Jake Lassiter - 02 - Night Vision Page 20

  Charlie stepped between us just as the valet swung the Land Rover under the portico. “Now, now. I see the truce lasted all of one day. Jake, why not let Dr. Maxson drive? She knows the route and…”

  I ran a Z-pattern that Jerry Rice would admire and grabbed the keys from the valet. The doorman, a tall fellow in a red tunic and a fur hat two feet high, tried to stow our bags, but I grabbed those, too, and tossed them unceremoniously in back. Then I boldly opened the door, slid behind the steering wheel, and slammed the door behind me like a spoiled brat who’s fled to his room.

  Only I wasn’t behind the steering wheel at all. Because the wheel was on the right, and I had gotten in on the left. This wasn’t my ancient convertible in the good old U.S. of A. This was a lady psychiatrist’s thirty-grand-plus glorified jeep in a country where they talk funny and drive on the wrong side of the road. I remembered all the movies where the guy walks into the closet, thinking it’s the front door. No wonder they stay inside. There’s no graceful way out.

  Finally Pam Maxson came around to my side, opened the door, and showed the barest hint of a smile. Not a supercilious or condescending smile. More of a tolerant one. I got out without pouting and she got in without any help from me. I headed to the other side while Charlie climbed into the back. The doorman watched with as much amusement as they allow and gave me a “very good, sir” when I palmed him a two-quid tip.

  I didn’t have any trouble the first hundred yards. But hitting second gear brought the clang of metal on metal. “Whoops,” I apologized, “not used to shifting with my left hand.”

  I felt spastic. Kensington Road was no problem until I ran over the curb. Cars coming at me on the right made me pull harder left. The bumper is made to bounce off elephants, so the Rover was fine, and so was the guy whose newspaper kiosk I had flattened, once I gave him a wad of bills.

  “Why not let Pamela drive until we’re out of the city?” Charlie suggested.

  It was two against one, so we switched places again. The rain let up, and the sun peeked out of some low-hanging gray clouds. Pam Maxson said, “There’s someplace I want you to see.” She wound off the main streets and through a series of turns and kept driving until we pulled into a narrow alley in a part of the city they don’t show in the tourist brochures. Abandoned warehouses, empty windows gaping like missing teeth, lined each side. A few delivery trucks drove by, but there was no foot traffic.

  “On these very cobblestones,” Pam Maxson said, “Jack the Ripper stalked and killed.”

  “Of course, Whitechapel!” Charlie Riggs was as delighted as a country priest whisked to the Vatican.

  Pam stopped, put on the parking brake, and we got out. It was mid-morning, but my mind conjured pictures of foggy nights and gas lit streets. “August thirty-first, 1888,” Pam said. “Mary Ann Nicholls. Throat slashed, nearly severing her head. Nine days later, Annie Chapman, stomach slashed, intestines draped round her neck. September thirtieth, Elizabeth Stride, throat slashed and on the same night, Catherine Eddowes, throat slashed, body mutilated. Finally on November ninth, Mary Jane Kelly, throat slashed and body severely mutilated.”

  “All prostitutes, all slain within a stone’s throw of each other,” Charlie whispered in reverent tones.

  “Then the killings stopped,” I said. “Why?”

  “There are all sorts of theories, mostly rubbish,” Pam said. “The murders have been blamed on everyone from Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Eddy, to Freemasons. Some believe that Montague John Druitt, a failed barrister, was the killer. He ended up floating in the Thames not long after the last killing. Others believe he was a scapegoat, used to cover a scandal involving the royal family.”

  “In any event,” Charlie said, “the killer was never caught and his motives never known.”

  “But we’ve come such a long way since then,” I said, “with all our psychological profiles and investigative techniques.”

  “One would think so,” Pam said, “but it took five years and thirteen killings before the Yorkshire Ripper was captured.”

  “A baker’s dozen,” Charlie said, shaking his head.

