Among Irish people old enough to remember the summer of 1982, Malcolm Macarthur is as close to a household name as it is possible for a murderer to be. He grew up in County Meath in the east of Ireland, on a grand estate with a housekeeper, a gardener and a governess. In his 20s, he received a large inheritance, and lived well on its bounty. But on the brink of middle age, he found he was going broke. At the time, the IRA was conducting a campaign of bank heists to fund their struggle. Macarthur was a clever and capable man, he reasoned, and so why should he not be able to pull off something along those lines?
He had been living for some months with a woman named Brenda Little and their son in Tenerife. He told Little that he had financial affairs to attend to, and flew to Dublin. But he did not bring off the heist; in the effort to attain a gun and a getaway car, he murdered two complete strangers. His first victim was a nurse, Bridie Gargan, whom he beat to death with a hammer in the process of stealing her car. His second was a farmer, Donal Dunne, who had agreed to sell him a shotgun. Macarthur shot him in the face and left his body in a bog. Both victims were 27 years old.
The murders quickly became the focus of a great deal of media attention. Looking for a place to hide, Macarthur went to see his friend Paddy Connolly, who lived in a seaside suburb. Connolly knew nothing of his friend’s crimes and offered him the spare room in his penthouse apartment. When Macarthur was arrested there, three weeks later, a convulsion of captivated outrage ensued, not only because the murderer had been caught, but because of where he’d been found. Connolly wasn’t just Macarthur’s friend. He was Ireland’s attorney general, the most senior legal official in the country and a significant figure in an already embattled government.
He was also the neighbour of my grandparents. As a child, I often visited their apartment complex overlooking Dublin Bay, where these bizarre and terrible events had culminated. Hearing the story, I imagined a suavely sinister figure, in a tweed jacket and bow tie, hiding out with a shotgun down the hall. Years later, in my late 20s, I began work on a PhD at Trinity College Dublin, about the Irish writer John Banville. One of Banville’s best-known novels, The Book of Evidence, is narrated by a patrician loafer named Freddie Montgomery, who gets into financial trouble while living abroad. He attempts to solve this problem by returning home, to Dublin, and stealing a painting from a wealthy acquaintance, but he is interrupted, mid-theft, by a housekeeper, whom he beats to death with a hammer. He then hides out in the home of a prominent art dealer before being arrested and brought to trial. The Book of Evidence is his testimony, a slippery mix of self-justification and confession, and the monstrously eloquent Freddie is among the most haunting characters in Irish literature. He is based – loosely but very obviously – on Malcolm Macarthur.
I was riveted by Banville’s novel partly because of my slight family connection to Macarthur’s story. But it was not only that. There was something of the fable in the story of an heir who murders a nurse and a farmer. Macarthur’s arrest led to Connolly’s dismissal as attorney general; the resulting scandal contributed to the government’s downfall later that year. Macarthur pleaded guilty, and never spoke a word publicly about his crimes. I came to realise that if this story still occupied a kind of mythic register, not just for me but for the country, it was largely because it had never really been told. Or, rather, it had been told, endlessly and luridly, but always in the same tone of breathless incredulity, and with a sullen and persistent silence at its centre.
In September 2012, Macarthur was released from prison, after nearly 30 years of good behaviour. I had completed my PhD and had stayed on at Trinity for a postdoctoral fellowship. One night, I emerged from Berkeley Library, after a day spent working on a chapter about The Book of Evidence. I was drifting across the cobbled front square when I noticed, coming toward me, a man I could not quite place, but whose face was immediately familiar. He wore a tweed jacket with a silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. I was about to nod blandly toward him, in a gesture of noncommittal acknowledgment, when I realised it was Macarthur.
He gave me a look of almost cartoonish wariness; he knew that I knew who he was. What he could not have known was that my reaction was not just to seeing a famous murderer walking around campus, but to encountering a character from a novel in the realm of supposed reality. It was as though the fabric separating fact from fiction had been torn.
