Captives

SIXTEEN

15 APRIL 1977

The new patient was due to arrive in a week.

At present he was still under guard inside Wandsworth, but according to the letters Dexter held in his hand - one from the Governor of that prison, the other rubber-stamped by the Home Secretary - he was to be receiving into his care a man by the name of Howard Townly.

Townly had, over a period of two months, kidnapped, tortured and finally murdered two men and three women, all of whom he had picked up while they were hitching lifts. He had made home movies of their deaths, replaying the videos over and over again for his enjoyment.

Townly was thirty-six.

About the right age.

Dexter checked through his notes on the man and saw that he had been unmarried. He was an only child.

This looked hopeful.

His mother had given evidence on his behalf during the trial.

Dexter shook his head.

No good.

Dexter sat back in his seat, massaging the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He had the psychological evaluation of Townly before him, too. The police psychiatrist who had interviewed him had noted that the man had tendencies towards schizophrenia, paranoid delusions and sociopathic leanings. A hopeless case? That was probably the reason he was being sent to Bishopsgate. The institution, which Dexter had been in charge of for the past eleven years, had over three hundred patients within its antiquated walls. They ranged from those who visited on a daily basis through to the voluntarily committed, graduating to the criminally insane. In fact almost a third of the inmates were of that latter category. Prisons, unable to cope with them, shunted them off to Bishopsgate, Broadmoor or Rampton. Dexter often wondered if this was a genuine attempt to put them in the hands of those better equipped to deal with their mental instability or merely a way of relieving the pressure on an already overcrowded prison system which sometimes packed men three to a cell.

Perhaps the very fact that these men were insane had ensured they at least enjoyed a little more privacy for the period of their incarceration.

Insane.

It was a word he heard nearly every working day. One which he had been hearing for as long as he could remember in connection with the wildly aberrant behaviour and attitudes of some of his wards. What the hell was insanity? And who had the right to define it as such?

Dexter had come to see, with some individuals he'd treated, that insanity was not a disintegration of the mind but rather a re-building. Madness was sometimes displayed in a startling clarity of thought which apparently 'normal' mortals could never hope to understand. There was a relentless logicality to the way a madman thought. That madness sometimes proved to be so single-minded, so obsessively consuming, that Dexter found himself not fearing or hating these murderers he had charge of but admiring them.

Ted Bundy, an American mass-murderer convicted of killing more than twenty young women, was once quoted as saying 'What's one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?' When war, usually started and controlled by supposedly sane men, took the lives of millions, Dexter found it easy to subscribe to Bundy's observation. Who was madder, the solitary individual who killed a dozen for his own reasons? Or the soldier, trained to kill hundreds in the name of a cause he could not even understand?

His philosophical musings were interrupted by a knock on his office door.

'Come in,' he called.

Colston practically stumbled in, his face drained of colour.

'What's wrong?' Dexter asked, noticing his colleague's expression.

'One of the patients,' Colston said agitatedly. 'You must come now.'

'Is it that important?'

'It's in Ward 5.'

Dexter was on his feet in a second. He and Colston moved with great haste along the corridors, Dexter almost breaking into a run as they drew closer. His mind was in turmoil, ideas and visions flooding through it like a raging torrent through a broken dam. He didn't even think to ask Colston what had happened.

Ward 5.

He swallowed hard.

They turned a corner and came upon two interns standing beside a heavy steel door. It was firmly locked and secured.

The entrance to Ward 5.

The ward was in the East Wing of the institution and accessible only to half a dozen interns, Colston and Dexter himself. The two doctors watched as one of the interns, Baker, unlocked the door and stepped back to allow them through. He and another man called Bradley followed.

'Where?' Dexter said. 'Which cell?'

Colston led him past four doors, grey-painted and nondescript but for an observation slot and a small square hatch for pushing food through. Colston paused at the fifth and nodded towards Bradley, who unlocked the door and stepped back, allowing Dexter to enter the room.

The smell of excrement hit him immediately, but he was able to ignore the stench; his attention was rivetted to the body of the man slumped against the far wall of the cell.

He was in his thirties, Dexter knew, but a stranger would have found it impossible to guess at his age.

His face looked as though someone had been across it in all directions with a cheese-grater. His skin hung in bloodied ribbons from bones which were visible in places through the crimson mess. The front of the grey overall he wore was soaked with gore and, as Dexter moved closer to kneel beside the man, he noticed a thick, reddish-pink piece of matter lying in the man's lap. A glance at his open mouth revealed that the reddish-pink lump was the end of his tongue. He'd bitten through it, severing it. His teeth, visible because what remained of his shredded lips were stretched back in a rictus, were also coated with crimson. It looked as if he'd been using scarlet mouthwash. One eye, torn from its socket, dangled by the slender thread of the optic nerve. It rested neatly on his mangled cheek, the orb fixing Dexter in a sightless stare.

The doctor looked down at the man's hands and saw that the fingers were drenched with blood, strips of flesh, some two inches long, stuck beneath the nails. He had used his fingernails like claws on his own face, gouged his own eye from its socket.

Colston, standing in the doorway, was aware almost for the first time of the uncanny silence that reigned over the rest of the ward. It was as if the other occupants were in silent mourning.

'The same as the others,' he said quietly.

Dexter nodded and got to his feet, the expression on his face one not of sadness but of anger. He looked at Colston.

'I want a report on my desk by the morning,' he said. Then he looked back at the shredded features of the man, blood beginning to congeal in the wounds. 'We have to know.'