He stood in the shower stall of the punishment wing, wearing full canvas restraint suit, and plainly driven mad by the harsh light reflected from the white tiles, which were streaked with blood from a leaking contusion on his forehead. He has been punched about a great deal, and flinched from me as I approached, but I felt that he almost invited physical attack as a means of provoking himself. He is far smaller than I expected, and looks only seventeen or eighteen (though he is now twenty-nine), but is still strong and dangerous — President Reagan and Her Majesty were probably lucky to escape.
Case notes: missing caps to both canines, contact dermatitis of the scalp, a left-handed intention tremor, and signs of an hysterical photophobia. He appeared to be gasping with fear, and Governor Henson tried to reassure him, but I assume that far from being afraid he felt nothing but contempt for us and was deliberately hyperventilating. He was chanting what sounded like ‘Allahu akbar’, the expulsive God-is-Great cry used by the whirling dervishes to induce their hallucinations, the same over-oxygenation of the brain brought on, in milder form, by church hymns and community singing at Cup Finals.
The Boy certainly resembles a religious fanatic — perhaps he is a Shi’ite Muslim convert? He only paused to stare at the distant aerials of Daventry visible through a skylight. When a warder closed the door he began to whimper and pump his lungs again. I asked the orderly to clean the wound on his forehead, but as I helped with the dressing he lunged forward and knocked my briefcase to the floor. For a few seconds he tried to provoke an assault, but then caught sight of the Sotheby’s catalogue among my spilled papers, and the reproduction of mother’s Samuel Palmer. That serene light over the visionary meadows, the boughs of the oaks like windows of stained glass in the cathedral of heaven, together appeared to calm him. He gazed at me in an uncanny way, bowing as if he assumed that I was the painter.
Later, in the Governor’s office, we came to the real purpose of my visit. The months of disruptive behaviour have exhausted everyone, but above all they are terrified of an escape, and a second attack on HMQ. Nor would it help the Atlantic Alliance if the US President were assassinated by a former inmate of a British mental hospital. Henson and the resident medical staff, with the encouragement of the Home Office, are keen to switch from chlorpromazine to the new NX series of central nervous system depressants — a spin-off of Porton Down’s work on nerve gases. Prolonged use would induce blurred vision and locomotor ataxia, but also suppress all cortical function, effectively lobotomising him. I thought of my wrangles with Sarah over ECT — psychiatry cannot wait to return to its dark ages — and tactfully vetoed the use of NX until I had studied the medical history in the Special Branch dossier. But I was thinking of The Boy’s eyes as he gazed on that dubious Palmer.
In 1982, during the state visit of President Reagan to the United Kingdom, an unsuccessful aerial attack was made upon the royal family and their guest at Windsor Castle. Soon after the President and Mrs Reagan arrived by helicopter, a miniature glider was observed flying across the Home Park in a north-westerly direction. The craft, a primitive hang-glider, was soaring at a height of some 120 feet, on a course that would have carried it over the walls of the Castle. However, before the Special Branch and Secret Service marksmen could fire upon the glider it became entangled in the aerials above the royal mausoleum at Frogmore House and fell to the ground beside the Long Walk.
Strapped to the chest of the unconscious pilot was an explosive harness containing twenty-four sticks of commercial gelignite linked to NCB detonators, and a modified parachute ripcord that served as a hand-operated triggering device. The pilot was taken into custody, and no word of this presumed assassination attempt was released to the public or to the Presidential party. HMQ alone was informed, which may explain Her Majesty’s impatience with the President when, on horseback, he paused to exchange banter with a large group of journalists.
