Return

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘That makes a change,’ said Powell.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The excitement of anticipation was phenomenal. Orgasmic. Better than orgasmic: better than any killing, any woman. Every eye upon him, the absolute focus of every attention. Total silence. Everyone waiting. Watching. Listening. Could see the public gallery for the first time, from the witness box. Packed. People crushed together on the benches, standing shoulder to shoulder entirely along the furthest back wall. Not a single unoccupied seat in the court and more people standing there, too. No-one wanting to miss it. Miss anything. I was there! Saw him! Close enough to touch him, the man who’d died and was born again, died and was born again and again and again. Moment in history. Fantastic.

  Taylor affirmed, playing their stupid rules. But he would tell the truth. The truth was what he wanted to tell. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. He’d rehearsed Jonathan Fry not just that morning but on the Sunday night to get it all right. Every question, every follow-up. It didn’t, in fact, matter if Fry lost his place, dropped the questions list. He didn’t need to answer any specific questions. Just follow their stupid rules, to get his place on the stage.

  Here now, he thought. Everyone straining to look at him. Say what he wanted, irrespective of Fry’s groping, stumbling prompt. Rehearsal time for himself. Rehearsal for what was going to follow in America. Cameras on him then. His face – as many other faces as possible – constantly filling the screen. Nothing like it, before or since. World audience, already primed from today. Waiting.

  He felt very confident. Everything clear in mind. Ready. Had done it twice that morning, after Fry had left the cell. Taylor to Nolan, Nolan to Taylor. Like a juggling act: now you see me, now you don’t. Try very hard to go back further, for America. As far as he could. Have his disciples – his congregation – by then. Kneeling, praying, standing on their heads if he told them to. That would be amusing, seeing the totally absurd things he could make them do. Make them call him Tzu. Master of millions. Stand on your heads. Stand on one leg. Put your finger up your ass. Tongue up the ass of the person next to you. Only wear red on Wednesdays, blue on Thursdays, nothing on Fridays.

  Important to concentrate on Jonathan Fry, who sincerely believed the remand cell briefings had been his idea, his preparation. Delighted to take the court back to the beginning, London of the 1750s. Very dirty. Lot of smells. Never liked the smells. Lot of people living in the streets, although he hadn’t had to. Bedroom of his own. Shoes to wear. Extra pair for Sundays. Always church on Sundays, prayers in the morning, prayers in the afternoon, prayers in the evening. Thank you God, for Your generosity and goodness. Forgive those that trespass against us. Stupid to forgive people who did you harm. Hurt them worse. Tzu taught him that. Enjoyed hurting people. Seeing the fear. Seeing the blood. Tzu liked it too. Allowed him to. Lots of bunters to choose from. Lift their skirts, open their mouths. Traitors in the temple, though. Informed the militia, hue and cry, lucky not to be in the temple when the mob attacked, beating, burning. They’d have found him, in time: hanged him and burned his body if his parents hadn’t got passage on the Discovery. To save themselves, though. They’d burned him to death in the locked shack when he’d started the killings, in Boston. Mary Murphy the first, a seventeen-year-old Irish whore. Jeremiah Bates, potboy at the Blue Anchor on Beacon Street. Jane O’Hare, daughter of the haberdashery store owner who’d befriended his father and given him a job, on her way home from the church where she’d planned her wedding. Killed his parents the same way when he’d come back, as Luke Thomas. After dismembering them – sacrificing them – he’d burned them in the draper shop they’d opened in Plymouth, Massachusetts, before setting off West.

  Not a sound, not a movement, in the court. They were engrossed, worshipping. How long would it take for the book offers to double, treble? Wouldn’t employ a lawyer or an agent, after what James Durham had done. Easy to handle everything himself. Promote himself. Give interviews in prison. Present the book as his Bible. Anyone who believed in him – wanted to learn from him – would have to buy the book. Save the biggest sensation for the book. Promise the worshippers that he, their Messiah, would never again be away for as long as it had until now taken him to reincarnate. He’d return at once from now on, possessing whomever he wanted, doing whatever he wanted. No-one could stop him. Never had been able to.