  We stood, peering into the shell of what Pam said had been a slaughterhouse, the wooden floor stained black from dripping carcasses. “He hired prostitutes, smashed them on the head with a hammer, then stabbed them with a screwdriver. The psychological profile built a picture of a socially incompetent, unattractive loner living in a furnished room. Turned out he was a happily married lorry driver, a decent-looking fellow with a trimmed beard, who lived with his pretty wife in a two-story house with two cars in the garage.”

  “Go figure,” I said.

  “The investigation cost four million pounds, the police interviewed three-hundred-thousand persons, and the man was captured only when he was found with a prostitute in a car with stolen license plates.”

  “It’s often that way,” Charlie said. “All the computers and all the files go for naught, but then a tiny slip, and the bugger’s caught.”

  We all smiled at Charlie’s unintentional rhyme and headed back for the Rover. Pam opened the passenger door for herself and tossed me the keys. “Drive,” she said.

  ***

  Somewhere near Oxford on M-40 I finally got the hang of it, easing into a speed lane and letting the Rover purr. That seemed to relax everybody. Charlie fell asleep in the back and Pam stirred a little. “Did you learn anything from my group?” she asked.

  “Only to follow the backward elbow strike with a left jab if there’s a guy in front of me.”

  “Other than the fisticuffs.”

  “I’m not sure. Clarence was highly manipulative. The Fireman seemed dangerous, or at least wanted to appear that way. Ken was inscrutable, and Stephanie was—as the kids used to say—a trip.”

  “It may be,” Pam said, watching the roadside fly by, “that you don’t have enough information yet about your killer.”

  “I’ve got everything the cops have put together.”

  “But they have only two victims. You may need…”

  She stopped, both of us realizing the horror when bodies become data, mere input for the computerized profile, grist for the thesis and the government grant.

  “There will be more deaths, won’t there?” I asked.

  “Yes, if the first two, or either of them, was a motiveless murder. If a psychopath is about.”

  I heard Charlie snoring in the backseat. I turned and saw him curled contentedly in the fetal position, his mackinaw under his head for a pillow. Probably dreaming of a historic autopsy where he found a rare poison in the pancreas.

  I opened a window and let the crisp air fill the Rover. I had sore ribs and an angry red knot was blossoming on my temple, but it was turning into a fine day in the English countryside. I turned and looked at the beautiful woman sitting next to me. I wondered why I misfired with her at every opportunity. She seemed genuinely peeved about my conduct at the hospital.

  I decided to confess. “I was scared.”

  She looked at me skeptically.

  “In the hospital with four lunatic killers and your two minimum-wage goons.”

  “There was no reason to be frightened of the group. They only kill women, you know.”

  “And their reasons for killing women?”

  “Answering that question is my life’s work. But we’re talking about you. What frightened you?”

  “Confinement, I guess. Claustrophobia, maybe. Not being able to come and go. Having hands laid on me. Plus the fear of getting knocked around by a couple of guys who know how to inflict pain without leaving scars.”

  “I see.” She bit her lower lip and seemed to ponder my case. She was staring straight out the windshield, or windscreen, as she called it when we stopped for petrol, but she was thinking about me. I liked the attention. But I didn’t know if she was interested in the big lummox as a person or merely an interesting case study. Freud had his Rat Man; maybe Maxson wanted her Macho Man. “I wonder,” she said delicately, “if you
are using claustrophobia in a colloquial sense or if you have a true phobia, an anxiety far out of proportion to its danger.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “As for Clive and Francis, with your background as a footballer, you can certainly handle yourself, as you proved.”

  I passed a double trailer in fifth gear and looked straight ahead. “But I was afraid, even then.”

  “Afraid, playing your game?”

  I nodded.

  “Afraid of what? Losing?”

  “The pain, both physical and emotional. Getting hurt, getting embarrassed. I was always one step from getting cut.”

  “Cut?”

  “Fired, canned, let out to pasture.”

  I politely allowed a Jaguar to take me on the right side. Pam seemed to be mulling over the contradictions of the ex-linebacker admitting his weaknesses. She inched closer in the seat. Maybe she liked me better this way, two hundred twenty-five pounds of neuroses. “What caused these fears?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “We could find out, you know.”

  “You mean analysis.”

