by Robert Sims
‘A pretty sad condition.’
‘Exactly. It’s our lack of enlightenment. And to find the truth we must break our chains, climb out of the cave and see the sunlight,’ he said, closing the book and handing it back to her. ‘I mentioned Atlantis before. That’s another of his stories that still has people guessing. It’s now part of New Age religion, but in a way it’s the opposite of the cave. Let me explain it this way. Plato describes Atlantis as an earthly paradise - a place of amazing wealth, technological wonders and perfect order. But it was a heaven on earth that couldn’t last. Human nature got the better of it and Atlantis was destroyed. Like the cave, it’s an arcane symbol. Plato was challenging us to build a better world.’
Picking up her shoulder bag, Rita extracted the Plato’s Cave card and held it out. ‘It’s this particular arcane symbol I’m worried about.
And I’d love to know what it means.’
Hendriks studied the card carefully, turning it over in his hand.
‘How fascinating,’ he said. ‘Where does it come from?’
‘A violent crime scene. It was left there by the perpetrator.’
Hendriks shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you what it means,’ he said gravely, returning the card to her. ‘But it’s something you know already. You’re hunting an intelligent man who is also mad.’
Rita nodded and the conversation gradually moved on to other things. Then she finished her tea and got up to pay for the book.
Hendriks patted her arm affectionately. ‘You’ve shared your time with me. That’s payment enough,’ he said, then added with a frown,
‘It worries me - the things you have to deal with.’
‘Human nature.’
‘But you see it at its worst,’ he said, walking her to the door. ‘I hope you’re looking forward to a relaxing evening in pleasant company.’
‘No. I’m on my own tonight. Soup, salad, and a bit of light classical reading.’
A steamy heat had settled on the night and Rita opened her windows wide in the hope of getting a hint of breeze into the old weatherboard house. But it was sticky and still, with no movement at all. Wearing only a T-shirt and shorts, she curled up in her armchair, the whirr of an electric fan straining against the humid air, the dramatic tones of Carmina Burana playing softly around her. From the open window beside her drifted the cloying scent of the honeysuckle that smothered the end of her wooden verandah. Within reach was the highball she’d mixed, and on her lap rested The Republic.
After reading the introduction Rita dipped in and out of the text to familiarise herself with the themes. She found herself agreeing with much that Plato had to say, with his focus on justice and knowledge, and his belief in a supreme Form of the Good. She was less enthusiastic about his idea that governments should be run by philosopher-kings. This struck her as unlikely and impractical, though it must have been revolutionary stuff twenty-four centuries ago.
When she reached Book Seven of The Republic she slowed down, reading and rereading the strange and mysterious passage she needed to get her head around. The speaker was Plato’s old mentor, Socrates:
‘Imagine people living in a cave. They inhabit an underground chamber far away from the opening to the outside world. They have been confined there since childhood, with their legs and necks chained. Their heads are also shackled in place and all they can see is the wall in front of them. Imagine a bright fire burning further up the cave behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a roadway with a low wall beside it, like the screen at a puppet show.’
Rita reached for her drink as she visualised the scene, swallowing a mouthful of chilled malt whisky.
‘Imagine there are passers-by on the other side of the wall, carrying objects in the shapes of men and animals. As you would expect, some of the travellers are talking, while others are silent.’
She skipped through an exchange between Socrates and his friend Glaucon, who agreed that the only realities for the prisoners were the shadows on the wall and the echoes of the voices, then read:
‘Let us suppose that one of the prisoners is released. He is suddenly forced to stand up, turn around and walk towards the firelight. All these actions cause him pain and the flames dazzle his eyes. It leaves him incapable of discerning the objects of which he used to see the shadows. And suppose someone tells him that he was watching a series of phantoms, but now he is closer to reality. Would he not be bewildered?’
