The Cat-Catcher . . .‘A Lurid Scandal’ Some Thought Beyond Recall.

‘In case you haven’t noticed, here in Honkers fish-heads and humidity are the active components of a combustible atmosphere,’ Neville gibed, at his most sarky. ‘One of us will have to go.’

            Her husband was referring to a score of cracked saucers and chipped enamel dishes clustered at the gate of the rear courtyard that Nina had made her refuge. This little enclosed ting yun was bordered with purple azaleas and scented orchid shrubs, and she had tried to convince herself that their exotic fragrance overburdened the rancid market smells and reek of sewage from the street.

            Their new quarters were rooms in a colonial villa leased to them by a foreign correspondent temporarily reassigned; in the bedroom a whiff of burnt incense hung in clammy air.

            Within hours of her arrival in Hong Kong, there had been ignited within her an unknown but very living passion for the salvation of the feral cats that roamed the alleys behind the villa.

            She felt charity enter into her soul and at once saw her task to be their defence against a skilled adversary who each day preyed on the starveling frantic-eyed creatures.

            ‘Sei baht poh!’ the street sweeper had shouted fiercely the first time she’d fed the cats to lure them into her little compound.

            ‘You damned bitch!’ His speech was oddly thickened.

            Nina soon learned to fear the gaunt cat-catcher, a municipal worker in a uniform of dark blue dungarees and billowing long shirt whom the market stallholders called Sei-ngaan Lou.

            But not until over a week had passed did she learn from other wives at the Garrison Club that the grim sweeper was notorious in the district for his defiance of the Dogs and Cats Ordinance, and profited from the vagrant cats he collected by selling their meat to certain outré restaurants, whose menus included lung-fu-dou. Some of the husbands claimed to have eaten Cat and Snake Soup with relish, and sickening descriptions of the delicacy caused shudders of revulsion to run through the Bridge players at the club.

            Nina declined invitations to Bridge parties extended by the expats. Although Neville and Nina were a celebrated couple, they were a team bound together in harness merely by a notional yoke. Even under Neville’s merciless tutelage, she had never quite grasped the Rule of Twenty for evaluating opening bids.

            Whenever Neville sought her out in the garden she would be wearing a half-concealed frown of preoccupation, her lips moving in silence, as day long she nursed her growing tribe of cats, her feelings expressed only by an enigmatically wistful smile.

            ‘You asleep or daydreaming?’ was her husband’s invariably brusque demand.

            When he was angry, Nina told herself, she retained nonetheless a substratum of self-belief. A residue of truth.

            ‘The cries of the feral cats are sounding continually in my heart,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘and I feel a great need to forget myself and to please them alone.’

            Sei-ngaan Lou, Old Snake Eyes, wore an expensive pair of Polaroid cat-eye sunglasses with fake snakeskin frames, no doubt once the property of an inattentive tourist, which evidently accounted for the street sweeper’s name.

            ‘We’re not of the same world, you and me,’ she was heard to murmur as the emergent shadow of the cat-napping sougaailou fell across her threshold, and she closed the courtyard gate on him to pen in her mewing strays. These native cats from the streets, she was certain, exhibited an Edenic cattiness unlike any breed she had ever known.

            Their miaows clawed at her mind.

            Moreover, wasn’t Cantonese so much more vivid in its expressiveness once you knew the word for ‘cat’ was maau?

            ‘It’d take too long to explain,’ she mumbled when Neville demanded facts from her, as if facts could explain her peculiar malaise. He shook with rage and could barely control himself.

            ‘He has a right to be angry,’ she thought, ‘but he does not have the right to despise me.’

            Shortly afterwards she found herself immersed in a lurid scandal when late one night, prowling an arcade lined with lingerie shops and apothecaries for herbal medicine, she encountered Snake Eyes laying a trail of scraps.

            Shreds of crab and morsels of barbecued pork were tracked by sprinklings of powdered fish meal.

            Nina followed the powder trail to the point where pent up resentments suddenly detonated in a great blaze of recriminations.

            In an access of fury Nina summoned the strength to grapple with Snake Eyes and wrench him to the ground.

            His trademark sunglasses lay smashed on a kerbstone.

            She saw his eyes for the first time. The face of a sick man, with eyes wide open and blood-shot, in which she read a fear of life no different from her own. His thickness of speech, she discovered, was due to an absence of teeth.

            Their fumbling struggle brought down strings of naked light bulbs festooned above the market stalls.

            The old man was overcome with shame and wept.

            For her own part, she resigned herself to the knowledge that another opening bid in a game of incalculable odds had failed.

            The colony turned their backs on her.

            ‘Indecorous,’ was the word Neville chose.

            He gave her a mild sedative and put her on the first homeward plane out.

           It was as though she had desecrated her marriage. Like a cat peeing on a shrine.

