Protests outside Parliament are intensifying this morning, following recent questions raised about Aversion Therapy, as attention turns to what Tier Four might have in store for offenders. This tier has long been the subject of speculation by conspiracy theorists, and the lack of information from Janus Justice has only served to fan the flames. Demonstrators, already agitated by the Robyn Cooper case, have been demanding answers.
Glossed over in government reports as a ‘safe space’ for those who cannot be rehabilitated, little is known about this tier, which is reserved only for those who cannot be cured lower down the system, including psychopaths and serial killers. A Minister for Justice has described it only as ‘a secure unit for those who cannot be trusted with freedom, to protect the safety of our citizens’. When pressed, the minister refused to say more.
It’s rumoured that criminals who participate in serial crimes but who have not been through Tier Three may also be sent there. Conrad Becker, CEO of Janus Justice, went some way to clarify this, saying: ‘Offenders who take part in premeditated murder or serial crime may well be sentenced to Tier Four. They know what they’re doing. The lower levels of the Tier System are designed for those who want a chance to change. These people don’t want to change, so they end up at the final destination.’
This is Dan Gunnarsson reporting for NewsFlex
Tier Four – the Incurables.
Only those with the highest security clearance were allowed on this floor. Grace assumed it was because the inmates here were so dangerous. It was reserved for the worst of the worst – murderers, terrorists, serial criminals – people who Tier Two could not heal and Tier Three could not rehabilitate. She’d assumed it was some kind of secure unit where offenders wore slippers and watched TV in a communal sitting room, jeering or cowering at the occasional fight between one of their fellow residents and the guards.
Now she was going to find out the truth.
Abigail scanned her eye and palm on the digital panel and the lift door opened onto a brightly lit, white corridor where George was standing talking to another clinic porter.
‘Hi Abigail. Hi Doctor G. Don’t usually see you up here.’
The other porter entered the lift pushing a cart of linen and the doors shut behind him.
‘Just doing a quick tour,’ Abigail said, looking down the corridor.
‘Promotion, huh?’ he said to Grace pleasantly.
‘Something like that, George,’ she replied, unable to return his smile. They usually made time to talk. Grace would ask about his three school-age children. George would update her on how his sister was doing. But today, her mind was on other things.
The two women made their way through yet another security door.
Grace’s senses were on high alert as Abigail ushered her in.
It was not what Grace had expected at all.
The room was huge, white and clinical, the lights dimmed, the air still. Row upon row of inmates lay in beds that lined either side of the room like a hospital ward. Their prone bodies, covered up to the neck with white sheets, were all motionless. It was difficult to tell which were male or female. Their heads were shaved. Each of them wore a headset which covered their ears and eyes, metallic bands criss-crossing their shiny or downy skulls.
Grace felt as though she was standing in a mortuary. It was deathly quiet apart from the occasional rolling of the ergonomic mattresses making a sound like the sea crashing onto shingle.
‘What is this?’ Grace’s words came out in a shocked whisper.
Abigail studied her face.
‘We call it the Siberia ward. Biostasis, chemically induced locked-in syndrome.’
Siberia – the pure white, the sensory deprivation, the internal exile – an apt nickname.
Grace had read about locked-in syndrome as a student and it had terrified her then. Now here it was, laid out before her, in all its horror.
These people were fully conscious, alive and awake, but unable to move or communicate. They could think and reason, but could not express any need or desire. There were no choices for these offenders. And no escape.
The body had become the prison. Who knew where the mind would go in such a situation?
Grace imagined lying still, paralysed, naked and vulnerable, as people washed her, shaved her head and catheterised her. The thought made her skin crawl. Death seemed preferable, but they would keep her alive – force-feed her through tubes, pump her full of antibiotics. There would be no relief.
Next to each bed was a white post containing the liquid, feeding and waste tubes which came out at the top and ran under the sheets. At the top of each post a shell flashed away, projecting a bright rectangle of information onto the wall above the inmate’s head – name, number, vital stats, reminders, and other information necessary to maintain life in this most meagre of ways.
‘Who knows about this?’ Grace asked in a hushed voice.
