The Next to Die, page 23
Think I’m wrong? Then ask yourself this: If a serial killer murdered four podiatrists and one tightrope walker, would or wouldn’t the papers and the blogs be full of speculation about what grudge he might have against podiatrists? How often do you think you’d hear the word “podiatrists”? I think we all know that aspect of the story would be central in our communal narrative. But substitute “women” for “podiatrists” and it’s not thought by mainstream reporting to be a detail worth dwelling on.
And why should we dwell on it, especially if we’re women? What does it matter what we think, when we’re so insignificant? Most of us aren’t podiatrists, and we certainly aren’t human beings with innate value. We can’t be, or else how do you explain the way we’re treated in the world and the way the phenomenon of our mass slaughter for centuries at the hands of men is ignored and erased by the very police officers whose job it ought to be to keep us safe?
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3 Comments:
From: Colin, Culver Valley
You’re properly off your trolley, aren’t you?
The police are trying to keep people safe and prevent further deaths. All right, they haven’t got there yet. Think you can do a better job? Feel free to catch Billy and bring him down to the station at your earliest convenience—maybe having all the right thoughts about violent men and misogyny will make you a better detective than trained and experienced officers.
The police haven’t ignored or erased any murders. All their official communications mention all of Billy’s victims—including Joshua Norbury, the man Billy murdered whose name you don’t even mention in passing. So if anyone’s erasing anyone’s murder, it sure as shit ain’t us.
“After all, belonging to the superior sex class is more fun if you get to exterminate the subordinates once in a while—right, guys?” Unless I’m mistaken, you’re implying that all or most men would find it enjoyable to murder women. This is an out-and-out lie. The vast majority of men don’t want to kill anyone, just like the vast majority of women.
Your podiatrists point, and what you think it proves, is a load of crap. If a killer kills only men, or only women, then it’s noteworthy. If he kills a mixture of both, it’s seen as not relevant, for obvious reasons. Men + women = people. People = everybody. What use is it to say a killer’s targeting people? It doesn’t narrow down his victim field at all. All Billy’s female victims were straight. His male victim was gay. According to your logic, does that make it the ritual slaughter of heterosexuals? Or would you say that, no, that makes no sense because there’s one gay victim? If so, I’d agree with you.
Best friends pattern. It was there in four out of the five cases. In the fifth case—Marion Hopwood—you’re right, it seems not to be there. Let’s hope that means there’ll be no sixth victim. Or, to put it in terms you’ll be able to relate to, let’s hope that if there is a sixth victim, it’s only one of those potentially lethal male murder machines you talk about (otherwise known as “men”) and not a fellow human being that you dane to consider worth caring about and writing about because she happens to share certain body parts with you.
From: David Howard, Oxford
Well said, Sondra! Your analysis is, as ever, superb. Unfortunately, your brain is too large and brilliant for most people to be able to cope with. I wish everyone would listen to you! I have been spreading the feminist word as best I can!
From: Herr Jennda, Wolverhampton
So only men and women are people, Colin? Wow. Just . . . wow. What about those of us who don’t slot neatly into your bigoted gender binary? Please, educate yourself. Also, there is no point trying to reason with Sondra Halliday—she too is a bigot, though of a different stripe from you.
1 Reply:
From: Sondra Halliday, London
Fuck all the way off, Herr Jennda. David Howard—you seem to be suffering from White Knight Syndrome, aka Entitled Tosser Syndrome. I don’t need the endorsement of any man, so stop trying to insert yourself into feminism, which belongs to women and has nothing to do with you. You’re not wanted or needed. As for you, DC Conker Deep (you gave yourself away with “it sure as shit ain’t us” when you should have said “them” if you were pretending not to be a detective) . . . sorry once again if I hurt your delicate manfeelz, and, yes, please do educate yourself. “Deign” is the word you’re looking for. “Dane” is Hamlet.
13
1/14/2015
The redbrick semidetached house on Thress Street in Rawndesley had nothing to distinguish it apart from the color of its door—an unusual shade that Sellers, if forced, would have described as sea green—and a small metal fountain in the mainly paved-over front garden, with water spouting from it. Around the fountain’s base were flat smooth stones of different sizes that hadn’t gotten there by accident; someone had arranged them in a kind of three-hump circle shape. Sellers wasn’t surprised, given whose house this was and what he’d learned about her in advance from her website. Still—it was nice that there were people who cared enough to make a shape out of matching stones around a fountain in their garden.
The door opened, and a woman appeared.
“Ms. Baillie?”
“DC Colin Sellers? Welcome!” She beamed at him. “Please, call me Lane. All my friends and family do.”
Well, that was easy. Sellers told himself not to leap to conclusions.
Lane Baillie was in her late fifties or early sixties and dressed in a red tunic with a wide black belt, black leggings and slip-on pumps. Her outfit was too young for her, but it looked okay. Her smile made her seem much younger too, though her neat, short hair was silvery-gray, like tinsel, and her skin was lined. Sellers checked with himself: Was she definitely middle-aged to old? Yes, her hands were covered in liver spots. She might even have been getting on for seventy, in fact.
