David Malouf: The Complete Stories

There are those among these men who genuinely believe they are the prowler. Faced under the glare of the arc-lamps with indisputable proof that they are not, they break down and sob, they plead with Senior Detective Pierce to examine the evidence again, to find something, some small detail, that will convict them; they resist, they fight, they clutch at straws. Senior Detective Pierce finds these men pathetic. Of all the males in the suburb, they alone are above suspicion, since the one thing they lack (what else does their behaviour mean?) is the courage to commit the crime.

As for the others, the self-confessed prowlers who know they are lying, Senior Detective Pierce has begun to dread their arrival, more even than a new victim. Each of them has a bad conscience. Confessing to the prowler's crimes is a kind of diversion tactic. It is meant to save them from confessing to the real crime they have committed — or think they have committed. They are men who are laden with guilt, who hope that punishment and conviction for one crime, even if it is not their own, will be sufficient and will relieve them of dread. The real crime, in some cases, is trivial, the anxiety is not. And it is the weight of all this secret guilt that Senior Detective Pierce finds so oppressive, since he cannot absolve the men of it, and could not, even if he were to extend to them the one thing in his dispensation, the recognition that the prowler's crimes are theirs. Faced with the men's despair when he declares them innocent, their deep sense of grievance, their sullen hostility, Senior Detective Pierce, on one or two occasions, has come close to breaking down. He has been trained to deal with crime — specific incidents — not with deep, unspecified guilt.

Still, information about all these men is fed into the computer; they become part of Senior Detective Pierce's memory bank. Even if they did not commit the prowler's crimes they reflect them. Only when all the facts have been collated, and many things that are not facts as well, will some sort of pattern emerge.

But when will that be? And what pattern?

Senior Detective Pierce has come to believe, as the number of victims continues to rise and the identikit pictures top thirteen, that sooner or later the whole male and female population of the suburb will find its way into his files, every man a potential prowler, every female a victim. And what then?

19

In the middle of the last century in Rome, the old stone prison of the Mammertine on the Capitoline Hill, where St. Peter is said to have been jailed, was set up as an oratory. Here, among the usual votive offerings, silver hearts, limbs, eyes with little filagree bows and angels about them, symbols of a miraculous return to wholeness, hung offerings of another sort: knives, meat-cleavers, clubs still wet from the skulls they had broken, and damp hair sticking to them, cords that had been used in a strangling, a dirty pillow, a pair of blood-stained scissors. The whole place, one writer tells us, was haunted; as if all the city's murders had gathered there and hung about, palpably, in the dark. Blood and the odour of blood had seeped into the stones. The air was thick with unspoken confessions and pleas for absolution. Within the city, a temple had been dedicated to the city's secret crimes. The criminals had crept away, but the instruments they had used were left to speak for them in a language, at once concrete and abstract, that made the whole place a whispering hall for abominable declarations, where the guilty might come, under cover of dark, to relieve themselves of the tokens of their guilt …

20

SENIOR DETECTIVE PIERCE,who is surprisingly literate, has read of this place and begins to be haunted by it. He also has dreams in which he imagines himself to be a computer, softly whirring as the pieces tumble into place within him and the day's facts are fed in, some dark act committed in the streets of the suburb, a new face (victim or violator, it hardly matters which), a private fantasy brought to light at last and tucked away in the memory bank, which is his own head. His head is filled with the crimes, real and imaginary, of a whole suburb, it bursts with them, the violence calmly subdued in compulsive rituals or breaking out in savage bloodshed. He staggers up out of these dreams in a cold sweat, terrified of where he might have been and who might have seen him there.

Often when Senior Detective Pierce has these dreams he is awake.

What frightens him most is that he has begun to predict the crimes: the time, the place, the kind of woman. Has his accumulation of so much information, his entry into the pattern that lies under the facts, given him insight — unconscious as yet, but accurate — into the real nature of the crimes, so that a part of what is still to occur becomes visible to him? Does he begin to have so godlike a knowledge of us all that every detail of what we will, even those things that have not yet entered our heads and become the focus of will, is already clear to him? Or is there some simpler and more sinister explanation?

Senior Detective Pierce has asked twice now to be relieved of his duties and sent back to the Vice Squad, but on both occasions his request was refused.

Why? he wonders.

Is it because they have their eye on me and want to keep me where I can be watched? Even these notes are a dead giveaway. I know too much. I have become a primary suspect.

Confess! Confess!