Phil Lovesey - Ploughing Potter’s Field

‘Adrian!’

‘What? Christ! I’m sorry.’ Ten before midnight the same day. The bedroom. I turned to my wife. ‘You’re right. I’m miles away.’ I put down Rattigan’s file on the linen-fresh duvet.

Jemimah Rawlings opted for tact, starting again. ‘I’ve waited all evening, Adrian. A word or two would be nice. You know, a brief description for the woman who’s had to bite her tongue every night for the last God knows how many weeks as you read about the secret freak you finally met today?’

‘It’s not secret, J. Just want to spare you some of the gorier stuff, that’s all.’

‘How noble.’ She went back to her reading, wearing the slightly-stung-but-indifferent expression which I always found strangely attractive. Her short pointed brown bob perfectly framed the frowning profile doing its best to ignore me. I remembered the first time I’d set eyes on her high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes. She had the look of an Eastern European, a Hungarian noblewoman, perhaps, smuggled across hazardous borders to escape Communist authorities. A pity to have the romantic illusion shattered, then, when I learnt she’d spent most of her life in Catford.

I rubbed my eyes. ‘Want to know what he said?’

‘Look, if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I can wait for His Master’s Voice.’

‘He said I didn’t look academic enough.’

She put down the book. ‘Well, you don’t.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Academics are supposed to look bookish and pale. You look more like a rugby player. Healthier, more well-rounded.’

I was grateful for the compliment.

‘Besides,’ she added. ‘I thought this Rattigan man was insane.’

‘Apparently.’

‘So it shouldn’t bother you what he thinks, then, should it?’

I nodded, conceding the point.

‘And what about him, then? What did he look like?’

I thought for a second. ‘Sort of normal, I guess. Not a horn sticking out of his head in sight. Which made it worse, I suppose. Knowing what he’d confessed to, and looking like the average Joe.’

‘And are you going to see him again?’

‘If he agrees.’

‘You want to?’

I closed Rattigan’s file, placed it on my bedside table. ‘I thought I did. It’s different, though, in the flesh. I was almost looking forward to it in a way. There’s so much about his story that just doesn’t make any sense.’

‘But that’s the point, surely?’ Jemimah replied brightly. ‘If he’s crazy enough to do whatever he did, then surely the motive could be just as crazy?’

‘No one really knows what he did. We only have his word for it.’

Another frown crossed her face. ‘He killed a woman, didn’t he?’

I nodded, slightly uncomfortable with the question. I didn’t want Jemimah to go too heavily into the details which had so shocked me.

‘So they would have been able to examine the body then? Find out how he killed her?’

I shook my head. ‘There wasn’t really that much left to examine.’

‘Oh.’

‘Sorry. But you did ask.’

Eventually, she broke the silence. ‘I wish to God I knew what you find so fascinating about evil bastards like him.’

‘He’s not evil, J.’

‘What, you’re defending him, now?’

‘No. I’m …’ I sighed heavily. ‘Just tired, that’s all.’

She relaxed. ‘He really upset you, didn’t he?’

‘He wanted to know all about me, whether I was married, what you were like, did we have kids.’

‘And you told him?’

‘Didn’t have to. He got it out of me. I wasn’t concentrating, I suppose.’

I felt her disappointment.

‘I’m sorry, J.’

‘Look, Adrian, this criminal stuff. It’s your choice. Just don’t involve me in anything you think I can’t handle. Insanity scares me. I get nervous if I see a wino on the street. Jesus, life’s mad enough as it is. Just please, don’t go telling this man any more about me. He’s a killer, Adrian, and I don’t want him to know I even exist. Me or the kids.’

She rolled over and I cuddled into the small of her warm back. ‘It was a dumb mistake. Like I say, he just got it out of me.’

‘Which makes me wonder,’ she said quietly, switching out her bedside lamp. ‘What else is this man going to get out of you?’

But despite her worries Jemimah was asleep long before I was, leaving me alone with the distant roar of occasional traffic and a wandering mind stuck on the last thing she’d said. When I could stand it no longer, I got up, took the file downstairs, made myself a black coffee and began reading it again. There had to be a clue in there somewhere, a pointer, the beginnings of a possible motive. Even though I’d met the man, felt his open hostility, there was still no way I could simply accept his word that he’d done what he’d done ‘for fun’. Insane or otherwise, there was something else he was concealing, I felt sure of it.

And even if that motive made no rhyme or reason to anyone else except Rattigan, I determined that night to get it from him. ‘For fun’ just wasn’t good enough, even for the most sickening demented psychopath. I felt sure it was most probably sexual – he’d spent nearly three days torturing a girl to death, after all – now all I needed was to have the theory confirmed by the Beast himself, then track the psychiatric path which took him there. Which, at three in the morning, sitting in a near silent kitchen, finishing my third coffee, I figured shouldn’t take much time at all.

The pointers would be obvious, wouldn’t they?

Someone once remarked that I had a certain stillness in my eyes. And that no matter how much my face animated itself around them, it was as if they were disconnected from the surrounding expression.

The description unnerved me, partly because I was trying my best to bed the girl in question and now knew she found me to be somewhat strange and disconnected, but also because it was something I’d noticed myself as an adolescent counting spots in front of the mirror.

Another contemporary way back had told me that if you stared hard enough at your reflection, you’d find the devil grinning back. I tried – and found nothing. Just the stillness.

Others too, have sometimes remarked on my eyes. Sad, they’ve been called, empty, even vacant. I began to study eyes, staring intently with my own duff specimens at others, determined to learn their tricks, syphon some of their vitality. I became expert at eye-widening shock, practised arching my eyebrows for various different studied effects. But however I tried to mask the lifelessness, it remained.

Although to be fair, this optical handicap had its advantages. While some thought I was weird, an equal number were intrigued, or took pity, determined to unlock the secrets behind my flat, staring irises. And to a certain extent, I played along with their games, inventing a variety of instant tragic pasts to gain their sympathy, friendship, sexual favours, or all three. I was in my late teens, insecure, fuelled by hormones, so I can forgive myself for the deception.

But the eyes have stuck. Still as vacant today as when I first perceived them. But now I have knowledge. I know they weren’t always this way. They saw something which denied them their vigour. Then spent thirty years colluding with my subconscious to deny me the memory.

And when I began speaking to Rattigan, the lid to Pandora’s box began to lift a little. His taunts of ‘Fat-boy’ were the catalyst, taking me back to my schooldays, when I was frequently bullied over my weight – which I only very recently recognized was another complex psychological mechanism I’d constructed in order to forget.

For me, the term ‘hindsight’ is the cruellest of puns, but I’m forced to admit it played its part. For the first time in my life, I can really ‘see’, trace the causes of who I was, who I am now, and what happened in between. I see now what I saw then, and realize why the life drained from my eyes.