  He heard Jonathan Fry, obedient to his script, refer to St Louis and picked up the continuity. Scout for the wagon train, to give himself the freedom. Killed an entire family one night, not part of the train but trying to travel literally in its wake, for protection from marauding Apache and Sioux. Killed three Iroquois – two women and a child – in a village he’d come upon by accident. Got the wagons attacked in revenge but they’d fought them off. Killed four more during the raid. Like St Louis. Set up his first brothel in a tent, two more within a year. The fourth was the first in a proper building. Personally tested each of the whores before they started, before they became diseased. Hadn’t meant to kill the ostler’s child. Hadn’t intended sexually to touch her but she’d thought he had and started to scream and he’d had to stop her. His neck hadn’t been broken by the lynching noose, so he’d strangled to death. Killed everyone who’d been involved, when he’d returned as Maurice Barkworth, even the whore who’d discovered the child and led the mob to him. By the time he’d found her she’d been running a brothel of her own in San Francisco, where he enrolled at the newly established medical college from which it only took him three years to graduate.

  Good to get back to London in 1829. Same year as William Burke and William Hare were found guilty in Edinburgh of suffocating to death fifteen people to sell for medical dissection. Easy to get bodies for experimentation in those days. Resurrection Men robbed graves, taking the corpses naked, which was only a misdemeanour, not the felony it would have been to steal the burial shroud as well. Killed some of his own, of course. Trying to confirm the theory that the victims of violent attack died with the image of their killer imprinted on their retinae. Lionized for that opinion – and for his ophthalmic ability – for a long time until the ridicule of other eye surgeons drove him to suicide, too impatient to wait for a natural death from which he could return and start all over again.

  They’d all died when he came back as Patrick Arnold, at the beginning of the century. The police would never have got him but it was easy to disappear anyway, answering Kitchener’s call that his country needed him. Time for legalized murder. Reconnaissance corporal, a scout again as he had been on the wagon train, this time working for various units all along the Western Front, from Nieuwpoort in Belgium to Ypres and Arras and Albert and Soissons in France. Sometimes put the German heads on the marker poles that designated the hard ground beneath the constant, sucking mud. Stupid lieutenant, all of 19, deserved the bullet Arnold put into his idiot back for ordering the charge into the certain death of the German machine-gun emplacements they wouldn’t believe existed, despite his insistence that they did.

  The Army was literally an escape for Myron Nolan – from an ever enclosing NYPD and Port Authority investigation into the Gambino family source of the most lucratively loaded delivery trucks leaving New York harbour – but he had joined in 1940 never intending it to be a lifelong career, just a place to hide. It was only when he got there that he recognized its incredible potential. By the time America entered the conflict – and Lucky Luciano imposed a Mafia clampdown on waterfront war supply pilfering in exchange for jail parole – he’d been a master sergeant and an even greater master in the art of black market manipulation of every saleable, bribable, usable and influence-peddling commodity in the US Army. He’d travelled and killed all the way across Europe with Patton’s Third Army and found real gold at the rainbow’s end in Berlin. With so many opportunities he’d arranged a permanent transfer to the military support staff of Berlin’s post-war Four Power Control Commission and was a cash-rich dollar millionaire, with more than another million dollars’ worth of
gold, antiques and art carefully stored in New York safe deposit facilities, when he bought the contaminated penicillin and streptomycin from Samuel Hargreaves.

  ‘He identified Myron Nolan to the military police within five minutes of being questioned,’ testified Taylor. ‘So he had to die, obviously.’

  He easily followed Fry’s lead, avoiding references to the American killings with which he hadn’t been charged, although not to conform – not to surrender control to the court or to Fry – but because it was important to have something new for the American trial. Destroy James Durham there, too. Expose the unctuous asshole as the thief he’d always been. Although they’d been circumspect – the woman particularly – it was obvious from what Powell and Amy Halliday had told the court that Durham had co-operated: led them to him. Had to be punished for that. Always essential to punish those that trespass against him.