From Listen Close to Me by Catherine Eisner (2011).

Section 22. Hong Kong’s Dogs and Cats Regulations.

Slaughter of dog or cat for food prohibited. Onus of proof

(1) No person shall slaughter any dog or cat for use as food whether for mankind or otherwise.

(2) No person shall sell or use or permit the sale or use of the flesh of dogs and cats for food.

(3) Any person who is found in possession of the carcass of any dog or cat or any part thereof in such circumstances as would reasonably give rise to a belief that such dog or cat was being or had been slaughtered or sold or used for food in breach of this regulation shall be guilty of an offence against paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, unless he is able to satisfy a magistrate that he has not in fact committed any breach of paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be.

Section 23. Hong Kong’s Dogs and Cats Regulations.

Penalty

Any person who contravenes regulation 22(1) or (2) shall be liable to a fine of HK$5,000 and to imprisonment for 6 months.

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

A Web Link to Catherine Eisner’s published works . . .

Publishers of Catherine Eisner, Salt is one of UK’s foremost independent publishers, committed to the publication of contemporary British literature. Salt Publishing was founded in 1999. 

    For more information :

    https://www.saltpublishing.com/collections/author-catherine-eisner

Schrödinger’s Second Paradox . . . ? Unexpected Deaths

As the great forensic pathologist and criminologist Professor Francis Camps remarked, when investigating Unexpected Deaths: 

‘A death which may be expected to take place can still be of unexpected causation. It is for this reason that any fallacy in thinking, such as acceptance of the obvious or lack of true critical approach . . . may well become closely allied to self-deception . . .’

The startled cat, a detail from
Olympia by Édouard Manet
first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. 

Simultaneously live and dead. 

Professor Camps then goes on the consider deaths by electrocution . . .

‘The minimum current to kill from electrocution is stated to be about 65 milliamperes. Death from electrocution can occur in two ways, either by a sudden shock causing vagal inhibition or by true electrocution which produces ventricular fibrillation or respiratory failure. Although the importance of the element of surprise should not be over-emphasised, cases have been recorded in which death has occurred from touching a wire which was believed to be live but which was, in fact, dead.’

For more on precocity in forensic pathology (Francis Camps was, according to my mother, a child prodigy in the advancing of the forensic sciences as the keystone of criminal justice) see An Unreined Mind : 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-skinner-principle-seminal-sp5-case.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Resemblant Lineaments of Kindred Birth . . . a Study of Asexual Twinlife.

What marvel then if thus their features wore 

Resemblant lineaments of kindred birth?

                            — Robert Southey

‘She has sex, but no particular gender.’

                                                           — Marlene Dietrich on Greta Garbo

(Detail.) A sixteen-year-old girl contemplates herself uncomprehendingly in front of a dressing table mirror.  Adolescence (1932), a mezzotint by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst RA, caused a scandal when first shown. The artist was forty-two when the print was made, and the sitter was a life model with whom he began an affair when she was only fifteen about four years earlier.

Listen Close to Me (an extract)

‘The term, normal,’ my father asserted, ‘so far as physical signs may be seen, is purely a relative one.’

             My father was an Associate Lecturer in Cognitive Robotics. At that time we lived on the garrison campus near his Department of Artificial Intelligence and Applied Neural Computation, and he was determined to reduce all human impulses to algebraic brevity.

             In his view it was more shameful to be morally neutered than for a girl to lack the grosser anatomical features of sexual dimorphism.

             For, embarrassingly, it was my fate, when I was fourteen, to exhibit none of the distinguishing attractions shared by other girls of my age.

             Reed-thin, flat-chested, lanky, and hopelessly wooden, I was aware I was less than graceful; yet more painful to me than this compromised girliness was my problematic asexuality.

             ‘She isn’t too bright in the dating department,’ I once overheard an ex-classmate say to her best friend, less than a year after we’d parted at our school-leaving dance.

             The remark was answered by the vilest giggle.

             ‘Nor in the desirable man department either!’

             Some moments passed before I fully apprehended they were not talking about our local Departmental store, and I shuddered as I realised the true perilousness of my position.

             For I began to see that asexuals like myself are caught in the never-ending crossfire of the Sex War, destined to be stranded, paralysed with dread, stark in the middle of No Man’s Land with nowhere to hide.

             Truly, I thought, asexuality must be very like bearing the mark of an hereditary disease if schoolgirls could so easily guess at it.

A Tragedy of Errors.

You should know I am the younger of consobrinal twins, a strange kinship between cousins which I have no doubt anthropologists have categorised as a particular dynastic blood class.

             Let me tell you frankly, my cousin Vernon and I bear a disturbing resemblance to each other and, since our births, our strange twinship has been furthered by an upbringing indistinguishable from that of siblings.

