Cabal

‘Look at them again.’

‘No,’ Boone insisted. ‘I can’t.’

He heard the doctor inhale, and half expected a demand that he face the horrors afresh. But instead Decker’s tone was placatory.

‘It’s all right, Aaron,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. I’ll put them away.’

Boone pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. His sockets were hot, and wet.

‘They’re gone, Aaron,’ Decker said.

‘No, they’re not.’

They were with him still, perfectly remembered. Eleven rooms and eleven bodies, fixed in his mind’s eye, beyond exorcism. The wall Decker had taken five years to build had been brought down in as many minutes, and by its architect. Boone was at the mercy of his madness again. He heard it whine in his head, coming from eleven slit windpipes from eleven punctured bellies. Breath and bowel gas, singing the old mad songs.

Why had his defences tumbled so easily, after so much labour? His eyes knew the answer, spilling tears to admit what his tongue couldn’t. He was guilty. Why else? Hands he was even now wiping dry on his trousers had tortured and slaughtered. If he pretended otherwise he’d only tempt them to further crime. Better that he confessed, though he remembered nothing, than offer them another unguarded moment.

He turned and faced Decker. The photographs had been gathered up and laid face down on the table.

‘You remember something?’ the doctor said, reading the change on Boone’s face.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘What?’

‘I did it,’ Boone said simply. ‘I did it all.’

II Academy (#ulink_7cf947b6-a4dc-58cf-92fb-eee05766d72c)

1

Decker was the most benign prosecutor any accused man could ask for. The hours he spent with Boone after that first day were filled with carefully plied questions as – murder by murder – they examined together the evidence for Boone’s secret life. Despite the patient’s insistence that the crimes were his, Decker counselled caution. Admissions of culpability were not hard evidence. They had to be certain that confession wasn’t simply Boone’s self-destructive tendencies at work, admitting to the crime out of hunger for the punishment.

Boone was in no position to argue. Decker knew him better than he knew himself. Nor had he forgotten Decker’s observation that if the worst was proved true, the doctor’s reputation as a healer would be thrown to the dogs: they could neither of them afford to be wrong. The only way to be sure was to run through the details of the killings – dates, names and locations – in the hope that Boone would be prompted into remembering. Or else that they’d discover a killing that had occurred when he was indisputably in the company of others.

The only part of the process Boone balked at was reexamining the photographs. He resisted Decker’s gentle pressure for forty-eight hours, only conceding when the gentility faltered and Decker rounded on him, accusing him of cowardice and deceit. Was all this just a game, Decker demanded; an exercise in self-mortification that would end with them both none the wiser? If so, Boone could get the hell out of his office now and bleed on somebody else’s time.

Boone agreed to study the photographs.

There was nothing in them that jogged his memory. Much of the detail of the rooms had been washed out by the flash of the camera; what remained was commonplace. The only sight that might have won a response from him – the faces of the victims – had been erased by the killer, hacked beyond recognition; the most expert of morticians would not be able to piece those shattered façades together again. So it was all down to the petty details of where Boone had been on this night or that; with whom; doing what. He had never kept a diary so verifying the facts was difficult, but most of the time – barring the hours he spent with Lori or Decker, none of which seemed to coincide with murder nights – he was alone, and without alibi. By the end of the fourth day the case against him began to look very persuasive.

‘Enough,’ he told Decker. ‘We’ve done enough.’

‘I’d like to go over it all one more time.’

‘What’s the use?’ Boone said. ‘I want to get it all finished with.’

In the past days – and nights – many of the old symptoms, the signs of the sickness he thought he’d been so close to throwing off forever, had returned. He could sleep for no more than minutes at a time before appalling visions threw him into befuddled wakefulness; he couldn’t eat properly; he was trembling from his gut outwards, every minute of the day. He wanted an end to this; wanted to spill the story and be punished.

‘Give me a little more time,’ Decker said. ‘If we go to the police now they’ll take you out of my hands. They probably won’t even allow me access to you. You’ll be alone.’