‘They can’t hear you,’ Abigail replied, pointing to the earphones on the headsets. Her words echoed around the clinic.
‘Who knows?’ Grace asked again, her voice louder but tremulous.
Abigail shrugged. ‘Obviously Conrad and the hand-picked staff who work here. We have a minister in the Department of Justice who’s aware, and now you.’
So this wasn’t just a crazy project of Conrad’s. The government actually knew about this.
‘Is this the only clinic like this in the country?’
‘For now. We’re running the trials, and if it’s agreed with the Department of Justice then it will be rolled out over the next five years.’
‘How long do they stay like this?’ asked Grace, unable to absorb what she was hearing.
Abigail didn’t answer. Instead, she moved towards the nearest bed and raised the wrist of the occupant. ‘Here,’ she said, showing Grace a tiny ribbed fan under the skin of the inside lower arm. ‘The bioplastic implants break down over time, to maintain sedation, and we use this,’ she turned the hand over to show a cannula, ‘to inject psychotropic drugs that make up part of the treatment. It’s intravenous so we can adjust it depending on the efficacy of the dose.’
Grace wondered how efficacy might be measured in this situation.
Her eyes travelled along the arm until they reached a familiar tattoo, the Janus Justice logo with a number 3 beneath, still unfaded. She looked up at the display and read the name Mikey Kilgannon. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been mowing lawns at the Agrarian. He’d smiled and waved at her in the sunshine. She could smell the cut grass now.
‘Why are these people here? Are you trying to cure them?’
Abigail tucked Mikey’s arm back under the sheet. ‘I think that was Conrad’s intention initially, but to be frank, I think he bit off more than he could chew. As if anyone can cure a psychopath.’
‘So they’re going to stay here – until they die?’
‘Until natural death. Yes.’
‘But that could be years! And Mikey? Why is he here?’
‘He’s a reoffender. We don’t know what else to do with him just yet.’ She touched his temple gently. ‘Maybe he is a psychopath, which would explain why Aversion Therapy didn’t succeed, because…’
‘…they don’t have the emotions to make it an effective treatment,’ Grace finished for her.
‘That’s right. It would have been water off a duck’s back.’
‘So why don’t you scan him and find out for sure?’
‘Doesn’t really matter now. Because it’s an unusual case, he has to stay here until Conrad figures out what to do with him.’
Grace glanced at Mikey. It hurt her heart to look at him for too long. She remembered him telling her a stupid joke and laughing like a kid. Her heart ached for him.
‘I treated him at Tier Two, you know, after he burgled a social club and punched one of the workers when they tried to stop him getting away with some expensive kit. I didn’t pick up on any signs of psychopathy, though.’
Abigail raised her eyebrows slightly. It felt like a judgement.
‘We did our best for him, but…’ Grace began. From birth Kilgannon had been steeped in crime, raised in a notorious family. ‘It’s not that easy with the violence gene. Sometimes we manage to retrain behaviour and thought patterns. But I guess we just couldn’t get through to him.’ Had they missed something at Tier Two?
‘That’s what Tier Three is for,’ Abigail said, tapping at the shell screen. ‘You deal with the sad and mad, we get the bad.’
The mad? At least those who committed crimes out of insanity didn’t have to come here. They were safely tucked away in the secure hospitals. Weren’t they?
But how trustworthy was the Department of Justice if it condoned this?
‘But Tier Three wasn’t successful either,’ Grace countered. Abigail kept her eyes on the screen. This was her chance to glean some information for Dan’s investigation and to help Remy. ‘Is there any reason you think Mikey might have offended again? I mean, you might expect a Tier One or Two to reoffend because sometimes we need to dig deeper to get to the root of the matter, but Tier Three – it’s a different type of treatment altogether.’
‘It is,’ agreed Abigail. ‘We’re not pandering to people’s needs but cauterising the cause of crime.’
Grace ignored this. Probably another one of Conrad’s sound bites. ‘So why did it fail? Why did no one recognise that Mikey is a psychopath, if that’s what’s going on here?’ She pointed vaguely towards the bed.