For my Case History, Listen Close to Me, the physical appearance of Vernon and that of his first cousin, the narrator, summoned up a memory of the movie star, Montgomery Clift, and his twin sister, Roberta, who as children were inseparable. It is recorded that both children expressed fears of loss of identity, common to twins, and ‘experienced moments of uncertainty’ as to which twin they were sexually. Even when aged forty, the actor is said to have asked his personal physician, ‘Did I start off as a girl in Ma’s womb?’  

•

‘How does that grab you?’

             The pretty blonde girl of sixteen who kissed me forcibly on the lips I’d never encountered until that moment. She gave me no opportunity to protest.

             It was as if two calf livers, slaughter-warm, had been pressed to my mouth.

             The occasion was a clandestine bottle party in a derelict house to celebrate my pseudo-twin-brother’s seventeenth birthday.

             I’d retreated from the candle-lit revelry of his school-pals to an upper room so she must have followed my shadow up the stairs.

             Cornered in a musty recess, I’d heard a far door open and the rustle of her skirt had announced her determined approach. Yet the weak shaft of moonlight on the landing that illuminated the dusty floor must have been too dim for any certain recognition of my silhouette.

             But she seemed to have no hesitation. She was quite natural and very deliberate. She appeared to know quite well what she wanted as she approached me, her eyes glittering with eager communicativeness.

             She closed the inner door, turning the key behind her, then crossed the room and took me in her arms, with a powerful lock of possession, as if there were no question about it; as if she knew the market value of her attractiveness.

             The kiss was as spontaneous and natural as my rejection of it.

             There was an involuntary contraction of her little pale fingers and we drew apart. We faced each other for an instant, and she re-examined me with a franker admiration than could be decently tolerated.

             ‘Tomorrow night,’ she whispered, before she darted away. Her kiss tasted of sweet cider. ‘Seven o’clock. The Vault.’

             It was a page of my life I would have wished to tear out completely.

•

Next evening, heavy with misgivings, I approached the so-called Vault; actually, it’s a collapsed limestone sarcophagus on the very edge of the vast burial mound that is Stoneburgh cemetery. It’s a solitary nook with every surface scrawled over or carved with penknives. The sunken lid of the monument forms a seat from which one has a wide view of the unending gloomy fens.

             The girl with fair hair had arrived early; she was hunched with her elbows resting on the parapet, looking indifferently into the distance over the floodplain, where white smoke rose lazily from a marshman’s bonfire.

             ‘If I were a man I would bash your filthy mug,’ she wept, when I tried to explain the misunderstanding sparked by my peculiar twinship with Vernon.

             She could not understand why, perversely, I’d envied my cousin’s sleek, closely-cropped head, or why, the previous week, I’d visited his barber and repeated his demand. (Vernon was, at that time, in regular training as a dedicated long distance runner, and he was convinced his military cut was an aid to streamlining his performance.)

             The girl’s glance took in my meek, downcast appearance and her manner turned from a slow anger to a look amounting to furious contempt.

             ‘Freak!’ she suddenly shrieked. ‘I will grow up thinking I have been out with a girl!’ Then she burst out brokenly, ‘I’ll believe my first serious date was with a girl! You make me wish I’d never met you or your cousin!’

             She advanced in an access of rage and, without warning, slapped my face.

             ‘I wouldn’t have kissed him if I’d thought Vernon was a girl,’ she added confusedly, and ran off into the shadows.

For more concerning consobrinal twins and monochorionic identical twins, see . . . 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/consobrinal-twinship-esau-and-de.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

The Skinner Principle . . . the seminal SP5 Case Study identifying a Homicidal Sociopathic Personality in Childhood.

Le fantôme du crime à travers ma raison y rôde . . .

(The ghost of crime prowls across my reason . . .)

                                                       Maurice Rollinat, Les Névroses (1883).

From the Publisher’s Announcement for Listen Close to Me (2011) : An eighteen-year-old governess becomes a suspect in a notorious case of serial murder and begins to harbour suspicions about the budding sociopath in her charge, a sinister nine-year-old boy [extract below]. These are tales that probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines that we wouldn’t normally hear. 

. . . A meticulous recorder of behaviour, pitch-perfect on accents and the faultlines between class, sex and age, Eisner imbues each account with an unsettling verisimilitude that reaches its peak in “An Unreined Mind”. An 18-year-old governess struggles to comprehend her nine-year-old charge . . . on an isolated country estate . . . When a series of murders begins, the governess falls under suspicion . . . Eisner shows the workings of a highly original mind.

   (Review by Cathi Unsworth in The Guardian. 14.02.2012)

‘Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.
                                            (Ambit magazine commends An Unreined Mind.)