  She nodded happily. “Let’s call it a preliminary inquiry concerning your mental health.”

  “Fire when ready.”

  “Did you like playing your game?”

  “The game…the game is stupid!” I stopped short. I’d never said that before, never even thought it, not consciously at least. Then I wondered if there is a subconscious. Or was I becoming a radical psychojock?

  “What makes it stupid?” she asked.

  I kept my eyes on the road. “Let’s start with the uniform.”

  “Those knickers and plastic hats.”

  I nodded. “And the game itself, smashing into each other at full speed, pushing an odd-shaped ball a hundred yards, back and forth, according to a set of arbitrary rules. Only one forward pass per down, can’t touch a receiver when the ball’s in the air, offensive line can’t hold but they all do. Viewed objectively, it’s a pretty stupid game and a pretty stupid way to make a living.”

  Her eyes brightened. “But the smashing was a release of hostility like steam from a kettle. Or is there another reason you chose a profession certain to cause you anxiety and conflict? That’s a classic counter-phobic attitude, you know, taking pleasure in precisely the activity that arouses anxiety. And when you derive satisfaction from triumphing over the anxiety, it’s just a manifestation of a manic defense.”

  “Something like a pass prevent?”

  “More like an all-out blitz.”

  My foot slipped off the gas pedal and I gaped at her, astounded.

  She shrugged. “I’ve done a little research on your game, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “To better understand you. Why do you suppose you derived pleasure from the smashing and hitting?”

  “Isn’t my fifty minutes up, doctor?”

  “Please. Don’t joke your way out of this. We’re making progress concerning the omnipotence you felt from mastering your fear of pain and failure.”

  “I never felt omnipotent getting blind-sided by the tight end.”

  She settled back into her seat, annoyed. “Perhaps that’s all we can accomplish for today.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments, and then she pointed to the left to keep me from missing the turn toward Chipping Camden, ancestral home of the Maxson clan. If I’d stayed on the highway, we’d have headed straight for Stratford-on-Avon, and my mind wandered to Professor Prince and whether he ever played Hamlet in his meanderings.

  After a while Pam Maxson asked, “You don’t want to explore what’s under the surface, do you?”

  That started something buzzing in the back of my mind. What was it?

  “On the flight over here,” I said, stirring up a fuzzy memory, “I dreamed about you.”

  “Oh!” She straightened, tugging at the harness restraint. She was genuinely excited, whether from professional or personal curiosity I still didn’t know.

  “Yes, but it’s hard to remember. I fell asleep thinking about you and woke up the same way, and in between…”

  “Yes, yes. Think about it.”

  “You were in Miami. You must have been, because it was very warm. And we were on the beach.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “We?”

  “You and me. I was rigging a sailboard.”

  She gave me a quizzical look.

  “A Windsurfer,” I said. “It was one of those spring days, a strong warm wind from the east, whitecaps on the water, sand blowing down the beach. I was tying the boom to the mast, and you were next to me. Yes, I see it now, in a bikini!”

  “Indeed?”

  “A red bikini, and your hair was blowing downwind. And you were saying something. What the hell was it?”

  She didn’t know and I didn’t either, but I dredged it up, or was I making it up? Dreams are so fuzzy, who can tell? I thought of George in Virginia Woolf, unable, or unwilling, to distinguish truth from illusion. The thought was there, so I spit it out. “You said, ‘Jake, I can’t hold on.’”

  She leaned closer. “Hold on to what, or to whom?”

  I wrinkled my forehead and thought some more. “I don’t know. That’s all I can remember. But you were frightened, and so was I.”

  “The sensation of falling is a common dream experience, but you seem to have transferred the anxiety to me. Quite interesting.”

  She thought about it a while, so I concentrated on the road, which by now had shrunken to two undersized lanes. On either side were rolling farmlands, alternate patches of brown and green, an occasional herd of sheep grazing on grassy slopes. Tractors hauling plows chugged along the road, hogging both sides and crowding me toward the ditch on the left.

  After a few moments Pam Maxson said, “Freud wrote that dreams often express a repressed, unconscious wish from childhood.”

