Death's Jest-Book (28 page)

When Ellie had protested, her
mother had reminded her of a ruined Christmas Day when, aged twelve,
Ellie had decided she was going to send all her presents plus her
Christmas dinner to Oxfam. That was only one of many times,' she'd
concluded.

'Your father's right out of it
now. It's my place to be with him on Christmas Day. It's yours to be
at home.'

Good for her! Pascoe had
applauded internally. But he had tried not to let it show.

Now seated
alone with another mug of coffee, he glanced at his watch, groaned to
see that though his body-clock told him it must be dinner-time, its
hands told him it was still only nine forty-five, then reached out
and picked up
Dark Cells.

He skipped
through the introduction in which the author assured him that this
was a serious in-depth analysis of the relationship between
penological theory and the practicalities of incarceration, a claim
somewhat at odds with that made on the jacket sleeve where he was
invited to be titillated by
a riveting account of evil unmasked
and a disturbing analysis of the failure of our prison system to
contain it. Do not read this book unless you feel strong enough to
meet some of the worst men in our society. Be prepared to be shocked,
to be scandalized, to be terrified!

A perfect antidote to Christmas,
he thought. He went out to the hall and from a shelf in the cupboard
under the stairs he took his private Roote file. Dalziel's gaze had
noted it on his office desk, and doubtless noted too the drawer into
which he'd slipped it. The drawer had a sturdy lock as did the office
door, but Pascoe would not have bet sixpence against the Fat Man
breaking through. So that same day he had brought the file home.

He sat down
again and from the file he took Roote's first letter and glanced
through it. Here it was . ..
I am Prisoner XR pp193-207...

He picked up
Dark Cells
and turned to page 193, where sure enough the
author began her case history of Prisoner XR.

After giving details of crime and
sentence, Ms Haseen got straight down to her sessions with Roote.

His recorded responses during
the investigation, the psychological assessment prepared in
concurrence with his trial, and the whole raft of subsequent and
consequent reports I had read of his reactions and behaviour since
sentence all contained significant indices that here was a highly
intelligent man sufficiently in control of himself to use that
intelligence to make his stay in prison as comfortable and as short
as possible, and, though I am very aware of the need to proceed with
great caution in matters of analysis, in his case I felt within a few
minutes of our first meeting fairly sanguine that the proposed course
of analysis would affirm the accuracy of those advance impressions.

God, this was turgid stuff! No
wonder the book had been remaindered!

From the start he was keen to
demonstrate, and to underline in case I missed the point, that he was
accepting these sessions absolutely on my terms. Unlike many of the
others (see Prisoner JJ pp!04ff and Prisoner PR pp!84 ff) he never
showed any overt sexual awareness of me, nor when my investigation
touched on matters pertaining to his sexuality did he see this as an
opportunity to indulge in self-titillating sex talk (see Prisoners AH
and BC pp209 ff). Yet despite this strict propriety, I often felt the
atmosphere between us was highly charged, sexually speaking.

You can bet your sweet ass it
was! thought Pascoe.

This fitted in very well with
my developing judgment that Prisoner XR was going to be a difficult
case to put under the magnifying glass of detailed analysis.

He was dearly determined to
provide me with no insight into his psyche that might be at odds with
what he saw as the only truly important objects of our sessions viz.
his rapid transfer from Chapel Syke to an open prison, and
subsequently his early parole.

She may be a lousy writer, old
Amaryllis, thought Pascoe, but at least she got that right. Let's see
if she managed to get under his guard at all. Though, remembering
that it was Roote himself who'd drawn his attention to her book, it
didn't seem likely.

Our first few sessions
therefore were in the nature of preliminary skirmishes whose main
function in his eyes was to establish that he was in charge while I
endeavoured to persuade him that I was unaware of his efforts so to
do. Once past that point, though he always remained on a high level
of vigilance, I was able to utilize his greater relaxation to make
contact with him at a deeper level than hithertofore.

Hithertofore! He smiled, then,
recalling what a sad Christmas this must be for the woman, he stopped
smiling and read on.

Lot of background stuff. No names
or identifying details, of course, but he fitted these in from his
own researches.

Family background: mother and
stepfather; the latter a well-heeled businessman called Keith Prime
who married Mrs Roote when Franny was six and clearly didn't take
long to decide it was worth spending a little of his wealth on
keeping his stepson out of his hair.

Boarding schools from age seven -
first a prep school, then Coltsfoot College, a progressive public
school near Chester. At some point, apparently for business reasons,
the Primes had set up home in the Virgin Isles and most of young
Franny's vacations were spent staying with friends in England, a
practice continued when he went to Holm Coultram College of Liberal
Arts where his and Pascoe's paths had first crossed.

Thereafter the vacation problem
was solved by residence at HMP Chapel Syke.

His mother, according to Pascoe's
own records, had visited her son once during pre-trial custody,
thereafter pleading poor health as reason for not attending the
trial. Prime had never appeared. There was no record of the mother
ever visiting her son in the Syke, but her claim to physical debility
was supported the hard way when she died during his second year of
detention. She was buried in the Virgin Isles. No application was
made by Roote to attend the funeral. No contact with Keith Prime was
recorded.

It was evident that Amaryllis
Haseen had been fascinated by the relationship between Roote and his
mother and father and stepfather, which must have made it easy for
him to jerk her around with fictitious memories of the father he
couldn't recall at all.

XR was clearly father-fixated
to a degree which must have been psychologically disabling till he
developed techniques of control, though not without detriment to
other more conventional emotional procedures. His obviously enhanced
memories of incidents involving his father all tended to stress
qualities which made the dead man a worthy object of admiration and
affection, yet underpinning them always was that syndrome in which
the subject's sense of being abandoned by the object, even though the
cause of abandonment is death, manifests itself in angry and abusive
resentment.

