When You Wake up and Scream

So many crime scene photographs, so many dead ends and unanswered questions. Detective McAfee sat at his desk in the midst of all the confusion and glared at the report of the latest body. He tried his best to deny that it was linked, but he couldn’t deny it. The man had been travelling alone. He had been strangled to death. The body had been left where it lay. There was evidence of the man being brought down with a blow to the back of the head. The bruises on his neck showed that the murderer had been pinning him to the ground at the time. The hands had still been around the man’s throat after the time of death.

It was all there, all obviously linked. Detective McAfee sighed. As bad as it sounded, he had been hoping for a copycat, some sick person who wanted to get a bit of notoriety and fast. People like that never lasted; they didn’t have the mind of a serial killer. He didn’t know what to do now – he had been so sure, so convinced. He naturally still suspected that Conán had still had something to do with it. It would take a lot longer to throw him off the scent. He had been doing this job longer than Conán had lived, and although he was convinced that the young man had more involvement than he was willing to admit, he couldn’t think of a way around what he had been told. He had been in his bed at the time, and he certainly couldn’t be in two places at once. All sorts of doubts were entering Detective McAfee’s head, mingled with guilt. What if Conán was innocent, and he was harassing an innocent man? Conán Connolly was unhinged as it was, and was clearly suffering from psychological problems. What if Detective McAfee was just adding to his problems? The last thing Conán needed was these thoughts entering his mind, it wouldn’t take a lot for him to perhaps convince himself that he was involved …

Detective McAfee sighed. He knew to trust his instincts, but he couldn’t help but doubt himself in situations like this. He always ended up doubting himself, usually at the point where everyone else had complete faith in him. He pulled the file on his desk towards him, which had all of the crime scene photographs from all of the known murders and the profiles of those who were missing and presumed dead.

There was thirty-one year old Paul Farrell, who had been missing for a month now. Detective McAfee thought deep down that he had been a victim, but with no body he couldn’t prove this fact. Twenty-four year old Simon Megarry had been missing for nearly as long, and once more there had been no body. Detective McAfee had met Simon Megarry before, when he had helped with an investigation into a fatal stabbing at a club he had been at. Detective McAfee had liked him. Even though it had been a few years back, the detective’s memory was phenomenal, and he remembered him to be very calm, soft-spoken and co-operative. Twenty-seven year old Jack Donnelly had been missing for weeks now, as well. Detective McAfee had heard from the man’s mother that he had a worrying habit of wandering off when he was annoyed or frustrated. Who knew where he was now? Buried somewhere lonely, was what Detective McAfee reckoned. The rest of the victims were known.

A flash of memory. Detective McAfee sat bolt upright, his tired eyes alert again. He scanned through his file until he came to the entry about Mary O’Connell. He looked at the picture he had of her. She was a pretty girl, grey eyes framed slight with blue, dark blonde hair bordering on light brown, she looked like –

Detective McAfee flicked through seven more unfortunate victims, both suspected and confirmed, to find the latest young girl to have been murdered – Moiragh McDonnell, one year older than Mary and similar in appearance. He read the notes on their murders. The initial ones were nearly the same. Strangled to death. No sign of a motive, possibly random attack. Victim left where murdered, no clues of witnesses. Marks show pressure was still applied for a significant amount of time after the moment of death.

The brief notes, the appearance of the girls, all was stirring something in Detective McAfee’s mind. He left his chair soundlessly and walked down through the dark corridors, long empty after everyone had retired for the night. He let himself into a cramped room where, on one side, the kept all of the files of the cases that had been solved, along with numerous files from the North of Ireland from more trouble days on terrorist suspects and crimes occurring up there, and where, on the other side, the kept the files of those crimes which were unsolved. Several Northern files filled the shelves here, but the was not what Detective McAfee was looking for.

Cillian McAfee’s mind was a mind rivalled by many of the other detectives. You gave him a name or a face and he could retain it in his mind for years to come, and this was what enabled him to trace his finger along the 'M' section, looked for a particular surname.

"There you are," he muttered, finding 'Mc' and searching until he found a file which hadn’t been touched for at least two years. He opened it up and blew the dust off the inside, holding it up to the single light above him on the ceiling which swayed slightly with a draft.

Elizah McGuire had been found throttled to death in a city centre park around three years ago. She had been a prostitute and in severe financial difficulty, however her mother and father noted her disappearance and were naturally worried about her, even though because of her choice of work they were slightly estranged. Detective McAfee had been working on the case and it hadn’t mattered how hard he and his colleagues had tried, they couldn’t find a motive, or a single clue as to the identity of the killer. Now, as Detective McAfee squinted at the picture of the smiling girl, who looked like Mary and Moiragh and who had the same scrawled notes on an old and slightly crumpled piece of paper.

The more the detective looked into the face of the young girl who had been dead for three years, the more he convinced himself that the murders were linked. They were dealing with a serial killer, that much was clear, and Detective McAfee knew enough about serial killers to know that their killing sprees were dragged out over months or even years. They could kill, and then live normally for year before killing again. It had happened before, the detective reminded himself. Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer go nine years in between his first kill and his second?

Conán swam into Detective McAfee’s mind once more. He would have been seventeen three years ago. Hadn’t Naoise told him in the full course of his speaking with her that Conán had ran away from his abusive mother at sixteen? Conán hated his mother, couldn’t talk about her without the rage becoming evident in everything about him – his voice, his body language … and his eyes. Detective McAfee had never seen such hatred and rage in a person’s eyes than when he had seen Conán’s eyes glint manically that day. What did his mother look like? He would have to find out. He knew if she bore any resemblance to these dead girls, he could have a question that could make Conán squirm his way into a trap.

