Troubled Blood

“Go on.”

“Margot Bamborough’s daughter,” said Dennis Creed, watching carefully for Strike’s reaction. “The husband gave up on her long since, but her daughter’ll be forty-odd now and she’ll be well-heeled. Whoever hired you’s got money. You won’t come cheap. I’ve read all about you, in the paper.

“The second possibility,” said Creed, when Strike didn’t respond, “is old Brian Tucker. He pops up every few years, making a spectacle of himself. Brian’s skint, though… or did he put out the begging bowl on the internet? Get on the computer and whine out some hard-luck story, so mugs send in cash? But I think, if he’d done that, it would’ve been in the papers.”

“D’you get online much?” asked Strike.

“We’re not allowed, in here,” said Creed. “Why are you wasting time? We’ve only got forty-five minutes. Ask a question.”

“That was a question, what I just asked you.”

“Why won’t you tell me which so-called victim you’re interested in?”

“‘So-called’ victim?”

“Arbitrary labels,” said Creed. “‘Victim.’ ‘Patient.’ This one deserves pity… this one gets caged. Maybe those women I killed were the real patients, and I’m the true victim?”

“Novel point of view,” said Strike.

“Yeah, well, does people good to hear novel points of view,” said Creed, pushing his glasses up his nose again. “Wake them up, if they’re capable of it.”

“What would you say you were curing those women of?”

“The infection of life? Diagnosis: life. Terminal. ‘Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled and the consoler…’”

(He’d slit open the corners of schoolgirl Geraldine Christie’s mouth, and photographed her crying and screaming, before, as he told her parents from the dock, slitting her throat because she was making so much noise.)

“‘… I am unique and conqueror. I am not of the slaves that perish.’ Know who said that?”

“Aleister Crowley,” said Strike.

“Unusual reading matter,” said Creed, “for a decorated soldier in the British army.”

“Oh, we’re all satanists on the sly,” said Strike.

“You think you’re joking,” said Creed, whose expression had become intense, “but you kill and you get given a medal and called a hero. I kill and get called evil and locked up forever. Arbitrary categories. Know what’s just down the road from here?”

“Sandhurst,” said Strike.

“Sandhurst,” repeated Creed, as though Strike hadn’t spoken. “Institutions for killers, side by side, one to make them, one to break them. Explain to me why’s it more moral to murder little brown children on Tony Blair’s say-so, than to do what I did? I’m made the way I am. Brain scans will show you, they’ve studied people like me. It’s how we’re wired. Why’s it more evil to kill because you’ve got to, because it’s your nature, than to blow up poor brown people because we want oil? Properly looked at, I’m the innocent, but I get fattened up and drugged like a captive pig, and you get a state pension.”

“Interesting argument,” said Strike. “So you had no control over what you did?”

“Control,” scoffed Creed, shaking his head. “That shows how far removed—I can’t explain it in terms someone like you would understand. ‘You have your way. I have my ways. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.’ Know who said that?”

“Sounds like Nietzsche,” said Strike.

“Nietzsche,” said Creed, talking over him. “Obviously, yes. I read a lot in Belmarsh, back before I got stuffed full of so many drugs I couldn’t concentrate from one end of the sentence to another.

“I’ve got diabetes now, did you know that?” Creed continued. “Yeah. Hospital-acquired diabetes. They took a thin, fit man, and piled the weight on me, with these drugs I don’t need and the pig-swill we’re forced to eat. Eight hundred so-called healers leeching a living off us. They need us ill, because we’re their livelihoods. Morlocks. Understand that word?”

“Fictional underbeings,” said Strike, “in The Time—”

“Obviously, yes,” said Creed again, who seemed irritated that Strike understood his references. “H. G. Wells. Primitive beings preying on the highly evolved species, who don’t realize they’re being farmed to eat. Except I realize it, I know what’s going on.”

“See yourself as one of the Eloi, do you?” asked Strike.

“Interesting thing about the Eloi,” said Creed, “is their total lack of conscience. The higher race is intellectual, refined, with no so-called remorse… I was exploring all this in my book, the book I was writing before they took it off me. Wells’s thing was only a superficial allegory, but he was groping toward a truth… What I was writing, part autobiography, part scientific treatise—but it was taken away from me, they’ve confiscated my manuscript. It could be an invaluable resource, but no, because it’s mine, it’s got to be destroyed. I’ve got an IQ of 140, but they want my brain flabby like my body.”

“You seem pretty alert to me. What drugs have they got you on?”

“I shouldn’t be on any drugs at all. I should be in assertive rehab but they won’t let me out of high dependency. They let the little schizophrenics loose in the workshops with knives over there, and I can’t have a pencil. When I came here, I thought I’d meet intelligent people… any child who can memorize a seven times table could be a doctor, it’s all rote learning and dogma. The patient’s supposed to be a partner in this therapeutic process, and I say I’m well enough to go back to prison.”

“Certainly seem sane to me,” said Strike.

“Thank you,” said Creed, who’d become flushed. “Thank you. You’re an intelligent man, it appears. I thought you would be. That’s why I agreed to this.”

“But you’re still on medication—”

“I know all about their drugs, and they’re giving me too much. I could prescribe better for myself than they know how to, here.”

“How d’you know about that stuff?” asked Strike.

“Obvious, easy,” said Creed, with a grandiose gesture. “I used myself as a guinea pig, developed my own series of standardized tests. How well I could walk and talk on twenty milligrams, thirty milligrams… made notes on disorientation, drowsiness, differences in side-effects…”

“What kinds of drugs were these?” asked Strike.

“Amobarbital, pentobarbital, phenobarbital,” rattled off Creed: the names of barbiturates of the early seventies, mostly replaced, now, by other drugs.

“Easy to buy on the street?”

“I only bought off the street occasionally, I had other channels, that were never widely known…”

And Creed launched into a meandering speech that couldn’t properly be called a story, because the narrative was disjointed and full of mysterious hints and oblique allusions, but the gist seemed to be that Creed had been associating with many unnamed but powerful people in the sixties and seventies, and that a steady supply of prescription drugs had been an incidental perk, either of working for gangsters, or spying on them for the authorities. He hinted at having been recruited by the security services, spoke of flights to America there was no evidence he’d ever taken, of barbiturate-addicted politicians and celebrities, and the dangerous desire of humans from all walks of life to dope themselves to cope with the cruel realities of the world, a tendency and temptation which Dennis Creed deplored and had always resisted.

Strike surmised that these fake reminiscences were designed to feed Creed’s overweening craving for status. No doubt his decades in high-security prisons and mental hospitals had taught him that rape and torture were considered almost as contemptible there as they’d been on the outside. He might continue to derive sexual pleasure from reliving his crimes, but in others, they elicited only contempt. Without a fantasy career in which he was part-spy, part-gangster, the man with the 140 IQ was merely a dry-cleaning delivery man, a sexual deviant buying handfuls of downers from street dealers who’d exploited, then betrayed him.

“… see all that security all round me, at the trial? There were other forces at play, that’s all I’ll say…”

There’d been a solid cordon of police around Creed on his way in and out of court because the crowd had wanted to tear him apart. The details of his torture chamber had leaked: police had found the hot-irons and the pliers, the ball gags and the whips, the photographs Creed had taken of his victims, alive and dead, and the decomposing head and hands of Andrea Hooton, sitting in his bathroom sink. But the image of himself Creed now presented Strike turned murder into something incidental to a much more prestigious criminal life, a hobby that for some reason the public continued to harp on, when there was so much more to tell, and admire.