Suffice to say that Doug, as always, was immensely helpful. I am concerned though that he might try to confront Andy. 'If he were here right now, I'd kill him!' He is an 89 year old pensioner (albeit a very fit and sprightly one) but he still sees himself as the 25 year old reconnaissance commando he once was.
Ever since I have been spending most of my time in the bedroom with my laptop (my desktop is steam driven), Bella has colonised the living room. Her white fur covered every surface. Doug had only been sitting on the sofa for five minutes and he was covered in white fluff.
The policewoman arrived and, much to my relief, I warmed to her almost immediately. She was polite and efficient and not in the least patronising, a credit to her profession. We discussed the Tony Martin case in the context of ways in which I could defend myself should Andy attempt to gain access to my flat. She told us that Andy has assaulted the police officers who had gone to his flat to question him. I think they (the police) despise him. Assaulting police officers is something of a hobby of his. Maybe they are looking for an excuse to put him away for a while. They have raided his flat (once in riot gear) and have arrested him on numerous occasions but have never been able to make any charges stick mainly because Our Hero: Dr. H and his team have always stepped in to protect him. Andy has told me that he has no criminal record (only in Israel when he was working on a Kibbutz for shoplifting).
'It seems unlikely that he would have had so much contact with us and not have some kind of criminal record,' said the policewoman.
I ran through the catalogue of Andy's 'crimes and misdemeanours' in my head - committed against friends, enemies, strangers. I thought of the day he stormed into the Catholic Church around the corner and struck a priest in the face and then smugly boasted about how he had escaped the consequences of his actions by feigning illness and being admitted to hospital. He even gloated over the fact that the priest had to move to another parish because he was so unnerved by the incident. Andy is beyond justice thanks to Dr H. and his ilk. 'Why did he need to move away if his faith is so strong,' he mocked. 'He should have turned the other cheek anyway.'
A person only has so many cheeks to turn, Andy, my dear. He also conned a fellow bipolar sufferer out of £5,000. I'll call his victim 'Brendan'. He is pitifully faithful to Andy, following him around like a starving puppy. He went through a severe manic episode and gave away all of his money - £5,000 of it to Andy, who took it and spent it on redecorating his flat and an expensive computer system. (A real friend would have taken the money and kept it safe for 'Brendan' until his crisis was over.) He also abandoned his friend and 'partner in crime' 'Caleb' when he was most in need and then tried to turn me against him by claiming that he had stolen his credit card and had withdrawn four hundred pounds from his account. (£400? Pah! Andy rarely has more than four hundred pence in his bank account. Actually, I'm not sure he even has a bank account). He has taken an iron bar and smashed down two people's front doors. One of his 'victims' was 'Daniel Merchant' (another alias) - a gentle New-Zealand drug dealer (Does that sound like an oxymoron to you?) who has somehow gained the respect of Doug, perhaps because of his love of animals and the fact that he reads for the blind, what a saint, huh? But this just proves that everyone is inconsistent, even Doug.
I thought about his string of ill-treated girlfriends - blonde, buxom Helene who left Andy to live with his flatmate Sean. Years later, Sean left Helene to live as a lodger in Andy's flat where he remains today. Poetic justice, I thought, until I heard Andy and Sean referring to Helene in the most hideously misogynistic manner. 'Helene's huge. She's a gross bitch.' Bearing in mind that Sean and Andy are not exactly God's gift to womankind. I think they're both so deluded that they both look in the mirror and see Adonis or some other Greek God gazing back at them. I remember Helene nodding Andy's front door and referring bitterly to him as 'That thing in there'. I remember the girl who came to live with Andy last summer and the grim face of her mother when the two of them came to collect her things. What did that man do to her? All of these images jostled for prominence in my mind, but one forced its way to the forefront: the look of triumph on Andy's face as he told me that he had beaten Sean up the Christmas before last. And still he returned, as did Daniel Merchant and Brendan. Our Friendly Neighbourhood psychopath seems to have some kind of hold over them. What is going on down there? Some kind of bizarre sado-masochistic society? Andy being the sadist and his followers the masochists (Do they really believe he is some kind of Messiah?) Was Andy's assault on me my initiation ceremony. Well, I'm keeping well away from that weird little cult and I'm going to do my damnedest to warn potential new recruits off too.
The policewoman politely listened to Doug's war stories. He told her he had once been arrested for killing a civilian in Sicily during World War II when he was a Special Services Reconnaissance Commando and tried by a military tribunal. 'There was a riot,' he said. 'And this man lunged towards me. I moved aside and he fell forward over a cliff. I was exonerated, of course. It turned out this man was a soldier who had disguised himself as a civilian - pro-Mussolini. This was before Italy surrendered.' The policewoman noted the parallels with contemporary Iraq in which the occupying forces are unsure of who is friend or foe.
I was frank with her from the start: 'I can't testify. I'd be a useless witness in court. I have a history of mental illness and the Defence are sure to bring that up.'
'Don't worry,' she said. 'Your role in this is restricted to making a statement. You don't have to appear in court. We, the police, are pressing charges.'
She told me what happened during the attack from the point of view of 'the witness'. (Daniel, I presume). A scene flashed through my mind: 'I've always fancied you,' Daniel was saying and in my Schnapps fuelled state I reached out and grabbed his hand. I was starving for human companionship. The police woman said that when Andy attacked me Daniel had stood, rooted to the spot, unable to process what was going on and then he had lunged towards me, seized one of my arms, pulled me out of the door and dragged me upstairs to my flat. It was there he had called the police and, because of my obviously distressed state, an ambulance. 'That's another thing that would make me a disaster in the witness box,' I said. 'That huge gap in my memory. It's as though someone pressed the pause button and, for me at least, time stopped.'
Doug suggested that Andy might have slipped something into my drink and the policewoman conceded that this was a possibility.
In spite of her warm and sympathetic attitude, I was relieved when the policewoman received a call on her radio and announced that she had to leave. The interview had been prolonged by Doug's reminiscences about his time as Sergeant Major of Regimental Police in the '50s. 'I'll see myself out,' she said after I had signed my statement and she had given me details of a victim support organisation.
Doug left soon after. Just before he stepped out of the front door, he turned and embraced me and I clung to him as though he were the last decent human being on earth.
Labels: assault, betrayal, crime, war, world war 2
