Little Fingers! (5 page)

The answer is
yes, definitely, I will tell you all, and it is all just about to
begin.

I came to
Hanburgh for one reason only. I became very, very rich. Less than
five years after I had been virtually annihilated as a person, I
became a super-person, someone who no longer cares about the rules,
or the consequences. I can afford them all.

I do not
suppose you know what it is like to be exceptionally rich. You have
no doubt met such people, and found us either exceptionally decent
or exceptionally arrogant. I flatter myself that my wealth did not
change me much. I was always both.

The secret of
my wealth is no secret. I invested every penny I could get my hands
on in a market as it swept up like a tsunami wave, and I bailed out
before it crashed into all those high rise buildings lining the
beach, killing everyone still aboard or in its way.

I remember
just sitting back and watching the numbers whizzing round. And such
large numbers, bigger and bigger every time I looked at them. I sat
there laughing helplessly, the uncontrollable giggling of the
supremely lucky. How can anyone have had this much luck? I was not
even anywhere near the richest woman alive. What must she feel
like, no doubt many years on from me? Was she still feeling lucky,
or bored, or angry, or euphoric about the world? Where would I be
by then?

Of course, I
know the answer by now - bemused, and disassociated, out of the
swim of humanity, sidelined, alienated, afraid to lose what I have,
and to be lost in what I have. I am about ready to complain to some
young person in a bar about the burdens of wealth. Oh my
God!

I remember the
day I leapt out of bed and said “Enough! Get out before everyone
else starts flailing around.” I offloaded the lot over two months
without anyone noticing, I believe. Three months later, the
Internet bubble starting blowing air through its anus, stinking out
the financial world as it shrivelled away.

And I have all
that money in the bank, and bonds, and precious metals, anything
other than shares. It is all sitting there. I can do almost
anything I want.

With the
voices of the world in my ear, I am almost godlike. Is it time for
hubris to lengthen its shadow over me?

So let me talk
about Mary Knightly, the first person I ever heard of in Hanburgh.
The woman my mother hated with a passion.

My mother
warned me many times about people like Mary Knightly, with whom she
spent some of her childhood in Hanburgh. “You must believe in
people,” my mother would counsel me. “Most people are good, even
when they are behaving badly. They are willing to help, and to
share, and to enjoy others' enjoyment alongside their own. It is
foolish to be cynical about people because you are afraid.” Then
she would take hold of my hands and kneed them with gentle strokes.
“On the other hand, there is another type of person. They are
usually deeply unhappy people. They absolutely must be feared, and
preferably avoided. They will introduce you to hell, and they will
never stop. They will never get better, and there is no strategy
for dealing with them. They are destructive, out and
out.”

“
And how
would I recognise them?” I would ask.

My mother
leant forward and whispered. “You cannot hear them.”

“
Not at
all?”

“
When they
are being silent. In the spaces between their words.”

“
You cannot
hear anyone when they are silent.”

“
You can if
you are listening carefully.”

“
You can hear
them when they are saying nothing?”

“
Yes.”

“
Mummy, you
are losing it.”

Now I know
differently. I can both hear and see what people are saying, and I
know that my mother was more right than she can even have been
aware of. She was guessing. I know.

I misuse my
powers, I am afraid. I have a little stratagem that I try out from
time to time. It is a miraculous sleight of thought. I synch into
your thoughts and travel alongside them. I can make comments that
astonish you by how much we believe in the same things. I have
heard you exclaim “Extraordinary! That is what I think too.” I
normally blushed modestly, and said something like “Well, yes, we
do seem to be of like mind, Inspector.” Then when we were running
down the same track, I would insinuate a deviant suggestion,
encouraging you into a direction that you would not normally have
entertained. You cavilled for a second, and then you chose to
re-align with me. That like-mindedness was just too cosy to
abandon. I built on this disorientation of the psyche to push you
further. Within minutes, you were flat out with me, whatever I
said.

I am sorry to
have treated you like a laboratory rat, but it was just so
wonderful to watch, to have this power over you, over
everyone.

However, it
does not work on people like Mary Knightly. They have some sort of
disruptive technology that resists empathy. If you lock in on what
they say, you find that they have dodged elsewhere. Unlike everyone
else, they are not interested in whether you agree with them or
not. They are only interested in whether you do what they want you
to do, which is inevitably unreasonable. They insist on being
unreasonable. If they were being reasonable when you complied with
their suggestion, then you may have obeyed them merely because what
you thought they wanted was the right and proper course of action.
That is no test of their power over you. However, if they are
totally unreasonable, and you still follow their wishes, the only
possible cause is because they have power over you. You are their
creature. So, all the time they test whether you are still enslaved
to them by being rigorously unreasonable. Are you with them, or are
you against them? Do you dare to be against them?

I cannot read
their thoughts. I hear silence. I approach a zone of white sound.
Nothing can be heard. The air becomes eerily still, and a little
cold. There is a blank expression to their mind. And then I know
that I have to be watchful, on my guard.

The good news
is that they do not seem to know who I am, or at least there is no
indication that I have ever detected. There again, as their
thoughts are silent, I would never know. Either way, they do not
glance at me or in any way acknowledge my presence. They pass me
by.

And how would
you spot them? It is not as easy for you. That is why you do not
recognise them, why you are taken in by them, why you victimise
others before falling victim to them yourself.

Now let me
tell you the story as it happens.

* *
*

Before I do
that, I must tell you one more thing about myself.

After I had my
accident, after I was reconstituted by the surgical team, after I
learnt about my new powers, as I began to come to terms with them,
I made a strategic decision.

