I began by asking Subject 47767 if he was who I thought he was. He confirmed that he was. We used his real first name throughout. It was Jay. I asked him why he thought he was here.
He laughed bitterly. “I hit the wrong person.”
I asked who that might have been.
“The son of the Justice Minister.” He gave a sour smile.
I asked why he had hit him.
“Because I’m sick to the back teeth of vicious, ignorant dickheads telling me what a fucking hero I am.”
I asked him if he meant because of what had happened with the terrorist he had tortured to discover the location of the bomb.
Jay shook his head and looked away. “Oh, let me guess. I’m a hero figure to people like you, would that be right?”
I said that many people admired what he had done, amongst them, certainly, myself.
“Yeah, well, you would, wouldn’t you?” he replied.
I asked if he meant because of what he obviously – and correctly – took to be my role.
He nodded. “Because you’re a torturer,” he said. He looked straight into my eyes as he said this. I am well used to staring people down, but he would not look away.
I told him that even if I was not, I would still admire him because of what he had done.
“You and every other idiot,” he said. He said it more with resignation than defiance, thought there was an understandable hint of nervousness too. He swallowed conspicuously.
I asked if he didn’t feel proud of what he had done.
“No,” he said. “No, I fucking don’t.”
But he had saved lives, I pointed out.
“I did what I thought I had to do,” Jay said.
Would he do the same thing again, knowing what he did now?
“I don’t know.”
Why not? I asked.
“Because I don’t know what might have happened differently if I hadn’t done it. Probably nothing would have been any different so I suppose I might as well have done what I did. A few people may still be alive who wouldn’t have been otherwise, but who knows? We haven’t got a time machine.”
What did he think might have happened differently?
“We might not live in a society where people live in fear of people like you,” he told me. He shrugged. “But, like I say, probably it would still all have worked out just like it is now. I don’t kid myself that what I might have done differently would have made any difference.”
I said I thought he was wrong to assume the current state of our society was somehow his fault. The fault lay with the people who threatened our society: terrorists, radicals, leftists, liberals and other traitors – those who would like to tear down the state either through direct action or through using words and propaganda to influence the more gullible sections of the masses to do their dirty work for them.
“Yeah, you would think that, too.” Jay sounded tired.
I told him I thought it was tough that he’d ended up in prison. He should never have been prosecuted in the first place and certainly should never have been found guilty. He should have been given a medal, not sent to prison. That had probably ruined his life. Especially as they had kept him in for so long.
“Here we go,” he said, sounding tired again. “You don’t understand anything, do you?”
If he thought that, I said, perhaps he ought to tell me what he thought I ought to understand.
“I insisted that I should be prosecuted. I demanded that I be prosecuted. I refused a defence because I’d wanted to plead guilty but they wouldn’t let me. They threatened my family. So I had to plead innocent. But then I offered no defence and so I was found guilty. They sentenced me to two years but the correct sentence, the least anybody else would have got would have been nine years, so I made sure I stayed in prison for that amount of time. Having time added is not difficult.” Jay smiled without humour. “And when I got out I told anybody who accused me of being a hero that they were an idiot, and people who said I should have got a medal to fuck off. Finally, when one guy got too insistent about how big a hero I was and how he could make sure that I did get a medal, I hit him. Only it turned out he was the son of the Justice Minister, like I said. And that’s why I’m here.”
I told him I didn’t understand. Why had he wanted to be prosecuted? Why had he wanted to be found guilty? Why had he wanted to be locked up for nine years?
Jay sounded animated at last. He held his head up. “Because I believe in justice.” He spat that word out. “I believe in the law.” That word too. “I did something wrong, something against the law, and I needed to be punished for it. It was wrong that I was going to be let off for it. Even more wrong that people wanted to give me medals for it.”
But he hadn’t done something wrong, I suggested. He had saved innocent lives and helped defeat those who would bring society down.
“It was still against the law!” he shouted. “Don’t you see? If the law means anything then I couldn’t be above it. Not just because I was a police officer or because my breaking it had resulted in some lives being saved. That’s not the point. Torture was illegal. I’d broken the law. Can’t you see any of this?” He shook his the chair, rattling the chains attaching his handcuffs to the floor. “It’s even more important to prosecute police who’ve broken the law than it is to prosecute anybody else, because otherwise nobody trusts the police.”
I pointed out that the forceful questioning of suspects was now entirely if unfortunately legal, even if it hadn’t been then.
“‘Forceful questioning.’ You mean torture.”
If that was what he wanted to call it. But why hadn’t he made his feelings clear to all these newspapers that wanted to talk to him? Or at his trial, where, of all places, he was guaranteed a fair hearing?
Jay looked at me scornfully. “Do you really think the papers print what people actually say? I mean, if it’s not what their proprietors or the government want everybody to hear?” He shook his head. “Same at the trial.”
I said that I still thought he was being too harsh on himself. He had done the right thing.
He looked tired and defeated now, and we had, as I have made clear, applied no physical pressure whatsoever to him up to this point. “The thing is,” he said, “maybe in the same situation, even knowing what I know now, I’d still do the same thing. I’d still tear that Christian bastard’s nails out, get him to talk, find out where the bomb was, hope that the plods got the right street, the right end of it, the right fucking city.” He looked at me with what might have been defiance or even a sort of pleading. “But I’d still insist that I was charged and prosecuted.” He shook his head again. “Don’t you see? You can’t have a state where torture is legal, not for anything. You start saying it’s only for the most serious cases, but that never lasts. It should always be illegal, for everybody, for everything. You might not stop it. Laws against murder don’t stop all murders, do they? But you make sure people don’t even think about it unless it’s a desperate situation, something immediate. And you have to make the torturer pay. In full. There has to be that disincentive, or they’ll all be at it.” He raised his head and looked about him, his gaze obviously being meant to take in not just the room we were in but the whole building; maybe even more than that. “Or you end up with this.” He looked at me. “With you. Whoever you are.”
I thought about this. It seemed to me that the fellow’s mind had been broken in prison, probably, but that he had also probably always been an idealist. He certainly sounded like one now. Almost like a fanatic. Nevertheless, had it been up to me I’d have released him, frankly. However, it was not up to me. There was high-level interest in this case, for one thing, and an accusation of having aided terrorist groups could not simply be ignored. He was right in that; the law had to be obeyed. I thought of handing him over to one of the younger people who would not have heard of him, but decided on reflection to question him myself, determining that I would be more lenient than they, given that I knew the unfortunate circumstances that had led him here.