The Shadow Maker (19 page)

When morality was a fiction invented by a cruel and ruthless society, and all that mattered was power and the thrill of exercising it. The compulsion was irresistible then.

It was after three in the morning now and even the cheap bars and more sleazy restaurants were closed. The lights along the seafront shone their tawdry haloes into a steamy mist rolling off the bay. Homeless drunks squabbled on the foreshore under the limp fronds of palm trees. There was little traffic about, just an occasional car swinging erratically along the curve of the Esplanade, or slowly cruising towards the backstreet hotels with their flickering neon signs. He’d come here, restless and compelled by his need and excited by the danger.

He heard her footsteps first, the loud click of heels in the silence.

Then her shadowy figure appeared, moving past the darkened pubs and shopfronts. She paused under an awning, looking towards where he sat in his car. As she walked over, he wound down the window.

She bent forward, her face close to his. ‘Looking for business?’

Did she do bondage, he wanted to know. The answer was yes, and she got into the car.

He drove past the pier, the shuttered kiosks and then the rickety hulk of the amusement park - its lights out, paint peeling from the woodwork. Turning into a street by the marina, he parked beside an apartment block and she took him up to her rooms on the second floor. Once inside, he opened his laptop case and handed her the money. She was young and thin-faced with an obvious drug habit, but attractive enough to look at. She said her name was Nadine.

He didn’t care.

She led him into the bedroom. It was girlish and cosy - strangely incongruous with a street pick-up. A Chinese lantern hung above the bed, which was covered with a brightly coloured quilt. A teddy bear sat beside the pillow. There were soft rugs on the floor and lace curtains draped the windows. A dressing table was cluttered with cosmetics and personal treasures - framed photos, china ornaments, a brass candlestick. Among the jumble was an overflowing ashtray and a syringe. A peculiar mixture of innocence and vice.

As she dimmed the lights, he watched her, aroused by his anticipation of what was going to happen. The woman took off her clothes. Her body was thin and pale with small pointed breasts.

There were tattoos on her hips and a metal ring through her navel.

He wondered how old she was.

‘Ready?’ she asked, attaching leather and metal bondage equipment to the bed.

‘Instead of dimming the lights,’ he said, ‘can we just have candles?’

‘If that’s what you want.’

She collected half a dozen candles from around the flat, lit them and switched off the bedroom lights.

He stripped off and stood there naked, penis erect. Then he put on a bronze mask.

She picked up a condom and gave him a perfunctory look.

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’

He spoke quietly, teeth clenched. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’

She folded her arms. ‘No protection, no fuck.’

He took a deep breath and surrendered to the moment. She didn’t have time to cry out. With one movement he lifted the brass candlestick and bludgeoned her across the left temple. The blow concussed her and she dropped to her knees, sagging onto the floor, unable to focus. He picked her up and put her on the bed, face up, strapping her into the bondage restraints. As she lay there, dazed and incapacitated, he climbed on top of her. Then, in a low crouching position, with all the force of his thigh muscles, he started penetrating her violently.

When he was finished he got up, still perspiring from the effort, and went to her kitchen. He rummaged through the drawers until he found what he needed - an instrument to inflict her necessary mutilation. His motive was trivial, but his actions were methodical and extreme. He turned her head and she groaned faintly. Her stupor dulled the pain as he inserted the thin serrated knife through her ear socket. Her blood trickled over his hand as he forced the blade in deeper, piercing the eardrum. He repeated the incision in her other ear, but this time the blade partially severed her carotid artery.

The wound was internal, and the arterial flow poured down her throat as her brain went into total unconsciousness. Finally, he sliced off her ears, tossing them onto the floor.

When it was over, he sat on her bed, feeling drained but exhilarated.

He didn’t view what he’d done as monstrous but, on the contrary, as eliminating a monster - and in some primeval way, it was liberating, like a process of unbecoming. Decompressing his sense of self and throwing off the person he’d become. Venting the violence embedded in his character. He looked down at the serrated knife on the floor between his blood-stained feet. It seemed innocuous now.

