Peter May: Snakehead

The Criminal Justice Center was a part of Sam Houston State University, and another seventeen students were watching Margaret on closed-circuit television from a facility at The Woodlands, nearly thirty miles away down the highway toward Houston. Any one of them could hit a remote unit on the bench in front of them and have their picture and voice relayed to the lecturer. She, in turn, could direct the camera toward herself, or toward the screen at the front of the room on which she was at that moment projecting an image of a woman hanging by the neck from the ceiling of a garage.

‘When the officer failed to show up for his shift and they couldn’t raise him on the telephone, the desk sergeant sent a couple of patrolmen round to the house to see what was wrong. They knew his wife was away visiting her parents that weekend and thought maybe he was just sleeping off a night of excess.’ Margaret chuckled. ‘Well, excess was right, and the sleep was permanent. When they couldn’t raise anyone in the house, the patrolmen went round peering in the windows.’ She prodded the screen with a pointer. ‘And this is what they saw in the garage. What appeared to be a large, heavy woman hanging from a light fitting, her face obscured by long black hair hanging down over it.

‘Well, they figured they had probable cause, and they called for the paramedics and broke in. They discovered two things very quickly. The first that the woman was dead, the second that she wasn’t a woman. That she was, in fact, their friend and colleague, Jack Thomas Doobey, a three-times decorated police officer with more than twenty-five years service.’

A tiny snigger rippled around the lecture room. Margaret invariably found that her lectures on auto-erotic deaths both amused and fascinated her students. Something to do with the human condition, perhaps tapping into the latent fear that most people have of the dark side of their own sexuality.

‘He’d done a pretty good job of turning himself into a woman,’ Margaret said. ‘As you can see. Good enough to fool his fellow officers, at least until they got right up close.’ She segued through several other transparencies as she spoke, including close-ups of Officer Doobey’s carefully made-up face, his black wig, the glued-on fuschia-pink fingernails that adorned hairy fingers, the dress, the layers of padding beneath it to give him hips and breasts.

‘He had gagged himself.’ Red silk over pink lips. ‘And tied his hands behind his back.’

‘How’d he do that?’ a black girl on the front row asked.

‘Stand up,’ Margaret said.

The girl glanced at her fellow students self-consciously and got reluctantly to her feet.

‘Step out in front of the class and clasp your hands in front of you,’ Margaret ordered. The girl did as she was told. ‘Now bend forward, reaching for the floor, and without unclasping your hands, step through them.’ The girl struggled a little to follow the instructions while her classmates laughed. But with only a little difficulty, she managed to do what she had been asked and stood up with her hands now clasped behind her back.

‘You see? Easy.’

Another series of transparencies flashed on-screen to reveal how Officer Doobey had rigged up a pulley mechanism to raise and lower the hanging noose through a large hook sunk into the roof.

Margaret elucidated. ‘He controlled the pulley with a remote control unit he had adapted from a basic stereo system. So that made-up, dressed up, gagged and tied, he stood on a chair with the noose around his neck and the remote control in his hands behind him. That way he could raise the noose until it was tight around his neck and taking most of his weight, literally choking him. And then at the last moment lower himself back on to the chair.’

The class looked back at her in awed silence, clearly visualising the scenario. Then the face of a dark-haired young man from The Woodlands popped up on the monitor and his voice came across the speaker system. ‘But why, Dr. Campbell? I mean, why would he do that?’

Margaret said, ‘Good question.’ She paused, considering how to phrase her response. ‘We are led to understand that by starving oneself of oxygen, one is able to heighten the sexual experience.’ She registered the consternation on the faces of her students as they tried to imagine what was remotely sexual about dressing up as a member of the opposite sex and hanging yourself. Margaret smiled. ‘But I don’t recommend that you try it at home.’ Which brought the relief of laughter to the room.

‘When I got there,’ she went on, ‘I was able to determine pretty quickly that Officer Doobey had managed inadvertently to turn the remote control the wrong way around in his hands after setting the pulley in motion, and was unable to lower it again. You can picture the scene. There he is, hanging by the neck, choking on his own weight. The binding on his wrists that is loose when in front of him, is twisted and tight behind him. He has no flexibility of movement with his hands. He is fumbling desperately to turn the remote around to lower himself to safety. And then it slips from his fingers and smashes on the floor and he knows he is going to die. He struggles for a few moments, feet kicking, then gives up and succumbs to the screaming in his ears and the blackness that descends over him bringing, in the end, a very long silence.’

A silence filled the lecture room as these green freshmen conjured images of death they could never have imagined. Images, Margaret knew, with which they would become only too familiar when they graduated into the real and unpleasant world beyond this cloistered academic environment. The hum of the sound system seemed inordinately loud in the silence. Margaret caught a glimpse of herself on the monitor. Pale and freckled, fair hair tumbling carelessly over her shoulders. The CCTV cameras did her no favours. God, she looked old, she thought. Much older than her thirty-four years. Perhaps all those images of death she had had to deal with herself over the years had etched themselves into her face. What was it they called it…character?

A young man with close-cropped blond hair at the back of the room asked, ‘How could you know that for sure? Couldn’t someone have set it up just to look that way, and really it was murder?’

‘Yes, Mark, that’s possible,’ Margaret said. ‘But I was able to rule that out pretty much straight off.’

‘How?’

‘Because Officer Doobey not only liked hanging himself, he also liked watching himself do it. He had set up a camera, and the whole drama was there on video tape. Death by Hanging —at a cinema near you.’ Margaret grinned ruefully. ‘It would make life a lot easier if all my cases were available on video.’ She closed the folder on her desk. ‘That’s all for today, guys.’

In the corridor outside, the babble of excited student voices had already receded as they headed out for coffee and no doubt a few cigarettes. Margaret never ceased to be amazed at how many young people were smoking now. A whole generation had given up, but the kids apparently didn’t care about the health issues. It made Margaret think of her time in China where everyone, it seemed, smoked. Everywhere. But even the most fleeting thought of the Middle Kingdom, even after a year, touched raw nerves, and she immediately turned away from it. She pulled her leather jacket on under the turned-up collar of her blouse and stooped to take a mouthful of water from a stainless steel drinking fountain below a wall-mounted display case filled with the badges and stars of innumerable law agencies.

‘Ma’am? Can I have a word?’

She looked up and saw the boy with the cropped head of fair hair from the back of her class. He was grinning shyly, clutching his satchel to his chest, and her heart sank. He always managed to find something he could ask her about after class.