I began to spot him, from time to time, around Dublin. He was a frequent attender of public talks at Trinity; he went to museums and to galleries. I browsed for books in Hodges Figgis one night and, as I was coming out on to Dawson Street, there he was again. On this occasion, he returned my gaze, and held it. I continued home, wondering what it would be like to know that people recognised you, and knew the evil you had done. What a rare and strange form of abjection that must be.
With this thought came the realisation that I was going to write about him – and that, to do so, I would need to speak to him. I could piece together a reasonably vivid account of the murders by interviewing the people involved, and sifting through newspaper archives, but this would only affirm and embellish what everyone already believed. I wanted to learn things I could barely imagine. I was drawn, too, by what I knew of Macarthur – his apparent refinement of manner, his reputation as an intellectual loafer – not because I was interested in these qualities in themselves, but because they seemed to make him more approachable. I knew people like this; I was, perhaps, one of them. The sheer awfulness of what he had done seemed unfathomable, and yet I felt strongly that we might share a language in which he could speak to me of it. I became determined to try.
Not long after that sighting outside the bookshop, Macarthur disappeared. Everyone did. The pandemic had begun, and absence was general all over Ireland. There began a period of lockdown-addled months during which I spent two or three afternoons every week walking around the abandoned city, hoping to bump into him.
Summer passed, then the autumn, and the winter. In early spring, I saw a headline in a daily tabloid: “MASKING A MURDERER: Double killer Malcolm Macarthur backs Covid lockdown restrictions – labelling them ‘necessary precaution’”. In a photograph, a masked Macarthur strode along a city street, levelling a sidelong gaze at the camera. “The notorious murderer believes the current health rules are based on ‘scientific facts’ and is confident they are working,” the article began. After a brief recap of the murders and the political scandal they caused, the piece veered back into Macarthur’s stolidly sensible view of the lockdown.
I found the reporter’s number and called him, explaining that I was hoping to write about Macarthur’s case. He mentioned the supermarket outside which he’d approached Macarthur. I began concentrating my walks in that vicinity. One day, after strolling up and down a short stretch of street all morning, I saw a masked figure rounding an intersection, and immediately recognised him. As he waited at a crossing, I walked to the other side. Then I approached very tentatively, and asked if he was Malcolm Macarthur.
He seemed a little startled, and wanted to know whether I’d been following him. I said no, but that I’d been hoping to bump into him, that I’d been fascinated by his case for many years. He asked whether I was a journalist. I knew this question was coming, and felt it was important to intimate that my interest was less puerile than that of the tabloid reporters who had doorstepped him over the years. I said that I thought of myself as more of an essayist. Even as I was saying it, I felt a heat rise in my face, and I was viscerally aware of my own absurdity. It was true, but was no less embarrassing for being so.
I handed him a book of mine and a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, which included a piece I’d written. I’ll admit that my strategy here was to present myself as the kind of figure with whom Macarthur might be glad to associate. He said he was reluctant to talk; he’d been given a life sentence, and could be recalled to prison if he broke the conditions of his release. One condition was that he not contact any members of the media about his crimes. (Macarthur eventually agreed to speak to me on the grounds that I was neither a journalist nor an employee of a media organisation, and that it was I who had contacted him, rather than vice versa.) I told him I would be happy to confine our conversations to other matters – to his childhood, say, or his life since he’d been released. “That may be possible,” he said. “We shall have to see.” He spoke with a drawling precision, in a manner that seemed an imperfect imitation of the pronunciation and cadences of the English upper class.
Then he immediately became voluble. He spoke about the estate he had grown up on and his family’s history; he spoke about his love of libraries. Forty minutes later, we were standing at the same spot, and his autobiographical torrent showed no sign of abating. Suddenly, he broke off, mid-sentence, and looked sharply at something over my shoulder – there was a tall man in a raincoat, holding a camera. Macarthur asked him if he was taking photographs of us, and the man said that he was. Macarthur asked if he would mind not doing so.
“You didn’t give that poor girl much of a chance, did you?” the man said.