Rita got the point about the difference between illusion and reality. In the following pages Plato hammered it home as the prisoner was dragged out of the cave and into the blazing sunlight. Blinded and confused at first, he was eventually able to see and understand the real world. But if he were to return to the cave, he would be blinded again, this time by the darkness, and what he told the other prisoners about his experiences would be incomprehensible to them.
They believed only in their illusory world of shadows and echoes.
Rita shuddered at the theme of blindness. Emma’s attacker seemed to have followed the cave’s imagery to the letter, and it was likely that his next victim would suffer the same fate.
As she read on, Socrates ended the story on a hopeful note:
‘In each human being is the capacity for knowledge. But just as it is impossible to turn the eye from darkness to light without turning the whole body, so must the whole mind turn away from the world of appearances. Only then can we see reality and the brightest light shining from it - which we call goodness.’
Rita closed the book and drank the rest of her highball, crunching the ice cubes between her teeth. It seemed obvious that the image of the cave had inspired the crime she was investigating, but what could possibly connect an ancient philosophical text with rape and mutilation? Somewhere there was a link, and she had to find it.
35
The compulsion had its own relentless logic. It was beyond reason, and yet was driven by an almost clinical rationality. It was a fantasy on the borderline of consciousness, a secret desire too dangerous to act upon under normal circumstances. But it never quite went away, merely subsided, or became hidden - like an encrypted program in his mind, or an attachment waiting to be reopened. Or worse still, a virus that could be contained but never deleted. And when his conscious mind was weak - from stress or stimulation, or when he was overtired but hyper - that’s when it emerged. The worst time was in the early hours of the morning, when thoughts were random, sleep was elusive, and the darkest moods were the most intense.
When morality was a fiction invented by a cruel and ruthless society, and all that mattered was power and the thrill of exercising it. The compulsion was irresistible then.
It was after three in the morning now and even the cheap bars and more sleazy restaurants were closed. The lights along the seafront shone their tawdry haloes into a steamy mist rolling off the bay. Homeless drunks squabbled on the foreshore under the limp fronds of palm trees. There was little traffic about, just an occasional car swinging erratically along the curve of the Esplanade, or slowly cruising towards the backstreet hotels with their flickering neon signs. He’d come here, restless and compelled by his need and excited by the danger.
He heard her footsteps first, the loud click of heels in the silence.
Then her shadowy figure appeared, moving past the darkened pubs and shopfronts. She paused under an awning, looking towards where he sat in his car. As she walked over, he wound down the window.
She bent forward, her face close to his. ‘Looking for business?’
Did she do bondage, he wanted to know. The answer was yes, and she got into the car.
He drove past the pier, the shuttered kiosks and then the rickety hulk of the amusement park - its lights out, paint peeling from the woodwork. Turning into a street by the marina, he parked beside an apartment block and she took him up to her rooms on the second floor. Once inside, he opened his laptop case and handed her the money. She was young and thin-faced with an obvious drug habit, but attractive en
ough to look at. She said her name was Nadine.
He didn’t care.
She led him into the bedroom. It was girlish and cosy - strangely incongruous with a street pick-up. A Chinese lantern hung above the bed, which was covered with a brightly coloured quilt. A teddy bear sat beside the pillow. There were soft rugs on the floor and lace curtains draped the windows. A dressing table was cluttered with cosmetics and personal treasures - framed photos, china ornaments, a brass candlestick. Among the jumble was an overflowing ashtray and a syringe. A peculiar mixture of innocence and vice.
As she dimmed the lights, he watched her, aroused by his anticipation of what was going to happen. The woman took off her clothes. Her body was thin and pale with small pointed breasts.
There were tattoos on her hips and a metal ring through her navel.
He wondered how old she was.
‘Ready?’ she asked, attaching leather and metal bondage equipment to the bed.
‘Instead of dimming the lights,’ he said, ‘can we just have candles?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
She collected half a dozen candles from around the flat, lit them and switched off the bedroom lights.