‘I already am,’ Boone replied. Since he’d first seen the photographs he’d cut himself off from every contact, even with Lori, fearing his capacity to do harm.

‘I’m a monster,’ he said. ‘We both of us know that. We’ve got all the evidence we need.’

‘It’s not just a question of evidence.’

‘What then?’

Decker leaned against the window frame, his bulk a burden to him of late.

‘I don’t understand you, Boone,’ he said.

Boone’s gaze moved off from man to sky. There was a wind from the south-east today; scraps of cloud hurried before it. A good life, Boone thought, to be up there, lighter than air. Here everything was heavy; flesh and guilt cracking your spine.

‘I’ve spent four years trying to understand your illness, hoping I could cure it. And I thought I was succeeding. Thought there was a chance it would all come clear …’

He fell silent, in the pit of his failure. Boone was not so immersed in his own agonies he couldn’t see how profoundly the man suffered. But he could do nothing to mitigate that hurt. He just watched the clouds pass, up there in the light, and knew there were only dark times ahead.

‘When the police take you …’ Decker murmured, ‘it won’t just be you who’s alone, Boone. I’ll be alone too. You’ll be somebody else’s patient: some criminal psychologist. I won’t have access to you any longer. That’s why I’m asking … Give me a little more time. Let me understand as much as I can before it’s over between us.’

He’s talking like a lover, Boone vaguely thought; like what’s between us is his life.

‘I know you’re in pain,’ Decker went on. ‘So I’ve got medication for you. Pills, to keep the worst of it at bay. Just till we’ve finished –’

‘I don’t trust myself,’ Boone said. ‘I could hurt somebody.’

‘You won’t,’ Decker replied, with welcome certainty. ‘The drugs’ll keep you subdued through the night. The rest of the time you’ll be with me. You’ll be safe with me.’

‘How much longer do you want?’

‘A few days, at the most. That’s not so much to ask, is it? I need to know why we failed.’

The thought of re-treading that bloodied ground was abhorrent, but there was a debt here to be paid. With Decker’s help he’d had a glimpse of new possibilities; he owed the doctor the chance to snatch something from the ruins of that vision.

‘Make it quick,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ Decker said. ‘This means a lot to me.’

‘And I’ll need the pills.’

2

The pills he had. Decker made sure of that. Pills so strong he wasn’t sure he could have named himself correctly once he’d taken them. Pills that made sleep easy, and waking a visit to a half-life he was happy to escape from again. Pills that, within twenty-four hours, he was addicted to.

Decker’s word was good. When he asked for more they were supplied, and under their soporific influence they went back to the business of the evidence, as the doctor went over, and over again, the details of Boone’s crimes, in the hope of comprehending them. But nothing came clear. All Boone’s increasingly passive mind could recover from these sessions were slurred images of doors he’d slipped through and stairs he’d climbed in the performance of murder. He was less and less aware of Decker, still fighting to salvage something of worth from his patient’s closed mind. All Boone knew now was sleep, and guilt, and the hope, increasingly cherished, of an end to both.

Only Lori, or rather memories of her, pricked the drugs’ regime. He could hear her voice sometimes, in his inner ear, clear as a bell, repeating words she’d spoken to him in some casual conversation, which he was dredging up from the past. There was nothing of consequence in these phrases; they were perhaps associated with a look he’d treasured, or a touch. Now he could remember neither look nor touch – the drugs had removed so much of his capacity to imagine. All he was left with were these dislocated lines, distressing him not simply because they were spoken as if by somebody at his shoulder, but because they had no context that he could recall. And worse than either, their sound reminded him of the woman he’d loved and would not see again, unless across a courtroom. A woman to whom he had made a promise he’d broken within weeks of his making it. In his wretchedness, his thoughts barely cogent, that broken promise was as monstrous as the crimes in the photographs. It fitted him for Hell.