girls and uncaught murderers.
'Sounds delightful,' Charlie said.
'My family's summer home is in the Cotswolds,' she said to the windshield.
Family. It finally occurred to my dense brain matter that maybe the English lady was married. I pictured a dry Cambridge professor or a balding vicar, a stooped guy in a tattered tweed coat puttering around a drafty house, stirring the fire with an ancient poker.
'My mother's home, really. It's been in the family for two hundred years.'
Mother, blessed mother.
'I keep a flat in London, of course. But every fortnight or so, it's ever so nice to go home. So peaceful. It's sheep country and some roads are rather primitive. The Range Rover is quite useful there.'
Aha. The crack about the Range Rover had drawn a response after all. So she wasn't ignoring me. And the enchantment of that crisp voice: rather primitive…quite useful. How do they learn that unhurried enunciation?
In the city she negotiated the traffic circles they call roundabouts, smoothly shifting and accelerating, rarely yielding the right of way. The rain-polished streets were jammed with spacious black taxis and double-decker buses. On the sidewalks, tidy, well-dressed businessmen and women poured from banks and shops, walking briskly, umbrellas poised against the chilly rain.
'Not much of a day for sight-seeing,' Pam Maxson said, 'but that's Trafalgar Square off to the right.'
I looked over my shoulder and caught sight of the National Gallery on one side and Buckingham Palace on the other and figured I had filled my culture quota for the trip.
Pam Maxson dropped us at our hotel for a quick shower before Charlie's first lecture at the Covent Hospital for the Criminally Insane. I was quicker than Charlie and in fifteen minutes found Pam sitting in a leather chair in the lobby, legs crossed, staring through large-rimmed eyeglasses at a bundle of papers in her lap.
She looked up, tossed the papers onto a side table, and slid the glasses on top of her head, brushing her hair back. 'Medical students write such rubbish,' she announced.
I nodded and sat down on a sofa facing her.
'So easy to condemn something they don't understand. So very avant-garde to denounce radical psychiatry.'
'Haven't heard of that,' I admitted.
'An unfortunate name for an innovative way of viewing psychiatric conditions. A radical psychiatrist would say that mental illness is a myth, that those we call mentally ill are just as rational as anyone else, from their own perspective.'
'You mean they're not crazy because they don't know they're crazy.'
'They're not crazy, as you say, because their actions are just as goal-directed and motivated as yours or mine. They are perfectly reasonable from their point of view.'
'That's nuts! I'm sorry…I mean it's just semantics. They're crazy or ill or whatever you call it because they can't conform to society's standards of normal behavior.'
She gave me the tolerant look an extraordinarily patient trainer might show to a particularly inept chimpanzee. 'You may be surprised to learn that some schizophrenics actually choose careers as mental patients. They appraise their alternatives in the outside world, then make a rational choice as to their actions.'
It didn't make sense to me, but then abstract concepts are not my strong point. 'If their actions are violent or bizarre, does it matter if we call them rational or not?' I asked.
'Perhaps not, but it affects the very roots of psychiatry. Radical psychiatrists argue that the unconscious is a myth, that all wishes, emotions, and feelings are conscious thoughts, and if not conscious, they don't exist at all.'
'Hold on. I thought the whole game you shrinks play is that the unconscious affects behavior.'
'Historically accurate, but our science is changing.'
'Are you saying it isn't the subconscious that causes someone to kill and kill again? Are you chucking out the old plea of not guilty by reason of insanity?'
'The fantasies acted out by serial murderers are clearly conscious. Your FBI has conducted lengthy interviews with imprisoned killers that demonstrate the extent of conscious fantasizing from the planning of the crime to the crime itself to disposal of the body.'
'But the fantasies are the product of the unconscious, aren't they?'
'Prove it,' she demanded.
Then it dawned on me. 'You're a radical psychiatrist.'
'Let's just say I have an open mind.'
I mulled that over a moment and she continued: 'Dr. Riggs rang me up about the second murder last week. The messages are quite interesting. Equus is a British work, you know.'
I knew.
'The protagonist is a psychiatrist, you know.'
I knew that, too.
'How do you interpret the Equus message?' she asked.
'I don't know. It was written to Mary Rosedahl by a professor who teaches drama when he isn't drunk. I was hoping you had some thoughts.'
'Well, one thing is quite obvious. Judging from the differences between the messages, I would say it is unlikely that the professor wrote both the Equus excerpt to Miss Rosedahl and the 'green, scaly monster' rejoinder to Miss Diamond.' I stayed quiet and she slid the glasses back down and looked directly at me. 'Additionally, you have the other messages to deal with. The Jack the Ripper taunt at the Diamond murder scene and the Tennyson poem at the Rosedahl scene. They are all so different, it is difficult to know where to begin.'
Now we were getting somewhere. I knew the lady shrink would be helpful. I was concentrating on every word, something made more difficult by the fact that her black wool skirt was starting to ride up her thighs. Her legs, as any objective eyewitness with moderate powers of observation could testify, were long and slender and carved from ivory. I forced myself to look at a spot in the middle of her forehead. 'I'm not sure I follow you,' I said.
'If you're trying to build a profile of the killer, you must be certain that the factors you build into it are derived from the killer. With these messages, some obviously are and some are not. But which? Equus is fiction, lyrical, and metaphorical. It's not about murder.'
'The boy blinds six horses with a spike. He is deranged, as the killer must be.'
'But the play is not about mutilating the horses, is it?'
As I thought it over, well-dressed London matrons carrying umbrellas began filling the lobby. The hotel apparently served an afternoon tea. Behind us, an elevator opened and some distinctively American voices-loud, complaining-filled the air. A family in warm-up suits and sneakers tromped out, festooned with video gear, the husband griping at a majestic decibel level about the price of fish and chips in SoHo.
'No,' I said finally. 'It's about materialism and the blandness of modern life, about our losing the capacity for passion.'
'Whereas the Jack the Ripper message is starkly literal, harshly real. A madman killing women and jeering at the authorities.'
'And you don't think the same person, the same killer, can be both literal and metaphorical?'
'It's unlikely, but the person who wrote the Equus note-'
'Professor Prince, by name.'
'— may well have written the Tennyson poetry at the second murder scene.'
'Whoa! Whoever wrote the poetry killed Mary Rosedahl. He left it for us just as the Ripper note was left at the Diamond scene.'
'Is the professor not the obvious suspect, a man who knows literature and drama?'
'Yes, but he doesn't seem capable-'
'Read me the poem, just the last two lines.'
I tried it with some feeling:
''Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.''
She raised her eyebrows and smiled an enigmatic smile. 'Now read this.' She reached into a folder and