Macarthur seemed taken aback, but not especially rattled by the exchange. “Thank you, all right,” he said, with brusque civility.
“You didn’t give her any chance at all,” the man said. “You cunt.”
Violence felt imminent. We began walking; when we stopped at a crossing, I saw that the man was following us. Macarthur suggested that we continue our conversation in his apartment building, which was close by.
We ended up standing in the foyer of the building, talking, for another hour. But I had been shaken by the incident on the street, and returned to it obsessively in my mind. Prior to the other man’s arrival, I was able to maintain a sense of myself as an observer-narrator. But, as soon as he appeared, with his compact camera and obscenely truthful language, I was no longer the one composing the scene. If he did manage to take a photograph, it is one in which I appear not as a writer making contact with a subject, but as a random guy who happens to be chatting to Malcolm Macarthur – or, even worse, as a friend.
The following Sunday, as I ate breakfast, my phone buzzed, and the word “Macarthur” appeared on the screen. I was not expecting to hear from him. We had exchanged numbers, and I had said that I would call in a week or so. I went outside, leaving the children on the sofa watching cartoons, and answered the phone. “Macarthur here,” he said.
He told me that if I was going to write about him with or without his cooperation, as I had said I would, then I might as well do so with the correct facts in hand. He wanted to clarify certain things about his past, which had been misreported after his arrest and had calcified over the years into an accepted version of his life, and of what he called his “criminal episode”. I told him that I was interested, first of all, in his childhood, but that I hoped that we could go through his life more or less sequentially.
“Well,” he said, wasting no time, “the first thing to be said is that I lived a blameless life until 1982. Entirely blameless. If you were to plot my life along a graph, morally speaking, you would see a very flat line for the first 37 years, then one very sharp spike in the middle, followed by another completely flat line right up until the present day.”
“Given,” I said, “that that seems to be the case – ”
“Oh, it is the case,” he said.
“Well, I thought we might try to talk about why it happened.”
“Fine,” he said. “But you must remember that this was a financial situation. It wasn’t what you might call irrationality, or lack of control. There was a problem to be solved. And you might well ask, well, why solve it using this particular technique? And that’s a legitimate question. But it wasn’t an act of madness.”
After the call ended, I sat on the bench, staring at the words I had scribbled in my notebook as we spoke. I circled the word “problem”, and then the word “technique”.
We arranged to meet the following Thursday. That morning, I dropped my son off at school and walked to Macarthur’s building. He had a small apartment, with one bedroom and a living room-cum-kitchenette. He directed me toward a glass table and a couple of wooden chairs, and sat across from me, on a couch. I told him I would be recording the conversation and taking notes. I was behaving more formally than I normally did in such situations; at one point, I heard myself ask whether he found the apartment building a “convivial” place to live.
I told him that The Book of Evidence had deepened my fascination with his case. He said that he was not terribly interested in fiction – he was very much a “fact person” – but that he had made an exception for Banville’s novel. What interested him about it especially were those places in which Banville had unwittingly written the truth. Among the more widely reported details after his arrest, for instance, was that, as the police were about to pounce, a taxi had pulled up outside Connolly’s apartment building carrying items that Macarthur had requested, including hacksaw blades, Town & Country magazine and Perrier spring water. In The Book of Evidence, Macarthur’s doppelganger drinks spring water, but Banville changed the brand from Perrier to Apollinaris – presumably, Macarthur said, to distance his story, slightly, from the facts of the case. But the press had got it wrong about the Perrier; it was Apollinaris. Connolly was fond of the stuff, because it was very lightly fizzed.
Macarthur and I would eventually meet many times, and speak frequently on the phone, over the course of nearly a year. But during that first conversation, we agreed only to a small number of meetings, in which he would tell me about his life before the murders. He was, he said, wary of upsetting the families of the people he had murdered, though he never put it in these terms – he spoke only of “the bereaved”, or “the deceased”, or even, on one occasion, “the deceased persons”. For the time being, though, we could start where his story began.
