.

  The only decision she had been able to make was that she had to get away for just a few days. She needed to be on her own. She had managed her self-imposed isolation up to this point and she needed to do so for just a short while longer.

  She left Marcus a note saying that an unexpected job had come up and that she was leaving immediately for a remote part of Kenya; it was unlikely, she wrote, that she would be able to contact him for several days at least. There was, she assured him, no need to worry.

  In truth, she had booked a cottage in Devon on the edge of Dartmoor and had somehow managed to drive there safely. She had taken her camera and all other relevant equipment with her. Whatever happened in the coming days, weeks or months, whether she lived or died, Anne-Marie was going to record it all. She was going to make her own homage to the photographic essay that had started it all: Richard Avedon’s ‘In Memory of the late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort’.

  Although right now, for her, comfort was in very short supply.

  22.

  Peter Jones shook his head in bewilderment. ‘The problem I’ve got is that there was no damage to the brain. As far as we can tell, after the cranium was removed there was no further contact between the killer and the victim. There are no indications that the killer was trying to get inside the
actual brain.’

  ‘That’s what makes this so interesting, isn’t it?’ Marcus brightened for the first time since the film had been played. ‘I know I’m right and yet none of it makes any sense. If the killer’s motive really was to look for something in the brain we would expect to see clear evidence of brain damage. Only, as the desperately dull post mortem confirmed, there isn’t any.’

  ‘So maybe you’re wrong.’

  ‘You know I’m not.’

  ‘I trust that you’re not. I’m a policeman remember? I only know what the evidence proves.’

  ‘And I only ever know what I see or what I hear. And I know what I saw – the killer was looking for something.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because my intuition tells me I’m right. And it’s always accurate.’

  ‘That’s no use to me in a court of law.’

  ‘You’re a million miles away yet from getting a conviction on this one.’

  ‘And reminding me of that is meant to help how exactly?’

  ‘It’s meant to stop you getting ahead of yourself. Remember the research that shows highly experienced professionals develop a powerful sense of intuition they can, and should, trust – particularly in challenging situations? Well, I am the most highly experienced professional in my field and you can – and should – trust my intuition. When I watched the film my subconscious saw something, possibly a number of cues that were far too subtle for my conscious mind to register, and it is sharing that information with me in the form of kinaesthetic feedback that, over the years, I have come to recognise and act upon.’