  “Makes sense. Ever since puberty, I wanted to spend time with girls in bikinis.”

  Her emerald glance chided me. “You’re being too literal. The unconscious wish is repressed, so it cannot be given direct expression even in a dream. The dream must distort the wish, so the dreamer need not face the cost of recognizing the true wish, which has been disguised.”

  “You’re saying I don’t really have a repressed desire to see you in a bikini on a windswept beach?”

  “No, but it represents something. The bikini may signify that you wish to see me stripped bare—”

  “I can buy that.”

  “—Stripped of the barriers each of us erects to protect ourselves. The color red can signify violence or bloodshed. As for what you heard, perhaps you have a desire to see me fall, a metaphor for fail.”

  “Why would I?”

  She considered it. “I don’t know, are you somehow threatened by me?”

  “Intrigued, yes. Threatened, no. I’d like to get to know you. And not just in my dreams.”

  She smiled and sat back, alone in her thoughts.

  ***

  It was slow going as I followed her directions up a winding road. The asphalt turned to gravel, and as the road narrowed and overgrown shrubs clawed at each side of the Rover, the surface became brown dirt, pocked by holes. After bouncing through a few of the axle breakers, I heard a stirring in the backseat. Charlie Riggs was stretching like a bearded cat.

  “There it is,” Pam said, pointing up a hill.

  “Now, that didn’t take long at all,” Charlie mumbled, leaning over the front seat to take a peek.

  I pulled into a gravel driveway that led to a large limestone house topped by a thatched roof. Pam caught me staring at the shaggy top of her home. “Our insulation,” she said. “The reeds are stacked a foot thick and nailed down by thousands of wooden stakes. Keeps us warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Only needs to be replaced every sixty years or so, but the fire insurance is quite exorbitant.”

  “Splendid, just splendid,” Charlie was saying.

  “Shall we?” Pam asked,
gesturing toward the house. “I’ve told Mum all about you.”

  “You, singular or plural?” I ventured.

  “Plural,” she answered with the biggest smile to date. Then she darted close and kissed me. It wasn’t a kiss that would lose a PG-rating in Hollywood. It was more of a whisk of lip across cheek, but my spirits soared to the top of the thatched roof where a weather vane pointed west. “Gracious,” Pam said. “It’s nearly tea time. Let’s see if Mum still remembers how to make a Bakewell tart.”

  We headed up a flagstone path to a huge front door. It came to me then, a nagging question from earlier in the day. “Why would the royal family be killing prostitutes?” I asked her.

  “It had to do with Prince Albert, called Eddy in the Court. He was the son of King Edward VII and Alexandra. He was in line to be king. But he was known to be bisexual, and there were scandals involving relationships with boys. Those were fairly easy to hush up. Not so easy was the rumor that he had surreptitiously married a young Catholic shop girl, who gave birth to a baby girl. The royal family is said to have spirited the shop girl off to an insane asylum, kidnapped the child, and forcibly returned Eddy to the Court. All was accomplished very efficiently, except there was a witness. A friend of the shop girl: Mary Jane Kelly.”

  “The last Ripper victim,” Charlie said.

  “Yes. She was an East End harlot.”

  “But five women were killed,” I said.

  “The others were the smoke screen, necessary to create the myth of a Ripper indiscriminately killing prostitutes.”

  “The royal family had five women killed to protect the Prince’s reputation?” I asked, incredulous.

  “It’s one theory,” Pamela said.

  “Bizarre,” Charlie Riggs concluded.

  “Farfetched,” I agreed, mulling it over. “As ridiculous as a state attorney killing a woman to protect his reputation as a war hero, then killing another to cover up the first.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Tea Time

  An ancient clock above the marble fireplace bonged four times and a uniformed kitchen girl rolled a silver cart of scones, muffins, and crumpets into the drawing room. The walls were hung with gold silk damask and matched the festooned curtains. The floor was dark wood covered with a carpet of burgundy and gold. On the walls were grim portraits of Victorian folk, stout men with long tangled hair and pale women with swan necks.