Attention to Detail

A psychopath confesses

Whenever I hear that someone I know has died, I always want to burst out laughing. This has nothing to do with my recent descent into insanity — I have shown the same reaction for the last twenty years.

Nor is it because I am particularly callous and unfeeling.

It is the combination of the solemn tone of the person breaking the news and the excruciating awkwardness of the situation which produces the desire to erupt. The sense that laughing is the least appropriate of all responses.

To be fair, I normally manage to contain my mirth, at least for long enough to mumble some shocked regrets and retreat out of earshot. My wife Pamela will swear under oath that she heard me stifle a snort when I heard that my favourite teacher from grammar school, my old Latin master, had died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of fifty-eight.

It is looking increasingly unlikely that she will have to testify to this effect, but as you can see I think of everything. My darling wife can be called into court, should the need arise, and will be able to support me when I explain my reaction to Patrick’s news last week.

Patrick walked into my office first thing on Monday morning, adopted the solemn tone and asked whether I had heard about Peter. I looked straight into his eyes and said no. Then he told me. Then I laughed.

For over a month now I have been practising lying directly to people while maintaining eye contact. It is a technique which I first observed when Peter used it a few months ago, at the time of our last disagreement. He looked me in the eye, while his own boss looked on, and said:

“Tom, this has nothing to do with what you did in June. Your performance is the sole item on the agenda. Believe me, Tom, we are trying to help you.”

Although half of my mind was occupied in constructing elaborate answers for the tissue of lies contained in my appraisal, the other half was struck with wondering admiration at my boss’s aptitude for deception.

The crowning glory was the pleading stress he gave to the words “Believe me”. The man was a genius and, in calm reflection after the meeting, I realised that if I were to learn nothing else from the encounter, I had to learn this knack of barefaced lying.

I practised on Pam, starting with exaggerations and lies which did not diverge too far from the truth. The train became forty minutes late instead of twenty. I went for a drink because it was someone’s birthday and my presence was explicitly requested, rather than simply because I wanted to go.

Before long I progressed to more outrageous claims, which could easily have been disproved had Pam been of a less trusting nature. One night I covered up for a few rounds of drinks after work by having half of London immobilised by a terrorist bomb threat.

I arrived home cursing the delays I had suffered and expressed amazement when the story was not even covered on the late night news. I not only got away with it, but collected a wave of sympathy and wholly undeserved commiserations. This was a result I had not expected, but very pleasing. Clearly a skill was developing whose usefulness would outlive the immediate need.

I was therefore able to look straight up into Patrick’s eyes last week, a slightly puzzled frown puckering my brow, and say, “No. What’s up?”

This is how it went down.

It had to be a Friday night, because for a start, the rest of the department would have left early to go to the pub. Also Peter would leave at least an hour earlier than normal, when the tube platforms would still be sufficiently crowded.

The easy bit was doing the job. It was the cover-up which took the planning.

I slipped out of the office to buy some cigarettes at just after five pm. Coming back into the office, I not only had to show my identity card but also swipe it through the card reader. That caught it. Tom Brooke, employee number 61724, entering the building at 5:04 pm, recorded on computer disk in a secure part of the building and available for any future investigator to print out and peruse at leisure.

Employees who use the card reader going in must do the same on the way out. Those possible future investigators would naturally find a corresponding entry for the time I left the building at 7:47 pm. No intervening entries for my employee number.

Peter left at 5:48pm, giving me an unusually cheerful goodnight. His path lay down the long escalator to the foyer. Mine took me down the service lift and out through the kitchen door, long after the kitchen staff had gone home and, more importantly, via the only route between my office and the outside world which wasn’t covered by a single security camera.

To those theoretical investigators, poring over the films taken by the sixty video cameras spread around the building, I was the invisible man. (I sometimes feel like the invisible man anyway. I have noticed that sometimes automatic doors do not open for me, or open too slowly so that I risk colliding with them. It is so embarrassing to have to stop in front of a set of doors to see whether they are going to acknowledge your existence.)

Once they drew a blank on the surveillance cameras, they might possibly move on to investigate computer activities. In that case, skilled technical people, accessing the system logs, would confirm that Yes I was at my desk at the time, actively typing and entering data at the precise moment when Peter took his tumble.

I had decided that the key to misleading investigators was to give them a sense that they had uncovered something which I wanted to conceal. This might give them sufficient job fulfilment and self-satisfaction to prevent them from prying any further.

Or rather, they would be so pleased with how clever they had been that they would not even consider that someone might have been smarter.

Having a pseudo-secret which they would slowly be allowed to discover would also provide a ready explanation for any lack of composure or suspicious demeanour on my part in the heady days after Peter’s death.

I wrote a computer program to help me out.

As I left the office to follow Peter to the Tube, I set the program going. All that the program did was to replay some keystrokes that I had recorded on disk with my home computer.

The keystrokes were all of those involved in typing a short document into a word-processing package, and the program even replayed the time delays between letters and words.

Every two minutes while the document was being auto-typed, the program would save the document, as it was this saving activity which would be recorded on the system log.

