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I missed Lucie even more than I would have expected but I developed strategies for coping with her absence. The main one was based on fantasy. The blog had gone from fewer than 10 unique visitors a day to more than 50, but nobody was breathing over my shoulder to make sure that I updated it regularly. I had many idle hours and I passed most of those rehearsing the circumstances in which Lucie and I would be reconciled. I had no real doubt that a reconciliation would be effected, and even less that it would be very difficult to bring about. Lucie, it was increasingly clear to me, was in denial about what Benjamin Colleran had done to her. She found it impossible to accept the role of victim, hence her insistence that she had willingly had sex with her attacker.
Nobody likes to believe that she (or he, of course—this applies equally to men) is not in control of what happens to him, that he’s at the mercy of circumstances, and of other people’s malice. So we reframe events, cast them in an alternative narrative in which we acted freely and voluntarily. Even when the outcome is unambiguously disastrous — where we’re the victim of a violent crime, for example — we look for ways to control the story, things that we might (and ordinarily would) have done differently which would have led to a much more benign outcome. And then we tell ourselves that, in the ideal world, this is exactly what we did.
It seems probable that some such psychological mechanism is at work in the phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome. The hostages’ sense of powerlessness and vulnerability is unacceptable to them and the only alternative is to believe that they are voluntarily cooperating with their captors, who in reality have enormous power over them. Lucie, I became convinced, was suffering from a condition akin to Stockholm syndrome which forced her to insist that Colleran had not coerced her in any way.
Did Colleran know this, and use it to avoid being denounced? It certainly seemed plausible, but I didn’t have any evidence. For all I knew, and unlikely as it sounded, Lucie was the first of his students he’d ever “slept with” (as he’d no doubt have described the rape).
I thought about following him. This would have the additional advantage of either confirming that he was not still seeing Lucie, except as a student (which, to my mind, would have supported my conviction that what had happened between them had been an assault) or of revealing her whereabouts to me, so that I could have a go at persuading her to come back. Not that I had much confidence in my powers of persuasion, but it was unthinkable to me that we would remain estranged for very long, and, without my making some approach to her, I couldn’t imagine how we could be reconciled.
However, I was forced to recognize that tailing Colleran wasn’t very practical. For one thing, although the blog could hardly have been described as a roaring success, it did make some demands on my attention. More importantly, for three days each week, Colleran spent most of his time, not just the working hours, around the college. There was a risk of being spotted by Lucie herself or by one of several of her friends who knew me. I didn’t want to appear to be stalking either Lucie or her supposed lover. So, for weeks I did nothing but fume and feel powerless, all the time growing angrier that Colleran seemed to be getting away with his attack.
I heard from one of Lucie’s friends that she had gone to Cork for four days. She had often said that she intended to visit Ireland sooner or later. This removed the major obstacle to picking up Colleran’s trail at his place of work. I wasn’t familiar with the layout of Queen Mary and I did not, of course, have any student ID but I was confident that I could mooch around without being challenged. If asked what I was doing there, I would say I’d arranged to meet a friend who was a student. I’d armed myself with the name of a vague acquaintance of Lucie’s.
Although there was no reason to think that Colleran, whom I’d met only once, might recognize me, it would clearly have been asking for trouble to have made myself conspicuous around his departmental office, the bar or his other haunts on campus, assuming that I could find out what they were. Instead, I thought it wiser to spend the first day becoming familiar with the campus and generally getting the feel of the place. I didn’t get a glimpse of him all day. At 7.15 in the evening, I decided to give up and head home. I stopped off in the City for a pie and chips in a pub.
When I got home, I Googled Colleran’s name for maybe the fifth or sixth time. I didn’t have much hope that somewhere on the internet I’d find his home address, but you never know your luck. This time, it remained elusive. I went to bed, wondering if my day had been a complete waste of time.
The next three days passed without my getting more than a brief glimpse of Colleran. After that, Lucie was due back from Ireland and I decided that the risk of being caught hanging around Queen Mary were too great.