Getting up, he looked at the woman spread-eagled on the bed, her unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t dead yet, but she had only a few seconds left. Her head wounds were seeping into the quilt. Blood was leaking from her mouth, though much more of it was flooding into her lungs. When the terrible gurgling sound stopped, he knew it was over. He sighed. That hadn’t been his intention.

Rita was eating breakfast in her local cafe, a cup of coffee, croissants and her laptop lined up on the table in front of her. She couldn’t get Plato’s dark allegory out of her mind. There was something haunting about the image, shackled prisoners trapped in a fiery cave, nothing real but echoes and shadows. This was more than philosophical symbolism, it seemed emblematic of hell. Her mind became immersed in it as she began rethinking the profile of the offender.

Her thoughts were interrupted by her phone ringing, Strickland on the line.

‘Nash wants me to bring him up to speed on the hooker case,’

he said. ‘Have you got anything new to tell me, anything at all?’

‘Yes, I know what the attacker was doing with the chains, mask and fire, and why the victim was blinded,’ she answered.

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s not bondage he’s into, it’s role-playing. He was re-enacting a scene from the fourth century bc, something described by Plato in his book
The Republic.
‘

‘Why would someone base a brutal rape attack on Greek philosophy?’

asked Strickland.

‘Why indeed?’ Rita replied. ‘Why identify with any symbol? Why name your nightclub Plato’s Cave?’

‘I don’t need a debate, Van Hassel, I need something coherent to say to Nash.’

‘I’m making the point that all behaviour has a purpose. If we find out
why
our perpetrator turned the cave scenario into a psychotic fantasy, we should be able to pinpoint him.’

‘Okay, Nash might swallow that,’ Strickland grumbled. ‘Anything else?’

‘I’ve found another Plato’s Cave,’ she told him. ‘It’s an informal fellowship, an academic group at Melbourne University and I’m about to check it out.’

‘No shit,’ he said. ‘That’d be a turn-up for the books - a lunatic philosopher.’

‘He wouldn’t be the first,’ said Rita. ‘After the university I want to backtrack a bit. Kelly Grattan’s story about a bike accident still bothers me. I want to tackle her again.’

‘You’ve got a point,’ Strickland agreed. ‘If she really was the first target she’s a vital witness. If not, we need to be certain. Do a follow-up interview and find out for sure - without getting us sued for police harassment.’

As Strickland hung up, she opened her laptop, went online, found the university website and clicked on the appropriate page. The fellowship appeared insignificant, nothing more than a faculty club for undergraduates, providing an excuse for indulging in talk and drink. The website was full of notes from past gatherings, the venue for the next, essays, anecdotes and intellectual jokes.

She scrolled through them but stopped when she came to the

‘Quote for the week’ - a one-line comment chosen by the fellowship’s founder and chairman, a Phillip Roxby Ph.D. Rita found the choice more than a little resonant. It was a quote from Nietzsche:

‘God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.’

Rita wanted to know more about Roxby.

A further search of the website pulled up a page with an official outline of his career. He was thirty-two, came from Adelaide, and had been to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. From there he’d gone to the US where he tutored at Berkeley for several years before returning to Australia. He currently held the post of lecturer in Greek philosophy. The page also listed a number of books he’d published on Plato and the Pre-Socratics, along with articles he’d contributed to various journals.