An Unreined Mind 

Seeing him again after all these years, as he was led out of the Crown courtroom after the verdict, flanked by an armed police escort, I was somehow neither surprised by his notoriety nor amazed by my own prophecy fulfilled.
  Because, after all, hadn’t his own governess murmured to herself with a shudder, when Skinner was no more than nine years old, ‘Well, that settles his place in history!’ as the boy perched on the wall of his reclusive animals’ graveyard and owlishly watched the hay rick burn while his squealing mice suffocated in their cages. 
  ‘If it’s nae ane thing efter anither wi’ tha’ wickit wee daftie,’ the housekeeper squawked, wildly beckoning to me before the wind could carry the smoke and smuts to descend on her washing line. 
  Not that Nessie could hear those caged death throes from the haystack. She was stone deaf, and her plangent speech was oddly intonated. 
  ‘Uch! Tha’ wretchit Pish-a-Bed cannae be dealt wi’!’ she screeched, pointing to indissoluble traces of yellowish stains on one draw-sheet.
  I helped her fold the batch of single flannelette sheets the boy had brought back from boarding school; each one carried a woven name-tape:

H. L. Skinner.

  Looking down at us from that distant grave-mound, the boy was now half hidden behind the iron-fenced enclosure, hands clutched upon railings, insolently sucking a sweet.  
  ‘A’wa wi’ ye!’ Nessie screeched, and brandished a raw fist. ‘Back tae the stank ye wis spawned in! Behind bars! That’s whaur ye belong!’ 
  Nessie Macmurtagher had a way of menacing those she scorned by bestowing snide epithets according to some ancient Borders custom. For example, Haskull Lauchlan Skinner, the bed-wetting young ‘maister’ and only son of the ‘Big Hoose’, she disparaged as ‘tha’ sleekit Wee Skullie’, and – willing-unwilling – within that household ‘Skullie’ was the name the boy answered to.
  Of course, whenever criminologists cite Skinner’s name, those gruesome serial killings over three decades will always come to mind; a notoriety that will be forever associated with the Skinner Principle (SP5), the five well-known signifiers of homicidal sociopathy which even today socio-psychologists still consider to be the essential ‘quintad’ for identifying in children first-rank personality disorders predictive of future criminal behaviour.
  ‘Cruikit weans oot o’ thair raison!’ 
  For Nessie Macmurtagher, such wilful children were unmistakable. And any child so labelled – in her own maledictory words – was likely to be possessed by ‘a demon soul blacker than the Earl of Hell’s waistkit.’
  As you’re no doubt aware, these components of the SP5 homicidal sociopathic personality consist of Enuresis (bedwetting), Pyromania (firesetting), Zoosadism (torturing pets and small animals), Necromania (a morbid attraction to dead bodies), and Zootomy (dissection of animal cadavers).
  ‘Well, that settles his place in history!’ I whispered to myself for, indeed, it was I who was that hired governess or, rather, since at that time I was myself little more than twice the boy’s age, it would be truthfuller to describe the eighteen-year-old factotum who drifted into Skinner’s warped childhood at that critical moment in his life as a sort of immature Universal Aunt.

