Brian Freemantle - Kings of Many Castles

Olga didn’t have an answer.

The Botanic Gardens on Moscow’s Glavnyy Botanicheskiy Sad, with their enormous, tunnel-shaped glassed exhibition halls, had been the secret tryst for Charlie and Natalia after he’d been sure enough of her love-which he wasn’t any longer-to admit his supposed defection to the then Soviet Union was phoney but that because of that love he was refusing to trigger his KGB-wrecking return to London until he’d guaranteed her safety from suspicion or recrimination.

There was a twitch of recognition when he was ushered into the presence of the psychiatrist who’d analyzed the tapes and the transcripts of the George Bendall encounters. A slipper-shuffling housekeeper-or maybe even the man’s elderly and totally disinterested wife-led Charlie through an echoing mausoleum of a Hampstead house directly into a carbuncle of a glass greenhouse, abandoning him at its tropically-heated entrance. From there he found his own, sweaty way through giant fronded plants and ferns and sharp quilled, brilliantly technicolored cacti to locate, along the third path he followed, the shoulder-stooped, cardiganed professor. Arnold Nolan was in conversation with himself, narrow-spouted watering can in one hand, snipping secateurs in the other, his canopy of white hair more tangled than the foliage he was tending. His patchwork-patterned slippers matched those of the elderly woman and Charlieenvied their obvious trodden-into-comfort shapelessness.

The man showed no surprise at Charlie’s arrival beside him, just slightly raising his voice above the earlier self-conversation. He said, “Plants have an intelligence, you know. They feel discomfort, injury.”

“So I’ve been told,” said Charlie. Perspiration was rivering his face and forming into tributaries down his back.

“Restful things, plants.”

“I’ve come about the Moscow tapes.”

“I know. See that plant there? Dionaea Muscipula. Have to feed it flies and insects. Isn’t it pretty?”

“Do you mind if I wait outside? I find it very hot in here.”

The man turned for the first time, fixing Charlie with pale blue eyes. “Hot? You think so?”

“Very much so.” Nolan wasn’t sweating at all, Charlie saw. The man’s cardigan was thick, all the buttons secured.

“If you need to. Shan’t be long.”

Charlie returned gratefully to the outside corridor, feeling the sweat dry upon him, wondering if he’d make his second meeting with Geoffrey Robertson. When he’d telephoned the pathologist the man had said he could only give him ten minutes and insisted Charlie be on time, an hour from now.

Charlie heard the shuffled scuff of Nolan’s approach before he saw the man. He was talking to himself when he finally appeared. Or maybe, Charlie thought, he was talking to the plants. He’d read that people did.

“Come on,” said Nolan, as he past, and Charlie obediently followed. Over his shoulder Nolan said, “Like to meet your man. Interesting.”

“I appreciate the difficulty of what I’m asking, your not being able to do that.”

“Awkward but not a problem,” said the psychiatrist. “Some things are fairly obvious, others not.”

Although he’d never actually seen one Charlie decided Nolan’s office looked like the inside of a bear’s cave after a winter’s hibernation. It was a completely shelved cavern of books which overflowed on to the floor and on to overstuffed leather chairs and acouch, interspersed with apparently discarded papers and magazines and occasionally skeletal newspapers from which articles had been clipped. The debris was so great that there were clearly delineated paths through it, the most obvious to the overwhelmed, leathertopped desk, with side alleys to the bookshelves.

“There’s a chair …” said Nolan, waving to his right with a distracted arm, as if he’d forgotten where one might be. When the man snapped his desk light on Charlie saw his tapes and their transcripts were neatly-surprisingly-stacked next to a pocket-sized replay machine.

“I’m only able to give you-to suggest-a general picture,” began Nolan, abruptly professional. “There are clear indications of a schizophrenia, which is too often used as a catch-all when people like myself can’t think of a more positive diagnosis. We’re not going to go all Hollywood and suggest there are strange voices telling Bendall what to do. I suspect, though, that he’s obsessional. He’d be very susceptible to being told what to do, particularly if he loved or felt particularly close to the person giving the instructions …”

“What about more than one person? A group?” interrupted Charlie.

Nolan pursed his lips. “Possible but there would still need to be one person in that group upon whom he would need to focus. But certainly a group could be important to him. Your notes were helpful. He’s classically dysfunctional, alienated from a splintered home. That’s why the army might have been attractive to him: somewhere in which he might have felt embraced, a family he did know or have. But I think it would have been too big, too amorphous. But a group, a brotherhood, wouldn’t have been. And let’s get a correction in here, because it’s important. All the interviews so far have been wrongly directed, the Americans most of all. Bendall needs to be encouraged-praised, admired, loved if you like, not ridiculed which has been the tone of everything I’ve listened to so far, with yours as a possible, partial exception. From what you’ve said in your notes, there’s certainly more than one person-a conspiracy-involved here but Bendall did what he did to become admired by his friends, in the same mentally disturbed way that loners have attacked-killed-famous people, to become famous themselves …”

“Did he-does he-know what he was doing?” broke in Charlie again.

“Very much so. That’s part of it, a very important part. That’s your way forward, when you talk to him again?”

“How can I get him to tell me who the others are?”

Nolan gestured uncertainly. “From your interview, more than any of the others, I got the impression that he wants to tell someone: after all his life being discarded and down trodden he’s suddenly someone, the object of everyone’s attention. He wasn’t just being used physically, to fire a rifle. He was being used-manipulated-mentally. Those short, staccato replies to you are indicative. He believed he was playing with you: testing you out. Let him go on thinking that. Let him think he’s superior, in charge.”

“There’s something that wasn’t in my notes, that I’ve only just discovered,” said Charlie. “Somehow-I don’t know how-Bendall was administered with an unauthorized drug, thiopentone. It could have been during the American interview when he broke down. Could that have any long term effects, combined with the other drugs with which he’s being treated: affect, in fact, how he might be in any future sessions?”

Nolan humped his shoulders. “You know what the prescribed drugs are?”

Charlie felt a burn of embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

“Now he’s well out of surgery I guess it’ll just be some type of sedative,” suggested the psychiatrist. “Thiopentone shouldn’t react against any of the barbiturates.”

“So it wouldn’t have caused that outburst, during the American session?”

The psychiatrist shook his head. “That was far more likely to have been caused by the way he was being talked to. He was being ridiculed, which was how he’s been treated all his life. He simply closed himself down.”

“Why did he break all the models he made, which his mother told me he did?”

“Models of things that moved, could have taken him away from an existence he hated, had they been real,” Noland judged. “That was his physical way of showing that hatred of his surrounding-smakinghis imagined escape and then smashing it-before he began showing the actual violence towards others.”