The pilot was never charged or brought to trial, but detained under the mental health acts in the Home Office observation unit at Springfield Hospital. He was a twenty-four-year-old former video-games programmer and failed Jesuit novice named Matthew Young. For the past eight months he had been living in a lock-up garage behind a disused Baptist church in Highbury, north London, where he had constructed his flying machine. Squadron Leader D.H. Walsh of the RAF Museum, Hendon, identified the craft as an exact replica of a glider designed by the 19th-century aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal. Later research showed that the glider was the craft in which Lilienthal met his death in 1896. Fellow-residents in the lock-up garages, former girlfriends of the would-be assassin and his probation officer all witnessed his contruction of the glider during the spring of 1982. However, how he launched this antique machine — the nearest high ground is the Heathrow control tower five miles to the east — or remained airborne for his flight across the Home Park, is a mystery to this day.
Later, in the interview cell, The Boy sat safely handcuffed between his two warders. The bruised and hyperventilating figure had been replaced by a docile youth resembling a reformed skinhead who had miraculously seen the light. Only the eerie smile which he turned upon me so obligingly reminded me of the glider and the harness packed with explosive. As always, he refused to answer any questions put to him, and we sat in a silence broken only by his whispered refrain.
Ignoring these cryptic mutterings, I studied a list of those present at Windsor Castle.
President Reagan, HM The Queen, Mrs Reagan, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Princess Diana The US Ambassador, Dr Billy Graham, Apollo astronaut Colonel Tom Stamford, Mr Henry Ford III, Mr James Stewart, the presidents of Heinz, IBM and Lockheed Aircraft, and assorted Congressmen, military and naval attaches, State Department and CIA pro-consuls.
Lord Delfont, Mr Andrew Lloyd Webber, Miss Joanna Lumley…
In front of Young, on the table between us, I laid out the photographs of President Reagan, the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles and Diana. He showed not a flicker of response, leaned forward and with his scarred chin nudged the Sotheby’s catalogue from my open briefcase. He held the Palmer reproduction to his left shoulder, obliquely smiling his thanks. Sly and disingenuous, he was almost implying that I was his accomplice. I remembered how very manipulative such psychopaths could be Myra Hindley, Brady and Mary Bell had convinced various naïve and wellmeaning souls of their ‘religious conversions’.
Without thinking, I drew the last photograph from the dossier: Colonel Stamford in his white space-suit floating free above a space-craft during an orbital flight.
The chanting stopped. I heard Young’s heels strike the metal legs of his chair as he drew back involuntarily. A focal seizure of the right hand rattled his handcuffs. He stared at the photograph, but the gaze of his eyes was THE OBJECT OF THE ATTACK far beyond the cell around us, and I suspected that he was experiencing a warning aura before an epileptic attack. With a clear shout to us all, he stiffened in his chair and slipped to the floor in a grand mal.
As his head hammered the warders’ feet I realised that he had been chanting, not ‘Allahu akbar’, but ‘Astro-naut’
Astro-nought…?
Matthew Young: the Personal History of a Psychopath So, what is known of The Boy? The Special Branch investigators assembled a substantial dossier on this deranged young man.
Born 1958, Abu Dhabi, father manager of Amoco desalination plant. Childhood in the Gulf area, Alaska and Aberdeen. Educational misfit, with suspected petit mal epilepsy, but attended Strathclyde University for two terms in 1975, computer sciences course. Joined Worker’s Revolutionary Party 1976, arrested outside US Embassy, London, during anti-nuclear demonstration. Worked as scaffolder and painter, Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory, 1977; prosecuted for malicious damage to reflector dish. Jesuit novice, St Francis Xavier seminary, Dundalk, 1978; expelled after three weeks for sexual misconduct with mother of fellow novice. Fined for being drunk and disorderly during ‘Sculpture of the Space Age’ exhibition at Serpentine Gallery, London. Video-games programmer, Virgin Records, 1980. Operated pirate radio station attempting to jam transmissions from Space Shuttle, prosecuted by British Telecom. Registered private patents on video-games ‘Target Apollo’ and ‘Shuttle Attack’, 1981. Numerous convictions for assault, possession of narcotics, dangerous driving, unemployment benefit frauds, disturbances of the peace 1982, privately published his ‘Cosmological Testament’, a Blakean farrago of nature mysticism, apocalyptic fantasy and pseudo-mathematical proofs of the nonexistence of space-time.