His family owned an estate called Breemount. There were extensive gardens, tennis courts, stables. Macarthur’s father, Daniel, was a man of leisure. His mother, Irene, had trained as a nurse, but never practised. Horses, in particular, were her thing. When she wasn’t around horses, she could be found in Breemount’s gardens, or on one of the tennis courts. She would later admit that children didn’t really figure in her interests, even after Malcolm was born. “I carried on the tradition I had been brought up in,” she said in a radio interview after her son’s conviction, “that children are seen and not heard.”
Other recollections of the young Macarthur appeared around that time, and a picture emerged of a boy who was neglected, possibly abused. “The poor little lad was scared stiff of everyone,” a former employee of the family said. The art historian Homan Potterton, whose family knew the Macarthurs, described Malcolm, in his memoirs, as “very much neglected”. He added, of Breemount, “In light of what happened later, it is obvious that demons lurked there.”
This version of Macarthur’s childhood was one that Macarthur, in our conversations, claimed not to recognise. He was not, he said, “regularly beaten” by his father, as one article claimed, nor was he neglected. His mother taught him to ride a horse; he fished with his father. In the winter, they would play billiards in the games room. They would go for long drives on Sundays, visiting sites of historical interest, or the large country estates of their friends.
People were always desperate to find so-called red flags in the details of one’s early life, Macarthur said. But, despite what his mother had said – she told the interviewer that Malcolm had “seen violence at an early age” and that her husband had a “sadistic streak” – he recalled no disturbing incidents. There must have been some discord between his parents, because they divorced when he was in his teens. But if it ever turned “physical”, he said, that never unfolded in his presence. I suggested that people might be less likely to see him as a monster if they believed he’d had a difficult childhood. He acknowledged that this might be the case, but it would not be true, he said, and, furthermore, it would be an injustice to his mother and father.
As odd as it sounds, it was important to Macarthur not to be seen as a violent man. If his childhood had been a happy one, then it could not be said that his life had followed an inexorable psychological course – a “thread of violence”, as he called it.
When we spoke about the murders, he always wished to make it clear that he had acted in a logical manner. (“It was all,” he said, “in the cerebral cortex.”) He needed money, therefore the solution was to rob a bank, therefore he must get a car and a gun. But he did not want this act of heartless rationalism to define him; it had to be seen as an aberration, an “episode”. One could not extrapolate the meaning of a story from the events of a single episode, however central that episode might be.
When Macarthur was 17, in 1963, he went to the United States. His father’s brother lived in California, and Macarthur spent a year at a junior college there, a year at Oregon State, and two years at UC Davis, where he got his degree. Then he returned to Ireland. For the next 15 years, he seems to have done nothing of consequence. “I was never a careerist,” he told me. He didn’t feel the need to pursue a vocation, or gainful employment of any kind. “I was lucky in that I never had to,” he said. “That is the wonderful thing, by the way, about inherited wealth. You become the master of your own days.”
His father died in 1971, and he inherited two-thirds of the estate. (The other third went to his mother.) Breemount was sold, and Macarthur netted about IR£70,000, the equivalent of nearly €900,000 in today’s money. He moved to Dublin and rented a flat on Fitzwilliam Square. The stories that ran after his conviction suggested that Macarthur had entertained lavishly and spent frequent weekends in London. Macarthur told the police that he’d burned through the proceeds of the estate through “mismanagement and unwise use”. But, in our conversations, he was kinder to himself. To some degree, he said, he was simply too generous. He picked up a lot of cheques and made a lot of loans – mostly small and short-term, but they added up, and not all of them were paid back.
One loan in particular, he said, contributed significantly to his financial straits. Late in 1981, he got a call from a man he liked and trusted who was in a tight spot. He needed a five-figure sum, and Macarthur agreed to help. About a month later, the man called to say that he would be unable to pay him back on time. Almost immediately, Macarthur told me, he began to feel that he was in trouble. He might have to temper his socialising and his travel; he might even have to look for work.
