Copyright ©2011 Rod Madocks . All Rights Reserved Worldwide. No part of this work to be reproduced without permission.



It loomed above us. The blade shone softly in the dim light.

"It's a sabre not a sword," Reg had explained.

A sword was for stabbing and this instrument was single-edged, made for slashing. It was for a man on a horse slicing down at a fleeing foe. The weapon dominated the room and we found that our gaze kept returning to it as Reg spoke to us. He had been one of the city's late summer crop of mad people. Reports had come in that he had been screaming abuse at the local children and banging his head against the walls of his sitting room. The police had been called after he had apparently encouraged his dog to attack his neighbours. Our job had been to assess the risk that he posed to the public. We were from a community protection unit made up mostly from forensic specialists trained in high security hospitals.

He lived at a cluster of bungalows designed for elderly and disabled folk. My colleague, Dr Shafik and I had surveyed the place before opening the gate. There was no-one to be seen in the adjoining houses. Our footsteps had sounded loudly on the slab path as we approached and rang the door bell. A thick dog chain hung down off a plastic washing line and swung uneasily in the breeze. The chain was attached to a large, studded, empty dog collar. We silently wondered at what size of canine neck that collar could encompass.

A face appeared at the window then Reg opened the door. He was a heavy man with mounded shoulders under his plaid shirt. His deep-set eyes squirmed behind thick smeary glasses. He faced us for a moment in his narrow hallway like a bear cornered in his den. His head swung from side to side as he glared at us then with a gesture of resignation he led us to his shadowed sitting room. We could hear the dog breathing heavily through its nose in long blasts under an adjoining door. There was also the sound of skittering, heavy claws. Reg indicated to us to be seated. I crouched on the edge of the greasy sofa and Dr Shafik took a recliner chair with grubby floral covers. I hadn't previously worked much with this doctor but we had been both trained in the same system and knew the ropes. We cooperated enough to keep up a connection of shared glances by which we ensured that our visit would be as safe as possible and we were prepared to beat a hasty retreat.

Reg's cave-like room contained little apart from the furniture. There was a sound system in one corner with a CD cover visible of 'Marching Bands of the World'. The walls had several stained dints in them and that was about it - apart from the sole dominating presence of that large, old sabre without a scabbard. It was hooked by two wires quite close to where Reg was standing. The pitted blade gleamed menacingly in the dim light. He could have grabbed it in an instant.

Reg began to tell his story and he paced around the room as he spoke. He ignored our attempts to steer the interview and insisted on pressing his version of events on us. He had a forceful voice and he accompanied his account with thrusting gestures from his stubby arms. Whenever we attempted to interject he glared and fumed at us and took a step forward as if about to charge us. We knew much of his personal circumstances anyway from the thick medical notes and so we let him grind on with his painful history.

He had been born in an air force base in Germany but his father had transferred to the experimental unit at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast where he spent his childhood from the age of nine. The family lived on a forces estate there. Reg described his lonely school days, shunned by the local boys and marooned with two unhappy parents His father worked on the bombing ranges doing missile research or so he told his son, although Reg subsequently learned that he actually was an aircraftsman engaged in retrieving spent rocket casings from the shingle banks and the lagoons around the low-lying spit of land. Reg told us that his father was a silent man who, in his off-duty hours would take himself away down the shore, just sitting with a bottle, watching the waves go swashing on to the beach.

His mother was another person of few words but she attempted in her own way to compensate for the emptiness of their life together. She took to feeding Reg large, fatty meals. As a boy, he began to hate the taste of lard in everything and the streamers of congealed butter that ran across the plates revolted him. She continued to press her awful dinners on him. He often felt nauseous at the meal table and he began to gag when she tried to make him eat. Reg pressed his broad fingers down his throat and made gargling noises to illustrate to us. He told us he had been taken to see a child psychiatrist in Norwich who diagnosed emetophobia, a morbid preoccupation with vomiting. Reg was given tranquilising tablets and his mother advised about meal preparation. The difficulty was only really resolved by Reg eating alone in his room as he did from adolescence onwards. He told us that he would throw much of his food out of his bedroom window to the neighbour's dog and then would exist on snacks bought with his pocket money.

