Mindgame Read Online Free PDF Page B

appearance.
    STYLER: How he looks.
    FARQUHAR: He was twenty-three when he was brought here. For ten years he wouldn’t even leave his cell, ten years without seeing the sun. Gradually we managed to coax him out, into the grounds, into therapy but it took another two or three years before he’d even agree to speak.
    STYLER: He was ashamed of what he’d done.
    FARQUHAR: Not at all. He seemed to be unaware of it, though secretly I think he was rather proud. As you rightly said, he’s been here for twenty-nine years now. Half his life. He must be about the same age as me. I doubt if you’d recognise him.
    STYLER: I’ve only seen a few photographs of him.
    FARQUHAR: Most of them were destroyed when he burned down his house.
    STYLER: There was one taken by an aunt. He must have been about eleven years old. Slim. Fair hair. Blue eyes. Dressed all in white. He was a very beautiful boy, I thought. The face of an angel.
    FARQUHAR: Was that what drew you to him? His looks?
    STYLER: No. Of course not. But on the other hand, I knew it would give a commercial edge to the book. Most of the serial killers are so depressingly ugly. Chikatilo bald and wild-eyed. Dennis Nilsen every inch the minor clerk that he actually was. The Wests, hideous. Myra Hindley either dowdy or satanic. Easterman was different to all of them. But you know as well as I do that it wasn’t just his looks.
    FARQUHAR: You said you did research?
    STYLER: Of course.
    FARQUHAR: I’d be interested to know what you found. Your take on Easterman.
    STYLER: Why?
    FARQUHAR: What are we, Mr Styler, but what other people perceive of us?
    A pause.
    STYLER: Easterman was every mother’s dream of a perfect son. Healthy, good-looking, athletic, intelligent. He went to a local grammar school. The family lived in Yorkshire.
    FARQUHAR: In York.
    STYLER: Yes.
    FARQUHAR: Was that near you?
    STYLER: Yes. It was, as a matter of fact.
    FARQUHAR: But you never met him?
    STYLER: ( Hesitant .) No. ( Pause .) When he was sixteen, his father died.
    FARQUHAR: He killed his father. On a wine-tasting holiday at the Chateau Mavillion in France.
    STYLER: No. His father died in a car accident.
    FARQUHAR: Easterman was driving the car. He reversed it over his father.
    STYLER: Accidentally.
    FARQUHAR: Twice.
    STYLER: That never came out in the trial.
    FARQUHAR: Since Easterman refused to speak at all during the time of his trial, a great deal didn’t come out.
    STYLER: Well, however he really died, after the death of his father Easterman lived with his mother, in York. According to his neighbours he was a completely trouble-free teenager.
    FARQUHAR: He killed the neighbours.
    STYLER: He only killed one of them.
    FARQUHAR: Ah yes. Mrs Barlow.
    STYLER: ( Pause .) Yes. That was her name. ( Pause .) But you’ve jumped ahead of me. The bulk of his killings took place in the eighteen months between age twenty-one and his arrest at the age of twenty-three. He actually killed his mother on the morning of his twenty-first birthday.
    FARQUHAR: That’s right. When her head was found it was still covered in gift-wrap.
    STYLER: He buried her in the garden and went on living in the house. It makes you think a little of Hitchcock, doesn’t it.
    FARQUHAR: No.
    STYLER: The Bates Motel? His next victim was his girlfriend, Jane Plimpton. ( Realising .) Nurse Plimpton! That’s where I’d heard it before!
    FARQUHAR: Where is Nurse Plimpton? She seems to be taking a devil of a long time with your sandwich.
    STYLER: She’s not related?
    FARQUHAR: I hardly think so.
    STYLER: Well, anyway, at this time Easterman was running the family wine shop in Bootham Gate — just in the shadow of York Minster by some horrible irony. What nobody knew was that he had adapted some of the cellars, the ones furthest under ground, to his own horrendous end.
    FARQUHAR: He had turned them into a torture chamber?
    STYLER: Yes. He picked up hitch-hikers, some of them students at the