Having little option but to relinquish my attempt to track Colleran down, I tried to make a virtue of necessity. I forced myself to consider whether my devotion of so much of my time to him couldn’t be construed as bordering on obsession; and agreed that, with just a little exaggeration, it could. After all, Lucie was his victim; it was true that his attack had also injured me, but only incidentally. If she didn’t want to take any action, the choice, however misguided it might be, was hers. He was going to get away with it. It was unjust, but so are many aspects of life. Ultimately, one has to accept that some injustices will never be rectified. I was going to have to let Colleran go.
I’m well aware of the risk that my motives will be misunderstood, so I intend to be unambiguously explicit about them. What I did was not done out of a desire for revenge. Some people, no doubt, will find that impossible to accept, or even to grasp. Therefore, it is worth repeating: I was not motivated by revenge. Rather, I acted in order to preclude the possibility of revenge. In the weeks after Lucie moved out, I became consumed by the thought of making Benjamin Colleran suffer for what he’d done to her, and to us. I fantasized about kidnapping him, immobilizing him (temporarily or permanently) and inflicting the most intense and prolonged pain I could devise. I can’t now describe those fantasies. Their vividness and twisted ingenuity, as well as my inability to disengage myself from their power, still disturbs me. After several weeks, they showed no sign of fading. I began to be seriously worried that I would not be able to resist the urge to act on them. Once, I sat at the computer, intending to search the internet for instructions on how to flay a man, then stopped myself, to avoid leaving a trail of evidence. I began to worry that this obsession might not pass of its own accord. I would have to take responsibility for it, do something decisive to end it, before it turned me permanently into a monster.
I would have to remove the object of temptation. If Benjamin Colleran no longer existed, neither could the urge to do extremely brutal things to him. Once that solution had occurred to me, it was clear that it was satisfactory in several respects, not just as an answer to my immediate problem. He was, after all, a dangerous predator. Lucie had made it clear that she was not willing to report him to the police. Removing him from circulation would have the incidental merit of making sure that he did not rape again. But I had to be very careful. It was essential that I kill him instantaneously, as cleanly as possible, so that he suffered no more than momentary pain. Otherwise, I’d be defeating my primary purpose, which was to frustrate the all but irresistible temptation to hurt him. In short, this killing was to be pure prophylaxis, with no element of punishment.
Once I had seen where the solution lay, I was (by my standards) surprisingly quick to act. Weeks before, I had given up my attempt to track Colleran, partly out of fear that I would be spotted by Lucie or her friends hanging around his college office. From the departmental website I was able to discover his academic timetable. His teaching was concentrated on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, with a lecture followed by a seminar on Thursday mornings. Accordingly, it was not his habit to attend college at all on Mondays or Fridays. (This, I surmised, reflected his perceived value to the department.)
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, he rarely left the college premises before 8 pm and sometimes it was well after 10. On Thursdays, he was available in his office to advise students until 3.30 and usually left before 5. I concluded that, if I were to follow him as he left college on successive Thursday afternoons, I could minimize my risk of being spotted by Lucie or anyone who knew us both. So, at 4.35 pm the following Thursday, I took up a position from which I could see the main entrance of the building which housed his department. By 5.15, I had failed to spot him and had come to feel that I myself was a little too noticeable for comfort, so I withdrew to a coffee shop a good quarter of a mile from the campus.
I had found the experience of surveillance unsettling. Though I don’t think there’s anything particularly conspicuous about my appearance, I didn’t have much faith in my ability to pass unnoticed. I had a whole week to get myself into a suitable frame of mind for a repeat performance the following Thursday but I wasn’t really confident that that would be enough. I began to consider alternative possibilities. I suspected that a private detective would be an unaffordable extravagance, even if I’d had any idea how to go about finding one that I could trust. I discovered that I really didn’t like the idea of coming back, Thursday after Thursday, to watch the departmental offices. If Colleran was a creature of habit, so might other members of the department be. To them, although my bouts of watching would occur just once a week, they might appear suspiciously (and obviously) regular.
