I wanted to ‘do’ with the rest of my life, finally realizing what a privileged position I was in. I could start again, a new life, new friends, new interests, a phoenix rising from the ruins of my own self-destruction. And after a few weeks settling into our new home I was off the sauce, had joined a local gym and, more importantly, had the answer to my new direction.
During the move to Chelmsford, I’d rediscovered an old hoard of crime magazines I’d collected as a youngster, sensational articles offering a tabloid insight into the minds and motives of the evil perpetrators. Rereading them, I found myself fascinated by both the crimes and criminals, wondering what lay at the heart of the human psyche. It seemed incredible to me that humanity, universally acknowledged as an exploratory creature, could put a man on the moon without ever having fully explored his mind.
What shapes the most deviant individuals – brain dysfunction, environmental factors, the past, or perhaps a fatal cocktail of all three? Or is it simply that some of us are born with a terrifying predilection for evil?
The questions fought for space in my mind, as I began to realize I was developing an obsession with human psychology. I began subscribing to modern crime mags, immersing myself in the twisted worlds of current-day serial killers and psychopaths, child-murderers, Satanists and worse. And yet it seemed to me that the more I ‘discovered’ the less I actually knew. Each publication was merely concerned with sensational grisly details to ensure higher sales. Indeed, sometimes I found myself wondering about the appetite for such bloodthirsty material, speculating that perhaps we hadn’t actually evolved all that much since thousands turned up to witness a handful of Christians thrown to hungry lions.
But I too, was hooked. I may have tried to cloak my interest in academic terms, convincing myself I had superior motives for buying the glossy mags and tabloids, but the result was the same, I paid my money – I participated in the voyeuristic merchandising of insanity and pain.
Then one day – a breakthrough. Waiting in Chelmsford Central Library to check out another volume dedicated to the ongoing mystery of Jack the Ripper, I began leafing through a local prospectus. The University of Essex offered a reasonably well-thought-of degree in psychology. Perhaps this was a start then, a move in the right direction. After talking it over with Jemimah, we agreed I should apply. She was still happy enough working at the agency, and provided I really was serious about it, she’d fund my enthusiasm. I was taken on as a mature student the following September.
I worked harder than I’d ever done, couldn’t get enough of the subject, eating up theories, devouring vast textbooks, ingesting all that was said in every lecture and tutorial. I was motivated, sober, deliriously happy with my second shot at life.
Former friends visiting the Rawlingses’ Essex retreat for dinner would often make the mistake of complimenting me on my willpower, watching as I drank mineral water while they knocked back the hard stuff. I was always quick to correct them. It had nothing to do with willpower – fear was the key. I’d already teetered at the edge of my sanity once, nothing would persuade me to do so again. Or so I thought at the time.
Three years later, the BA (hons) became an MA, with Dr Clancy telling me I had the talent to ride it all the way to PhD in forensic psychiatry if I wanted to.
I dedicated myself to finding a thesis subject. There was so much to choose from, but eventually decided to settle on the media’s easy obsession with ‘evil’, and the damage it caused to proper psychological investigation. I worked hard. Cases like the Wests’, Dunblane and numerous others seemed to spring from quiet suburban backwaters almost every month as I toiled away on my researches. And as each horrifying case broke, I found myself ever more on the ‘side’ of the perpetrators, rationalizing that there had to be some concrete reasons why they’d done whatever they’d been accused of. Concrete beyond the media’s constant assertion that they were simply ‘evil’, anyway.
Next I learnt that the Home Office had agreed to partially fund a series of PhD students through their thesis years if they participated in a national data-gathering exercise for a brand-new law-enforcement initiative identifying behavioural characteristics of incarcerated psychopaths.
Or, as Fancy put it, they’d stump up a few readies if I agreed to ask a nutter some personal questions. The programme had been up and running for a few years, and research gathered had apparently proved invaluable in lobbying the relevant parties for a change in the judicial understanding of random violence.
‘Bugger it, Adrian,’ Fancy’d said by way of explanation. ‘You only have to look at the States to see what a balls-up they’re making of it. Defence attorneys are pressing for the admission of “the crime gene” in order to get their psychos out of the death chamber. Like the murdering sods are somehow born to kill, genetically programmed, so it’s not their fault. Preposterous!’
‘And you say what?’ I replied. ‘That every lunatic is morally responsible for the actions he commits?’
‘We’re not that far, Adrian. We need more data. Will you do it? It’s bang up your street, nature of evil and all that.’
My thesis, the magnum opus – The acceptance of Evil as a resultant supernatural force actively prohibits positive psycho-social studies into the internal and external factors influencing random, unmotivated violence’ by Adrian Rawlings (soon to be) PhD.
So I agreed, both trepidacious and excited. Here was a chance to actually step inside a secure mental institution, converse with an inmate, form some kind of temporary relationship, perhaps even finally come to terms with what lured me to the analysis of violence in the first place.
It had been bothering me for some time, silently, something I tried my best to suppress, keep from friends and family. But late at night, while I worked in the gloom of a computer screen, it was always there, a warning keen to be heard and analysed, a fear which had wound its way effortlessly into my psyche, mocking my attempts to reinvent myself over the last ten years.
Maybe longer. The longer I worked at trying to understand the human mind, the more I began to analyse my own. I was finally beginning to have some understanding of my own inadequacies. The reason I had drunk so passionately was a good deal greater than simply hitting my thirties, redundant and shit-scared. No – it was for far simpler, far darker reasons. The more I drank, the less I needed to answer the real questions gently swelling and beginning their way up from deep down inside. Questions I’d buried from childhood and adolescence. Questions which the redundancy had thrown up, and which I feared would never go away.
Fancy duly put my name forward to Dr Neil Allen at HMP Oakwood High Security Mental Hospital, and after a short submission on my part detailing my willingness to compile relevant data regarding antisocial behaviour disorders, I was duly accepted and funded.
‘Game on!’ Fancy had beamed when telling me the good news. ‘A year from now and I’ll be calling the man “Doctor”.’
Fancy rang late the following Thursday night.
‘He’s gone for it, Adrian.’
‘Rattigan?’ I answered nervously.
‘Wants to see you tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Shit! So soon?’
‘Told you he would. They all do.’
‘Jesus. Tomorrow?’
‘Don’t worry. Pop into the uni. on the way. See me before ten. I’ll give you all you need to know. And Adrian?’ His voice was deadly serious. ‘Remember, you get in, you do this, you get out. You’re the boss. It
