The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [16]
‘I take it you believe in evil, Professor Clarke.’
‘I’m an ethicist. It’s never been a subject that lends itself to definitive interpretation, to the black and white of easy answers, because even if you accept its existence, evil is still very difficult to define.’
Seaton nodded.
‘How we think about evil depends to a very great extent on what we as individuals can assimilate emotionally. It has always been more convenient to think of Hitler, for example, as mad rather than bad because of the sheer magnitude of his crimes. It’s somehow an easier option for us. It’s tempting to think because it’s more comfortable to contemplate than the alternative.’
Seaton nodded.
‘It also depends upon the prevailing mood of the times. In the nineteen sixties, I would have bet money that the murders and mutilations committed by the Yorkshire Ripper would have been regarded as atrocities carried out by a man driven to his crimes by insanity. But he was caught and tried in the early Thatcherite years by a judiciary determined to hold him to account for what he’d done. Thatcher’s government believed in the power and vote-winning popularity of public retribution. Do you remember the early nineteen eighties? Vengeance was the prevailing imperative among those who prosecuted the law. The Ripper was duly judged to be sane and convicted of multiple counts of murder. But he is still in Broadmoor rather than Belmarsh, Mr Seaton. And if you read the transcripts of the trial today, there is no doubt that Peter Sutcliffe was deeply and incurably insane.’
Seaton remembered the early 1980s, all right. They didn’t remind him of the Ripper trial, or Thatcherism either. He’d been in London. He’d been a junior reporter on a local London newspaper. His brother had been a student, on the painting course at St Martin’s School of Art, with a shared studio on the fifth floor of the Charing Cross Road building that led to the rooftop by a fire escape. He remembered long afternoons on that roof during the early months of a scorching summer a dozen years ago, spent drinking Italian wine bought in Soho. He recalled evenings with girls studying fashion, which travelled from the Cambridge pub to the Soho Brasserie to Le Beat Route or Club Left or the Wag Club. He remembered ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’ on the jukebox upstairs at the Cambridge. He remembered reading about the Ripper trial and the Falklands War and the simmer of industrial dissent in the pits of North Yorkshire. He recalled vividly enough the red banner outside County Hall, flagging the unemployment figure to taunt the government sitting in the House of Commons, opposite. He’d attended Pogues gigs in Kilburn on St Patrick’s Day and followed Liverpool’s epic form in Europe and the league. But he hadn’t analysed the moral imperatives of Thatcherism. He’d been far too busy having a good time. Ethics had been a subject unknown to him. But then he’d been blissfully ignorant about black magic in those days, too.
Clarke cleared his throat and above him, the strip light in his office flickered and briefly threatened life. He pushed his glasses back against the bridge of his nose and Seaton saw that his hand was shaking. It was hard not to feel pity for him. He was seeking solace in the relative certainty of what he had studied, what he thought he knew. But soon he would have to leave the sure footing of familiar territory. He would have to wander into the darkness again, eventually.
‘Society believes in the notion of places as evil, I think. And the authorities act in a way that perpetuates this superstition. So Ten Rillington Place was demolished after Christie was caught and convicted and hanged. It is almost as though we believe retribution can be exacted against bricks and mortar. Which, of course, it can’t. And, by contrast, tourists pay to get into the Tower of London to gawk at instruments of torture.’
‘Most of them Victorian forgeries,’ Seaton said.
‘Tourists travel to Auschwitz. Where nothing needs to be faked. Where you cannot exaggerate the horrors.’ The professor