For several days, I failed to come up with a solution that I found satisfactory. I had decided to take up my position only every second or third Thursday, even though (given that I had failed to spot him my first week there) this multiplied by two or three the risk that my presence would fail to coincide with his. However, when the following Thursday came around, I was pleased to find that I was unable to wait an additional week before I resumed my pursuit, and I was waiting when Colleran emerged at 4.47 pm by my watch.
By a coincidence that was at once pleasing and disturbing, he went to the same coffee shop as I had the previous week, where he drank a cup of something and read a dog-eared library paperback with every appearance of listlessness. I didn’t go in, of course, but neither did I have very long to wait for him to come out. When he did, I followed him at a brisk walking pace to a tiny square of old, well-maintained small houses within a stone’s throw of Southwark Cathedral. I had, I was confident, tracked him to his home.
And so it proved. Less than a minute after Colleran entered the house, using his own set of keys, a light went on in the uncurtained basement window. Pausing by the railings around the area, I could see Colleran put something in the fridge and then begin to chop some onions. I quickly moved away; having been fortunate enough to find out where he lived, I didn’t want to let my good luck go to waste by drawing attention to myself as a prowler. I noted the house number and the name of the street and went home. Now that I knew where, apart from college, Colleran was to be found a good proportion of the time, I could begin to make my plans in earnest.
The next day was Friday, so he he wasn’t due to show up in college. I decided to make several passes by his house once it got dark, to try to get some sense of his habitual activities. At that time of year, it was fully dark a few minutes before 5 pm, so I decided to begin my patrol shortly after that time. To my slight consternation, the street lighting on the square was unusually bright but I didn’t let that discourage me. There was, I assured myself, no particular reason why anybody should notice that I walked along one side of the square at, say, twenty-minute intervals. Every third or fourth time, I took in a second side of the square, so as to increase my ‘contact time’ and reduce the likelihood that Colleran would go out while I was at a point in my trajectory from which I couldn’t see his house. Each time it came back into view, I deduced from the lights that were on that he had not, in fact, left the premises.
Then, at about 6.15, just after I had passed his front door for the fourth time, I heard it open behind me and a tread that I knew must be his descending the steps. I had to manoeuvre a bit to get into a position where I was following him rather than the other way around. I crouched down and quickly loosened my left shoelace — the side nearest the inside of the footpath and therefore the one on which he was less likely to pass me — and then retied it more slowly. Colleran showed no sign of having noticed me. I forced myself to count to ten before standing up and following in the direction that he’d taken.
The streets were quiet, so I dropped quite far back without being in danger of losing sight of my quarry. Luckily, he was a fast walker, so I didn’t have to force myself to slow down so as to maintain the gap between us. He walked along the river to the British Film Institute, where he bought a single ticket. I did the same and entered the cinema. I was unsurprised to see that Colleran took an aisle seat to the right of the room. I placed myself some twelve rows further back and more towards the centre. Assuming that the row would fill up, this would make it impossible for me to follow if Colleran should decide to leave suddenly before the end of the film but I told myself that to follow him in those circumstances would in any case be to make myself too conspicuous. As it turned out, Colleran was one of the last members of the audience to leave the cinema. He went home and made himself a cup of coffee in his basement kitchen.
The film was something by Jean-Luc Godard that I hadn’t seen before. No doubt, I could look up the title on the internet but it isn’t important. My overall impression of it is one of confusion. No doubt, I was too preoccupied with making sure that Colleran remained in my view, and with my plans for him, to pay proper attention. My French had improved a bit during the time I’d lived with Lucie, though nowhere near as much as her English had. There were subtitles but I found them more a distraction than a help. The following Friday, Colleran went to the British Film Institute again. Was this a pattern?
I found watching Colleran, which became my principal activity over the next few weeks, to be surprisingly therapeutic. The mere fact that I could keep him in view for, on occasion, hours at a time, without being overcome by an all-consuming fury, came to me as both a comfort and a revelation. If I could study his activities and stay calm, then I could, coolly and rationally, plan his removal from our lives.
