Slow Burning Lies - A Dark Psychological Thriller

by Ray Kingfisher

  “No!” Patrick shouted, before recovering some composure. “No. I’m… I’m not thirsty.”

  The Sandman shrugged. “Your choice. Just trying to offer you a final request.” He placed Patrick’s coat and the bottle on the floor. Then he picked up the newspaper cuttings, thought for a moment, and placed them back into the folder. “If you don’t mind I’ll just tell it as I know it. If there’s anything you have doubts about we can refer back to the newspaper cuttings and psychological reports and so on.” He put his glasses away and cleared his throat.

  “Declan O’Halloran was a perfectly ordinary boy. As far as interviews with those concerned and psychological profiling tests can ascertain he was born to loving, caring parents in a lower middle class suburb of Manchester, England in 1984. He attended playschool and subsequently a conventional state school and was a singularly average young boy – and I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense, you understand.”

  “I know all that,” Patrick said. “I was there.”

  “Yes, of course you were. Anyway, he meandered through those early school years in a similar fashion, was bright without being outstanding, and enjoyed the benefits of a stable family environment. His father was a senior technician at an engineering company and his mother was a secretary for a stationery firm – part-time so she could take Declan to and from school. Most of their time and efforts revolved around what was best for Declan, giving him love and… and…”

  There the Sandman’s voice wavered.

  “And what?” Patrick said. “What is it?”

  The Sandman exhaled sharply, glanced down to the floor and coughed to regain composure, then continued.

  “You know, so many children simply never appreciate the sacrifices their parents make for them – how much thought and care goes into ensuring they develop into happy and successful adults that thrive in the big bad world.” He looked up and gave his head a little shake. “Please pardon my digression. I’ll continue. When Declan was ten, a small boy in the neighbourhood went missing. His name was Gary and he was four years old. The case made the national newspapers and triggered a veritable army of volunteers to search for the missing boy. It seemed that half of Manchester – including Declan’s father – combed the streets of that part of the city, including parks, gardens and house-to-house searches of those with a criminal history.

  “Almost two weeks later, when the search had started to wind down and it was no longer front page news, Gary’s pathetic naked body floated to the surface of a nearby stretch of canal. The close-knit community was devastated and children were in effect confined to their homes until the perpetrator was found. The tension heightened even more when details of Gary’s body started to emerge. Although the cause of his death was drowning, the poor boy’s head was badly charred; it had been set alight while he was still alive. What with the body being underwater for all that time it was difficult for forensics to be certain, but the most likely accelerant was thought to be cigarette lighter fuel.”

  Patrick twisted and tugged his head to one side. “Oh, no,” he said. “You’re not pinning that on Declan. He was a good lad. I’m not going to sit here and—”

  “If I can continue,” the Sandman said with a raised voice. “By the next summer no killer had been found – not even a strong suspect in fact – and the members of the community slowly returned to their routines. Declan was once again allowed to play with his friends out on the local green around the corner from his house – but only on the understanding that he went nowhere else and was home before five o’clock.

  “Then one day he was late – only thirty minutes, but enough to concern his mother so much that she went out looking for him. She looked around the green, found nobody, and was about to phone the police when Declan returned. He was dishevelled, but in one piece. Mother and Father scolded him for breaking the rules, and grounded him.

  “As it turned out, the decision was academic; the very next day a chill descended on the neighbourhood again with the news that another child – a five-year-old girl called Amy, visiting relatives for the day – had gone missing.”

  “No!” Patrick shouted, nostrils twitching. “I know what this is leading up to and it’s not true!”

  The Sandman leaned in close to Patrick’s face. “Declan’s mother was distraught, and hardly spoke for two days. Her husband initially assumed her behaviour was simply due to shock at Amy’s disappearance, but at the end of those two nights he confronted her. She told him she’d been finding the charred remains of animals while gardening – mainly hedgehogs but also the occasional mouse or pigeon and a stray cat. Declan’s father was incensed, and couldn’t bring himself to believe it until he saw the sickening evidence himself, and even then they both said nothing, neither wanting to suggest what they both suspected.

  “Three days later Amy’s body turned up – found by some ramblers under bushes on a nearby footpath. Her hair, which had been long and blonde and the pride and joy of her parents – now resembled the aftermath of a bushfire, having been burned to a black wiry mess of stubble. Most of her facial features had also been burned off. She was identified by her clothing and dental records. The cause of death was strangulation – meaning the burning had happened while she was still alive.

  “Declan’s mother and father argued over what to do. If they acted on their suspicions and they subsequently turned out to be unfounded… well, the effect on young Declan didn’t bear thinking about. Then Father had an idea. He would take his son out to play football while Mother could search his bedroom. Declan refused to go but was frogmarched out. The only thing Mother found was a gassy smell towards one corner of the room, but nothing incriminating under the bed or in any cupboards. That night Declan’s parents argued some more – into the early hours – of what the evidence was and what any investigation would mean for Declan. Finally, reluctantly, they agreed that the next day they would go to the police and tell them everything they knew, and leave it up to the police to assess the weight of evidence.