An example of the exaggerated
memory was the following, being an account of an incident when the
subject was four or five years old.

XR: we were walking through
the park one day, me and my dad, when this big guy jumped out of a
bush brandishing a knife. He grabbed me by the hair and put the knife
to my throat and said to my dad, 'Here's the deal, give me your
wallet and the kid lives.'

And my dad reached into his
jacket and pulled out this huge pistol and he said, 'No, here's the
deal, let go the kid and you live.'

And the big guy said, 'Hey
man, no need to get heavy,' and let me go. And my dad jumped forward
and smashed him across the side of his head with the gun, and when he
fell down my dad stamped on the hand carrying the knife till he
dropped it.

And the big guy lay on the
ground screaming, 'I thought we had a deal, man!'

And my dad said, 'The deal
was, you get to live, but I didn 't say anything about you living
healthy.'

That an
incident occurred in which the subject as a small boy was frightened
in a park and was defended by his father is possible. In this and
other recollections the father is always referred to as 'my dad', the
possessive and the familiar abbreviation being together indicative of
a deep sense of loss and an almost painful desire for repossession.
The gun-toting
Dirty Harry
accretions have probably been
developed over many years of creative recollection and it is likely
that the subject is by now completely persuaded of the truth of this
version. It is interesting to note that the qualities this
embellished narrative stresses have less to do with the kind of
story-book heroism which might have appealed to a young boy and more
to a cold and calculating self-sufficiency. It would have been
interesting to hear the version of this story that the subject was
telling at the ages of, say, ten, and then again at fifteen.
Alongside this let us set the subject's response when it was
suggested to him that he must have missed his dead father greatly.

'Miss him? Why the fuck should
I miss him? He never earned any more than kept us out of the gutter.
Useless bastard, getting himself killed like that. We were better off
without him even though he didn't even leave us a pension.
Fortunately Mother found herself this drooling dickhead who was so
loaded we could afford to buy ourselves all the stuff we wanted.'

Subject's attempts to reduce
his bereavement to economic terms are a typical grief-controlling
stratagem in which the discomforts of poverty are substituted for the
pain of loss. Accusations of selfishness aimed at the dead for dying
appear in this light to have a real and computable base, and the
return of prosperity can then be projected on to the subject's
ego-view as a healing of any wounds the bereavement may have caused.

At the same
time the source of the new prosperity is likely to be viewed with
suspicion, or indeed as in this case contempt verging on hatred. I
could discern little trace here of any Oedipal jealousy - subject
always refers to his mother simply as 'mother', never using 'mum' or
any other diminutivization, or employing the possessive pronoun, and
never offering any anecdotes in which she features other than as a
functional presence - so the unfailing choice of pejorative
descriptions for his stepfather must be ascribed to subject's
appreciation of his stepfather's wealth as a criticism of his real
father's failure to provide for his family and his determination that
the newcomer is
never going to get close to taking the dead
man's place.

There was a
lot more like this and soon Pascoe was yawning. What was it the blurb
had said?
Be prepared to be shocked, to be scandalized, to be
terrified.
It hadn't mentioned the danger of being bored out of
your skull.

The author blurb seemed to
indicate that Haseen had a good track record as a serious academic
psychologist, but even this seemed non-proven to Pascoe in the light
of the way she swallowed hook, line and sinker everything that Roote
dangled in front of her about his memories of his father.

'I'm glad to see that at least
one of my gift choices has not been in vain’ said Ellie, who'd
returned undetected.

'It would be a comic masterpiece
if it wasn't dull’ said Pascoe. 'How's your mum?'

‘Fine. At least she says
she is. Celebrating Christmas surrounded by people most of whom can't
even remember who they are let alone what day it is can't be a bundle
of fun.'

'It's happening all over the
country’ said Pascoe. 'Sorry. You're right. It can't be. Still,
she'll be with us tomorrow. We'll see she has a great time. Your dad,
is he . . . ?'

'No miracle cures, Pete’
she said. 'Or, if there are, they're going to be too late for him, I
fear. It's really pissy, isn't it? Losing someone without being able
to grieve properly because they're not officially dead.'

'I know, I know’ said
Pascoe. He stood up, poured a drink and took it to Ellie. But before
he gave it to her, he put his arms round her and pulled her close.
After a while she moved away, took the glass and said, 'Thanks. That
helped. This too.'

'Part of the service’ he
said lightly. 'But do me a favour, any time you think of getting real
help, don't apply to Ms Amaryllis Haseen!'

'No? And apart from her sex, what
objective evidence do you have for that slur on a well-respected
professional woman's competence?'

Pascoe tried to detect how much
self-mocking irony there was in Ellie's reaction, found no clue in
her expression and decided to play it straight.

'Maybe I'm being a bit hard’
he said. 'Lots of bright people have been given the run around by our
Franny. Listen to this.

Subject evinced a
comprehensive mental blink-ering with regard to interpretation of his
father's evidently increasingly eccentric behaviour. He said, 'Mother
never gave my dad credit for anything he did, in fact she 'd
deliberately take things the wrong way. When he was away from home on
dangerous missions he couldn 't tell us about, she got very angry and
talked about him going off and enjoying himself boozing with his
fancy woman. She even refused to go down to London with him when he
was being awarded a medal. He wanted to take me but she wouldn't let
him, I don't know why.'

And Ms Haseen takes all this as
gospel! I know how good Roote is at pulling people's strings, but
surely a pro should be able to see through him.'

'But what makes you so sure he's
pulling her strings?' asked Ellie.

'What? Ah, you think that Roote
Senior might indeed have been an MI5 undercover agent who died
bravely in the line of duty? Well, let me disenchant you.'