Kings of Many Castles

“Restful things, plants.”

“I’ve come about the Moscow tapes.”

“I know. See that plant there? Dionaea Muscipula. Have to feed it flies and insects. Isn’t it pretty?”

“Do you mind if I wait outside? I find it very hot in here.”

The man turned for the first time, fixing Charlie with pale blue eyes. “Hot? You think so?”

“Very much so.” Nolan wasn’t sweating at all, Charlie saw. The man’s cardigan was thick, all the buttons secured.

“If you need to. Shan’t be long.”

Charlie returned gratefully to the outside corridor, feeling the sweat dry upon him, wondering if he’d make his second meeting with Geoffrey Robertson. When he’d telephoned the pathologist the man had said he could only give him ten minutes and insisted Charlie be on time, an hour from now.

Charlie heard the shuffled scuff of Nolan’s approach before he saw the man. He was talking to himself when he finally appeared. Or maybe, Charlie thought, he was talking to the plants. He’d read that people did.

“Come on,” said Nolan, as he past, and Charlie obediently followed. Over his shoulder Nolan said, “Like to meet your man. Interesting.”

“I appreciate the difficulty of what I’m asking, your not being able to do that.”

“Awkward but not a problem,” said the psychiatrist. “Some things are fairly obvious, others not.”

Although he’d never actually seen one Charlie decided Nolan’s office looked like the inside of a bear’s cave after a winter’s hibernation. It was a completely shelved cavern of books which overflowed on to the floor and on to overstuffed leather chairs and acouch, interspersed with apparently discarded papers and magazines and occasionally skeletal newspapers from which articles had been clipped. The debris was so great that there were clearly delineated paths through it, the most obvious to the overwhelmed, leathertopped desk, with side alleys to the bookshelves.

“There’s a chair …” said Nolan, waving to his right with a distracted arm, as if he’d forgotten where one might be. When the man snapped his desk light on Charlie saw his tapes and their transcripts were neatly- surprisingly-stacked next to a pocket-sized replay machine.

“I’m only able to give you-to suggest-a general picture,” began Nolan, abruptly professional. “There are clear indications of a schizophrenia, which is too often used as a catch-all when people like myself can’t think of a more positive diagnosis. We’re not going to go all Hollywood and suggest there are strange voices telling Bendall what to do. I suspect, though, that he’s obsessional. He’d be very susceptible to being told what to do, particularly if he loved or felt particularly close to the person giving the instructions …”

“What about more than one person? A group?” interrupted Charlie.

Nolan pursed his lips. “Possible but there would still need to be one person in that group upon whom he would need to focus. But certainly a group could be important to him. Your notes were helpful. He’s classically dysfunctional, alienated from a splintered home. That’s why the army might have been attractive to him: somewhere in which he might have felt embraced, a family he did know or have. But I think it would have been too big, too amorphous. But a group, a brotherhood, wouldn’t have been. And let’s get a correction in here, because it’s important. All the interviews so far have been wrongly directed, the Americans most of all. Bendall needs to be encouraged-praised, admired, loved if you like, not ridiculed which has been the tone of everything I’ve listened to so far, with yours as a possible, partial exception. From what you’ve said in your notes, there’s certainly more than one person-a conspiracy-involved here but Bendall did what he did to become admired by his friends, in the same mentally disturbed way that loners have attacked-killed-famous people, to become famous themselves …”

“Did he-does he-know what he was doing?” broke in Charlie again.

“Very much so. That’s part of it, a very important part. That’s your way forward, when you talk to him again?”

“How can I get him to tell me who the others are?”

Nolan gestured uncertainly. “From your interview, more than any of the others, I got the impression that he wants to tell someone: after all his life being discarded and down trodden he’s suddenly someone, the object of everyone’s attention. He wasn’t just being used physically, to fire a rifle. He was being used-manipulated-mentally. Those short, staccato replies to you are indicative. He believed he was playing with you: testing you out. Let him go on thinking that. Let him think he’s superior, in charge.”

“There’s something that wasn’t in my notes, that I’ve only just discovered,” said Charlie. “Somehow-I don’t know how-Bendall was administered with an unauthorized drug, thiopentone. It could have been during the American interview when he broke down. Could that have any long term effects, combined with the other drugs with which he’s being treated: affect, in fact, how he might be in any future sessions?”

Nolan humped his shoulders. “You know what the prescribed drugs are?”

Charlie felt a burn of embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

“Now he’s well out of surgery I guess it’ll just be some type of sedative,” suggested the psychiatrist. “Thiopentone shouldn’t react against any of the barbiturates.”

“So it wouldn’t have caused that outburst, during the American session?”

The psychiatrist shook his head. “That was far more likely to have been caused by the way he was being talked to. He was being ridiculed, which was how he’s been treated all his life. He simply closed himself down.”

“Why did he break all the models he made, which his mother told me he did?”

“Models of things that moved, could have taken him away from an existence he hated, had they been real,” Noland judged. “That was his physical way of showing that hatred of his surrounding-smakinghis imagined escape and then smashing it-before he began showing the actual violence towards others.”

“Can I send you other tapes?”

“I’d like you to. I’ve never worked like this before: as I said, it’s interesting. And remember something else I told you. Let him think he’s superior: cleverer. You going to find that difficult?”

“Not at all,” said Charlie. “I’ve been doing that all my life.”

The pathologist was wearing a clean laboratory coat but it was again at least two sizes too small. Geoffrey Robertson gave the same answer as the psychiatrist when asked about thiopentone but promised to get a definitive assessment from a pharmacologist if Charlie sent back from Moscow George Bendall’s complete medication list.

“Can’t understand the point of it being done,” said the man.

“That is the point of it being done,” said Charlie. “For people not to be able to understand why. And it’s working brilliantly.”

With the need-minimally productive though it turned out-for a second meeting with the pathologist Charlie had put back for an hour his appointment with the ballistics expert at the Woolwich Arsenal. But he was still late and knew at once from the man’s demeanor that Archibald Snelling had fantasized for the further delayed thirty minutes about the toothbrushed lavatory cleaning sentence he would have imposed in a much mourned earlier army career. From the man’s disapproving, top to toe and sideways examination, Charlie guessed his appearance would probably have got him denied the toothbrush and that he would have had to scour with his bare hands, if not his own toothbrush. Snelling had to be almost two meters tall and although there was a slight stomach sag in the parade ground rigidity his voice retained the come-to-attention bark. Into the man’s office, which actually did overlook a parade ground, came the occasional and distant sound of a weapon being discharged. The only chair available was straight-backed and wooden-seated and Charlie turned and sat with one arm crooked over its rear rail, just for the hell of it. Snelling was sitting to attention, shoulders squared, ramrod straight.

“You got something more to tell me!” demanded Snelling, at once.

“I’d hoped you’d have something to tell me,” retorted Charlie. The aggressiveness was an abrupt contrast with the attempted helpfulness of the other specialists that day but then, remembered Charlie, he had shown the man-or his colleagues-to be lacking. Charlie was more irritated than offended; he certainly wasn’t intimidated.

“I don’t understand,” complained the man.

“I don’t, either,” said Charlie. “It might help if you explained in more detail what the problem is.”

“You don’t have another Dragunov? Photographs?”

Charlie’s feet twitched, in aching unison. Slowly he said, “Why would you expect me to have another