  “Unfortunately, Declan was no fool. He’d heard the earlier arguments and made a point of slipping out of the bedroom and was calmly sitting at the top of the stairs listening in on the to-ing and fro-ing of the discussion – including its conclusion. He went back to bed – but stayed awake.”

  “You’re talking shit!” Patrick said. “Declan wasn’t like that.”

  The Sandman placed a hand on Patrick’s shoulder. “Please. One more outburst and I’ll have to get that duct tape.”

  Patrick flinched, the straps causing weals on his flesh. “Get your hands off me.”

  “As I said, Declan wasn’t asleep, and in the early hours of that morning he crept out onto the landing. He stole into his parents’ bedroom as they slept, then took the key to the door and locked the door from the outside. Then he went back into his bedroom and took the five tins of lighter fluid from under the loose floorboard in the corner of the room. He squirted the liquid liberally around the house and tossed a match onto the floor. He stayed inside the house for as long as he dared, almost enjoying the sensation of his skin getting close to searing point – certainly enjoying the screams and shouts of his parents as they tried to smash the door down and threw a chair through the window in a futile attempt to let some air in.

  “Burned, blistered and sooty, Declan escaped from the house, and for a while was the darling of the media – the poor orphan boy who struggled to get out of the burning building and succeeded in that task where his parents had failed.

  “And it would have stayed that way had his mother – who had been rescued from the blaze – not regained consciousness a few days later after an induced coma. At first the medics assumed her unsavoury version of events was the result of delirium of some sort, but very soon afterwards the fire authorities completed their investigations on the remains of the property and concluded that the fire had been started deliberately using lighter fluid, and also that the parents’ bedroom door had been locked from the outside.”

>   Patrick launched his head forward, almost touching the old man’s sombre face. “Crap! I don’t believe you.”

  The Sandman drew back, giving his head a disconsolate shake, then left the room again.

  He reappeared with a roll of thick industrial sticky tape.

  Patrick threw his head back and shook it from side to side, but the Sandman calmly ripped a section of tape off and slapped it over Patrick’s mouth with little effort.

  “So. Now. Do you want to listen?”

  Patrick closed his eyes and nodded. For a few moments he took himself to another place where he and Declan and their mother and father had a pretty ordinary but idyllic upbringing. They played football in the park, cricket on the beach during the summer, and watched TV huddled up together on the sofa. They ate pizzas and burgers during the week and had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with all the trimmings on a Sunday.

  “Now I’ll continue,” the Sandman said. “The police also took a keen interest in Declan’s mother’s suspicions regarding the murders of the two children, and took Declan in for questioning. The ten-year-old boy pretty quickly confessed – even down to explaining where he’d gotten the lighter fluid from. Jean-Paul was an elderly man who lived across the road, a retired plumber who had two pleasures left in life. One was tobacco and the other was Meg, his faithful Jack Russell. Declan befriended the man but very soon started demanding lighter fluid. When old Jean-Paul declined, saying it was too dangerous, Declan threatened to set Meg alight, and the old man relented, supplying as many tins as Declan requested.

  “Declan freely admitted all of this, and old Jean-Paul – after initially denying the allegation – confirmed it and broke down, begging for forgiveness. When the story of Jean-Paul’s part in the child murders – albeit a reluctant part – came out six months later, it wasn’t long before some local vigilantes caught and killed Meg in revenge. Jean-Paul took an overdose some time later. When Declan was told all of this all he could say was that Jean-Paul was a stupid man.

  “In fact, Declan admitted pretty much every allegation thrown at him, including the torture and killing of Amy and Gary, the burning of animals in his garden, storing the tins of lighter fluid, locking his parents’ door and starting the fire. He was so cooperative that the social care people drafted in to act as his legal guardians insisted on some false allegations being planted into the story as a kind of ‘control’. He calmly denied the false allegations, thus confirming his own guilt.”

  Patrick was now squirming constantly, and behind the tape his mouth tugged to open, but the tape held firm.

  “Three weeks later,” the Sandman continued, “Declan’s mother died due to the damage to her lungs, without Declan ever seeing her again. His father had been dragged from the fire but never regained consciousness. And so, after the investigations into the deaths of little Gary and Amy, Declan was charged with four counts of murder. The local community – together with your wonderful tabloid newspapers – were screaming out for the return of the death penalty. Of course, in a country as liberal and soft-hearted as yours it was a futile demand. But long-term imprisonment was inevitable – at least until the boy could be proven to be no longer a danger to society, and also until the story had been well forgotten by the newspaper headline writers.

  “It provoked strong opinions within the government of the day – behind closed doors naturally – but ultimately the decision on what to do with the boy rested with your Home Secretary. In the short term all they did was wait until a battery of psychological tests had been carried out to determine Declan’s state of mind and allow the professionals to advise on the most appropriate method of treatment.

