She leaned closer to the microphone. ‘Of course, behaviour can be learned. An individual can observe what empathy looks like and appear to display it. But it is not necessarily genuine. It is merely mimicry of external signs. It is shadow play, like a painting. There are people out there who have set up a whole ghost personality to allow them to cope and act within society. Many of our violent criminals have these black holes and my conjecture is that it is these unconnected parts of the mind that make their behaviour so abhorrent, so alien, and make treating them so difficult. In very real terms, ladies and gentlemen, they know not what they do.’

The final slide came up. It showed five brain scans, each with at least one very noticeable area of darkness. ‘Here are five brains. You know who they belong to? These five brains belong to five different serial killers.’

The faces of the killers themselves came up on the screen one after the other.

‘Killers or brain damage victims? These are the pattern killers - ghosts with darkness at their centre who try to gain meaning by repeated sensation. Sensation as an attempt to fulfil a hole left by a lack of capacity to feel emotion, empathy or concern.’ Denise took a drink of water. The man in the black suit sat impassively, his eyes picking out the single diamond hanging in the dip of Denise’s neck.

‘We have often tried to imagine the mind of a killer,’ continued Dr Levene, ‘and I can think of no better image than a brain that seeks but can’t feel emotion - it is like a hand without nerve endings reaching into a fire. It does not feel the heat but it is burned none the less. But there are many of these brain types amongst us. Our contention is that they are like sleeper cells, indicating potential violence. And our next steps will be to look at how to reactivate these black holes. With science, to pour light into the heart of darkness. My apologies to Conrad.’

There was a murmur of laughter. Dr Levene looked out at the crowd. She was pleased. She summed up with a flourish of her right arm.

‘For want of better language, what we have found here is a place of neural silence, of isolation - of darkness. What we have found, ladies and gentlemen, is that there really is a dark heart at the centre of violent men and women. Violence is not caused by an experience of pain, but by the lack of an experience of human empathy. An absence, my friends, of love. Violence is neurologically the negative image of love, ladies and gentlemen. An unloved brain is only ever half formed.’

The man in the black suit smiled and stood up. He was love’s shadow, that was it. Love’s fucking shadow. That felt just about right. He would have liked to stay to talk to Dr Levene about his own theories, but instead he rose and started to make his way along the row of seats.

In the restroom of the lecture block, the man turned the handle of the glistening chrome faucet and washed his hands. He was pleased that he could feel the sting of the hot water. No problem there, he thought. He leaned forward and carefully splashed water over his face and then looked at himself in the mirror. Denise Levene was not half as clever as she thought she was. She had no idea about the true causes of violence. Only he did. Him and others like him. The causes of violence were very simple. So simple that killers never told anyone about them. Reasons were private, outcomes were public. He wanted to give Dr Levene an opportunity to see the truth. One day, he would.

He looked in the mirror and smiled broadly.

He picked up his black briefcase and put it on the vanity unit. He had another thirty minutes before the lecture would end and the inspired academics would stream into the lavatory with their vomit-inducing praise for what was, in his mind, a rudimentary and facile account. He opened his case and looked down with a smile.

He had liked the part about the ghost personality. Of course, most actors had the capacity to feign emotion. It was not a feature of some kind of sociological brain damage. He looked down at the make-up, wigs, prosthetics, hair colourings and various other items in the case. He had been in touch with a good theatrical warehouse in Boston. They had supplied everything he needed.

He looked at himself. Not a big change required, he thought. A bit of ageing, that was all.

He took out a bottle of latex, pulled the skin around his left eye taut, spread it over the stretched skin. He repeated the operation for the other eye and then around the corners of his mouth, and his forehead.

As the latex dried, his skin wrinkled up. He took out a brown-grey wig and placed it on his head. He looked up; the effect was immediate. Ten years older, at least.

He put in brown contact lenses and with a small tube of tooth colour he tinted his teeth a deeper shade of ivory.

All in all, his transformation took less than twenty minutes. It was not a perfect job, but he didn’t need perfection at the moment. The key to success, he knew, was in costume. People read your clothes quicker than anything. He took out a folded green jacket and a pair of trousers, both with gold braiding. He put them on and closed his case. He looked in the mirror at his assumed identity, smiled broadly and looked at his watch. Time was short.

He had things to do, deadlines to meet, people to kill.

Chapter Six

Barnard College

November 16, 5.10 p.m.

After her lecture, Denise Levene spent the rest of the day doing the rounds of the department, catching up with her former colleagues, and then drinking a good Sancerre with them well into the evening. The general consensus was that Denise had been a great colleague and she was sorely missed. She was a profoundly good communicator, but at thirty-two she was still young enough for the science community to patronize her. A woman had to produce twice as many papers and work twice as hard to get the recognition of a man with half her talent, but that was the way of the world.

It wasn’t right, but it was true, like many things in life.

It was partly the endless pats on the head while the glass ceiling was closing over it that had motivated her to move out of research and try to get direct law enforcement experience with the police or the Feds. She’d found a position as psychotherapist for the NYPD almost at once. Those jobs didn’t usually attract people as well qualified as Denise and they bit her hand off at the first interview. They offered her a nice office and enough bad cops to keep her interested, and they’d even let her continue her research and maybe find a way to fund it. She’d taken the job on the spot. The head of department at Columbia called her a ‘reactionary masochist’. She’d known then that she’d made the right decision. She wanted to be close to the real thing, not hiding away in the safety of academia her whole life.

Her dad would’ve approved too, to a degree. He was a practical man, a man who liked to get right in. She didn’t know how he’d feel about her working for the police, though. That would’ve been an interesting conversation if he’d still been alive.

The truth was that the NYPD offered her access to men and women who had seen these violent criminals first hand. They offered her access to the behavioural science unit at Quantico. She was excited, no doubt about it. It wasn’t the same, interviewing the convicted criminals in prison. Everyone thought it was, but she knew that these killers changed when they got caught. A murderer sitting in a cell, devoid of any targets, was not the same guy as the man still free in the world and open to the temptation of his desires.

Denise was interested in the time before they were caught. It was behaviour prediction that really excited her. She wanted to know if it could be modelled. That was the most interesting thing of all. How these people managed their own minds when they were out there in the world. Was there something predictable in these unpredictable killers? It was understanding how they operated out there that would lead to real developments in profiling. And that would mean more guys like them getting caught.