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uncontrollably around Kempton Park. This tends to happen to me in the face of stress. Apparently dogs do it, too. They yawn when anxious.
    Brian picked me up at the station and we drove the short distance to the hospital. We passed through two cordons—“Do you have a mobile phone?” the guard asked me at the first. “Recording equipment? A cake with a hacksaw hidden inside it? A ladder?”—and then on through gates cut out of high-security fence after fence after fence.
    “I think Tony’s the only person in the whole DSPD unit to have been given the privilege of meeting people in the Wellness Centre,” Brian said as we waited.
    “What does DSPD stand for?” I asked.
    “Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder,” said Brian.
    There was a silence.
    “Is Tony in the part of Broadmoor that houses the most dangerous people?” I asked.
    “Crazy, isn’t it?” laughed Brian.
     
     
    Patients began drifting in to sit with their loved ones at tables and chairs that had been nailed to the ground. They all looked quite similar to each other, quite docile and sad-eyed.
    “They’re medicated,” whispered Brian.
    They were mostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticized sweatpants. There probably wasn’t much to do in Broadmoor but eat.
    I wondered if any of them were famous.
    They drank tea and ate chocolate bars from the dispenser with their visitors. Most were young, in their twenties, and their visitors were their parents. Some were older, and their partners and children had come to see them.
    “Ah! Here’s Tony now!” said Brian.
    I looked across the room. A man in his late twenties was walking toward us. He wasn’t shuffling like the others had. He was sauntering. His arm was outstretched. He wasn’t wearing sweatpants. He was wearing a pin-striped jacket and trousers. He looked like a young businessman trying to make his way in the world, someone who wanted to show everyone that he was very, very sane.
    And of course, as I watched him approach our table, I wondered if the pinstripe was a clue that he was sane or a clue that he wasn’t.
    We shook hands.
    “I’m Tony,” he said. He sat down.
    “So Brian says you faked your way in here,” I said.
    “That’s exactly right,” said Tony.
    He had the voice of a normal, nice, eager-to-help young man.
    “I’d committed GBH [Grievous Bodily Harm],” he said. “After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, ‘I’m looking at five, seven years.’ So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, ‘Easy! Tell them you’re mad! They’ll put you in a county hospital. You’ll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.’ But they didn’t send me to some cushy hospital. They sent me to bloody BROADMOOR.”
    “How long ago was this?” I asked.
    “Twelve years ago,” said Tony.
    I involuntarily grinned.
    Tony grinned back.
     
     
    Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you’re seventeen and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don’t need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarize the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet . That’s what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist that he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart and a love letter was a bullet from a gun and if you received a love letter from him, you’d go straight to hell.
    Plagiarizing a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off. Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser , A Clockwork Orange , and the David Cronenberg movie Crash , in which people derive sexual pleasure from enacting car crashes. Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal.
    “Where did you get that one from?” I asked