He stripped off and stood there naked, penis erect. Then he put on a bronze mask.
She picked up a condom and gave him a perfunctory look.
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’
He spoke quietly, teeth clenched. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’
She folded her arms. ‘No protection, no fuck.’
He took a deep breath and surrendered to the moment. She didn’t have time to cry out. With one movement he lifted the brass candlestick and bludgeoned her across the left temple. The blow concussed her and she dropped to her knees, sagging onto the floor, unable to focus. He picked her up and put her on the bed, face up, strapping her into the bondage restraints. As she lay there, dazed and incapacitated, he climbed on top of her. Then, in a low crouching position, with all the force of his thigh muscles, he started penetrating her violently.
When he was finished he got up, still perspiring from the effort, and went to her kitchen. He rummaged through the drawers until he found what he needed - an instrument to inflict her necessary mutilation. His motive was trivial, but his actions were methodical and extreme. He turned her head and she groaned faintly. Her stupor dulled the pain as he inserted the thin serrated knife through her ear socket. Her blood trickled over his hand as he forced the blade in deeper, piercing the eardrum. He repeated the incision in her other ear, but this time the blade partially severed her carotid artery.
The wound was internal, and the arterial flow poured down her throat as her brain went into total unconsciousness. Finally, he sliced off her ears, tossing them onto the floor.
When it was over, he sat on her bed, feeling drained but exhilarated.
He didn’t view what he’d done as monstrous but, on the contrary, as eliminating a monster - and in some primeval way, it was liberating, like a process of unbecoming. Decompressing his sense of self and throwing off the person he’d become. Venting the violence embedded in his character. He looked down at the serrated knife on the floor between his blood-stained feet. It seemed innocuous now.
Getting up, he looked at the woman spread-eagled on the bed, her unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t dead yet, but she had only a few seconds left. Her head wounds were seeping into the quilt. Blood was leaking from her mouth, though much more of it was flooding into her lungs. When the terrible gurgling sound stopped, he knew it was over. He sighed. That hadn’t been his intention.
Rita was eating breakfast in her local cafe, a cup of coffee, croissants and her laptop lined up on the table in front of her. She couldn’t get Plato’s dark allegory out of her mind. There was something haunting about the image, shackled prisoners trapped in a fiery cave, nothing real but echoes and shadows. This was more than philosophical symbolism, it seemed emblematic of hell. Her mind became immersed in it as she began rethinking the profile of the offender.
Her thoughts were interrupted by her phone ringing, Strickland on the line.
‘Nash wants me to bring him up to speed on the hooker case,’
he said. ‘Have you got anything new to tell me, anything at all?’
‘Yes, I know what the attacker was doing with the chains, mask and fire, and why the victim was blinded,’ she answered.
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s not bondage he’s into, it’s role-playing. He was re-enacting a scene from the fourth century bc, something described by Plato in his book The Republic. ‘
‘Why would someone base a brutal rape attack on Greek philosophy?’
asked Strickland.
‘Why indeed?’ Rita replied. ‘Why identify with any symbol? Why name your nightclub Plato’s Cave?’
‘I don’t need a debate, Van Hassel, I need something coherent to say to Nash.’
‘I’m making the point that all behaviour has a purpose. If we find out why our perpetrator turned the cave scenario into a psychotic fantasy, we should be able to pinpoint him.’
‘Okay, Nash might swallow that,’ Strickland grumbled. ‘Anything else?’
‘I’ve found another Plato’s Cave,’ she told him. ‘It’s an informal fellowship, an academic group at Melbourne University and I’m about to check it out.’
‘No shit,’ he said. ‘That’d be a turn-up for the books - a lunatic philosopher.’
‘He wouldn’t be the first,’ said Rita. ‘After the university I want to backtrack a bit. Kelly Grattan’s story about a bike accident still bothers me. I want to tackle her again.’