*

"Why don’t you tell me about your mother, Conán?"

Conán, once more, was trapped in the dreaded office of the psychiatrist, wishing that he was anywhere in the world but where he was.

"No," he replied simply.

"You don’t make life easy for yourself, do you?"

"So dragging up these painful memories would help me?"
"You can’t suppress them, Conán."

"No, but I can try."

"You find it difficult to talk about her?"

"Yes."

"Why is that?"

"Because I hate her so much, and thinking about her makes me want to –"

Conán’s face was suddenly twisted in an awfully beautiful way, and his eyes flashed dangerously. As quickly as the look came over him, it disappeared.

"Makes you want to what?"

"Never mind."

Dr. McMurray sighed.

"I don’t usually suggest this to older clients, Conán, but perhaps I should suggest that we take an alternative approach? Would you feel better writing or drawing how these things make you feel?"

"Probably not."

Dr. McMurray pushed a clean sheet of paper over to Conán, along with a pencil.

"Do what you will," he told him. "Please, Conán."

Conán doodled in the corners of the sheet for a while. Spirals. Lots of spirals, tightly curling and never ending, a brief statement of infinity. Spirals descending because of the way Conán drew them, descending like his moods, swirling madly like his thoughts until Conán couldn’t take it anymore.

He growled under his breath, and the sharp point of the pencil lead snapped with an unusual sound in the quiet room.

Conán paused, and then he turned the pencil so the less jagged edge of the lead was touching the surface of the paper. Suddenly he was sketching, but what? Dr. McMurray could not work it out yet. Conán’s hand gripped the pencil with determined pressure, he made smooth, decisive strokes with the pen and suddenly Dr. McMurray recognised what it was. Conán was drawing himself, and brilliantly, too, but Dr. McMurray could notice changes between that of the face on the paper and the face of the man across from him.

The eyes on the picture were extraordinary. They were identical though Conán hadn’t traced them, and they were wide and questioning, perfectly shaded, the boldest things on the paper. There was a haunting look in them, a sadness or anger, Dr. McMurray couldn’t work it out yet. He guessed it was a little of both. The paper-Conán was looking into a mirror, but nothing looked back at him.

"I used to stand in front of the mirror all of the time," Conán suddenly said softly, touching the sketched mirror with the tip of his index finger on his left hand. "But I never got any answers. I thought that perhaps, if I stared at myself enough, I would work out why she hated me. I never got any answers. It was always just me. Just me looking at the mirror with no one else. I never got any answers."

Conán pushed the drawing away from himself, almost as though he were angry, but couldn’t quite muster the energy to put any effort into the emotion. Dr. McMurray took it and looked at it. Conán was a talented drawer, but he clearly didn’t realise it. The picture was so lifelike, with the sort of eyes that followed you as you moved.

"You used to ask for answers often?"

"All of the time."

"You think it was your fault, what your mother did?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Why else would a mother hate her own child? I was a troublemaker from the start, a bastard child, a kid no one would claim and who would dishonour my mother for the rest of her days."

"But you didn’t ask to be born. Conán. It was your mother’s responsibility."

"I ruined her life, even more so than it already was. She would have been better off if one of her boyfriends had ended up killing me. I ran away before one of them could."

"You were abused by others as well as your mother?"

"I was Dublin’s bloody punch bag," Conán spat.

"It was physical abuse?"

"And mental abuse," Conán smiled thinly. "They used to love messing with my head, love convincing me into confessing things that I hadn’t done."

"You believed them?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you still believe things about yourself now?"

"Believe? I know things. They were right."

"Like what?"

"Like I’m evil."

"Why are you evil?"

"I just am. There’s nothing to it, I just am."

"You feel evil?"

"Yeah."

"Naturally evil? Or do you feel something else is making you that way?"

"Naturally evil. I always was."

"Why do you think that?"

"I kept attracting death, you know?"

"Attracting death?"

"Yeah. Loads of my mother’s boyfriends or pimps or whatever they were kicked the bucket in the house, and it was always me who found them, never my mother. She started to think I was doing it on purpose, that I was cursing them or something. Perhaps I was? I yelled at one of them that I wished they were dead, and they died a few hours later. Perhaps I did curse them? Perhaps I did something and don’t remember? All I know is that my mother thought I was the devil and used to scrub me to within an inch of my life in cold water."

"What was their cause of death, do you know?"

"Drug overdose. The same thing that killed the bitch in the end," Conán shrugged. "What’s the point in going over all this anyway? The past is in the past, dragging it up in the future is never going to change anything. Bury it where it belongs."

"Clearly your past is affecting your future, though."

"It’s not."

"Why have you attempted suicide, then?"

"Because I hate myself, not because of my past."

"But do you hate yourself because of your past?"

"No. I hate myself because I’m bad news, and nobody who comes into contact with me is safe, because I’m evil."

"So, if your past doesn’t affect you, why are you still angry when your mother is mentioned?"

"Because I’ll always hate her."

"What about if you see someone who looks like her? Do you hate them?"

"I hate what they remind me of."

"What did your mother look like?"

"A state, that’s what she looked like."

"Draw her."

Conán sighed, and then he grabbed another bit of paper and stared at it for a while.

Finally, his pencil began to move over the paper smoothly and decisively, even though his hand was trembling.