•

‘We’re straying into tiger country!’ I once heard my father burst out in agitation, furiously shaking his News Chronicle on reading of some fresh ill-fated imperialist adventure in gunboat diplomacy.
  For me, aged eighteen in that year of my awakening, tiger country was the young plantation of silver birches, and the crooked path that led to Skullie’s lair.
  Skullie had promised to perform the office of burial in his animals’ graveyard [the dog, Sweetles, cherished pet of the lady companion to Skullie’s mother, had been discovered mysteriously poisoned] but , on my circuit of the boy’s haunts, I’d found the grave was empty save for the dead starling sealed in a film of ice. 
  But, now, as I approached the boy’s hideout, hooded in its cloak of snow, I heard Skullie’s raised voice, hoarse and strange, reciting a mysterious, rhythmic incantation:
  ‘The-more-there-is-of-mine! (Thwack!) The-less-there-is-of-yours! (Thwack!) 
  A muffled sound like pummelled flesh – a thrashing and flaying – followed by laboured breathing reached me from the other side of the trees.
  Then the breathing ceased. I heard the crisp sound of footsteps on the snow.
  I felt hidden eyes resting on me and shuddered. 
  The precise nature of the boy’s ghoulish hobbies was a forbidden subject between us, for I knew he regarded me as a trespasser. This tongue of ground, defined on three sides by the margins of a brook, and the farm’s water gardens and withy-beds, was the boy’s own secret territory . . . his own peculiar realm over which he ruled as autocrat and bandit chief.
  Those penetrating odours from his den still assail my memory and sicken me in the throat, so unhealthy was the place. And, never mind the stench, his workbench was too low and rendered a healthy sitting position impossible, so he would tend to hunch over his microscope or laboratory scales. 
  But more than this, his specimen tables, soiled gauze swabs and other impedimenta checked my advance so I paused no further than the threshold.
  ‘It’s dead enough,’ Skullie said without looking up. His features were unaltered by any sign of emotion.
  ‘I broke its neck. Didn’t you hear it go?’ 
  His shirtfront was stained, and he was bowed over the corpse of Sweetles, a set of brass knuckle-dusters on his hands. The hair on various parts of the dog’s head, trunk and legs had been shaved off, and on these spots heavy blows were being inflicted with a pounding from both fists. 
  In life, Sweetles had resembled a hairy caterpillar. Now the corpse suggested a hardened pupal case empty of all memories of doggy existence.
  Skullie glanced up and I looked everywhere but at the face opposite me, avoiding those unfathomable eyes, even though he did not appear to be looking anywhere in particular. All the same, I drew back from those eyes, as if I were about to push open the door to a stranger’s room and feared what I’d find there.
  ‘Maybe it’s not conclusive proof,’ he drawled, in imitation of his father’s suave barristerial address, ‘but it’s a . . .’
  ‘. . . helluva lot more than a hazardous guess.’  
  The fact that I’d remembered word-for-word this catchphrase of the major’s I think momentarily shook him.
  ‘It doesn’t keep the same colour for ten minutes together,’ he complained, pointing to the welts and contusions on Sweetles’ exposed pink flesh.
  ‘I dare say you are right,’ I said with a break in my voice. I’m not an imaginative person, nor am I highly strung, but at that moment I felt his words presaged the darkness of a calamity. I swallowed down my anger as best as I could. ‘Keep your temper,’ Skullie warned, as though he’d taken me for a scullery-maid come to clean his dissecting-room.
  He was wearing a Norfolk jacket cut in a novel fashion to afford more pockets. From one of these he withdrew an open cut-throat razor and commenced to slice an upheld sheet of paper into strips to demonstrate the keenness of the blade.
  His scowl gave place to a grin or, at least, an expression that passed for one.
  ‘An old stage dodge,’ he laughed, and pressed the ball of his thumb into the blade. ‘See? As blunt as a hammer. Our new English master showed us the trick for The Merchant of Venice. All you need is Nessie’s rice paper.’
  Nothing seemed difficult to that strong-willed boy; it was as though he’d donated his emotions to someone else in exchange for a bag of sweets.
  As I turned away, I saw out of the tail of my eye that he had stooped again to his grisly task and, above the stripped cadaver, was now poised a highly polished wooden truncheon.
   ‘My uncle was a Special Constable in the General Strike,’ the boy smiled with grim zest. ‘He cracked not a few heads in his time.’
  I had seen him assume that blank zombie-like appearance, and observed his bloodless disregard for sentiment, some months earlier at half-term. 
  Those vague leaden eyes had worn the same absorbed expression when studying the indwelling properties of crystalline structures in his microscope, or when I had surprised him in an experiment with a tin of Epsom Salts, feeding a little gobbet of pork fat on the end of a fishing line to a family of ducks until the incontinent flock was threaded together like beads on a string. 
  And, once, when I’d accompanied Skullie on an outing to a museum of taxidermy, those same reflective eyes had taken a fascinated interest, to an unnatural degree, in a bird with two heads. I had thought then that the freakish bird was like some malign projection of the boy’s state of mind.
  However, the weeks of ever-shortening days had ended, I thought, and, mercifully, there’d be no alternative to this devilment but the lad’s return to school.

•

Then the poisoned pen letters started to arrive again.
          Dora had given a little half-pitying, half-contemptuous jerk of the head when she’d shown me this second letter the previous August:

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Oreville Spy Campus: An Introduction to Stoneburgh Military Academy (Pt. 1)

Familiarly codenamed ‘Oreville’ by certain analysts in our spying fraternity, Stoneburgh Military Academy is the elite alma mater for generations of British Intelligence operatives who have graduated as commissioned adepts in cryptography, code-breaking, counterespionage, covert communications, disguise, forgery, infiltration, subversion, surreptitious entry, surveillance and sabotage, not forgetting the duplicities of PsyOps. For our intelligence community it delivers a unique curriculum whose content remains sensitive and highly classified so unsurprisingly its astonishing scope has never been openly itemised

Nonetheless, the unfolding Stoneburgh Chronicles (see Catherine Eisner’s collections, Sister Morphine 2008, Listen Close to Me 2011, and A Bad Case 2014) from time to time reward spy-watchers with teasing glimpses of the Stoneburgh cadre, so for the uninitiated a number of key passages are quoted here as prompts for further study.