It was all very worthy and formal and didn’t tell her much about the man. But a wider internet search threw up something far more interesting - a note on a radical student website. It listed alternative biographies of academics, including one under the epithet ‘Caveman Roxby’. The comments it contained were far from flattering, describing Roxby as autocratic and manipulative, claiming his attention to female students was more than professional. He was also accused, in true Platonic tradition, of being contemptuous of democracy. According to the website’s profile, he’d created the Plato’s Cave Fellowship as a private fiefdom for the nurturing of his favourite students and the exclusion of the rest. Most telling of all was a paragraph on his personal life: To his salivating acolytes Dr Roxby is a charismatic highbrow. They make the mistake, highlighted by Plato himself, of being fooled by appearances. They fail to look behind the oratory, the designer clothes, the fast cars and city penthouse. While on the surface he displays the elements of an enviable lifestyle, underneath he hides the sensibilities of an unreconstructed caveman. All was revealed during his stint at Berkeley. While there he was promoted to senior tutor, made a tidy bundle from online publishing, socialised freely with his Californian students and married one of them. He fathered a child. Then it went bad. Divorced on the grounds of mental cruelty, the court denied him access to his offspring and issued a restraining order to stop him intimidating his ex-wife. After finding evidence of sexual and psychological aggression, the judge described him as ‘intellectually brilliant, but emotionally dark’ - not something you’ll find mentioned in the university handbook.

The vitriolic comments sketched a disturbing portrait. Rita wondered if it was exaggerated. One way to find out. She’d meet him face-to-face.

Curiosity, as much as anything else, coloured her thoughts as she drove to the university. She parked in a street where she’d often parked during her undergraduate years. Then she crossed the road to the Melbourne University campus and followed the leafy byways and brick paths among the faculty buildings. Students with bags of textbooks and lecture notes sauntered through the archways. Another jogged past bouncing a basketball. There was an aura of calm - even in the sunlight on the walls of Tasmanian freestone. The old clock tower chimed the hour as she walked through the cloisters of the Faculty of Law, passing the camellia trees in their secluded grass square. She crossed the paved court to the Old Arts building, opened the door and went inside.

Roxby’s room was in the Philosophy Department on the first floor. She climbed the stone staircase with its worn wooden banister and paused in front of the students’ noticeboard. In front of her were the tutorial lists: ‘Does God Exist?’, ‘Topics In Formal Logic’.

There was also an offer of ‘Free Meditation Classes’. Next to it was an invitation to a meeting of the Plato’s Cave Fellowship at the end of the month, its subject for discussion: ‘Mind Games’. Rita had a feeling that’s what she was about to engage in. She walked up to Roxby’s door, read his name on it, and looked up through the window over the lintel. Through it she could see the glare of the strip lighting, and the slowly rotating blades of the overhead fan - signs that he was in.

She knocked on the door.

She heard a shuffle of papers, then a voice with a soft, modulated accent.

‘Come in.’

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Roxby looked up from the computer screen he was working on, a bland, accommodating smile on his face, no doubt the one he used for greeting students. Rita couldn’t assume the radical website was accurate in its assessment - after all, he might just be the victim of student animosity - yet there were immediate signs of psychological wear and tear - worry lines around his eyes and furrows above his eyebrows.

He was a man with ordinary looks and an average figure. Only his piercing blue eyes stood out in an otherwise unremarkable face.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked, his voice smooth and honeyed.

Rita walked up to his desk and stood there, looking down at him. ‘Dr Roxby?’

‘Yes, just as it says on the door. And who are you?’

‘Detective Sergeant Marita Van Hassel, from the Sexual Crimes Squad. I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

The expression on his face hardened. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You may be able to help with police inquiries.’

He stared up at her, suspicion creeping into his eyes. Then he sank back in his chair, regaining his composure with a fatalistic shrug. ‘I confess.’

‘To how many crimes?’

‘How many have you got?’

‘A rape and mutilation.’

He sat up straight. ‘I withdraw my confession. But you’d better take a seat.’

She pulled over a chair and sat down, looking around. Philosophy books lined the shelves, along with framed photos from Oxford and Berkeley. There were no family pictures at all. The floor was stacked with essay folders, and a jumble of discs filled a rack beside a laser printer.

‘Of course, you’re working on the blind prostitute case,’ he continued. ‘I’ve seen your picture in the news. So what exactly brings you here?’

‘Plato’s Cave.’

He shook his head, as if bewildered.

‘The fellowship,’ she said. ‘The one you’re chairman of.’

‘Pardon my ignorance, but what are you talking about?’

She took out the card and placed it carefully in front of him.

Roxby picked it up, gazed at it and frowned. ‘So, let me guess.