"Animals, they are the only ones that have been good to me," he said, pointing to the kitchen door which creaked under the pressure from the unseen creature beyond.

His chief joy and compensation had been his attendance at the local troop of the Boys Brigade. He loved the sense of order there; the reassuring motto Sure & Steadfast on his silver cap badge; the feeling that he was valued by the kindly troop leader and his worth was measured by the proficiency badges that he had won. He told us how his father had been transferred to Scotland but his family did not follow him. Reg's mother came back here to her home town and a replacement figure was installed in time. He was called Uncle Harry and Reg hated him from the outset. Uncle Harry at first attempted to make friends with him. He took him fishing and went with him on a corporation bus to the great October fair in the city. He soon gave up these activities in the face of Reg's sustained hostility and a mutual dislike took hold. They never spoke and Reg communicated through his mother.

Reg then returned to telling us of his love for the Boys Brigade. How he joined a new group that met at the local lads club. The troop leader there was a middle-aged ex-serviceman whose strong, freckled hands usually grasped a pipe. At first there was comfort in the familiar routines. He earned more bandsman's badges. His special instrument was the snare drum. The troop leader seemed to want to take Reg under his wing. He tutored him on brigade lore in his office - a partitioned box in the drill hall. This cubby hole had filled up with the smell of sweet pipe smoke. There came the first unsettling exploration, a touch on the knee, then rubbing his legs and inner thighs then worse - a hand creeping up the shorts. Sweat would bead the forehead of the troop leader as he groped at Reg and the boy could hear a champing sound as the man's teeth ground at his pipe stem. Reg told us that at first he felt surprise and incomprehension then he settled to a fearful acceptance. He screwed up his courage to tell his mother about the abuse but something about her blind panicky demeanour when he had previously complained about Uncle Harry prevented him from saying anything in the end. Reg was not able to tell about what was happening to anyone at all, neither to the teachers at school where he became a scowling, disruptive student lagging in his studies, nor to his Brigade comrades who sensed what was happening but said nothing. Still he went to Boys Brigade right through his teenage years. What else did he have? Year on year the troop leader mauled him, picked him out by torchlight in the tent on the brigade camping trips and all the while his anger grew.

Reg paused to puff on an inhaler and he dabbed at his eyes with a large stained handkerchief. I noticed Dr Shafik covertly looking at his watch.

Reg blundered on with his grim biography. How at seventeen he eventually left the Boys Brigade, the troop leader having transferred his attentions to younger boys by then. He wrote to his father whom he believed to be still in Scotland at this time, perhaps hoping to live with him again but the letter was returned by the Field Post stamped, 'Transferred- unable to deliver'. Reg then joined the services himself on impulse after visiting a recruiting stand one Saturday afternoon. He was sent to Catterick for infantry training and endured it for three months. Something about the bleak barracks, the 'beasting' by the yelling NCOs and the emptiness of the surrounding bleak moors reminded him of his lonely Suffolk childhood. His control eventually snapped. He went absent without leave and took the train back to the city. On arrival he got drunk in a pub for first time in his life and came home unexpectedly that night and confronted his mother and raged at her about all the painfulness of his childhood. Uncle Harry pushed him out of the house and they fought together on the meagre lawn outside.