Perhaps the most instructive introduction to Stoneburgh may be read in the section, Red Coffee, in Sister Morphine, which acquaints us with the young Russian legation interpreter Irina P., seconded to T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – to assist in the drafting of the Redistribution Plan under the direction of Brigadier Wingfield, chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security. Here are Irina’s first impressions (note: Irina does not disclose her difficulties in locating the academy since for security reasons the approach roads are unsignposted).

••••••••••••

The approach to Stoneburgh Military Academy was through the garrison’s camps, on a concrete road flanked by gorse thickets and wild heathland churned by tank tracks. 
‘The English soil,’ she thought fondly.
For she could not deny that in her long-dreamt-of assignment to the foreign fields of England, after all those oppressive years of diligent study in Moscow, her soul had recognised what her masters would condemn as the delusions of a spiritual home-coming.
When she arrived at the guardpost she saw a soldier remove a black disc from a hook and hang an orange disc in its place on the message-board. 
‘Security state raised to Condition Orange,’ Irina thought, suppressing an impulse to laugh, ‘but surely I alone can’t be the cause of their heightened threat alert!’ 
The Ministry of Defence guards inspected her Cyrillic passport, unsmiling. Not until Colonel Rees-Sholter rang the gate-house was the barrier raised. 
Irina drove the hired car cautiously; nerving herself to remember the rule of the left hand lane.
Where two broad avenues met she halted before a huge, black eighteenth century mortar with a mouth wide enough to fire a Landseer lion.
The Palladian façade, she observed with a pang of disappointment, was disfigured where the portico pilasters were parcelled up in green plastic for restoration.  She felt deprived of her proper due.
The guards had directed her to ‘K’ section. The college blocks for the gentlemen cadets and the great park of over six hundred acres had been laid out in tribute to beleaguered forts, border disputes and skirmishes in the Indian and Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century. An entire square mile was divided alphabetically into twenty-six sectors, ranging from Alipur and Berar, through Charasia to Zulfikar. Irina was detailed to ‘K’ sector (the siege of Kotah, 1858) which adjoined the Residency of the Lieutenant Governor.
A cadet platoon, selected from the New Intake Group of that momentous year, jogged by with war-whoops, thighs sweating like champion gladiators.
As she parked her car, a soldier-cyclist rode up and blew the midday lunch recess on his buglet.

 ••••••••••••

Entente uncordiale.

In the light of current political commentary (21.04.15) on the crisis of Europe’s frontline nations under Nato, and doubts – for example – as to the defence of a former Soviet republic with a border only 100 miles from St Petersburg, Irina’s hush-hush project at Stoneburgh (her account to me was written in 1997) now seems astonishingly far-sighted. Her presence at Stoneburgh at the time reflected Nato’s accommodations with Russia in so far that the signing with Russia of a ‘Founding Act’ (1997) promised no combat units would be permanently deployed on the territory of any new members of the alliance.

Today, instead of answering demands within the alliance to deter Russia by permanently stationing at least a brigade in the Baltic states, Nato is reliant on its strategy of the provision of a very high-readiness task force of 5,000 troops for rapid deployment to the Russian border. (See Irina’s reference in 1997 to rapid MSRs below.)

 ••••••••••••

In Red Coffee, Irina was privy to the ramifications of that trade-off, which Colonel Rees-Sholter had outlined to her on her arrival, a trade-off that demanded new nonbelligerent uses for the demilitarised zone.

From Day One of her induction, Irina had been determined to honour the supreme trust the Academy had invested in her. In those early weeks she could scarcely believe her good fortune. The six historic cannon evenly spaced along the South Terrace, the great Park, the ornamental Lake, the Piranesian vaulted library, all conspired to create a classically golden atmosphere of privilege and distinction in which she basked. 
The day was warm; the month was March; Shirt Sleeve Order was five weeks away. She sat at the lakeside and wrote an airmail to her sister.
Irina described Stoneburgh as a ‘time capsule’. In her own country Time and Change raced like the clouds reflected on the water.  She could not conceal her yearning to ‘remain always in ancestral gardens, seated on soft grass, without thinking’. 
Privately, the colonel had told her she had ‘made a hit’ in K section; Duncan had referred to her as ‘the lady of the regiment’.
She had almost completed the blue features on her map. The scheme was classified ‘Most Secret’. 
Under the auspices of the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan – the conversion of military bases was proposed on a vast Central European demilitarised zone where three state frontiers met. This forested land-mass cradled more lakes than Finland. 
The trade-off was two-fold: admission of the former satellite states to an Entente with the Powers, and development of the infrastructure for new rapid MSRs – Main Supply Routes – to their borders, in return for cutbacks in front-line military establishments. 
The MSRs had been carefully assessed for vehicle choke points

 ••••••••••••

Wingfield’s Redistibution Plan was to integrate a series of foreign equity-funded water sedimentation plants to yield highly mineralised compounds for fertilizers and animal foodstuffs. Fifty lakes taken together contained more than five hundred million tons of sapropel, it was estimated, based on optimal utilisation of the natural resources beneath waters surrounded by the largest undisturbed ancient forest in Europe.
The Report’s centre-fold map summarised the Industrial Reclamation Plan with a legend keyed to Irina’s own symbols.  
Lakes containing sapropel were marked with a gold leaf.
Formed by broadleaf and coniferous forests, sapropel organic matter is an aquatic carbonaceous nutrient lying in ooze on the lakebeds.