I imagine that he conceived of this as a kind of death, the end of everything he had been born into. But, whenever I brought the matter up with him, he was vague. I could never quite decide whether this period was truly a blank, or if he was staging a failure of memory because he didn’t want to talk about the premeditation of his crimes. When he returned to Dublin, he called his mother, to check in on her. He told me that he didn’t mention his financial situation, and she herself said, in interviews, that he never asked for money. “Possibly it never occurred to me,” he said, when I asked about this. “Possibly it was inhibition.” I suggested that it could have been shame, but he rejected the notion. He had loaned many people money, and had not thought less of them for it.
The portrait that emerged in the media after Macarthur’s conviction was that of a calculating psychopath, a man who knew what he wanted and killed with ruthless logic in pursuit of his aims. Macarthur himself, in his statement to the police, described his “venture” as a “heartless, cold-blooded operation”. And yet there is a whiff of madness emanating from it, a persistent sense that none of it remotely adds up. Macarthur described the murders to me one day as “complete nonsense”. He said it as though he were cross with himself for some youthful folly. I recalled a moment in the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game, when Ripley looks back on his first killing. “Hotheadedness of youth,” he thinks. “Nonsense!”
A few weeks after I first met Macarthur, we were in his apartment, talking in general terms about the aspects of his crimes he felt had been misreported or misinterpreted, when he began to speak, almost out of the blue, about the murder of Bridie Gargan. I was caught a little off guard; until that moment, it had not been clear if he would ever speak directly about the two killings.
It was not a sadistic, motiveless attack, he said. His voice was quiet and tentative. He had expected to take the car easily – it was possible that she didn’t take him seriously, he said, because he was not threatening in demeanour. She asked whether it was a joke, and when he made it clear that it was not, she asked to get her things. He invited her to do so, but then he couldn’t get her out of the car. That, he said, was the triggering mechanism. This happened in the middle of thea park; he couldn’t see anyone. If it had been a built-up area, he said, he probably would have disappeared.
He paused a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was lower still. The blows were to subdue, he said. To subdue, and to extract. It was a terrible word to use, he said, but the blows were calibrated to knock out.
There was a short silence, during which Macarthur remained perfectly still, leaning against a windowsill that was his frequent perch, gazing downward at his shoes. It had been very wet all that afternoon, and as he spoke droplets darted fitfully down the length of the glass behind him.
The blows, he said, were not intended. His words trailed off in the darkening room. I asked if he was trying to say that the blows he dealt Gargan were not intended to kill her. He said, at length, the word “no”. He said, more quietly still, the words “not to”. Because the blows did not have the desired effect, he said, they were repeated. Those were his words: “They were repeated.” When a small amount of blood appeared, he said, he stopped, because he was horrified.
There was another silence of almost intolerable length. His expression was difficult to judge, because, as always, he was wearing a medical mask. But his eyes looked suddenly tired, as though something in him had gone slack. He tapped the sole of his shoe against the wood of the floor. He continued tapping for a while.
All at once, then, he seemed to rally his energies, and began to speak again, more animatedly now. Before he got out of the car, he said, he turned around and was relieved to see that she was sitting up, and seemed relatively unharmed. She was not exhibiting any distress, he said, and he told her that help would arrive shortly. These words, “help will arrive shortly”, he pronounced with a kind of breathy, pleading precision. The phrase “help will arrive shortly” was absurdly officious, as though, even when faced with the dire consequences of his own savage irrationality, he was maintaining a performance of sensible authority. It was possible that he had erased the memory of her injuries from his mind, and it was possible that he was straightforwardly lying to me, but it was not possible that, in the minutes after he battered her skull with a hammer, Bridie Gargan exhibited no distress.
