Influence

by Chris Parker

  ‘I am focussing on what I perceive to be the realities of the situation. What you need to understand though Peter, is that I’m doing so from a totally different perspective to you. After all, I’m not under any professional or political pressure to achieve a result.’

  ‘I’m not here because of media pressure. I’m offended that you think that.’

  ‘How am I supposed to separate you, my friend, from the professional this situation requires you to be?’

  ‘You’re the last person in the world who can ask that question!’ Peter took a step forwards. ‘When do you ever stop being Marcus Kline the expert? When do you ever step out from that shelter? Honestly, I don’t know if words are your weapons or your defence.’

  Marcus blinked. ‘Why make them so combative?’

  ‘Because you do.’ Peter stepped back. ‘Anyway, that conversation is for another day. When the killer is in prison and I know you are safe.’

  ‘When you’ve won.’

  ‘Dear God! I’m talking about your life!’

  ‘Not in isolation!’

  ‘Do you not think that you are under threat?’

  ‘From whom?

  ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘Said the Detective Chief Inspector.’

  Peter’s fists clenched. ‘Where are you Marcus? Honestly? Where are you – who are you – in all of this? We’re the closest of friends, aren’t we? Today my professional responsibilities and my personal desire overlap. It’s as simple as that. So let me protect you, for God’s sake!’

  ‘No.’

  The single syllable was delivered with a finality that Peter had never experienced before. He felt it resonate in his body. He willed himself to ignore it. ‘Your life is potentially at risk and you need to move out of here into a safe place. My professional assessment is accurate and I urge you to act upon it!’

  ‘No.’

  Peter’s fists clenched again. ‘You could die!’

  ‘We will all die sooner or later.’

  Peter slammed the underside of his fist onto the granite work surface.

  ‘I’m sure that could be interpreted as threatening behaviour.’ Marcus frowned. ‘It’s certainly behaviour unbecoming of a person with your rank.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Peter shouted, unable to control himself any longer.

  Marcus didn’t reply immediately. The silence was in marked contrast to the preceding escalation of pace and volume. It felt to Peter as if Marcus was somehow using the silence like a blanket to dampen the emotion that had been filling the room.

  ‘You cannot force me to accept protective custody,’ Marcus said eventually. ‘Whatever your motives and concerns, the decision is ultimately mine. So I’m going to stay here. This is my home and now that it has a panic alarm fitted courtesy of your rather stern colleague, it’s even more of a castle than it was.’

  ‘That’s your final answer?’

  ‘This isn’t a quiz show.’

  ‘I really don’t think you know what you are doing.’

  ‘I really think that I do.’

  ‘End of conversation then.’

  ‘Sounds that way.’

  Peter accepted defeat. ‘Then I have to go.’

  ‘You have someone to catch.’

  ‘Yes.’ Peter considered shaking Marcus’s hand before he left, but decided against it. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ He turned and walked away. When he reached the kitchen door he looked back. ‘You were right, by the way.’

  ‘What about?

  ‘About my reaction when I arrived, when I saw that the front door was open. I was scared.’

  Marcus’s gaze returned to the window, to the willow tree outside in its halo of light. It looked to Peter as if his eyes moistened. ‘We are lucky, aren’t we?’ He said. ‘Lucky that we are able to be afraid, to feel fear. Simon can’t. And he never will again.’

  48.

  Fear has its own special colour. Everything does. The killer had known that – had seen it – for as long as he could remember. To him sounds were also as much a visual sensation as they were auditory. He knew, for example, the colour and vibration of a child’s laughter. He knew how it thickened and dulled with age. He knew the blood red colour of anger, how it burst and shimmered like unbearable heat on a desert road. He knew the black cloud of the very last breath a living creature took. Many times he had watched it dissolve and fade as it travelled upwards.

  The killer had known he was different from childhood. It had been impossible not to know. It had always amused him in a cold, hard way, growing up listening to his peers determinedly trying to create their own individuality. As if difference was the product of styling and carefully selected, self-promoting opinion. It was, the killer thought, the greatest and cruellest paradox of all: people had been tricked into believing individuality came from following fashion.

  Society – just another name for the herd.

  The herd had its own colour too. It was the colour of mud. The lifeless slurry that results when many colours are mixed and none are strong enough to dominate.

  Without a leader, he reminded himself, the herd simply merges into a dull mass, unaware that life is being drained from them on a daily basis.

  How could you feel sympathy for people who allowed that to happen? To be more accurate, for people who actively sought it out? He certainly couldn’t.

  Sympathy was an emotion he had never seen the colour of.

  He had often wondered why it should remain beyond his vision, but he had considered it only in a disassociated way. In the same way that a cat considers a mouse as a potential plaything, a distraction, and nothing more no matter what the consequence. He had recognised as a teenager that some emotions, a limited few, were invisible to him. They remained so throughout his life, even as his skills and awareness continued to develop. He was sure that the emotions he could not see would also have their own colours. It was just that, for some reason, his eyes could not perceive them. He never felt diminished because of this. He knew there was no such thing as a perfect human being, just as he knew there was no such thing as a perfect colour.