  “Those tests, together with interviews with those he had been closest to for those ten years, provided some interesting facts. He was a perfectly well-balanced and loving child for the first nine of those years. Then something happened. They looked for a trigger of some kind – not necessarily a single event, possibly a repeated reinforcement of some morally reprehensible thoughts. They didn’t have to look far. It transpired that Declan had gotten hold of certain adult video games – Certificate Eighteen I think is the British term. The games contained many horrific images that the player would be placed in the middle of – sometimes fighting against the perpetrator – and sometimes in his shoes.

  “The medical professionals gave no opinion on whether the video games had been causative or merely coincidental with pre-existing tendencies, and the argument divided the Home Office authorities. They were split into two camps. The doves thought Declan was essentially a good boy that had been perverted by exposure to these images and could – in time – be rehabilitated with love and care. The hawks believed he was singularly evil and should be imprisoned for life. The latter group could also sense votes in the harsh treatment, it being as close as they could get to the death penalty. However, top level government wasn’t having any of this squabbling, and decreed there was no way Declan would be kept incarcerated for his entire life, that he should undergo therapy for the next eight years then be reassessed.

  “And so began an intensive program designed to cleanse Declan’s mind and realign his moral sensibilities, to mould him into a normal responsible citizen, and to repress what evil thoughts might still lurk in the dark corners of his mind.”

  As the Sandman’s talk became more considered – and as clinical as the psychologist’s report might have been – Patrick’s grunts became louder and more frantic. He threw his head left and right, tears flying to the side from red-rimmed eyes fit to burst.

  “All those involved were forced to admit that the course of treatment seemed to have worked. At eighteen the medical analysis was that he was ready to be released into the community with no risk to the public whatsoever. However, in those intervening years the political climate had changed. The government of the day were low in the opinion polls, and weren’t prepared to take the risk of releasing a quadruple murderer.

  “And that was where OrSum came into the picture. Some years before, OrSum and the US government had embarked on a highly covert joint research project to correct the minds of juvenile offenders. They’d carried out some minor experiments, but knew that if the story came out they couldn’t be seen to be attempting thought control on a citizen of the land of the free. The treatment plan had been shelved as unreliable, but one large element was salvaged as being of potential use: the assessment routines to determine the moral rectitude of a subject by assessing their behaviour in the safe confines of a virtual environment. It was a little like the testing of fighter pilots before they’re let into the real thing – but with more advanced technology.

  “On a routine state visit to Washington by the British Deputy Prime Minister the subject was discussed, and it was convenient to both parties to bring Declan over to the US to be the programme guinea pig. It took almost two years of legal wrangling before that was finally allowed to happen.”

  At that point the Sandman ripped the tape off Patrick’s mouth.

  “I take it I can now trust you to keep a civil tongue in your head?”

  Patrick spluttered and spat the sticky residue from his lips. “I don’t understand,” he said. “You make it sound like Declan was an only child.”

  Of course, Patrick did understand.

  By then he knew full well the truth of the situation.

  But he was praying he’d completely misunderstood the story he’d just heard.

  “That is correct,” the Sandman answered. “He was indeed an only child.”

  “What do you mean? What about me?”

  “Surely you’ve worked that out by now?”

  “No. You’ve been talking like I don’t exist.”

  “In a sense, that’s true.” The Sandman smiled. “Patrick doesn’t exist. We invented him.”

  “I… I don’t get it.”

  “Oh, I think you do. As part of the identity change programme Declan O’Halloran ceased to exist. He became Patrick Leary.”

  “Oh, no. Pl
ease God no!”

  49

  “But… that can’t be true,” Patrick said to the Sandman. “You’re lying.”

  Of course, he wasn’t, and Patrick knew it. All roads leading away from the harsh truth were being closed off.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “Declan’s my brother.”

  “And so where is he?” the Sandman asked.

  “He came across to the US at the same time as me. He lives in Seattle… or LA… or…”

  The Sandman gave a sympathetic smile, the sort dignitaries paste on when visiting the sick in hospital. “No, Patrick. You got a new name and a new identity – not too dissimilar from your real one so that what few childhood memories you still have would make sense.” He paused to watch the colour drain from Patrick’s face. “It’s true. You know it is. You are the subject of our psychological reorientation programme. You are Declan – or rather, you were.”

  “You mean… I don’t believe you – I can’t. You’re telling me I killed that little girl and boy and then killed my own…”

  “I’m afraid so.” A hint of compassion sat uneasily on the Sandman’s face. “And I’m sorry. You were never meant to find out. When you shot Rozita it was a good sign; it confirmed to us that you could make your moral judgement override your greatest desires. That was—”

  “I don’t believe it. You’re lying.”

  “Now please stop this charade. You asked me to tell you all about Declan. I just have.”

  “But if I’m so dangerous what the hell am I doing out in normal life, free and—”

  “Normal?” The Sandman gasped a laugh. “Normal? But don’t you see? Your whole life is managed from your job to your apartment. OrSum controls the TV and internet feeds you bestow so much trust onto, they provide high security accommodation for you, they vet most of your acquaintances. Did you really think you were free?”

  “I… I don’t know what to think anymore.”