Page 11 of The Medici Return

Casaburi opened the door.

And left.

CHAPTER 5

SALISBURY, ENGLAND

12:15P.M.

THOMASDEWBERRY DROVE HIS SILVER-GRAYMERCEDES AT ANunhurried pace, enjoying the mental release he always felt with being out in the countryside. He savored any escape from London’s hurriedness and its microscope, where nosy eyes and ears seemed everywhere. That apprehension all came from leading a solitary life, one devoted only to God, church, and his work, in that order.

The motorway ahead seemed a 110-kilometer-an-hour traffic jam steadily snaking its way west across southern England. Thoughts speckled through his brain like insects darting across water. More and more of late he’d found himself thinking introspectively. Analyzing. Wanting to fully understand himself. But always seeming to fail.

When had it all started?

That was easy.

As a child, when he tortured and killed stray cats and dogs. He’d come to learn that he did not commit those atrocities because he was born bad, or was inherently evil. Instead, as his former psychologist said, he was the product of systematic violentization.

“Experiences that make people dangerous happen over a long period of time. They do not occur all at once. They come gradually, like water over sandstone, and slowly change the shape of things.”

Yes, they did.

He now fully understood the five-step process.

It started with brutalization—when a child routinely witnessed and experienced violence. For him that came from his father, a fearsomely violent Welshman who beat his two sons, eventually killing one of them. He could still see his little brother lying in a pine box, not understanding why he wasn’t waking up. He’d begged him to get up, since his brother was the only other person he had, the only one who knew what it felt like to be him.

And he lost that.

Violent coaching by an authority figure came next. His started the day he was severely beaten in the neighborhood and came home bloodied and bruised. His father slapped him across the face and made him go back and fight.

He did and nearly beat a boy to death.

Belligerency followed, the conscious decision to use violence to protect yourself. For him that happened at Catholic school. When he acted out the nuns would rap him across the knuckles with a metal-edged ruler. One day he told the nun that if she hit him one more time he’d smash her head.

She did. So he did.

The fourth stage was violent performances.

That came when you asked yourself if you’d be able to hurt someone bad enough to keep them down, make them bleed, and do great bodily harm. He’d known exactly what the therapist meant, since he had no reservations about any of those. As a young man people began to view him differently. Some called him mentally unstable. Others dangerous. Most gave him a wide berth. And as he willingly accepted that newfound status, he quickly drifted into the final stage.

Virulency.

A commitment to act violently.

To hurt at will. Without regret or remorse.

He’d experienced all five stages by age seventeen. That’s when he first killed, beating a local bully to death with a cricket bat.He then tossed the body in a car he stole, drove it two hours to a bridge, and threw the corpse into a river. That was the moment he became what he’d hated most.

His father.

One of his biggest regrets was not killing that man before he died of a heart attack.

He exited the highway and navigated a series of back roads to his destination, which lay outside Salisbury on a broad, grassy plain.

Stonehenge.

Some say it came from the Neolithic Age. Others called it a Druid place of worship. An important burial site. Or something else entirely. On a midsummer’s day the sun definitely rose in a direct line with the avenue of stones. Did that make it a calendar? Was it some sort of religious site for sun worshipers? Nobody knew.