  The first time he had seen the colour of an emotion he had been nine years old. The family cat, Misty, had died of cancer. She had been adored by his mother; bought for her twelve years earlier by his father. His mother had always loved cats. When Misty died her grief was uncontrollable. The boy didn’t share her emotion. Her anguish didn’t touch him. Instead he had been captivated by an explosion of colour that emanated from her, surrounding her whenever she mourned her loss. He had shouted and pointed when he had first seen it, tugging at his mother’s sleeve whilst she cried, reaching with his other hand – grabbing – into space in an attempt to pull the colours from the air. His mother had turned her shoulder to him abruptly. The boy had been shocked and confused. Why did she not reach for the colours herself? Surely she could see them? After all, they were hers.

  The more he tried to tell her about them the angrier she became; the more the colours changed as her emotions did. His father ignored him, comforting his wife instead, promising her that everything would be all right.

  That night, when the boy had gone to bed, his father had visited him to kiss him goodnight as usual. Before the kiss he whispered, ‘I didn’t see any colours, son. I believe that you did. I believe you are telling the truth. You see, I believe that Mother Nature has given people the capability to be more aware of the world than they ever realise. I think she has given you a very special gift.

  ‘Do you know other people who can see the colours, Daddy?’

  ‘No son, I don’t know anyone, not even grown-ups, who can do it.’

  ‘Am I poorly, like Misty?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. In fact, I think you might be healthier than any other little boy you will ever meet…’

  For the next few years the boy shared
all of his increasing experiences of colour with his father. It became their secret. Within two months of starting comprehensive school, of being surrounded by a society of teachers and pupils, the boy stopped talking about his insights. His father stopped asking. From then on the boy’s sense of isolation grew.

  The killer grew to fill the space available to him. He didn’t recognise how significantly he changed. He was aware of some elements but not the overall shift. However he was increasingly aware of how different he was from other people. He never considered that it was the result of the changes inside him.

  He killed deliberately for the first time when he was fifteen. Not surprisingly, it was a cat. He wanted to see what he had missed when Misty had been taken to the vets for the last time. He saw the black cloud. He wondered dispassionately what happened to it when it dissolved. He wondered if he was breathing in the last breath of the dying animal.

  Over time he lost such interest. Instead he became obsessed with the source of his gift. It came, he realised, from his subconscious. He didn’t attempt to study it the way an academic would. Instead he sought to experience it, to delve into it deeply in the way a deep-sea diver would strive to go ever further down, to leave the light far behind.

  As the years passed the killer’s senses became more and more acute. He learnt how to see through darkness, how to hear even the slightest rhythm. He came to appreciate how wise his father was to believe in Nature. He found that he could see and hear the natural elements of the planet growing, dying and changing as the seasons passed. Nature, too, in all its many aspects had its colours. What it lacked as far as he could tell was a mind, a difference between conscious and subconscious. Nature did not have distinct ruling parts. Nature was a congruent system, without internal debate or doubt, at peace with itself, at odds only with man.

  Although he pursued it for a time, killing animals became boring and pointless. No matter how sharp his senses, he couldn’t see what he was looking for; he decided, therefore, that he was looking in the wrong places.

  So he turned his attention to the herd, to those who, on the outside at least, were his own kind. He sought comparisons. He did not need to search to find an obvious leader. That was the easy part. He did have to give a little thought to the others. Not too much, though. It was simply a case of ensuring the correct progression. His purpose when killing amongst the herd was two-fold. He wanted to learn and he wanted to teach. It was time now to complete both.

  The killer broke the light, plunging the tree into darkness, and walked to the side of the house. He sat with his back against the garage doors and waited. There was no urgency in either his movements or his breathing. He knew this place well. He knew what was going to happen. It was, he thought, as inevitable as daybreak.

  Ten minutes passed before the front door opened and the man came out to investigate what had happened. He stood with his back to the garage. The killer rose and approached him silently. He didn’t speak until he was close enough to whisper the man’s name.

  ‘Marcus.’

  And with that the final lesson began.

  49.

  When Marcus saw that the light on the willow tree had suddenly gone out he felt a nervous tremor run through his body. His mind asked the obvious question even though he had already decided on the answer.

  Was it a simple fault or a deliberate act?

  Marcus didn’t believe in coincidences any more than Peter Jones did. The removal and colouring of the purple branch could have been an act of mindless vandalism and the darkness could just be the result of a technical malfunction. Only he was sure that he had interpreted the first act correctly and that meant this was the development of a pattern rather than a coincidence. The darkness was a summons, a call to a meeting. It was the second direct communication from the killer.

