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were very seductive to a girl earning four pounds an hour. She went out with him several times over a period of six weeks but, as she told friends later, she’d never felt truly at ease in his company. She said that she found his mood changes ‘odd’ and that he frightened her at times. She suspected that he could be dangerous.
    After an incident in a pub in which Combe had threatened a barman with a broken glass, she had told him that she wanted nothing more to do with him but Combe had kept pestering her to continue the association, ultimately threatening her with disfigurement should she even consider seeing someone else. In the end, she had felt obliged to go to the police and they had warned Combe off.
    Combe appeared to comply but being a good – or indeed, any kind of loser – was not in Combe’s make-up. A month later he turned up at the girl’s home late at night. After savagely beating her he raped her in front of her parents whom he’d tied up and when he was through, he murdered all three of them, the parents by strangulation, and the girl by cutting her throat.
    He had showed no remorse when the police arrested him, maintaining that the girl had simply got what she deserved. He actually appeared to have forgotten that he’d also killed her parents when the police read out the charges. Combe was sent to prison for life, the psychiatrists finally awarding him full-blown psychopath status. Steven paused to pour himself a gin and tonic. He felt he needed it.
    Combe had been incarcerated in the State Hospital at Carstairs where he had gone on to cause mayhem whenever possible with sudden eruptions of violence, only calming down in the Spring of ’98 when cancer of the jaw had made an appearance on the left side of his face. The disease succeeded in breaking him where the authorities had failed. A desperate attempt to cling to life involving radical surgery to his face followed by intensive chemotherapy when the disease started to spread, took its toll and left him a broken – though still malevolent – shadow of his former self. He had finally died some ten days ago, bitter to the end and lamented by no one, his only legacy being a confession to a crime he could not possibly have committed.
    Steven refilled his glass and swivelled his favourite window chair round so he could look up at the sky. He switched out the room lights. It was a clear night and the stars were out despite competition from urban glare. He, like the local police, was puzzled by Combe’s confession. According to what the Church of Scotland minister had written in his report, it had not been made out of any sense of remorse but because he believed that he was entitled to some kind of automatic absolution if he confessed to something before dying. But if the whole thing had been a scam to embarrass the police why had he become so angry when the minister, Lawson, had declined to grant him what he wanted? On the other hand, if Combe had really been intent on gaining absolution, why own up to something he hadn’t done when there must have been plenty he had?
    Contrition of course, was not something that a psychopath could understand, Steven reminded himself. True psychopaths had no concept of conscience or regret although many were clever enough to simulate such feelings in order to get by in normal society. They would learn to say ‘sorry’ without any understanding of what the term implied, having deduced by observation that if you did something wrong and then said the word, that was an end to the matter – a simple mathematical equation.
    Such pretence of course, was occasionally destined to go badly wrong when the same offence was repeated and saying ‘sorry’ did not have quite the same effect the second time around. Psychopaths couldn’t understand why the ‘system’ had stopped working on such occasions and were often bemused at the exaggerated response of the aggrieved. It therefore made sense that Combe had seen confessing