Abigail’s orange eyes flared briefly at Grace’s deliberately chosen ‘fail’, a trigger word for perfectionists. Grace was hoping it might provoke some clarity.
‘It must be because Myriam didn’t read the scans properly before she treated him,’ Abigail said, smoothing the sheet that covered Mikey’s body.
‘What did the brain scans say?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t find them.’
‘Can’t find them?’ What’s going on here?
‘Maybe Myriam deleted them before she left. She might have realised her mistake and tried to cover it up,’ Abigail said.
‘But it was you who scanned Mikey’s brain?’
‘That’s the usual routine. I did the scanning but I left it to Myriam to read them. She was the expert, after all.’
Grace turned her attention back to the man in the bed.
‘So they just lie here, stuck in their own worlds, thinking about God knows what?’
She imagined Mikey feeling hungry, or having an itch, or worrying about his mum, or being bored or desperate to die… Her chest tightened and she felt breathless. She watched the rhythmic thud of his carotid artery against the skin on his neck. His lips were moving slightly as though in silent prayer.
‘They’re thinking about their crimes. All the inmates here have their own personal reel, like the one you saw used with Noah Begbroke. The only difference here is that it’s on a loop.’
‘What?’ Grace was sure she’d misheard.
‘You know, like a prolonged version of Tier Three treatment.’
Grace’s mind went back to the images that Noah Begbroke had been prescribed. It had been horrific – overwhelming and suffocating.
And it had only been played the once.
‘You mean, they actually watch the reels over and over again?’ asked Grace, appalled by the idea of continual misery and mental anguish.
This was way beyond torture.
She looked down at poor, daft, troublesome Mikey and tried to get her head around what was happening to him.
Oh Mikey, I’m so sorry. I should have fixed you. I should have made you better!
‘See here,’ said Abigail, as she touched the shell and the stats display above the bed was replaced with video footage. A silhouette of a man with a bat appeared to be leaning over the viewer. ‘This is what Kilgannon sees – as if he was the victim.’
The bat came crashing down.
Mikey’s arms twitched slightly.
‘They have audio as well, of course,’ Abigail added. ‘And the drugs make it seem like it’s really happening.’ She appeared unmoved.
Grace felt a rising nausea. She pressed her hand to her mouth.
‘It’s not as bad as some of them,’ Abigail insisted. ‘Bed six over there, she’s a serial killer, tied men up and shot them at close range. Bed nine, he did the terrorist attack on the kids’ hospital. And don’t even ask about bed fifteen.’
A personal video loop of the darkest deeds they committed, replayed over and over, but with them as the victim, intensified with psychotropic drugs and emotisonics? Death is too good. She wondered what the public would think if they found out.
Her stomach lurched.
‘This is… this is horrendous,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t do this to people! The government can’t…’
Abigail turned her feline gaze towards Grace with curiosity.
‘No worse than what they do to their victims, if you think about it. These people would reoffend ad infinitum. This is best for everyone. They’re getting punished. Their victims are getting justice. Society is safe.’
‘But don’t their relatives try to stop it? What must it be like to have a brother, a sister, a son or daughter go through this?’
Abigail shrugged. ‘Most of them don’t know what’s going on in here. Lots of families think they deserve punishment. Usually disown them.’
‘They don’t get any visitors?’
‘What would be the point?’ Abigail laughed and Grace felt her cheeks burn. She was glad that none of her bio-readings were visible.
Abigail put her hand on Grace’s shoulder to steer her out of the clinic. ‘It’s a lot to take in, a bit of a shock first time.’ She took her hand away as they came to the door and said, ‘Think about some of the horrendous things these people, these criminals, have done, Grace. It’s the balance of justice.’
Grace took one last look behind her, trying to remember every tiny detail as if somehow to convince herself that this was really happening.
This wasn’t justice. This was vengeance.
‘Grace, don’t question yourself,’ said Shannon on the other end of the line. ‘We always do our best, doll. You go above and beyond for all our residents.’
It was mid-afternoon and Grace was standing outside the herbalist on the street corner, the warm summer air mingling with the smells of fennel and thyme wafting from the shop’s open door.