It must have been the radiant smile that had confused him, creating a momentary illusion of youth. It was unusual for someone her age to beam like that—like a kid who’d just found some buried treasure and realized it was better than she’d hoped it would be. Sellers was as taken aback by the smile as by Lane’s enthusiastic cry of “Welcome!” She was doing a convincing impression of someone whose day had been greatly enhanced as a result of his sudden arrival in it; no one had ever looked at him that way before—not his mother, not Stacey, not either of his kids, none of the women he’d shagged. Literally no one.
Sellers decided it meant Marjolein Baillie was probably hoping to try to con him out of something, like all his money, or into something, like a freaky religious cult. He’d done his homework. As well as being a counselor and psychotherapist, she was—and she admitted it; she advertised it—an Ishaya of the Bright Path. There were articles on her website explaining what this meant, or purporting to, though Sellers had read all of them and was none the wiser. The Bright Path was described in several places as being a kind of meditation, though there were no instructions for how to do it, and in other paragraphs it was referred to more as if it were a religion.
“Please come in.” Lane Baillie stood aside and gestured with her left arm to indicate that he should enter. Using a series of arm movements that made Sellers think of ballet dancing, she directed him, wordlessly, into the second room they came to.
It was a lounge with hardly anything in it. French doors at one end led onto a small, tidy, fenced-in garden. The focal point of the room was a white marble-effect fireplace. There was a matching armchair and sofa—pale green with a white leaf pattern—a beige carpet and a rug that was made out of tiny wooden beads strung together. Sellers hadn’t met a wooden rug before. He wondered if Bright Path meditation might involve lying on it naked, with the wooden beads digging into your back. He stopped thinking about this in time to save himself from embarrassment.
“Please have a seat.” Still beaming at him as if he was the best visitor she’d ever had, Lane indicated the sofa.
Sellers sat, wondering what would have happened if he’d ignored the arm signal and gone for the chair.
“I’ll be with you very soon.” She turned and left the room, closing the door behind her.
Sellers stared at the fireplace. Along the edge of the bottom bit were five small white pebbles and two royal blue ceramic bowls full of what looked like water. Water, fire, stone. Perhaps Bright Path meditation involved thinking about the different elements. Was stone an element?
The door opened again, and Lane appeared with two pint glasses full of water. “Here you are.” She handed one to Sellers with a new smile. “You can put it down anywhere: on the arm of the sofa, on the floor. And please feel free to put your feet up on the sofa if you’d like to. You can remove your shoes if you want—if it would make you more comfortable. It’s up to you!”
“Thank you.” Sellers wanted to hold his glass of water in his hands, sit upright and leave his shoes on, but he appreciated the general message: whatever he wanted to do was okay with Lane Baillie.
Whatever Colin Sellers wanted to do had never been okay with anybody before.
“So, then.” Lane sat down in the armchair, curling her legs under her body. “What brings you here?”
“I’m one of the Culver Valley detectives working on the Billy Dead Mates investigation. I’m sure you’re sick to death of hearing about it.”
Lane shook her head. “Billy . . . Dead Mates?”
“It’s all over the news. I assume you’ve been following it, along with the rest of the country.”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t heard anything about it.”
Sellers laughed. “You’re kidding?”
“No. I don’t read newspapers or watch the news.”
“Oh. That’s . . . pretty unusual!”
“Yes, it is.” She smiled. “Do you keep up to date with the news?”
He was supposed to be interviewing her, not the other way around, but since she sounded genuinely interested . . . “Yeah, pretty much. Depressing as it usually is these days.”
“But you don’t stop watching? Or reading, or listening?”
“No. It’s tempting, sometimes. It can get you down.”
“Yes, that’s what so many people say. I think—I mean, this might not be of interest to you, and I know it’s not what you came here to talk about, so forgive me—but I think a lot of people with social consciences imagine they have a duty to immerse themselves, via the media, in the misery of others less fortunate than themselves. Having a social conscience and caring about others is of course a great thing. But there’s a danger that the misery that can seem to be everywhere will affect people negatively, and—quite understandably—they’ll internalize that negative energy and spread it around, causing more pain and suffering. I believe positive change can only come from positive energy. Meeting new people, seeing that everyone has good in them—which is incredibly obvious when you sit face-to-face with even the most troubled person and try to help them. I prefer to devote my attention to that instead of the news.”
“Well, I read the news, but . . . I couldn’t in all honesty describe myself as someone with a social conscience,” Sellers said. “If I had my way, I’d win the lottery and live out my days as a tax exile with my own private island. My wife says I’m a selfish . . . er, a selfish git.”
Lane laughed. “We’re all selfish much of the time. That’s only human. But of course you have a social conscience! You’re a policeman. Every day you do your best to make the world a safer place for everyone in the Culver Valley. Don’t you?”
“I s’pose.”
“Well, then. Anyway, I’m not saying for a moment you should stop watching the news. In fact, I think it’s great that you can and do, and still remain the person you are!”
Sellers didn’t know what she meant. He was about to ask when she said, “I want to help you in any way I can, but insofar as it’s possible, I’d rather not hear any details of murders or cruelty—if that’s all right?”