He said then that the death, which happened four days later, was caused by something called “contrecoup”, an injury that affects the side of the brain opposite from that on which an impact has occurred. That is to say, it was the brain moving inside the skull, rather than the blows themselves, that caused the death. (This was how he put it: “the brain”, “the skull”, “the death”.) His use of arcane terminology seemed profoundly strange and entirely characteristic. I wondered whether he told me this because he imagined that it somehow lessened his culpability, that it was not, technically speaking, his hitting her repeatedly in the head that had killed her – his clutching a fistful of her hair in one hand as he dealt blows of the hammer with the other – but the resulting impact of her brain against the side of her own skull. I didn’t think he could consciously have been trying to convince me of this, but it occurred to me that he may, unconsciously, have been trying to convince himself, or to already have done so, long ago.
The harm that Macarthur did to Bridie Gargan and Donal Dunne and to their families was so vast and absolute that for him to truly reckon with it would be to risk a kind of moral self-annihilation. I could not even imagine what such an undertaking would involve. But, as the months passed, and as our conversations circled more closely around the topic of remorse, I came to realise that this reckoning was precisely what I had been seeking from the start. I wanted him to be tormented by what he had done, and to see him tremble in terror and awe at the magnitude of his iniquity. I wanted him to be Raskolnikov in the final pages of Crime and Punishment. I am asking myself now why I would want this. I think that it has less to do with a desire for justice than with a need for the sense of resolution that such an emotional catharsis would provide. In failing to confront the enormity of his sins, in failing to be annihilated by it, Macarthur was failing me as a character. He was denying me the satisfaction of an ending.
When I pressed Macarthur on the subject, he said that yes, he felt a great and terrible remorse, but that he had never allowed it to overwhelm him, because what good would that have done, for himself or anyone else? People sometimes said to him that he must have been permanently damaged, ruined even, by the fact of what he had done. But he didn’t think that this was the case.
I generally saw little point in taking an adversarial approach with Macarthur, since to do so might have led to his closing himself off against me. But there were times when my frustration with his evasions was more than I could bear, and this gave rise, on occasion, to absurd exchanges. I remarked once, after we had been talking for the better part of a year, that he seemed to me a highly conflicted person. He took issue with this, telling me that he fully acknowledged the gravity of what he had done, and that he knew who and what he was: a decent and moral human being who had acted, many years ago, in a way that went strongly against his essential nature.
Perhaps a better word, I said, was contradictory, or even paradoxical, because the central fact of his life was that he had committed brutal murders, and yet he did not think of himself as a murderer. “I have committed the act of murder,” he conceded. “I am somebody who has unlawfully killed. That’s an action that took place, at one point, in my life of 75 years.” He might not want to be defined by these things he did, I said, but the act of murder was nonetheless irreversible. Once you had committed murder, you are, irreversibly, a murderer. “Well, let’s not dwell on the obvious,” he said.
One afternoon, close to a year after we first began talking, Macarthur called me on the phone. He was worried about a podcast the BBC was making about his crimes. I’d heard about it the previous week, and had told him about it. He’d since become concerned that the BBC might be secretly recording him, even perhaps accessing CCTV footage. I told him that, from both a legal and an ethical perspective, this sort of thing was basically unfeasible.
We talked a little more, and then he told me that he had been “studying up” about his case, “and why I might have done what I did”.
“Money?”
“Well, yes, money. But I mean why it was that I used the particular technique I used.”
“Murder, you mean.”
“Well, the adoption of criminal means.”
“Say more,” I said.
“Well, I won’t say anything over the phone.”
I told him I would come around the following afternoon. I was sceptical of this epiphany. I had resigned myself to Macarthur and his crimes never being more than partially knowable, like an underexposed photograph whose subject is visible only as a darkness. Still, as the evening went on, my scepticism gave way to curiosity, and then, against my better judgment, to hope.
The following day was bright and clear and cold. When I entered Macarthur’s flat, I noticed some Christmas cards on the glass table, from people whose names I didn’t recognise. There was also a DVD, Brideshead Revisited. I asked whether it was the one with Jeremy Irons. “Oh yes,” he said. “The 1981 ITV serial. That one they did recently was a travesty.” He mentioned some distant connection to the family on which Evelyn Waugh had based the Marchmains of Brideshead. Then, standing in the middle of the room, he cleared his throat and tugged on his jacket lapels, as if to announce that his presentation would be beginning.