  However, as Marcus was fond of reminding his staff, it took two to make a conversation. He was not obliged to accept the meeting request. In fact, it would be downright stupid if he did. Only, if he was going to refuse now, why had he rejected Peter’s offer of protection? He might as well have let the policeman put him in a safe room somewhere and acknowledged, at least to himself, that he was too scared to see this thing through.

  Truth be told, he was more scared than he had ever been. The fear was almost paralysing in its intensity. He felt as if he had to actually force himself to make the most basic of movements, to think the most obvious thoughts. So why had he been so dismissive of Peter’s concerns? Surely he could have admitted his own fear and still refused the offer of safety? Instead he had chosen to hide behind his skills, to seek shelter behind what he knew best. It was his de-fault position. He was used to being the boss, the expert, to getting his own way and having people do what he wanted. That was how he liked to live his life – how he had been living it for as long as he could remember.

  Marcus looked into the darkness and wondered why he was only just realising this now. When he had taught others about the emotional and psychological filters they created through which they viewed all of their experiences, why hadn’t he paused to consider his own? Why had he failed to recognise the feedback that would have told him loud and clear that he was too used to wielding power and seemingly incapable of accepting anyone else’s? Why had it taken the death of Simon to open up this level of awareness?

  And what else had he missed about himself?

  Any other time that question would have consumed his thoughts. The paradox, of course, which he acknowledged readily, was that if it had been any other time, any other situation, he wouldn’t have been asking himself the question. It would have been business as normal. He would have been too busy disassociating from everyone else, seeking to understand them well enough to create the desired influence, to have ever considered looking at and listening to himself. He knew how to create an emotional distance from others in order to help them. He knew how to avoid being dragged along by the current of their fears and concerns. He had loved being the expert, the master influencer. But at what cost? Who had he become? Perhaps even more importantly, who had he missed the opportunity to become?

  Marcus suddenly wondered why he was planning to divorce Anne-Marie and not the other way round? He thought again of her recent text. He had decided that they should separate for his own selfish reasons. Now, though, he was forced to concede that she would be better off without him.

  Perhaps if things went horribly wrong tonight she would be without him in a way that neither would ever have imagined.

  Marcus thought of the panic button in the bedroom. It would take no more than twenty seconds to get to it and press it. Six minutes later, so he had been assured, a team of armed police would be on the premises.

  The worst case scenario? He would look like an idiot if the lighting had suffered a simple electrical failure, and he would have also demonstrated to Peter just how very scared he was.

  The best possible result? The killer would be arrested.

  Or shot.

  Marcus shivered for the second time in as many minutes. Now it was his own thoughts that scared him. He had always argued against the availability, let alone the use of, the death penalty. He believed that society should only sanction killing in time of war. He supported the view that even the worst of criminals had rights and they had to be respected. If society failed to do that it became as bad as those it was punishing.

  Only here and now he was thinking that it would be a great result if he summoned the police and someone – a man whom, presumably, would have to go home to his family afterwards – shot the killer dead. Because he was terrified, he, Marcus Kline, the man who had always been so sure about so much, was actually considering staying locked inside the safety of his home whilst the police killed on his behalf. How could he possibly justify that?

  Simon.

  That was the answer. The simple answer that underpinned everything right now. Simon’s death had not been a r
andom act. His misfortune was not that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. His tragedy had been in knowing Marcus Kline. Being close to him. Marcus felt as responsible for Simon’s death as he ever had about anything. In the past, though, he had only ever felt responsible for success. And he had always regarded it as his success, even if others had acted out the associated events.

  Marcus had enjoyed his celebrity status, but he had chosen that deliberately. Whilst he recognised now that it had certainly satisfied and grown his ego, he had always believed that he made it happen purely as a means of promoting his business. After all, his first instinct had always been to operate in the shadows. He had never needed positive feedback from others to reassure him of his skill. He knew what he was capable of. He had always got a kick from helping someone change, making something happen, knowing that it was the direct result of his ability – and watching it all play out from the sidelines; comfortable that only the key players knew who was responsible and who to thank for their success.

  Now he felt responsible for the most tragic, terrible loss. And yet he was terrified of walking out into the shadows.

  The truth was Simon’s death could justify almost any decision he made right now. He could use it to justify locking himself in and calling the police or walking out to engage in the conflict he believed was waiting for him.

  Perhaps I am just a fraud? Marcus heard the question and felt his head pound. Perhaps when push comes to shove, I’d rather talk than push? Perhaps I really am out of my depth?

  Marcus stared down at his feet. They looked as if they were glued to the kitchen floor. He forced them to move. His breathing was ragged and fast. He had no idea how to control it. When he reached the front door, he opened it without hesitation. He knew that the slightest pause now and his determination would desert him forever. He found it impossible to make his mind work coherently. His body moved and he let it. Not because he had a plan, not because he was intending to influence, just because he had to.