 ••••••••••••

But Irina’s earnest desire to be an instrument of European rapprochement is thwarted by a powerful puppet-master emerging, still active, from the crucible of a dismembered USSR transmuted by its desperate ideological reconstitution. Very soon not-so-subtle pressure to betray her new comrades is exerted on Irina by dark forces from her Soviet past.

Irina’s boss, General Yegor Bolkashin was the former Chief of Intelligence in the republic where she was born. They had met in the state capital where he chaired the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pulled the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism.
The general zeroed in and expertly squeezed Irina’s well-shaped knee.
‘Irinka. Your knees are the property of the republic. So is sapropel. You should think carefully about what you are doing.’  

 ••••••••••••

However, Colonel Rees-Sholter at Stoneburgh is more gallant in his appreciation of Irina’s zeal.

Irina’s efficient progress with her Report for T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – pleased Colonel Rees-Sholter.

His trusty workhorse he called her.
‘Don’t think for that I am all horseflesh!’ she sparked up. 
‘Nor you are, my dear,’ brayed the colonel amiably.

 ••••••••••••

The emergence of ex-Soviet ‘placemen’ in the West, identified in Red Coffee, is highlighted in a more recent Stoneburgh instalment, Turnaround, in which my anonymous correspondent – a novice codebreaker in Stoneburgh’s exclusive cryptanalysis sorority – makes clear the continuing threat. 

Hans-Jürgen Weissener, a former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, taught politico-criminalistics at Stoneburgh. 
Klara Weissener was the only daughter of this eminent spy-catcher and master intelligence analyst whose lectures had been a memorable feature of our first year’s cadetship at Stoneburgh.
I remember so clearly his visionary conspectus of the Anno Jericho emergency – the collapse of the Berlin wall – and how, in his own words, ‘surveillance of Tumbleweeds from the Badlands’ should be classified as an immediate Heightened Alert Condition. By the label, ‘The Badlands’, he denounced the entire Eastern Bloc. 
Attendance at his acclaimed lecture on Soviet Sleepers was compulsory.
He spoke English correctly but slowly. ‘Do not doubt,’ he cautioned, ‘when I tell you that any number of placemen in the West are still in position feeding secrets to the Soviets. Beware of Latebloomers!’ A disarming smile had flickered for a moment. ‘I speak horticulturally. My subject is Badlands fauna but my metaphor is drawn from flora. (There had been a scattering of knowing laughter.)

 ••••••••••••

This continuing global threat shapes the academy’s strategies for spycraft that must answer to constant vigilance, the watchword of the Stoneburgh cadre. Of course, the academy’s more colourful personnel will become known to you in time, but a résumé is not out of place in this brief introduction, together with one or two directions as to where principal characters may be encountered in these occasional chronicles.

Dramatis Personae 

Current notable Stoneburghians 

(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and Lovesong in Invisible Ink
and In Search of the Fourth Man)
Brigadier Wingfield: chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security.
Colonel Rees-Sholter: director of T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security, with special responsibility for the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan. 
Major Roland ‘Rollo’ Poultney: a ‘Green Fly’ from Intelligence seconded to the Task-Force as the colonel’s ADC.
Lieutenant Duncan Pym: administers the Surreptitious Entry Unit and Special Surveillance Teams for his mentor, the colonel. (Poultney’s opinion of Duncan? ‘Mission creep? He was Mission Creep!’)
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener: former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, lecturer on politico-criminalistics. 
Klara ‘Flags’ Weissener: brilliant daughter of the professor and leader of Stoneburgh’s Cryptocomms, an exclusive cryptanalysis sorority.
Hilary Challis: youngest daughter of Stoneburgh’s Custodian-Marshall, on non-regular assignment to Klara’s Decrypt section. A mathematical prodigy, a fixated numerologist, she is a hyper-systemised teenage savant with eidetic recall. 
Mrs Greenham: only representative of non-regular personnel at top-brass level. She is Colonel Rees-Sholter’s secretary. (‘Wretched name for the unfortunate woman,’ the colonel would often confide to newcomers.) She is sometimes retained as an innocuous-seeming ‘handler’ in sensitive cases involving compromised women.
‘Barbara Ely’: Establishment socialite and co-opted to work with Stoneburgh’s psychological operations unit as a psycho-scenarist of criminal rôle-play for lectures in state espionage. 
Major Vivian X: Intelligence officer and undercover operative in ‘Paddyland’.