  The highest book offer increased to $9 million as a result of that day’s hearing and reached $11 million by the end of the second day. Prayer meetings had already started outside the remand prison. He could hear their day and night chants, from his cell. In a lot of churches, as many as a hundred according to some estimates, vicars and priests were conducting special weekday services, most supporting the doctrinal opinion of Bishop Stevenson and Monsignor Shere. A minority didn’t, talking of heresy and the Devil and the occult. Taylor watched the jail perimeter prayer meetings and some of the church services on his television, and what wasn’t televised was extensively reported in newspapers. All the time he carefully cultivated the hysteria from the witness box, drip-feeding the impression of something awesome – miraculous – still to come.

  On the third day Hector McLeash rose to cross-examine. My ultimate moment, thought the barrister. Harold Taylor was thinking exactly the same.

  ‘You have no conventional faith?’

  ‘No,’ said Taylor. Useful question, for the following he intended to create in the future.

  ‘Do you believe in the Devil?’

  Even better. ‘No.’

  ‘In whom did your teacher, Tzu, believe?’

  ‘Himself.’

  ‘So you believe in him?’

  This really was very good: he could scarcely have done better if he’d written the questions himself. ‘Utterly.’

  ‘And you believe in reincarnation?’

  ‘Of course. I am proof of it.’ Not yet. Too soon yet.

  ‘And possession?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Beliefs of established religions.’ asserted McLeash.

  Shit! The son-of-a-bitch had caught him there. ‘I accept what happens to me. It’s the rest of you who seem to have the problem, although after this trial you won’t have.’

  ‘Tell us what happened to you.’

  ‘Tzu was my teacher.’

  ‘Who was the disciple who fell out with the founder of Taoism, Lao-tzu, for perverting the rituals and the creed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you saying that a man born six centuries before the birth of Christ was the man burned to death in the eighteenth century, in London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t he return yet again?’

  ‘He was too tired. It was time for him to go.’

  ‘He taught you how to return?’

  ‘He is always there, when I leave my mortal body.’

  ‘What happens?’

  Taylor could feel the tension. ‘He asks me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Do you want to live again?”’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘I say yes.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘There is the creed – Water – cultivate – every existence with the blood of others.’

  ‘Is Tzu your God?’

  ‘He has enlightened me.’

  ‘Have you ever possessed anyone, instead of reincarnating?’

  He had to get more control of the questioning, lead it in the direction he wanted. ‘Not yet.’

  McLeash’s head came up, at the reply. ‘You mean you could!’

  ‘Of course.’ The next experiment, he decided. Impose himself: project himself. Occupy. He was sure he could do it. A will weaker than his own, that’s all he needed, according to the teaching. But there was a danger in choice, which was why he’d so far avoided it: encounter a stronger will, fail, and he couldn’t return again. But what risk? Whose will – determination – was stronger than his?

  ‘Who do you believe yourself to be at the moment? Harold Taylor? Or Myron Nolan?’

  The clever bastard had guessed! Use it then. Make this the moment. ‘I have the physical body of Harold Taylor.’

  McLeash nodded. ‘But revenging the ills and injuries committed against Myron Nolan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So the body of Harold Taylor is merely the vehicle for a dead man’s reincarnation? As Myron Nolan was for Patrick Arnold?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’m glad you understand.’

  ‘Who then is responsible for the murder of Beryl Simpkins and Samuel Hargreaves?’

  ‘Myron Nolan.’

  ‘Why Beryl Simpkins? She didn’t harm Myron Nolan.’

  Wouldn’t say that apart from killing he could only get satisfaction from a dirty whore. ‘I needed a woman. Fun. She died seeing something no-one else ever had before: a man change his face as she watched.’

  McLeash didn’t pick up on the remark. Instead he said, ‘Myron Nolan is dead. That’s why you’ve pleaded not guilty, isn’t it? You want the court – the jury – to find that a dead man cannot commit a crime!’

  ‘What other conclusion can they come to?’ Almost there! Just seconds away.

  ‘That Harold Taylor, the man standing before them and who has admitted the murders, is the man who committed them.’

  ‘Who is standing before this court?’ questioned Taylor. And then he did it. At last. With every eye breathlessly upon him he transmogrified, to become Myron Nolan. And stood there, a dead man.