It soon became clear that, while his visits to the BFI were far from infrequent, neither were they a regular Friday night fixture. Each Sunday afternoon, in contrast, he spent several hours in a house in South Clapham, leaving his own dwelling at shortly before 3 and starting his homeward journey at 7.30. He would take the Northern Line, getting off at London Bridge at any time between 7.45 and 8.15. The walk from London Bridge tube station to his house took him through some badly-lit streets which were practically deserted on Sunday nights. If I was going to cleanse our blighted lives of Colleran’s malign presence, this was where it must be done.
Knowing that the watching phase of my interaction with Colleran had come to an end changed the way I saw him. I discovered that, now that I no longer found it necessary to do so, I could not look on him with a calm resembling equanimity. So much the better. While I remained determined to excise him from existence with surgical precision, causing no unnecessary or prolonged pain, I nevertheless felt that my fury would be useful. It would (I hoped) ensure that I hit hard enough and fast enough, and save me from fatal hesitation. Over the weeks, I had entertained several vivid but incomplete fantasies as to how Colleran would meet his end. Now it was time to lay detailed plans.
I decided, in the first place, that I would travel by bike. I immediately ruled out the idea of a car for several reasons. For one thing, I’d have had to borrow or hire one, which might give rise to suspicion after the event. Anyway, although traffic would be very light in the northern streets of the Borough and in the City on a Sunday evening, a car would be noticeable and an observant passer-by might just note the number. A bicycle would make up for its relative lack of speed with flexibility. I could, for example, follow the riverside path to a spot where I could drop the weapon in the river without making too much of a splash.
As for the weapon itself, my first thought (no doubt suggested by the fact that I was going to make my getaway on a bike) was that a large spanner would do the job nicely. Unfortunately, none of the spanners in my possession was so heavy that I could be confident that it would crack Colleran’s skull with a single blow. If I’d been going to buy a new one, I should have done it weeks or even months ago, again to avoid raising police suspicions. So, what did I have in the nature of a hammer that could be used to stave in Colleran’s thick skull? It was the word ‘hammer’ that gave me the idea. Lucie had had to buy a small hammer to complete a sculpting exercise during her first term in college. Sculpting was not a particular interest of hers and I remembered her complaining about the expense of an item that she was unlikely to use ever again.
I couldn’t remember having seen the hammer for several months at least, but I knew immediately that it wasn’t the kind of thing that Lucie would have wanted to take with her when she had collected her belongings. But where would she have left it? Never mind, I had until Sunday to find it. As it turned out, I found it within forty minutes, in a drawer of the desk that Lucie had used for her work. The idea of killing Colleran with a hammer that had belonged to Lucie seemed fitting. After all, she was his true victim.
It was for much the same reason, I feel sure, that it occurred to me to wear her tights to the fatal encounter. They were the closest thing I had to her, the last link that she had left me. After I’d come back to the flat and found her gone, I’d picked them up off the floor and handwashed them, then put them away in one of my drawers, even though at that stage I didn’t consciously understand that she’d shortly be back to remove all traces of her former presence. Even then, I must have intuited much of what was to follow, though the notion of erasing Colleran from our — from everyone’s — lives had not yet formed in my mind.
I’ve never thought of myself as a decisive person. I’ve always been happier to review my projects and run them over in my head than to act on them; but, having arrived at a plan to dispose of Colleran, even I understood that this was a case where hesitation would serve no useful purpose. The longer I waited, the better Colleran’s chance of escaping his fate. (I had almost written “of escaping justice” but I think it’s important to stress that justice was not a consideration in the action I took. To be clear, I did not consider what I was about to do to be justified, but rather necessary.)
So, at 7.40 pm the very next Sunday, I found myself lurking in one of the dark streets in the shadow of London Bridge station, holding a small hammer, wearing tights and a dark cycling jacket and with my bicycle unlocked nearby, ready for a quick escape. At first, I’d intended to wear something over the tights but, once I’d realized that in the dark they’d be indistinguishable from Lycra cycling gear, I saw that it was more appropriate to leave them uncovered. That way, Lucie’s virtual presence at the scene of my vengeance on her attacker would be the tiniest bit more real.