Vicious Circle

I went back to the incident forms. Some of them I vaguely recognized from the news articles I’d seen open on Nicky’s desktop last night. Alfred Patterson was charged with strangling a complete stranger with his own tie in an office off the Uxbridge Road where he used to work. The two Heffers, father and son, had apparently raped and murdered an eighty-year-old woman and then thrown her body into the Regent’s Canal. Some of them were new, though. Lily Montgomery had been arrested and remanded after police were called to a loud domestic: they found her sitting on the sofa quietly knitting next to her dead husband, who had choked to death on his own blood after his throat was perforated with two sharp objects entering from different sides. Her knitting needles were oozing half-congealed blood all over the baby booties she was making for her niece, Samantha, aged eleven months, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

There were more. A couple of dozen, at least. After a while I just skimmed them, noting place and time while avoiding the noxious, heartbreaking details in the summary box.

The waiter came back with our drinks. He almost spilled my bourbon in my lap because of the problem he was having with his eyes, which still kept being wrenched back to Juliet’s face and body whenever he let his concentration slip for more than half a second. We made our food orders, but it was kind of a triumph of hope over experience. The kid wasn’t writing anything down, and nothing was going to stick in his mind except the curve of Juliet’s breast where it showed through the ragged tear in her shirt.

He hobbled away again, and I shook my head at her. “Can’t you let him off the hook?” I asked.

She arched an eyebrow, mildly affronted. “He’s eighteen,” she said. “I’m not doing anything—that’s all natural.”

“Oh. Well, could you maybe go into reverse or something? Pour some psychic ice water over him? It’ll only improve the service.”

“ ‘Go into reverse.’ ” Juliet’s tone dripped with scorn. “You mean, suppress desire instead of arousing it?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“I’ll leave that to you.”

“Ow.” I mimed a gun with my right hand, shot myself through the heart. That brutal directness, so easily mistaken for sadism, is one of the things I like best about Juliet. She’s a good corrective to my own natural sentimentality and trusting good nature.

I turned my attention back to the SIR sheets, going through them a little more carefully this time.

“Okay,” I said. “I get the point. They’re all local, and the odds against this many violent incidents in such a small—”

I stopped because she was shaking her head very firmly.

“Well what?”

“This.” She tapped the bottom sheet, which I’d somehow managed to miss because it was in a different format and seemed to be just a list of names. I’d vaguely assumed it was an index of some kind, since some of the names were the same as the ones on the incident forms. Now I looked again, and the penny dropped. If the bourbon hadn’t already been exquisitely sour, it would have curdled in my stomach.

The list, which had been produced on a manual typewriter with the help of a small lake of Tipp-Ex, was headed with the single word “Congregants.”

“Holy shit,” I murmured.

“No, Castor. Unholy shit. That’s the point.”

“These people all go to church at St. Michael’s?”

Juliet nodded.

“And now they’ve all turned into homicidal maniacs.”

“That’s a question of semantics.”

“Is it?”

“If you call it insanity, you assume they’ve lost the ability to make moral judgments.”

“Raping pensioners? Knit one, pearl one, puncture windpipe? What do you think they’ve lost?”

“Their conscience. Whatever evil was inside them already has been given free rein. Whatever desires they feel, they satisfy by the simplest and most direct means they can find. If it’s lust, they rape; if it’s anger, they murder; if it’s greed, they pillage a shopping mall.”

“So you think those people at the Whiteleaf—?”

“I don’t think. I checked.”

She reached into the same bottomless pocket, brought out a small clutch of wallets and billfolds and let them fall onto the table. I suddenly remembered her on her knees next to one of the men she’d felled: I thought she was checking him for a pulse, but obviously she was frisking him.

“Jason Mills,” she said. “Howard Loughbridge. Ellen Roederer.”

I checked the list, but I already knew what I’d find there.

“And Susan Book,” I added, just to show that I was keeping up.

“And Susan Book. Of course.”

Our food arrived. The waiter drew the process out as long as he could, his eyes all over Juliet from every angle he could decently manage. I sat on my impatience until he’d gone.

“So what are you saying?” I asked. “All of these people were in church on Saturday, when . . . whatever it was that happened, happened? And it somehow turned off all of their inhibitions? All of their civilized scruples? Made them into puppets that can only respond to their own desires?”