‘You’ve got a point,’ Strickland agreed. ‘If she really was the first target she’s a vital witness. If not, we need to be certain. Do a follow-up interview and find out for sure - without getting us sued for police harassment.’
As Strickland hung up, she opened her laptop, went online, found the university website and clicked on the appropriate page. The fellowship appeared insignificant, nothing more than a faculty club for undergraduates, providing an excuse for indulging in talk and drink. The website was full of notes from past gatherings, the venue for the next, essays, anecdotes and intellectual jokes.
She scrolled through them but stopped when she came to the
‘Quote for the week’ - a one-line comment chosen by the fellowship’s founder and chairman, a Phillip Roxby Ph.D. Rita found the choice more than a little resonant. It was a quote from Nietzsche:
‘God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.’
Rita wanted to know more about Roxby.
A further search of the website pulled up a page with an official outline of his career. He was thirty-two, came from Adelaide, and had been to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. From there he’d gone to the US where he tutored at Berkeley for several years before returning to Australia. He currently held the post of lecturer in Greek philosophy. The page also listed a number of books he’d published on Plato and the Pre-Socratics, along with articles he’d contributed to various journals.
It was all very worthy and formal and didn’t tell her much about the man. But a wider internet search threw up something far more interesting - a note on a radical student website. It listed alternative biographies of academics, including one under the epithet ‘Caveman Roxby’. The comments it contained were far from flattering, describing Roxby as autocratic and manipulative, claiming his attention to female students was more than professional. He was also accused, in true Platonic tradition, of being contemptuous of democracy. According to the website’s profile, he’d created the Plato’s Cave Fellowship as a private fiefdom for the nurturing of his favourite students and the exclusion of the rest. Most telling of all was a paragraph on his personal life: To his salivating acolytes Dr Roxby is a charismatic highbrow. They make the mistake, highlighted by Plato himself, of being fooled by
appearances. They fail to look behind the oratory, the designer clothes, the fast cars and city penthouse. While on the surface he displays the elements of an enviable lifestyle, underneath he hides the sensibilities of an unreconstructed caveman. All was revealed during his stint at Berkeley. While there he was promoted to senior tutor, made a tidy bundle from online publishing, socialised freely with his Californian students and married one of them. He fathered a child. Then it went bad. Divorced on the grounds of mental cruelty, the court denied him access to his offspring and issued a restraining order to stop him intimidating his ex-wife. After finding evidence of sexual and psychological aggression, the judge described him as ‘intellectually brilliant, but emotionally dark’ - not something you’ll find mentioned in the university handbook.
The vitriolic comments sketched a disturbing portrait. Rita wondered if it was exaggerated. One way to find out. She’d meet him face-to-face.
Curiosity, as much as anything else, coloured her thoughts as she drove to the university. She parked in a street where she’d often parked during her undergraduate years. Then she crossed the road to the Melbourne University campus and followed the leafy byways and brick paths among the faculty buildings. Students with bags of textbooks and lecture notes sauntered through the archways. Another jogged past bouncing a basketball. There was an aura of calm - even in the sunlight on the walls of Tasmanian freestone. The old clock tower chimed the hour as she walked through the cloisters of the Faculty of Law, passing the camellia trees in their secluded grass square. She crossed the paved court to the Old Arts building, opened the door and went inside.
Roxby’s room was in the Philosophy Department on the first floor. She climbed the stone staircase with its worn wooden banister and paused in front of the students’ noticeboard. In front of her were the tutorial lists: ‘Does God Exist?’, ‘Topics In Formal Logic’.
There was also an offer of ‘Free Meditation Classes’. Next to it was an invitation to a meeting of the Plato’s Cave Fellowship at the end of the month, its subject for discussion: ‘Mind Games’. Rita had a feeling that’s what she was about to engage in. She walked up to Roxby’s door, read his name on it, and looked up through the window over the lintel. Through it she could see the glare of the strip lighting, and the slowly rotating blades of the overhead fan - signs that he was in.