Reg had received a beating and retreated. He drank some more beer as his face smarted and his mind filled up with more anger. At closing time he went to a garage, obtained a two gallon can of petrol and lugged it back through the suburban streets in the winter's night. He poured the petrol onto the front lawn and onto Uncle Harry's car, a little Austin A30. All the while it was quiet except for the gurgle and splatter of the fuel. He recalled the sudden chill on his legs as he soaked his trouser leg, and for some reason he also poured the stuff all over a red pillar post box which stood by their garden gate. Then he tossed a match onto the grass. At first there was a yellow trail which went sparking and spluttering back towards him and ran up his trousers where he had dripped fuel onto himself. He had apparently jigged about for a few seconds as the flames flickered up his clothing and seared his hands as he slapped himself in a panicky attempt to put it out. Reg mimed that drama to us. Then he told us how he had lit another match. It had really taken hold that time and an orange flash lit up the street as the car petrol tank suddenly went. Then there was a second louder explosion when the pillar box blew. Reg had looked up at a piling mass of thick smoke that rose high up and dimmed the street lights. He became suddenly terrified at what he had done. He had run away down the back ways of the housing estate, heading by some instinct to the old lads' club drill hall. The building was all locked up for the night but Reg squeezed over a small wooden door to the side of the building and scuttled along to a passage way to the rear where there was a neglected yard. Here he crouched all night until he was found the next day by the caretaker.

This was Reg's offence, his 'index offence', as we in the forensic service called it. He received a sentence of six years in prison, the arson made worse by the mail offence of destroying the letter box. No-one had been hurt although the exploding petrol tank had taken off all the rendering from the front of his mother's house. He did the first year in a Young Offenders' prison. He worked on a farm there and that was not too bad. However when he reached the age of eighteen he was transferred to adult prison and found himself in a tough, crowded gaol. He was put in segregation for refusing food. A prison officer tried to bully him into eating and Reg lunged at the man, trying to gouge at his eyes with a spoon. After this, he was swiftly transferred to the secure hospital for the criminally insane under a prison transfer order. Thus he had entered our domain.

"It was there at the hospital that really did it, made me bad, still makes me bad so I have a go at the children, and other stuff and it's that place that had made people frightened of me 'cos I do things, stupid things." Reg stumped over to where the sabre gleamed on the wall and stared up at the weapon as if seeking inspiration. My colleague and I shared glances.

"You know the hospital don't you?" He said turning to us.

"I bet they sent you from there. Christ, what bastards you all are!"

Indeed we knew the nearby high security hospital. It was linked to our community service. Dr Shafik had worked there as a staff grade psychiatrist and so had I. Yes, we had been well soused in that sump.

Reg slumped against the wall and put his head into his hands. We could still hear his dog snuffling and scrabbling at the door. Then he raised his bewildered face and told us, "You went up the five steps of the hospital gatehouse lodge. Up the five steps then goodbye to the world boyos."

We knew the official story from the thick hospital files. We had read about how the hospital had dowsed the fire of his anger through the long years of incarceration to leave him burnt-out and crippled by early arthritis and emphysema. He had been dumped back in the city a few miles from the old family home and site of his index offence. His mother and Uncle Harry were long dead, the troop leader had disappeared to molest children somewhere else and Reg had no other connection to local people. Even the Lads' Club was long boarded up and due shortly to be the site of a new supermarket.

Reg continued to talk about his past. He evidently needed to get it out even if it was to us indifferent professionals, part of that system that had bound him.

"I was there eighteen years in that hospital. They took everything away. The things I could tell you about that place. If the staff didn't like a fellow. Once I was told to clean up on one of the bad wards. I swept up after the staff had had a go at one patient. I found a piece of bloody scalp with the hair attached. I'll never forget sweeping up a piece of that man's head."

Reg gave a gusty sigh.

"Sometimes I think I will go to the press. Tell them what happened."

The sound of children's laughter and loud voices reached us. Youngsters were coming home from school. They were larking about and making whooping noises, being deliberately noisy I would guess, to bait the local ogre. Reg interrupted his reminiscence and went to the window. He peered through the net curtains, muttering to himself and glaring out at his tormentors. His dog, perhaps sensing its master's anger, also began to growl and press against the thin kitchen door. We distracted Reg by asking about his health, getting him to tell us about his bad knees, his breathlessness, his neglect by his doctor who did not understand how disabled he was. He leaned against the wall next to his sabre. For some reason then I asked him about the weapon. I ignored Dr Shafik's warning glance to me.