The document was my letter of resignation, a ranting tirade addressed to Peter, which I would naturally not wish to publicise after Peter’s untimely end.

If the investigators ever get as far as finding what the system log thinks I was doing at the time of Peter’s death, I honestly think that they will draw a line at uncovering that letter of resignation.

It would take a large leap of imagination to reconstruct what actually happened. To figure out that I had set up a program to type a letter to Peter at the precise time that I was pushing him under a train.

As I said, the job itself was not difficult, especially after all of my preparation. Peter was barely half my size and was standing, as usual, far too close to the platform’s edge.

I had taken the precaution of a simple disguise — windcheater and whiskers, mainly in case the station cameras were inconveniently placed. But I need not have bothered. The platform was full and there was a little surge forward as the train came in.

I just had to make it a slightly bigger surge forward in Peter’s case. Making contact with the small of his back was deliberate — you cannot overdo the planning of details. That point was nearest to his centre of gravity and also allowed me to give a good shove below the line of sight of the other jostling passengers.

Of course, it is hard to exert maximum force when extending a single arm downwards at an angle. But I had been practising just this move on the punchbag in the garage for the past month, alternating arms so that I could use whichever side had a marginal advantage on the night.

Meticulous planning does not always guarantee success and I had a contingency plan available should the main event have fallen flat. In fact it worked like a dream.

I even had the opportunity for one of those inspired improvisations which you can only marvel at afterwards. Something which would never have worked as a scripted item. As my right hand pushed him forward from waist level, my left hand made what appeared to be a genuine but vain attempt to pull him back by the shoulder as he jumped.

The police were later said to be keen to interview a man with a green surf jacket and beard, who had attempted to restrain the dead man from jumping.

The police didn’t know and Peter didn’t know that he was actually a dead man since the morning of my appraisal. I frequently used to smirk to myself in that secret knowledge as Peter strutted about the office during his last month giving orders and making plans for the coming year, as though he would be around to see them through.

I suppose I am secretly disappointed that no-one has followed my trail far enough to test its effectiveness. Nor will they, if the police continue to rule out foul play.

While the program was starting its vehement tirade, at my usual ham-fisted typing speed and including all backtracking and corrections, I was putting on my whiskers and jacket in the dark kitchen.

While the software plodded on, I wedged a small sponge ball into the socket where the kitchen door bolt should return. That way the door would look closed, but the bolt would not engage and I would be able to re-enter without using my card.

As I ran around to the newsstand, to pick up Peter again as he stopped to buy his evening paper, my alter ego was typing in a distribution list which ran to almost a full page.

By the time I returned to my seat, breathless and elated, all that remained to be done was to print out and sign the letter. When Patrick came in on Monday morning I was just reading through it again, in theory just prior to copying it for distribution.

Wasted planning, as it turned out, since no-one has bothered to follow the trail that far. I may have overdone the laughter but, as I said, I have always tended towards that reaction, even when I was completely sane.

“Don’t rock the boat until you’ve got a lifeline” was what Patrick told me, although more verbosely, when I ran Plan A past him last June. Plan A was to get Peter sacked by pointing out to a suitably senior party that he had broken the law, or at least infringed company rules and industry guidelines, by dealing in shares without authorisation.

I suspected a trace of insider dealing as well, but thought I should stick to what I could prove. People who had dealt with Peter for longer than I had said that whatever mud I tried to throw would come back to me tenfold and that there were good reasons why his nickname outside the department was Houdini. I chose not to listen.

My actual thoughts were that I had enough to nail the bastard if I acted immediately, but that if I waited, then the chance would be lost.

So I jumped. There was an uncomfortable period when the top brass were sounding me out, trying to decide whether I had enough solid evidence to cause them a serious problem. This was my first shock (naïve creature that I then was). That they should not be interested in establishing the truth, but only in how much of the truth I was able to prove.

They finally decided, quite rightly, that I had nothing substantial, so they lined up unanimously behind Peter and against me. I still don’t know why I wasn’t sacked. Perhaps they suspected that I had held something back and could still cause them a problem by bleating externally to the newspapers or City regulators. Whatever the reason, they decided not to fire me, but instead to make my situation so uncomfortable as to force my resignation.

The heat came on like a blowtorch. I thought I knew what close scrutiny was, since I had been under the microscope once before in a previous job. But Peter’s attention to detail had always been superb and he tackled his new task with gusto.

Where other people’s work would get reviewed once, when it was finished, mine suddenly sprouted almost daily milestones, involving detailed review of work-papers, setting of man-hour budgets, development of programs and maintenance of four different varieties of status report.

Within two weeks I was drowning in a sea of paper.

They had knowingly gone for my Achilles heel of time management and I found myself thrashing about between assignments, getting nothing much done on any of them.

Needless to say, I had my CV out with every recruitment agent I could think of, but there was hardly a nibble and the interviews I did get were fruitless. Maybe because I had no ready answer for the obvious question of why I was looking to leave a good job with such a prestigious firm.

When the year-end bonuses were announced, there was nothing in the pot for Tom. “A disappointing year” was the summary comment on the appraisal.

