LITMIR.BIZ

       2

      ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘I felt like he was unpicking me.’

      ‘He probably was.’

      ‘Any chance you could open the window?’

      Two hours after my first encounter with Rattigan, Dr Stephen ‘Fancy’ Clancy sat in his college room pulling heavily on a slim panatella cigar. I had the beginnings of a headache, made worse by the exhaled fumes swirling within the confines of the chaotic little boxroom which laughably passed as his office.

      I remembered vividly as a psychology undergrad, a mature student, thirty-two, clutching a photocopy of the Essex University humanities building floorplan, walking the humming corridors, searching for his room, buzzing with clichéd expectations of its high ceiling mounted on elegantly windowed walls groaning with dust-laden volumes offering valuable historical insights into the hidden workings of the mind. I expected a pickled brain in a bell jar at least.

      But Fancy’s ‘office’ was a toilet, even by his own admission. Blind always down, desklamp permanently burning – his attempt, he explained jovially when we first shook hands, to, ‘Tardis my hutch into a tolerable space.’

      He’d smiled, and I’d responded. I liked him. Still do. I began a friendship with my tutor that often included him coming over to my place for supper, or Jemimah and I visiting him and his wife Sheila in their Tudor house in Roxwell. In retrospect, I believe that the minimal differences in our ages helped forge the friendship – although at times, his devotion to the long lunch put it under certain strains. He drank – I didn’t. Not any more.

      ‘Sounds as if you found the trip out to Oakwood heavy going,’ the tall, permanently tanned tutor surmised. ‘From what you’re saying, Rattigan appears ready to go, and you’re the odds-on favourite stalling at the first fence.’

      ‘He frightened me. Really. I felt exposed.’

      ‘Good.’

      ‘Good?’

      ‘Adrian, he’s a convicted killer. You aren’t up there to become best buddies with the man.’

      ‘I just thought …’ But I was tired, the words failed me.

      ‘You thought you’d walk in there, and he’d spiritedly comply with your every wish, utterly in awe of your academic prowess.’

      ‘He called me a pedantic little twat. I felt like punching him.’

      Fancy suppressed a smile. ‘He’s simply having some fun with you. Don’t get so involved. He wants to see you again, so the job’s done. He called you a few names, so what? Christ’s sake, Adrian, you’re a bloody good student. You have a keen interest in the malfunctioning mind. You wanted to meet him the moment you read the file. Positively salivating at the prospect this time yesterday.’

      ‘That was different,’ I wearily protested. ‘That was yesterday. I just expected something different. Less challenging. He hates me. I must have spoken to him for no more than ten minutes at the most. Came out shaking like a bloody leaf. God knows how I’m going to get through an hour of it.’

      Fancy sighed. ‘Look, Adrian. No one’s expecting you to unravel the man. It isn’t possible. He’s a psychopath. You know bloody well he operates beyond the conventional norms of any coded moral behaviour. Just go there, ask your questions, ignore the insults, get out. Business done. And remember, it’s an exercise, invaluable work experience.’

      He inhaled on the cigar again, a fairly pointless gesture. The tiny dishevelled room was so full of smoke, all he really needed to do was breathe in. I figured he’d unintentionally shared hundreds of cigars with me and countless other psychology students over the years.

      ‘I felt hopelessly unprepared,’ I admitted. ‘They just more or less left me with him.’

      ‘Like one of his victims?’ Fancy stood, turned his back and flipped his fingers through the yellowed Venetian blind, absorbed in the flow of laughing undergraduates passing beneath his window. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Adrian. How you’re out there, dealing with a real case. Your pivotal thesis study-piece. That I wasn’t there in the room, that I didn’t see the look in his eyes, feel the threat of his rhetoric. But you shouldn’t have been there, either. Not Adrian Rawlings. Like I warned you and warned you, you should’ve left him in Doc Allen’s office.’ He turned suddenly. ‘How is the old sod, anyway?’

      ‘Allen? Sent his best regards. Caustic man, isn’t he?’

      Fancy smiled. ‘Same old Neil Allen. Good, reliable, jaundiced Neil Allen. Which is exactly my point.’

      ‘Oh?’

      Fancy sat, and looked for one moment as if he was going to try to put both feet up on the cluttered desk. He opted for leaning back in the swivel chair, hands wrapped around the back of his head. A single plume of dark-blue smoke rose from his cigar, and I momentarily wondered if he might set fire to his hair.

      ‘Neil Allen conforms to all our expectations of him. Slightly bitter, hard-working, reliable, professionally unexceptional, and altogether notionally sane. An

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