Spider - Michael Morley [13]
Fenella made more notes, then added, ‘So it isn’t news about him that triggers your thoughts and your nightmares?’
‘No. He’s always there at the back of my mind, I never lose his shadow, it’s always around somewhere.’
‘Tell me, during the day, when your mind turns to him, what are you thinking?’
‘I wonder about what he’s doing, who he might share his life with, how he manages to live with himself. How normal he may be, or appear to be.’
Fenella knew he was self-censoring, holding back the full force of what was filling his thoughts. ‘And do you think about how he actually felt while committing those acts?’
‘No, not as much as I used to,’ he answered. ‘When I was working on the case, I used to think about that a lot. We are trained to think like that, to put ourselves in the shoes of those we hunt. We have to think how they think, feel how they feel, and understand what it’s like to do what they do.’
‘And what do you think it’s like?’
‘For them? What do I think scum like BRK feel when they do these things?’
‘Yes.’
Jack’s face hardened. ‘I think, for them, the experience is amazing. Godlike. They literally have the power of life and death. And that, for the BRKs of this world, killing is the ultimate thrill. Nothing on earth compares to it and, once they have experienced it, they are addicted as surely as if murder were a narcotic.’
The flashbacks came again: blood splatters, floaters in the river, fingertip searches. Jack mentally dammed the flood of images.
Fenella leant forward on the couch and lowered her voice. ‘You don’t sound judgemental. How do you do that?’
‘Do what?’ He gave her a puzzled look.
‘Suppress the disgust, the repulsion that you must feel?’
Jack was thrown for a minute. The honest answer was that he didn’t feel anything any more. The endless diet of homicidal horror had bludgeoned his senses into dullness. But how could he say that out loud and not sound inhumane? How could he admit that victims and killers had ceased being people and had been reduced in his mind to objects and puzzles, a mere algebra of violence? ‘It’s a good question,’ he conceded. ‘To be judgemental would be to blinker myself as an investigator, and I can’t afford to do that. I can’t afford any killer or rapist I interview to see any sign of that. Whatever they’ve done, however they’ve taken a life, I have to show them that I’m there to understand why they did it, rather than condemn what they’ve done.’
Fenella noted that he still spoke, and to a large extent behaved, as though he were an FBI agent. It was something she’d come back to, perhaps at another session, if indeed there was one. ‘I want to move on now to the exact content of your nightmares. Are you comfortable doing that?’
Jack shifted defensively in his seat. ‘You going to go all Freudian and Jungian on me?’
‘Maybe a little. Freud described dreaming as “the royal road to the unconscious” and I think it’s a route worth going down.’
‘Then, let’s go.’ Jack was surprised to see that he’d clasped his hands and was bracing himself. He felt his temperature rise and his heartbeat quicken. He closed his eyes for a second and stared into the grey-black eggshell darkness of his mind. ‘I’m at an autopsy. It’s being held in the middle of a night, in some dead-end town I’ve never been to before. It’s not my case; the cop in charge has asked me to step in at the last minute. We’re all downstairs, in some kind of basement; looks more like a cellar in a house than an autopsy room. It’s cold and has the sweet stink of old sump oil and running damp. The walls are brick and painted white, the floor is black and hard and your feet crunch when you move, as though you are walking on broken glass. Rusty pipes run along the ceiling and hiss and rumble in a way that makes you think they are going to break and burst at any minute.’
She noted the vividness and starkness of his language, how even in his dreams Jack had a sharpened sense of observation, was aware of sounds, smells and even things under his feet that he couldn’t see.