A crucial part of this process was the exploitation of Adams’s own talent for ambiguity. To spend time with him, as I occasionally did, was to be more deeply baffled by him, to understand less than before what he really thought or felt. He had grown up with a father who was a serial paedophile, and he had the traumatized child’s ability to compartmentalize experience. This had allowed him both to participate in violence and to seem coldly aloof from it.
