He caught himself up.

“Also?” probed Dr. Allwin.

Oh, he had taken along a taped chisel for a billy.

“Was that the first time you fixed one up?”

Yes, but the expedition had been a flop.

“Why the tape around it?”

“Well, that way it made a good handle to grip, for a billy, and solid steel inside,” he ended, with a little gasp, a hiss.

How many questions stood awakened in the mind of Dr. Allwin? The discarded chisels that had been rumoured found in the neighbourhood, the tale of a young man living nearby, drowned, a supposed suicide…

In that little hiss, there was a release of more, much more than some story of playing robbers. It belonged with the suddenly unfocused, evasive look in Artie’s eyes. It belonged to the small raging boy inside, the imprisoned child – to an Artie in this moment almost contacted, almost released to scream out his murderous tantrum: I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you if you say I can’t!

Dr. Allwin said quietly, while closing his notebook, “And there were still other times, with a chisel?”

Artie’s smiling cunning look had returned. “Am I supposed to tell you?”

The doctor screwed on the top of his pen. “We’re only here to help you, Artie.”

“What if you found out something that wouldn’t help me?”

Perhaps they had better stop for the day, the doctor said.

The alienists had come to a deep cleft, and there they halted. Should they let themselves down into every crevice, or would it be best to leap over, perhaps to improvise a bridge of ropes? Storrs and Allwin must have debated long and earnestly over this dilemma, and in Wilk’s apartment the discussions must have gone far into the night.

Can we judge their decision? We may say, from a purely medical viewpoint they were obliged to make every effort to explore the furthest crevice. And yet, taking into account the attitudes of that day, the prejudices and the limited understanding, their hesitation can be comprehended. They had been engaged – and the word was to be their own – in forensic medicine. In legal medicine. As experts. Did not the legal problem therefore remain a foremost factor in their work?

Their task was to study the minds of these two boys in relation to a, specific crime. Would it help to know the details of other crimes? Lawyers and doctors agreed: that this was for the family to determine.

Uncle Gerald came to Artie’s cell.

“All right,” Artie said, inhaling avidly – he had run out of cigarettes and the damn screw had been holding him up a buck for a pack – “all right, there were other things.”

“Judd know about them?”

“He always acted as if he had it on me. Anyway, for one of them.”

Their eyes met. “Big?” his uncle said.

“Big.”

“How many, Artie?”

“You could say – four.”

The deeds hung between them.

“I don’t want to know,” Uncle Gerald said. “Don’t tell me, Artie. They might get me on the stand.”

“What about the docs?”

According to law, Uncle Gerald said, only this case was to be tried, no others.

“Wouldn’t it make a difference if they call me nuts or not?”

His uncle reflected on that point. It could make all the difference. “Maybe you could tell the doctors you did – a certain number of things, without saying what they were.”

What would the family want? Artie asked, with the sudden genuine-sounding throb that could come into his voice. He didn’t wish to hurt Mumsie, the family, any more.

In such moments, you had to believe him.

When next he talked with Dr. Allwin, Artie kept to the line suggested by his uncle. Yes, there had been other things.

“These other – incidents – major outbreaks, shall we say? How many were there?”

“Four.”

“Let’s refer to them as A, B, C, and D.” Carefully the doctor went on to remind Artie that the press attributed certain specific crimes to him, or to him and Judd.

“That’s a lot of hooey!” Artie exclaimed, but then there came over his face his peculiar sidewise smile. “I never had anything to do with that monkey-gland robbery,” he stated. Nor had he had anything to do with the handless stranger. But, significantly, the two unsolved student deaths were not mentioned.

Now, in the night-long meetings in Wilk’s study, the entire defence position had to be re-examined. If Artie were a multiple murderer, wouldn’t he be seen by any jury as demon-ridden, demented? And if Judd were not a participant in the other crimes, was it fair to link him completely to Artie in a joint trial? Judd had, rather, participated as one enslaved, enthralled by a madman.

Surely this possibility must have been examined, discussed, a thousand times discarded, only to be examined again by the lawyers, during the days when Storrs and Allwin were intensively at work in the Wilk dining room, writing their report.

But was separation really advantageous? As both Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher pointed out, Horn was no fool. He could ridicule and riddle any plea that Judd was a mere accessory. The public reaction to such a move would be only of heightened anger – a legal “trick”. Nor could it be certain that the revelation of added horrors would cause Artie to be judged insane; rather, a jury might become even more determined to destroy so dreadful a fiend.

Fortunately, Dr. McNarry arrived during those days. His solid presence, Willie Weiss told me in a tone close to adulation, helped to clarify everyone’s thinking. Everything about him seemed full-packed – his clothing seemed packed with his large bulk, and his huge head, with veins standing out on the bald dome, seemed packed with knowledge.

He had studied Charcot’s work at the Salpêtriére in Paris, he had been to Nancy, he had known Jung in Switzerland and Bleuler in Vienna and lastly, the great Freud himself; his pioneering book on psychoanalysis was therefore not the work of a quick enthusiast who had picked up the latest jargon, but of a lifelong practitioner who had travelled the same paths, the head of one of the world’s great mental hospitals.

McNarry had his first few interviews with the boys, so as to obtain his own, unaffected impressions; then the three doctors conferred. McNarry’s material was much the same, the king-slave fantasies from Judd, the master-criminal fantasies from Artie, the childhood patterns. Eli Storrs laid out the results of his tests, eagerly watching for McNarry’s reactions to the new type of study, the apperception chart.

At once the doctors got into an intense discussion involving McNarry’s central concept of the psyche. He did not believe in separating emotion and intellect, as in two compartments. All belonged to a single biological entity that reacted as a unit.

“Well, but that unit has different aspects. Our tests obviously show us that different people react differently…”

“Yes,” McNarry at last agreed, there was a feeling-aspect, which might be called emotional in tone, and there was an intellectual aspect -

Gerald Straus, with an apologetic laugh, pressed them. Would all this help to show a jury that the boys were insane?

Equally smilingly, Dr. McNarry read him a short lecture on insanity, as though for an average juryman. “People think that at one moment a man is sane, and at the next he goes insane. To a doctor, insanity means nothing but mental derangement, sickness, and just as there are all degrees of physical sickness, from a common cold to paralysis, there are all degrees of mental sickness, from a mild neurosis to a psychoneurosis to a psychosis.”

Uncle Gerald nodded. “How sick can you say they are?”

“We have concluded” – the elderly Dr. Allwin took over – “that each of the patients is suffering from a functional disorder. Artie’s could develop into dementia praecox, a splitting of the personality, and Judd’s is in the direction of paranoia.”