Off-site deep-cover operatives.

(From Inducement and A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men)
Edward Faucon: manages a ‘shop window’, the Faucon Detective Agency, a bureau for commercial surveillance operations under a cloak of legitimacy.
Verity Y: Successful divorce lawyer, working as a ‘talent spotter’ in the recruitment and vetting of potential intelligence operatives. 
See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html

Hostiles

(From Red Coffee)
General Yegor Bolkashin: ex-Chief of Intelligence, semi-retired career intelligence officer in the Soviet military security service; chairs the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pull the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism; founder of his Institute for Security Affairs.
Konrad W: operates his own press agency in Warsaw – Biuro K – and exchanges communiqués with Yegor’s outfit in the neighbouring republic.
Stefan Mikhailovich Kazimirov:  Intelligence officer with diplomatic cover as a geologist; sub-section chief at his trade mission attached to the Russian Embassy in London.

Classified Operatives – Access Denied (Highest Level SC accreditation required)

(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and A Room to the End of Fall and Inducement and The Cheated Eye and Listen Close to Me)
Irina P: Rôle classified.
Frieda Tace: Rôle classified.
Dr. Walther T. Reindorf: Rôle classified.
Anneliese Hildegard Wintermann: Rôle classified. 
Constance Bryde: Rôle classified.
Nadezhda Stepanovna Cheremisovna: Rôle classified. 
Professor ‘Pappi’ and his nephew Vernon: Associate Lecturer in Cognitive Robotics in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Applied Neural Computation, and wunderkind astrophysicist/roboticist, respectively; both non-regular Stoneburghians. Rôles classified. 

Lost in Translation . . . the Desire for Union.

Irina P is not alone in permitting me to share a number of Stoneburgh’s intelligence insights revealed in despatches from prescient informants, often at great personal risk. As long ago as 2004 I related the conclusions of another Stoneburgh insider (see Elegy from a Locked Drawer): ‘Espionage specialists and security experts have known for almost a century that police bureaux in communist bloc countries have penetrated international academia by deploying suborned academics, awarded spurious honorifics and doctorates, to provide their political masters with local intelligence concerning the underground activities of émigrés around the world.’  

Any overtures to establish closer ties with the West are so often subverted by the ‘placemen’ and ‘placewomen’ Professor Weissener identifies in his seminal monograph, Red Whitewash. It’s pretty evident that Stefan Kazimirov (Inducement) was not the geologist he claimed to be. More than this, is it not curious that Stefan’s London address was Chesterfield House, Mayfair W1, just a stone’s throw from MI5 operatives’ quarters in South Audley Street? Did Stefan follow the first rule of concealment?  He Who Wants to Hide a Leaf should put it in a forest.

No. Our differences are irreconcilable, if Irina P is to be believed, 

(The Custodian-Marshall gave Irina P licence to explore the stacks at Stoneburgh’s extensive library.) On the shelves labelled  ‘Anthropometry’ she found an early monograph on Slavonians. ‘The tribe of Slavons is characterised by darker hair and eyes than the Saxon.’  There was an engraving of a house set far apart from others. ‘An Anglo-Saxon, if possible, always stands detached.’

Even a well intentioned olive branch can be misconstrued. Irina P laconically once noted a passage in her copy of Varieties of Topical Interpretation by I. S. Slovenko (Moscow 1993): ‘A false transcription by an interpreter rendered President Carter’s words on his arrival in Poland, in 1978, as “I desire the Poles carnally.” ’

Maxie’s . . . Come Again Soon!

Yes. Our best diplomatic endeavours can be so very easily lost in translation. A thought not unconnected with the fact that those two Russian interpreters of my acquaintance, Irina P and Nadezhda Cheremisovna, may well have successfully deceived with ease their assigned intelligence targets but in their own amours they are as likely as any lovelorn temptress to deceive themselves. Curiously, I notice only now in these reflections that, significantly, the nexus of their assignations was Maxie’s cocktail bar, Knightsbridge – the works canteen for certain active hostiles – just a short constitutional stroll from the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens . . . and their love potion du jour? Fact. Honey Dew Screwdrivers. Vodka, Orange Juice and Melon Liqueur.  

As the exhortation on Maxie’s bar check reminds us: Come Again Soon. So maybe, if we remain vigilant at this intriguing watering-hole –  who knows? – before very long we’ll encounter these femmes fatales once more. If not, be assured, the cocktails are delightfully inventive.

For Part 2 of the Stoneburgh Files (the instructive text for probationer agents, Turnaround) see  http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and for Part 3, which reacquaints us with the criminological theories of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html