  The first scream came from the gallery, a screech of terror that was picked up, once, twice, three times. There was a deeper groan, a lot of voices, sounds, of disbelief: of people not wanting to believe, not wanting to be confused. A black woman juror in the front, then another in the second row, slumped forward in a faint. The most visible reaction throughout the court, seeming to spread out from the barristers and their juniors through their instructing solicitors and reaching up to the judge and his court officials, was physical recoil: everyone wanting to get away, put space between themselves and him.

  He said, ‘I’m the person who killed them. And I’m Myron Nolan, not Harold Taylor.’ The American accent – the Bronx accent, hard, nasal – was very pronounced.

  Uproar – panic and chaos – instantly followed. It was worse in the public gallery. The screaming hysteria caught, like fire in a wind, and there was a rush for the single, inadequate door which blocked at once. People fell and were trodden upon, crushed uncaringly by those behind fighting and clawing to get out. Police and court officials trying to get to the upstairs brawl became embroiled in stampeding media, neither deferring to the other, and there were more falls, more trampling. The judge hammered and shouted for calm and was ignored, although he managed to tell his clerk to tell McLeash and Fry and anyone else who could hear that the court was adjourned and that there would be a pre-trial conference the following day.

  The American group didn’t move – couldn’t have moved if they’d tried – trapped just to the side of the witness box where the man with the face and head of Myron Nolan stood gazing down with total, smiling satisfaction – orgasmic again – at the bedlam he had caused.

  ‘That isn’t the proof of any religion,’ said Amy, broken voiced. ‘That’s total, obscene evil. He is a monster.’

  ‘But we’ve stopped him,’ said Powell, equally close to being overcome. ‘He can’t do any more harm.’

  Ross Kirkpatrick, the American lawyer entrusted with gaining Taylor’s extradition, said, ‘He can. More
people are going to flock to him than to any of the deities we’ve been lectured about. And his creed demands blood sacrifice.’ He shuddered. ‘We’ve opened Pandora’s Box and released every evil that was waiting to be set free.’

  ‘Hope remained,’ said Amy, remembering the Greek legend.

  ‘Not here it doesn’t,’ insisted the American laywer. ‘I wanted to be part of this but I don’t any more. I’m scared. Scared to hell.’ He paused. ‘Which is where all this is coming from.’

  They worked late into the night at the embassy, relaying to Washington the verbatim evidence and each speaking literally for hours on end to their respective chiefs, Powell to Clarence Gale, Kirkpatrick to the US Attorney-General, giving their personal feelings and impressions.

  ‘We’ll bring him home by FBI plane,’ decided the FBI Director, towards the end of his conversation with Powell. ‘Give the media every access.’

  ‘You sure that’s a good idea, displaying him as some kind of Almighty of evil?’ queried Powell.

  ‘He’s a real live Frankenstein’s monster,’ said Gale. ‘And he’s ours! The FBI got him and we’re going to show everybody how goddamned good we are. And no-one’s going to be allowed to forget it, ever again.’

  Chapter Thirty-two

  It had gone even better than Harold Taylor had anticipated; than he could have hoped. He’d awoken at dawn for the very beginning of television transmission, flicking from channel to channel to savour all that he’d caused. Three people in the public gallery had died – two men from heart attacks, a woman from fracturing an unnaturally thin skull after being knocked down and trampled in the rush to get out – and there had been at least thirty crush injuries, eighteen serious enough for hospital admission. Mr Justice Lockyer had ordered the public gallery closed for the last day of the trial.

  The television also showed the prison surrounded by a crowd police estimated at three thousand and by the time Taylor left in a window-shuttered van the entire route to the court was thronged. He travelled all the way there to the sound of people calling his name – all his names – and screaming and chanting; sometimes he even heard a strange moaning he thought were mantras, although he couldn’t recognize them. There were far more people around the court than at the prison and police had to form a shoulder to shoulder corridor to get the van through. Even so there was a lot of hammering on the side of the vehicle – the sound of missiles hitting it, too – and demands for him to show himself. Throughout Taylor sat smiling, satisfied, unsure at that moment how to continue the delirium, only knowing that he wanted to and would find a way.