Ploughing Potter’s Field. Phil Lovesey
a very dark and stupid time. I did things of which I’m still not proud, which even now I can’t fully explain or understand – but perhaps this is born out of a reluctance to do so.
There are some parts of all of us, I now recognize, which are graphically revealed in a crisis, and need one hell of a lot of honesty to accept. Even now, I have problems with the swiftness of my metamorphosis from happy-go-lucky copywriter to unstable drunk. I shudder at the ease with which I was unravelled.
Then came the move to Essex. Jemimah took charge and issued the ultimatum. She’d had enough. The family was moving from London. I could go with them, or stay and drink myself to death, but without her money or support. I was devastated, and in the selfish way alcoholics have, grew to hate her for making me choose.
Friends began calling less often, nervous of my unpredictable behaviour. Letters from estate agents began arriving. I was sleeping in the spare room when I could be bothered to get off the sofa. I had nothing in my life but alcohol.
One afternoon, Jemimah arrived back to tell me she’d exchanged on a place near Chelmsford. We had a God Almighty argument. And I hit her.
To this day, I hate myself for that drunken blow. She reeled back, shock and pain writ large on her reddening face. Juliet, our eldest, began to cry. I stormed out, spent two nights with a former colleague who persuaded me to get help. Thank God he did.
The message was stark. I was an alcoholic. Always would be. In less than six months I’d gone from a bloke who could have a couple of pints and leave, to someone who couldn’t face the day unless he had three large whiskys to take the edge off it. The only solution was to deny myself the solution. Either that or lose everything.
There were others there, that night. Broken individuals with similar tales, some spanning many years – but always at the heart, I felt, was a reluctance to look inside and face a particular truth which the alcohol blurred. I didn’t have the strength to face mine, preferring instead to soak up the group support, start the road to abstinence, persuade Jemimah that I recognized the problem, had taken steps to tackle it, was convinced I would beat it.
God love her – she tentatively agreed to ‘take me back’. I began the painful process of working out what 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