“But you’re all right?”
“So the scan says.”
“Just one more, please, gentlemen,” one photographer was saying.
“How about a smile, Mr Jamieson?” asked the other.
“And if our glamorous assistant could lean a little further in towards the patient...” (He meant the nurse, of course.)
Then the other photographer took a call on his phone and handed it to me. “Newsroom want a word.”
More questions, all about how I felt and what had been said to me. Then it was Thorpe’s turn to speak.
“Saved my life, so I’m told... eternally grateful to him... don’t know how I’ll repay... It’s all a bit of a blur...”
I realized I was drifting towards the swing-doors, keen to be leaving. But Thorpe waved for me to stay. When he handed the photographer’s phone back, he asked if he and I could be left alone for a minute. One of the photographers was asking the nurse for her name and a contact number as they left. There was a chair next to the bed, so I sat down.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t bring you anything.” There was nothing on the bedside cabinet except a plastic jug of water and a beaker. No cards from family, no flowers or anything. Thorpe just shrugged.
“They’re letting me out tomorrow.”
“You’ll be glad to get home.”
He gave a low chuckle, reminding me of the crash scene. His eyes were boring into mine.
“‘...the sanctity of human life’.”
“You remember that much then?”
“I remember everything, Mr Jamieson.”
I was silent for a moment. I wanted some of the water in the jug, but couldn’t bring myself to ask.
“Go on,” he said with a smile. “You’re dying to ask.”
“You were trying to kill yourself.” It was a statement rather than a question.
“Is that what you think?”
“You didn’t want to be saved. You said you’d do it again.”
“Do what, Mr Jamieson?”
“Kill yourself.”
“Is that what you told the police?”
I swallowed and licked my lips. I could feel sweat on my forehead. The ward was stifling. Thorpe gave a shrug.
“Doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Are you going to do it again?”
“I’m not going to kill myself, if that’s what’s bothering you.”
“So it sunk in then?”
“What?”
“What I said to you about the sanctity of life.”
“Is that what you want?”
I nodded again. Thorpe closed his eyes slowly.
“Go home, Jamieson. Enjoy it while you can.”
“Enjoy what exactly?”
The eyes opened a little. “Everything,” he whispered. To my ears, it seemed louder than any explosion.
You know what happened next.
Thorpe walked out of the hospital and disappeared. It was a couple of days before neighbours began to complain of a smell in the tenement stairwell. Police broke down the door on the second floor and found two bloodstained corpses. Ten days they’d been there. Both men were unemployed. They shared with a third, and he was missing. His name was Robert Thorpe. The car he’d crashed had belonged to one of the two. There were signs in the living room that a card game had been underway. Poker, according to reports. Cigarette-butts littered the carpet. They had been emptied from one of the murder weapons — a solid glass ashtray. It had been reduced to fragments by the force of impact against the first victim’s skull. Three empty bottles of vodka, traces of cannabis, the remains of a dozen cans of super-strength lager... The second victim had attempted escape but made it only as far as the hallway. He had been punched, kicked and bludgeoned in what the media kept referring to as a “sustained and horrific assault”, quoting one of the police officers.
Questions were asked. Why had police not checked on the flat in the aftermath of the crash? Why had none of the neighbours come forward earlier? What did it say about the state of our society that no one had intervened?
And why had Richard Jamieson felt it necessary to save the killer’s life?
THE MONSTER WHO LIVED — that was the headline I’ll always remember. Thorpe was pictured in his hospital bed, shaking my hand. It seemed to me that the pretty nurse should have been in the shot, but she wasn’t. I was aware that software existed which could alter photographs. I wished they’d used it on me instead of her, but of course I was the subject of their follow-up stories. The journalists were back at my door. They wanted to know if I felt anger, embarrassment, even shame.
“Aren’t you ashamed, Mr Jamieson?”
“Shouldn’t he have been left to die?”
“Don’t you regret...?”
“Didn’t he say anything...?”
I stopped answering the door. I left the house only in the middle of the night, shopping at the 24-hour supermarket on Chesser Avenue. I kept the curtains closed in the den. I ate from tins and drank from cans. I even let the bin go uncollected, so they couldn’t accost me as I walked up the path with it to the pavement.
Did I feel angry? No, not really. But I better understood the situation a few days later when he killed again. A shopkeeper this time, the event caught on the security camera which had been installed to deter shoplifters. It had failed to deter Thorpe. His haul consisted of cigarettes, alcohol and cash from the till. The victim left behind a wife and five children. My doorbell rang and rang. The voices called questions through the letter-box. One of them pretended to be a postman with a delivery. I opened the door.
“He’s killed again, Mr Jamieson. Do you have anything to say to the grieving widow? She wouldn’t be a widow if you’d...”
I slammed the door shut, but could still hear his voice.
Your father was a man of the church... your grandfather, too... how would they feel, Mr Jamieson?
Did I feel regret?
Did I feel shame?
Yes, yes, yes. Most definitely yes. And anger, too, eventually, as the meaning of his words sunk in. He hadn’t wanted to be saved because he’d known he would do it again — as in kill again. Don’t... I’ll do it again... And I had allowed this to happen. I had allowed the monster to live.
The TV and radio kept me up to date with the manhunt. Police questioned me several times. Could I shed any light? I explained it to them as best I could. One of the officers was the same man who’d come to my house that night with the follow-up questions, the one who had doubted Thorpe’s attempted suicide. He kept shifting in his chair, as if he could not get comfortable. His face was pale. I knew from the media that the police were under a good deal of pressure. They had let Thorpe go. They hadn’t checked his flat. They hadn’t noticed that the blood on his clothes belonged to more than one person. They shared a certain culpability with me in the minds of the press.
“If only you’d left him to die,” the officer said as he paused on my doorstep.
“I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Turns out you were wrong, Mr Jamieson.”
Wrong? But when I rescued him, he was still an innocent man, his crimes a secret. He was victim rather than monster, and I was the hero of the hour, wasn’t I?
Wasn’t I?
Well, wasn’t I?
I turned to my father’s library again in search of answers, but found too little comfort. There were books about the nature of evil and the more complex nature of good. Why do we do good deeds? Is it in our nature, or does communality dictate that what is best for others is also likely to be of benefit to us? Do people become bad, or are they born that way? Robert Thorpe’s life was picked over in the days that followed. His father had been a domineering drunk, his mother addicted to painkillers. There was no evidence that he had been abused as a child, but he had grown up an outsider. His spells of employment were short and various. Girlfriends came and went. One opened her heart to a doubtless generous tabloid. He watched violent films. He liked loud rock music. He was “a bit of an anarchist”. Photos were printed, showing the trajectory of the killer’s life. A blurry child, clutching a funfair ice-cream. A teenager in sunglasses, no longer smiling for the camera. A man at a party, cigarette drooping from his mouth, sprawled across a sofa with a woman in his arms (her face softwared out, to preserve anonymity).