There are two
types of Mary Knightlys in the world. There are the minor league
Mary Knightlys, like Mary Knightly herself, and there are the major
league ones, like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler. They are the same
creatures underneath, living on different scales.

With my
new-found powers, I could take on either. I could use sympathetic
suggestion to get a personal audience with the appropriate
dictator, I could enter the room, I could shake him by the hand, I
could flatter him and make him laugh. Dictators have no discernible
sense of humour, but they laugh when you flatter them. Then I would
kill him.

How would I do
that?

After the
accident, I was visiting South Africa and I went on a three-day
safari. It was magnificent. I saw all the big game in their natural
habitat, and they were magisterial. On the third day, we were
standing next to the jeep, and suddenly a lion leapt out on us.
According to the guide later, this was most unexpected behaviour
from a lion. The lion came at us very quickly. Involuntarily I
stepped in front of it to shield the rest of the group. As it made
ready to spring, I suddenly felt this energy welling up inside me,
my eyes flared like fire, and my brain exploded. The lion was on
its back legs, starting to leap, then it wobbled and it dropped at
my feet, its jaws gently encircling my ankles.

The group was
flabbergasted. They wanted to thank me out of sheer relief, but it
was not obvious what I had done. Because the situation was
otherwise inexplicable, the guide rapidly explained that this
particular lion was in the process of being monitored because it
had a heart problem. Obviously it had got over-excited at the
prospect of making a kill and had suffered a heart attack. Having
had the situation explained to them, the group came up to me one by
one to congratulate me on my courage in stepping into the path of a
rampaging lion.

What the guide
said was untrue, because I heard him. He was panicking as to how to
explain this apparently super-human feat, so he made up the story
of the lion's weak heart. He did not want to acknowledge to himself
what had happened as it defied nature, and he wanted to reassure
the others too.

I knew what
had happened. I had killed the lion with my thoughts.

So I could
kill a major league dictator too, using the same powers, but only
one of them. I would be arrested and the rest. I would be a bee
that could only sting once, not a wasp that could attack and sting
many a foe.

And would I
improve the world with that one sting? I am not sure that I would.
My favourite social scientific law is the law of unintended
consequences. For anything that you do, there could be the one
intended consequence (and that is not guaranteed) and the two or
three unintended ones.

Kill a
dictator, and who comes to the funeral? Maybe worse - does anyone
come to the funeral? There is, apparently, according to political
science, a significant difference in the way that conservatives and
socialists think. Socialists think that any change is for the
better. Conservatives know that change can go both ways. Your
investment can go both up and down.

And say I were
to kill Putin in the way I have just described. He almost certainly
deserves it. What he has done in Chechnya, the way that the people
have suffered for their desire to be independent, is utterly
reprehensible. He has tortured, maimed and murdered on the cynical
calculation that he is fabricating an enemy that will unite the
Russians and keep him in office. In its way it's as disgusting as
Bush's calculation that if he invaded Iraq the price of oil would
shoot up, and he would make himself fabulously richer.

The question
is, what happens when I have killed Putin? Is the world a better
place? If I were to kill Bush, it would be simple. The Americans
would get rather upset for a few days, the network TV companies
would drown in cash, there would be an election, and in a few weeks
nobody would remember who he was.

For Russia it
is different. Russia is always in the process of falling down
because it has never been given sturdy legs to stand on. It has
always been led by dictators who lend it their own legs and do not
see any benefit to allowing the country to survive independently of
them. If they die, the country may well collapse. It is not worth
the risk of subjecting over 200 million people to misery and maybe
civil war in order to rid the world of one would-be tin-pot
dictator.

And most of
the ugliest dictators run countries like that, ones that will
descend into chaos if they fall. That is why I dare not strike at
that level (plus I am terrified of pain, and I know exactly what
would happen to me if I were to bump off everyone's favourite
dictator who keeps the privileged in power, even if they could not
prove it was I who killed him).

So my decision
was to focus on the micro-dictators - the Mary Knightlys. In their
way they do an enormous amount of damage, and yet the fall-out of
their demise is minimal. Everyone shrugs their shoulders and says
“Good riddance. I am glad to see the back of that one.”

To deal with a
Mary Knightly is to commit a good deed acclaimed by all, except of
course by Mary Knightly, at minimal risk to myself.

So, I admit
it, Inspector. I came to Hanburgh as an act of revenge, with the
intention of killing or otherwise destroying those people whose
acts had driven my mother to suicide. I knew whom I was after.
First of all Mary Knightly, the woman my mother regarded as being
the most evil person in the world. Then Dr. Berringer, for a reason
I shall explain later. Then the man who raped my mother, leaving
her pregnant. Those were my targets as I drove up to Marshalls the
estate agents in Church Street looking for somewhere to rent in
this village.

And then I
found myself in the middle of someone else's war of revenge, I
assume. Someone decided to kill off quite a different set of people
for their own reasons, or perhaps out of their own unreason. It is
a shame that our lists have never coincided. We could have
co-operated. Instead, the killer blocked my sights. Mary Knightly
is still alive. Dr. Berringer is still alive. And I still do not
know who my father is.

So what does
it feel like to know that the person you sat opposite during all
those lunchtimes had murder on her mind, was a criminal in thought
if never in deed? Would that shock you, or surprise you, or leave
you unimpressed? Do you assume, as I have now come to understand,
that everyone is a murderer-in-waiting; everyone wishes to kill;
that we would all be murderers if we were certain that we would get
away with it? And, let's face it, someone is getting away with it.
Even though two of the people they killed were very special to me,
and I am extremely angry about that, I must admit that one part of
me says “Good on you for your courage. Now I would like to revenge
myself on you.”