‘I feel like Abigail’s analysing everything I do. Maybe she’s keeping an eye on me for Conrad. Am I being paranoid? I mean, I get it, she’s going to resent me because she thinks I’m taking over. And I’m horrified by—’
She stopped herself.
‘By what?’
Part of Grace wanted to blurt out everything she’d seen on the upper floor of the Janus building. But how could she put it into words? What she’d seen was so distressing that it had burrowed deep down into her, like a parasite.
She didn’t want to burden Shannon with thoughts of Siberia. Plus, she’d signed the extra confidentiality agreements. If it got out that she had told someone, she’d be out of Janus in a heartbeat. There’d be no helping Remy then.
Instead, she said, ‘So you don’t think we messed up with Mikey, that it’s our responsibility he’s here?’
‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Shannon said. ‘We did our best for him. Don’t let that cat-eyed bitch knock your confidence. It’s all bloody mind games. Abigail’s pissed off because you’re on her patch, so she’s trying to wobble you. No wonder Myriam fucked off. Maybe she left because Aversion Therapy is so… horrible. Maybe she was just sick of seeing the worst things a person could see, day in, day out.’
‘But that’s the thing. Abigail seems to think that it was Myriam who messed up, didn’t read the brain scans properly, and that’s why Mikey reoffended. It wasn’t because the tech was faulty, but because he wasn’t assessed properly. And now the scans are missing.’
‘Missing?’
‘Disappeared. No record on the whole system.’
‘Sounds like someone’s hiding something,’ Shannon said. ‘Do you think Abigail’s covering up her own mistakes by trying to blame us in Tier Two, suggesting we could have spotted something earlier? We’re not bloody fortune tellers.’
‘When offenders come to us, it’s usually obvious what the problem is. We don’t even scan for psychopathy.’
‘There’s no point. Our clients don’t commit the sorts of crimes that psychopaths are known for,’ Shannon interrupted. ‘So why does she think Mikey is a psychopath?’
‘Because he kept on offending, even after going through Aversion Therapy. It’s ineffective with them because of the way their brains work – no empathy, no reaction to fear and a totally selfish obsession with getting what they want. Psychopaths don’t stop, Shan. That’s the problem.’
‘But if, as you say, Aversion Therapy is so distressing, how can it not affect them?’
‘Because psychopaths don’t see those images as horrible and upsetting, but as interesting, so it’s obvious that reels, even with them in the starring role of those little horror films, aren’t going to cure them.’
‘So they get dumped up in Tier Four because they can’t be fixed?’
Grace didn’t reply, imagining Remy lying in Siberia, the human version of a toxic waste dump, and her disgust and anger grew.
‘I’ll have another look at the data we’ve got on Mikey and send the file over to you, doll, but as far as I remember he was in good shape when he left us. He certainly wasn’t psychopathic. Plus, we’re always very thorough.’ She sighed and said sadly, ‘I liked Mikey.’
‘Yeah, so did I. Thanks, Shan.’
‘No problem. Speak soon.’
‘Bye.’
Grace stood for a moment in the street watching the people go by, wondering how many of them were psychopaths. One per cent of society so the text books said – but they weren’t all homicidal criminals. Many were highly functioning members of society.
Her phone rang in her hand. She brought it up to her ear. ‘Don’t tell me, Shan, you think I deserve to go out and drink lots with you on Friday night.’
‘Grace?’
It was a man’s voice, one she didn’t immediately recognise. She looked down at the caller ID – a street-shell.
She put the phone back to her ear. ‘Hello?’
‘Gracie…’
The whole street around her seemed to come to a standstill like a paused reel, the sounds muted, the faces blurred. She knew this voice but it was deeper and tinged with fear, something she’d never heard there before. A surge of dammed-up memories was released.
‘Remy…’ she whispered.
‘I’m in trouble. I need your help.’
An automated message declared credit was out.
‘Remy… Remy?’ She pulled the phone from her ear to see the display but there was no caller ID. She put it back to her ear. ‘Remy?’
The action in the street started up again, a light rain began, and Grace was left standing on the pavement saying his name over and over again, but there was just silence on the other end of the line.