What he was about to say, he told me, was an “ex post facto rationalisation” – a deduction, from the vantage of the present, of what he might have been thinking at the time of the murders. “I’ve been trying to dredge my memory on this question,” he said, “and I have retrieved something that seems to me to be symptomatic of the disorder of thinking I was undergoing at the time of my episode. And I recall thinking, in the time before I embarked on the criminal venture, that if – and the word ‘if’ is very important here – if I were to apply myself to some important project, and if I were to achieve something of significance, something that might be worth writing about, the inclusion, in the narrative, of an account of the mundane activity of having to make a living by earning money would, aesthetically speaking, constitute a blemish, or an imperfection, on that narrative. Therefore the solution was criminality. And I don’t mean aesthetically in what I would regard as the superficial, Wildean sense of the word, but in the deeper, philosophical sense. This aesthetic sense of my life as a narrative, and that the narrative had to be untainted by earning money. Because that was, in my mind, an inferior activity. Time not given to the higher pursuits, the intellectual pursuits, would have seemed to me to be degraded time.”
I was scrawling words in my notebook, and Macarthur gestured toward it. “Now the crucial thing, again, is that the sentence begins with ‘if’,” he said. “If I were to achieve something important. Had that sentence begun with ‘when’, then we would be in the realm of personality disorder. Of grandiosity, megalomania, and so on. And there was none of that. It was a disorder not of personality, but of thinking. I believe it was a form of temporary insanity, quite frankly.”
I asked whether his belief that the murders were a result of a “thinking disorder” allowed him to separate himself from the fact of what he had done. “Morally, yes, of course it does,” he said. “That’s why every day, in prison, I knew that I was not the type of person to have done that.”
“But the reality,” I said, “is that you did do it. And so by definition, you are exactly the type of person to have done it.”
“Quite so,” he said. “But I didn’t do it through acting immorally, because I was being compelled, or impelled, by a disorder of thinking. My ethical side was overwhelmed. Disconnected, if you like. It wasn’t functioning. Because if it had been functioning, I wouldn’t have done it.”
He spoke then for a time about what he called his “ironic” view of life. It had to do, as far as I could tell, with the tension between the great cosmic significance of humanity as a whole, and the perfect meaninglessness of individual human lives. This, he said, was the central human problem, the ironic tension between these two facts. I said that I couldn’t but view this belief in the light of the fact that he had murdered two such individuals. He replied that an individual was meaningless only in the larger scheme of things, when one took the cosmic view. Taken in isolation, he said, the individual was unimportant, but there was, in reality, no taking an individual in isolation, because we did not function in isolation.
I was irresistibly drawn to this idea that it was in aestheticising his life – in conceiving of it as a story composed of plotlines, setting, characters – that he had come to commit his crimes. After all, since meeting Macarthur and beginning to write about those crimes, I myself had been preoccupied with a similar problem: how does one turn a life, or a death, into a story?
Was it possible that Macarthur grappled with a version of this problem? Was it possible that, had he not viewed his life in such terms, Bridie Gargan and Donal Dunne might still be alive?
It was an extraordinary idea, and yet it was, in the end, repellent for precisely the same reasons it was seductive. Macarthur continued to speak, and, for a time, I strove to make sense of such arguments. But, after a certain point, I stopped trying. Philosophical abstraction was no help in understanding Macarthur’s reason for committing murder. Perhaps philosophical abstraction was itself the reason. It was late in the afternoon by now, and the living room, which got little natural light at the best of times, was growing dimmer by degrees. Macarthur, in his beige jacket and beige trousers, seemed to fade into the lighter beige of the walls, so that at times I had a strange sense of his dematerialising completely, becoming a disembodied voice in the room, an unbroken stream of endless assertion. I had an intimation, in that moment, that this voice would never make sense, and that it would never leave me.
A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell (Granta Books, £16.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.