Cooper, but your unsupported claims of the existence of Heaven would be thrown out of court by any judge.’
‘A Hell, but no Heaven? So you reckon the equation is a bit out of balance, then? How did that happen, Gavin? Some kind of design fault in Creation?’
‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ said Murfin, wagging a sugar-coated finger. ‘You’ll upset God.’
The phone rang, and Murfin answered it.
‘DC Murfin speaking. Oh, hi. Yes, OK.’ He held the phone out at arm’s length. ‘It’s for you, Ben.’
‘Who is it? God?’
‘No, but she thinks she is.’
Cooper took the phone, grimacing at Murfin. ‘Hello, Diane.’ ‘Drop anything else you’re doing, Ben,’ she said. ‘We need the whole team down here for a meeting with Dr Kane.’
‘The psychologist?’
‘Yes. We’re setting up in the conference room. I want you and Gavin here in ten minutes.’
194
17
Well, have you found the dead place? Or did you lose the scent? Strange, when the odour is so distinctive. Some say it’s sweet, like rotting fruit.
Did you know that you don’t have to step on a decomposing body to carry away its smell on your shoes? The soil around a corpse is soaked with all those volatile fatty acids produced by human decay. Our soft tissues all decompose, but some more quickly than others. The uterus can last for months - the organ of life surviving intact as the body festers around it. Just one of nature’s little jokes.
And then all we have left is the skeleton. The teeth, the skull, the gleaming bones. This is the final revelation. It’s the uncovering of truth. To most people, death is a dirty secret, a thing of shame, the last taboo. To me, it’s completion, the perfect conclusion. It’s my only chance to be free.
I’m close to perfection now, you see. And you’re going to be too late. You may never find the dead place at all. You may never meet my flesh eater.
‘There was a German psychoanalyst called Erich Fromm,’ said Dr Rosa Kane. ‘You might be interested in one of his personality theories.’
195
She stood at the head of the table, looking smart and self possessed. Fry was reminded of Professor Robertson in a perverse sort of way. Dr Kane seemed to be the modern, more acceptable face of the same school. She hadn’t hesitated when DI Hitchens had invited her to take the central role in the meeting.
‘Fromm believed that even the most severely neurotic person is at least trying to cope with life,’ said Kane. ‘He called that type “biophilous”, or life-loving. But there’s another type he refers to as “necrophilous” - the lovers of death.’
Fry looked around the table, and saw both Hitchens and Cooper writing the new words in their notebooks. The DI looked as though he might be having trouble with the spelling.
‘Necrophilous?’ he said.
‘Yes. These are people who have a passionate attraction to anything dead or decayed. It’s a passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive. Fromm called it “a passion to tear apart living structures”. Typically, the individual concerned will be comfortable with machinery, but won’t be able to cope with people.’
Fry frowned. ‘Why machinery?’
‘Anything mechanical is unalive, and therefore predictable and reliable. If a machine breaks down, you can figure out why, and repair it. But people aren’t like that. We can’t always understand why they behave the way they do.’
‘That’s certainly true of some people around here,’ said Murfin. But Dr Kane ignored him. She’d probably noticed that Murfin hadn’t opened his notebook. Chances were he didn’t even have a pen with him.
‘For a subject with this type of personality disorder,’ she said, ‘machines are vastly preferable. If they’re forced to deal with people, that’s when problems can arise. Human unpredictability appears threatening. A subject may feel the compulsion to render a living person unalive, to make them safe.’
That was too much. Fry felt the irritation boil over.
196
‘Render a person unalive? What sort of mealy-mouthed expression is that?’
Kane paused, pursed her lips and brushed back a strand of hair. She was silent for just long enough to make it clear she wasn’t going to respond to the question. She looked up at DI Hitchens.
‘In terms of an individual’s own distorted perceptions, such an act might be considered a form of self-defence,’ she said.
Fry snorted, and Hitchens glared at her.
‘There’s another thing that might help you,’ said Kane. ‘Personality disorders of this nature often become evident in childhood. But it generally requires some kind of traumatic experience to bring it to the surface, producing a child who clings to ritual as a source of security. Such a child will find predictability reassuring, even when it flies in the face of normal logic’
‘Can you give us an example?’ asked Hitchens.
‘Imagine that you’re a child, and your father sometimes beats you when he comes home drunk on a Saturday night. A normal child will keep his head down and hope his father won’t beat him this week. But if you’re this kind of child, it’s preferable for your father to beat you every Saturday night, rather than not knowing whether he will or won’t. Unpredictability is the most frightening thing, you see. A child in that situation might deliberately do something to enrage his father, to make sure that he’s beaten. Then he feels secure.’
‘Good God.’
Kane nodded. ‘It’s a difficult disorder to deal with. There are no cures, only ways of minimizing the effects - and then only if the condition is diagnosed before it’s too late.’
‘Too late?’ said Hitchens.
