Mr In-Between

In March 2001, a killer stepped from my mind and into the world.

A cloudless, late winter morning. A North London churchyard. Traffic nose-to-tail on the nearby road. I'd come dressed for a funeral. I stood in line with the other extras, shivering, dry-eyed and tired, waiting for a Styrofoam cup of hot tea.

One of the producers stepped up to me and took hold of my elbow. She steered me through ninety degrees and pointed to a blonde man in a dark overcoat. He stood a few metres away, looking at the ground. His breath was steaming.

She said: "That's Jon."

It was an improbable moment. Jon Bennet had first made himself known to me some years earlier. I didn't invite him. He was a bad man, and I lacked any desire to become acquainted. But he moved into my life nevertheless, like something invoked by a ouija board. One day when I should've been doing something else, I sat down and wrote what became the opening line of Mr In-Between: When the man was dead, Jon was compelled to tidy up the mess he'd made in the process of killing him. And there he was. He came to me whole: a man who maims and tortures, a man who kills because he loves the man who makes him. A man who is beyond deliverance; whose tenderness, when he rediscovers it, is worse in its consequence than his malice.

My life has changed a great deal since I wrote Mr In-Between. I don't know the people I knew then. But I've never left Jon behind. Publication of the book didn't discharge him to a wider sphere. He stayed with me, lingering at my shoulder.

Something about their reaction to Jon often disturbs people. I'm frequently asked where he came from. It's as though people suspect him to be part of me, an avatar of my unexpressed violence, like a migraine headache. I've never been able to say. Instead, I've lied. In person, in print, on radio and television. Sometimes to myself.

Only my wife seems to know, or to have guessed. Sometimes she can tell that Jon is in the room with us. It doesn't happen much any more. But it happens.

The day I took possession of Phantom Pictures' script of Mr In-Between, I felt the peculiar anticipation of jealousy and betrayal. I experienced the very emotions that had birthed and informed the story. There was love for an old friend and an ache in my stomach for what I might learn about him, all these years later. Where had he been? What had he done? With whom? It was dislocating to see those familiar names typed out and centred on the page; each of them at once quite ordinary and charged with significance: Jon, Phil, Cathy, Andy. The Tattooed Man.

As I flicked through the script, I couldn't rid myself of the notion that the characters to whom these names belong were huddled in a group behind me, peering over my shoulder, eager for approval. It's a strange thing, to put those you love and those you fear in the hands of another, and to find them safe and well. The Tattooed Man swam beneath the surface of the page, patient and compassionate and malevolent. Perhaps for the first time, I understood a certain grief that had often been expressed to me: how could Jon fall so profoundly under such malign influence?

I'd always secretly respected the Tattooed Man. He had dignity, after a fashion. Much of what he said made perfect sense to me. I'd always liked to think that, had we met, he'd have liked me. We'd have talked as he prepared a lunch with simple, fine ingredients. He would have chuckled indulgently at my jokes and my gauche, self-conscious references to the books I knew he loved. Old books, most of them, full of high thought and poetry.

I don't think that any more. Not after meeting him again and hearing words his mouth had spoken to another's pen. I'm too weak to contemplate the things he requires, even in the name of love. Then I look at my baby son, who was new-born when the script arrived: fragile and perfect and mysterious, the source of tenderness that felt like rage. And I wonder.

It's during such moments that I feel Jon at my shoulder.

So it was remarkable to see him take possession of human form and step into the world. After the producer pointed him out to me, I kept sneaking glimpses of Andrew Howard, who had taken the role. Like everyone else, he was waiting round for something to happen. He smoked and talked and joked with members of the cast and crew. Occasionally he looked down and scuffed the soles of his shoes.

I tried to see Jon in him and I couldn't. Then, later, he approached me and introduced himself. The flesh on my skull went tight, as if burned. He was in there. He was the shifting light in Howard's eyes.

The first words he spoke were not: "I'm Andrew. " They were: "I'm Jon. "

Weeks later, my wife and I attended an early screening of Mr In-Between. We were nervous. When the title appeared on screen, the hair on my arms rose as if by static charge. It hardly seemed possible that the people up there, trapped in the light, were anything but projected shades of the creatures in my mind, endowed with partial autonomy. When he spoke ("Me and my mementoes!"), the Tattooed Man frightened me. I wanted what I knew was about to happen not to happen. But I had no control over those events. I'm not sure I ever did.

When the credits rolled, we went outside. We stood on the pavement. Neither of us smoke any more, but we each lit a cigarette.