I didn’t mind that so much — in fact I had to agree with it, but for different reasons. What irked me were the trumped up details supporting the poor overall rating.

“Inadequate technical skills”, written by someone who had difficulty in switching his computer on in the morning.

“Negligible planning ability” from someone whose every move was a knee-jerk reaction to some external stimulus. Whenever the puppet-masters at headquarters pulled a string, he would twitch into life.

“Insufficient attention to detail”. Well, to be fair there was slightly more merit in this last comment. I had always observed that the people who appeared to get on in business were those who could grasp and work with the big picture, without getting tangled up in the details.

Peter was a detail man through and through, who passionately believed that attention to the mind-numbing minutiae was the entire secret of effectiveness in our quality assurance role. Even allowing for our different perspectives on this, he had marked me way below my worth in this and two other areas out of the five on the appraisal form, with the inevitable result on my salary. It had taken him six months, but he had paid me back.

Pam says that when I get on the tramlines of recounting my grievances I forget myself and fail to notice people’s eyes glazing over. No audience can escape without hearing the full story, once I have launched into it.

She said last month that she was almost wistful for the time when I had sex on the brain all of the time, rather than my struggles at work. My colleagues, I noticed, stopped asking me how I was doing, because the chances are that I would give them a twenty minute rant, taking in most of the above details, whether the questioner had heard them before or not.

I didn’t blame them for avoiding me. I know that people with a permanent axe to grind are too tedious to bear. I have no tolerance left to listen to other people’s whines and, at least until the Friday before last, I was on an ever-shortening fuse.

My fists would clench in a spasm at the slightest contradiction or criticism, whether by Pam or someone in the office. I started to wake up in the night to find that I had been grinding my teeth, or clenching them until my jaw ached.

I was already covering tracks in anticipation of executing my plan. I made sure that I was never heard fulminating openly against Peter during the last few months. Other people in the group, however, continued to be irritated by him in more minor ways and were heard to utter death threats almost daily. I kept my silence and quietly rejoiced in the way they were helping to diffuse the indicators which would point to me.

The Tube idea came to me one day when I was waiting on a crowded platform and a voice announced “We regret the delay to your service this evening. This has been caused by a person under the train at Green Park”.

For a second I wondered what the person might be doing under the train, until the meaning of the words sank in. And then it hit me as the perfect ignominious end for an entirely inconsequential person.

No glamour, no newspaper reports, just a tiresome delay for thousands of cursing commuters. I also thought that the Tube offered the highest likelihood — I didn’t look for certainty — of the incident being viewed as an accident or suicide.

I could prepare all of the alibis I wanted, but I would be best served by never having to make use of them because of foul play not being suspected. Having decided on the overall method, the details were a delight to devise, amusing me endlessly as I commuted to and from the office each day. The part which pleased me most was the typing simulator.

If there is one disappointing aspect to the current situation, it is that no-one except me knows how clever I have been. I keep running my mind over scenes from fictitious future year-end appraisals where in response to any criticism, I could say:

“But aren’t you forgetting Peter’s murder? Didn’t that call for a combination of careful planning, excellent technical skills and meticulous attention to detail?”

These internal conversations are satisfying up to a point (because I always emerge triumphant), but I know that some genuine external recognition would be so much better.

It occurs to me that even were I to confess, I might have difficulty proving my guilt, so thoroughly did I cover my tracks. That might result in a further technical challenge — me trying to reconstruct a genuine audit trail which would stand up in court, while the police attempt to depict me as a deranged innocent, trying to take the blame for some unfathomable reason.

Peter was not entirely bad, in fact, but it was difficult for me to see that before he was dead.

Pam has always said that I tend to be obsessive and that I turn things over in my mind far too much. She can tell when I am lying in bed with my mind churning — perhaps my body stiffens slightly or perhaps she really is telepathic.

Normally I have to get up and go downstairs. Sometimes I write about whatever is eating me up. Most times I just watch television until I am so tired that I will sleep immediately when I go back to bed.

Now that I am able to be calmer about Peter, I sometimes feel that it may have been a little excessive to kill him. Perhaps I should have simply requested a transfer to another department.

Killing the boss is an extreme solution, although no doubt the thought has crossed everyone’s mind at some point. No. He probably had to die, if only to release me from my particular obsession with him.

In the past I have been distracted from one obsession by the rapid development of another. So for instance, an interest in judo, which was becoming obsessive, was replaced by an interest in roulette, which became expensive. Now that I have had to kill someone to escape from one of my obsessions, I have to ask myself what comes next.

More disturbing is the knowledge that the sweetness of that moment will stay with me forever. When everything came together, when I pushed and he fell. As I saw him go under, arms flailing, a surge of joy akin to a mystical rapture coursed through my body. That is a thrill which cannot be bought in powdered form.

The night that Peter died, there was a long delay to my journey home. An earlier incident of a person under a train had led to the Tube station being closed and I had to walk to the next station in torrential rain. My kind wife commiserated and even brought me a drink as I got changed.

Many thanks for reading!

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