“All right,” I said. “We’ll talk about something else.”
“You’ll get thrown out of the union, showing me that,” Morgan said. “Isn’t there such a thing as patient confidentiality?”
“In the first place, I don’t belong to a union,” I said, “and in the second, I’m trying to act in the best interests of all concerned.”
“Thinking he could kill again, are you?”
“Who are we talking about here?” I asked.
“The second man. Jon. He seems to have a thing about old people. He’s obviously very depressed.”
“That’s his usual state. It doesn’t make him a killer. I wanted you to look at the interview before you jump to a conclusion about Nathan, the other man.”
“Nathan isn’t depressed, that’s for sure.”
“Agreed. He has a more buoyant personality than Jon. Did you notice the body language? Nathan sits forward, makes eye contact, while Jon looks down all the time. You don’t see much of his face.”
“That stuff about the foster parents locking him in the cupboard. Is that true?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure of it. I’d be confident of anything Jon tells me. He doesn’t give out much, but you can rely on him. With Nathan I’m never sure. He has a fertile imagination and he wants to communicate. He’s trying all the time to make his experiences interesting.”
“Falling into the pond, you mean? Did you believe that?”
“It’s not impossible. It would explain the change of clothes.”
“I was sure he was talking bollocks, but now that you’ve shown me this other man I’m less confident. I’d like to question Jon myself.”
“That won’t be possible,” I said.
He reddened. “It’s a bit bloody late to put up the shutters. I’ve got my job to do and no one’s going to stand in my way.”
“Before you get heavy with me, Inspector, let me run a section of the second interview again. I’m going to turn off the sound and I want you to look closely at Jon. There’s a moment when he sways back and the light catches his face.”
I rewound the tape and let it play again, fast-forwarding until I found the piece I wanted, the moment I’d mentioned the old couple and Jon had started his swaying, a sure indicator of stress. “There.” I used the freeze-frame function.
Jon’s face was not quite in focus, but there was enough to make him recognisable.
“Christ Almighty,” Morgan said. “It’s the same guy. It’s Nathan.”
I let the discovery sink in.
“Am I right?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Then what the hell is going on?”
“This may be hard for you to accept. Nathan and Jon are two distinct identities contained in the same individual, a condition we know as Dissociative Identity Disorder. It used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder, but we’ve moved on in our understanding. These so-called personalities are fragments of the same identity rather than self-contained characters. Jon is the primary identity, passive and repressed. Nathan is an alter ego, extrovert, cheerful and inventive.”
“I’ve heard of this,” Morgan said. “It’s like being possessed by different people. I saw a film once.”
“Exactly. Fertile material for Hollywood, but no entertainment at all if you happen to suffer with it. The disturbance is real and frightening. A subject can take on any number of personality states, each with its own self-image and identity. The identities act as if they have no connection with each other. My job is to deconstruct them and ultimately unite them into one individual. Jon and Nathan will become Jonathan.”
“Neat.”
“It may sound neat, but it’s a long process.”
“It’s neat for me,” he said. “I wasn’t sure which of the two guys is the killer. Now I know there’s only one of them, I’ve got him, whatever he calls himself.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” I said.
He shot me a foul look.
“The therapy requires me to find points of contact between the alter-personalities. When you came to me with this double murder, I could see how disturbing it would be for Jon. He carries most of the guilt. But this investigation of yours could be a helpful disturbance. It goes right back to the trauma that I think was the trigger for this condition, his ill-treatment at the hands of foster parents who happened to own a dog they pampered and preferred to the child.”
“My heart bleeds,” Morgan said, “but I have a job to do and two people are dead.”
“So you tell me. Jon thinks he may have murdered them, but he didn’t.”
“Come off it,” he said.
“Listen, please. Nathan’s story was true. He really did have that experience with the balloon and the little dog and falling in the pond. For him – as the more positive of the identities – it was one more entertaining experience to relate. But for Jon, who experienced it also, it was disturbing, raising memories of the couple who fostered him and abused him. He felt quite differently, murderous even.”
“Hold on,” Morgan said. “Are you trying to tell me the murders never happened?”
“They happened in the mind of Jon, and they are as real to him as if he cut those old people’s throats himself. But I promise you the old couple are alive and well. I went to Steven Street at lunchtime and spoke to them. They confirmed what Nathan told me.”
“I don’t get this. I’m thinking you’re nuts as well.”
“But it’s important that you do get it,” I told him. “There’s a third identity at work here. It acts as a kind of conscience, vengeful, controlling, and ready to condemn. It, too, is convinced the murders took place and have to be investigated. Recognizing this is the first step towards integration. Do me a favour and have another look at Jon’s face. It’s still on the screen.”
He gave an impatient sigh and glanced at the image.
“Now look at this, Inspector.”
I handed him a mirror.
THE UNINVITED by Christopher Fowler
The elaborate silvered gates stood wide apart, ready to accept guests. You couldn’t arrive on foot, of course; there was nowhere to walk, except in the drive or through the sprinkler-wet grass, and it would have looked foolish climbing towards the house in the headlights of arriving cars.
Inside, the first thing I saw was an avenue of rustling palms, their slender trunks wound with twinkling blue and white lights, like giant candy sticks. Two robotically handsome valets in gold and crimson jackets were parking the cars, mostly sparkling black Mercedes, Daimlers, Volvos. The staircase was flanked by six teenaged waitresses in tiny red Santa outfits tentatively dispensing delicate flutes of champagne. A floodlit house, oblong, low and very white, was arranged on two levels between banked bottle-green lawns. I could hear muted laughter, murmuring, a delicate presence of guests. I saw silhouettes passing before the rippled phosphorescence of a pool with translucent globes pacing its perimeter. There was no sign of our host, but on the patio a butler, chef, bartenders and waiters were arranged behind banks of lurid, fleshy lobster tails and carrot batons.
There was a muffled beat in the air, the music designed to create ambience without being recognizable, Beatles’ songs rescored for a jazz trio. It was the end of the sixties, the age of Aquarius. Smokey Robinson and Dionne Warwick were in the charts, but there were no black people there that night except me.
In Los Angeles, parties aren’t about letting your hair down and having fun. They’re for networking, appraising, bargaining, being seen and ticked from a list. There were two kinds of guest roaming the house that night, ones who would have been noticed by their absence, and others who had been invited merely to fill up dead space. It goes without saying that I was in the latter group. Only Sidney Poitier would have made it into the former.
It was the home of Cary Dell, a slow-witted middleweight studio executive at MGM, and I remember seeing plenty of almost-familiar faces; Jacqueline Bisset, Victoria Vetri, Ralph Meeker, a couple of casting directors, some black-suited agents lurking together in a corner, fish-eyeing everyone else. The important people were seated in a semi-circular sunken lounge, lost among oversized purple cushions. The area was so exclusive that it might as well have had velvet ropes around it. Everyone else worked hard at keeping the conversation balloon-light and airborne, but couldn’t resist glancing over to the pit to see what was going on at the real centre of the party.