“Oh.” Normally people wanted to hear all the repulsive details and weren’t nearly as keen on the helping part. “Yes, that’s no problem at all. I mean . . . if you want, I can tell you nothing about Billy and stick to asking questions. If you don’t mind not knowing any context?”
“That’s fine.” Lane smiled.
“Although because you’re involved—only at several removes, so it’s nothing to worry about . . . But because your name’s been . . . mentioned in connection with Billy—this case, I mean—I’m going to need to ask you where you were on several dates, if that’s possible. It’s really nothing to worry about.”
“Absolutely fine. Shall I get my diary?”
“That’d be great, thanks. For this year and last year, if you have them.”
“Yes, I do.”
Lane rose gracefully and left the room, closing the door carefully. Sellers heard footsteps on the stairs, then nothing for about ten seconds, then more footsteps.
The door opened silently, and she reappeared with two black leather A4-size books. One by one, Sellers told her the dates of the five murders. It soon became apparent she wasn’t a suspect. Two of the five days Lane had spent at a private hospital in London doing group therapy with breast cancer patients from nine A.M. until four P.M. Another two had been spent there at her home, seeing private clients. She couldn’t share their details now, she explained, because of confidentiality, but she could certainly contact them and ask if any of them were willing to speak to Sellers and vouch for her. On the most recent Billy-kill day, Tuesday, January 6, Lane and her husband, Duncan, had been in Paraty, Brazil, on holiday.
“Don’t worry about asking your patients—clients, whatever—about the November and December dates,” Sellers told her. If Lane Baillie was anything other than the kind, gentle person she appeared to be, he would walk through Spilling town center naked. Though that particular gesture would mean less coming from him than it would from someone who hadn’t already once done that while very drunk, in the early hours of a particularly disappointing-on-the-picking-up-girls-front morning in 1999. Sellers shuddered. What a state he’d been in that night: his absolute low point, and, let’s face it, there was stiff competition.
“Are you all right?” Lane Baillie was leaning forward to inspect him, with a concerned expression on her face.
“Fine, thanks.” He grinned. “Sorry! All right, so we’ve dealt with the dates. Moving on . . .” He produced the printout of the “Two Sisters” story and passed it to Lane. “Is this familiar to you?”
“Yes!” It was as if Sellers had reintroduced her to an old friend. “This is a wonderful story. I give it to most of my clients. I have a few others like it—stories that contain unusual and, I hope, enlightening insights about life. I like to share them with as many people as I can.”
“Let’s talk numbers: How many clients have you had in the last year, say, and what percentage of that number have you shared the stories with?”
“I have no more than ten private clients at any given time. That’s my upper limit, if I want to give each of them the very best of myself, which I do. I also have the people I see at the hospital. There are about sixteen in that group.”
Cancer patients, thought Sellers. Marion Hopwood had been murdered on a cancer ward.
“I think the percentage must be a hundred,” said Lane. “There’s a wonderful website, boundlessconsciousness.com. It has many stories on it. Sometimes I print a particular one for a particular client, but I try to make sure I tell all the people I work with about the site, so that they can discover the wonderful stories for themselves. And I’ve put some of them on my website—with permission, of course. Have you read this one, ‘The Two Sisters’?”
Sellers nodded. “We all have. It’s funny, actually—when I first read it, I thought, ‘This is daft. It’s trying to make out that people who fight for good causes are doing more harm than selfish, greedy people.’” And then I met Sondra Halliday.
Lane laughed. “It does seem upside-down at first glance, doesn’t it? But in fact, if you read it closely, the story says nothing critical about those who work hard for good causes. The world urgently needs those people—you’re one of them! Saving us from harm, keeping us safe.”
Sellers felt positively heroic.
“What the story is saying, though, is that people who devote their energies to fighting are helping neither themselves nor others. Whereas someone who enjoys life and spends their days having fun and feeling happy—remember, in the story the words ‘greedy’ and ‘selfish’ are negative value judgments unilaterally imposed by the sister whose every moment is spent fighting. The other sister would probably describe herself as fun-loving and jolly—someone who makes sure to enjoy all life has to offer! Someone like you.”
Lane smiled. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you have a strong positive energy about you. I think you’re someone with a real zest for life, aren’t you?”
“Undoubtedly. But . . . well, some would say not in a good way. I don’t always . . . behave all that well. Anyway, I think you’re right about the moral of the story. This case has brought me into contact with a journalist who shares a personality type with the fighting, negative sister. She claims to be fighting for justice and equality, but all she does is spew venom all day long.”
“How sad.” Lane looked shocked and pressed the palm of her hand flat against her collarbone. Sellers wondered if the words “spew venom” had been too much for her.
“To take your two points one by one . . .” she said. “Nobody always behaves well. It isn’t only you. If you’ll pardon my outspokenness, I do sense that you have many clouds close to the surface, but I sense more strongly that if you could clear those clouds away, your positive energy would burn even brighter than it does at present. You’re someone who is capable of doing endless good in our world. I hope you know that. I felt it as soon as I opened the door.”
Sellers didn’t know it, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He concentrated on sipping his water, to avoid eye contact.