"Ah yes." Said Reg, reaching up and picking it off the hangers. He handed it to me. "This was the only thing left to me in my mother's effects. It belonged to an ancestor on my mother's side - army cavalry sabre."

I held it for a moment. It was heavy; its dimpled blade scrolled with antique lettering. The handle was bound with sharkskin held by silver wire. It sat solidly and comfortably in the hand. I wafted the blade for a moment. It felt easy and natural to heft and it was with a strange reluctance that I handed it back to him. There was a little smirk on his face and he had stopped puffing and panting. Our eyes met for a moment then he took it from me, turned to the wall and reverently clipped the weapon back on its wire hangers.

In the end we did not intervene with him. Dr Shafik judged him a personality disorder who was probably too fearful of a return to the secure system to offend again. Yes, he was dangerous but it was not policy to treat the untreatable - besides we were supposed to protect his rights to a private life. I did not agree with this approach but Shafik outranked me. We left him to drown in his loneliness, playing his Marching Bands of the World CD loudly to spite his meek, frightened, elderly neighbours, raging at his neglectful GP and at the local kids but with the anger slowly being dowsed by his physical decay. As Dr Shafik was leaving he had said, "You are really doing well, Reg. You must find positive outlets, take walks in the lovely countryside, find hobbies." His preternaturally white teeth gleamed encouragingly.

Reg glowered at him.

"Yes well, I've seen a lot of you Indian fellows in hospitals also. Good at advice you are," he replied. Shafik had been content to leave me to handle the aftermath of our visit to see Reg. After compiling our report to his GP and to the police, I took it upon myself to take an unorthodox step and I wrote official letters to the local schools and public agencies warning them to be vigilant about Reg. He must have somehow got wind of this and I was surprised to receive a letter from his solicitor threatening legal action for breach of privacy. Reg was really quite resourceful in his own twisted way. I replied that I had evidence that this man was dangerous and that it was my duty to protect the public and that seemed to have silenced his legal protectors.

Undoubtedly Reg was a victim yet I loathed him and all of his kind. It had seemed somehow harder than ever to stop feeling like this. I had come to a point in my career when I had heard too many of their hard-luck stories. These were outweighed in my mind by all the victim statements, post-mortem reports and crime scene photos that had been thrust upon me. It was as if I in turn wanted to do something to hurt them. Reg's history was indeed a sad one but there were so many like him who had damaged and tormented others. To my mind, they were malign, predatory, and irremediably set wrong - a threat to all tender and vulnerable things. Reg had somehow done me a favour that day. Allowing me to hold that piece of antique steel was his gift to me. That sabre was like a portent. Its message was that men like Reg were made that way and would never change. My colleagues had quite another view. They believed in rehabilitation, community reparation and the capacity of even the worst to become good citizens. They would have been shocked by my savage rejection of all that. The original institutions where we worked had been built to hold the dangerously mad in perpetuity. It was now only the most recent professional generation who saw these men as being curable and forgivable. My need was to slash through the facade of those new beliefs and to go back down to the bone. And so also, it was I, holding Reg's weapon and cleaving him again and again in fantasy, shearing him from my world and from all that which was important to me. And maybe I was the dangerous one then.

Before that summer had ended I had put in my resignation from the community protection service.

That was not the last of it. Three or four years later I glimpsed a newspaper billboard which read, "Blade Maniac Strikes!" The TV news showed a large stumpy man being led between minders into court. The camera picked out those blind muzzled features as he looked up for a moment. Yes it was Reg. He had apparently attacked a repair man who had come to fix the pavement outside his house. The reports said that he had used a sword.