Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (25 page)

All inmates came to Royal Oak on referral, usually the recommendation of a prison Senior Medical Officer. Which reminded him, their

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own Senior Medical Officer, Sam Rosenberg, would like to see him before he went to meet Jem Hocking. As he'd said, it was all first names here. None of your 'Sir' this and *Dr' that.

A member of staff conducted Wexford to the hospital, which was just another wing. They passed men walking about freely -- freely up to a point -- dressed in tracksuits or pants and sweatshirts. He couldn't resist a glance through an interior window where a group therapy session was in progress. The men sat round in a circle. They were opening their hearts mid baring their souls, the member of staff said, learning how to bring to the surface all their inner contusions. Wexford thought they looked as hangdog and wretched as most incarcerated people.

A smell just like Stowerton Infirmary hung about the hospital; lime juice, lysol and sweat. All hospitals smell the same, except private ones lefeich smell of money. Dr Rosenberg was in his toom which was like the charge nurse's room at lltowerton. Only the cigarette smoke was absent. jjfc commanded a view of the empty green plain pad a line of electricity pylons. ttrLunch had just arrived. There was enough two, unexciting piles of brown slime on >ws of boiled rice, chicken curry probably. idividuaP fruit pies to follow and a carton iion-dairy creamer. But Wexford was eating comfort and he accepted at once Sam nberg's invitation to join him while they d about Jem Hocking, e medical officer was a short thickset man

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of forty with a round childlike face and a thatch of prematurely grey hair. His clothes were like those of the prisoners, a tracksuit and trainers.

"What d'you think?" he said, waving a hand towards door and ceiling. "This place, I mean. Bit different from the 'System', eh?"

Wexford understood the 'System' to refer to the rest of the prison service and agreed it was.

"Of course it doesn't seem to work. If by 'work' we mean stopping them doing it again. On the other hand, that's rather hard to tell because most of them hardly get the chance to do anything much again. They're lifers." Sam Rosenberg wiped up the remains of his curry with a hunk of bread. He seemed to be enjoying his lunch. "Jem Hocking asked to come here. He was convicted in September, was sent to the Scrubs or it may have been Wandsworth, and set about tearing the place apart. He was referred here just before Christmas and he got into what we do here, roughly an ongoing 'talking it through', like a -- well, a duck to water."

"What did he do?"

"What was his conviction for? He went to this house where the owner was supposed to keep her shop takings over the weekend, found five hundred pounds or so in a handbag and half-beat to death the woman who lived there. She was seventy-two. He used a seven-pound hammer."

"No gun involved?"

"No gun, so far as I know. Have one of these

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pies, will you? They're raspberry and redcurrant, not bad. We have the nondairy creamer because I'm a bit of a cholesterol freak. I mean, I'm scared of it, I believe in battling against it. Jem's ill at the moment. He thinks he's dying but he's not. Not this time."

' Wexford raised an eyebrow. "Not a cholesterol problem, I'm sure."

"Well, no. As a matter of fact, I've never tested his cholesterol." Rosenberg hesitated. "A lot of the Bill -- sorry, didn't mean to be insulting -- a lot of the police still have gay prejudice. I mean, you'll hear coppers make tihese jokes about queens and queers and then diey'll mince about. Are you one of those? No, I can see you're not. But you may still think homosexuals are all hairdressers and ballet dancers. Not real men. Ever read any Genet?"

f "A bit. It was a long time ago." Wexford tried to remember titles and recalled one. "Our Lady of the Flowers"

*r "Querelle of Brest was what I had in mind.

J^*Are you saying Jem Hocking is one of se?"

Jem doesn't know about closets, being in ;m or coming out of them, but one of the us he wanted to come here was to talk nly to other men about his homosexuality, about it day after day, unchecked, in

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groups. The world he lived in is perhaps the most prejudiced of all worlds. And then he got ill."

"You mean he's got AIDS, don't you?"

Sam Rosenberg gave him a narrow look. "You see, you do associate it with the gay community. I tell you, it'll be as common among heterosexuals in a year or two. It is not a gay disease. Right?"

"But Jem Hocking has it?"

"Jem Hocking is HIV Pos. He's had a very bad go of flu. We've had a flu epidemic at Royal Oak and he just happened to get it worse than the others, badly enough to come in here for a week. With luck, he'll be back in the community by the end of the week. But he insists he's had AIDS-related pneumonia and he thinks I'm jibbing at telling him the truth. Hence, he believes he's dying and he wants to see you."

"Why does he?"

"That I don't know. I haven't asked and if I asked he wouldn't tell me. He wants to tell you. Coffee?"

* * *

He was a man of the doctor's age but dark and swarthy, a week's growth of beard on cheeks and chin. Aware of modern hospital trends, Wexford had expected him to be up, dressing-gowned, seated in a chair, but Jem Hocking was in bed. He looked far more ill than Daisy ever had. The hands which

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How are you?" Wexford said. Hocking made no immediate reply. He put one blue-configured ringer up to his mouth and rubbed it. Then he said, "Not good."

"Are you going to tell me when you were in Kingsmarkham? Is that what it's about?"

"Last May. That's making bells ring for you, isn't it? Only I reckon they've rung already." Wexford nodded. "Some of them have." "I'm dying. Did you know that?" "Not according to the medical officer." Derision altered Jem Hocking's face. He sneered. "They don't tell you the truth. Not even in here. Nobody ever tells the truth, not here, not anywhere. They can't, it's not possible to. You'd have to go into too much detail, you'd have to search your soul. You'd insult everyone and every word'd show you up for the bastard you are. Have you ever thought of that?" "Yes," said Wexford.

Whatever Hocking had expected it wasn't a feald affirmative. He paused, said, "Most of the time you'd just say, 'I hate your guts, I hate your guts' over and over. That'd be what the tttith is. And, 'I want to die but I'm fucking Scared of dying.'" He drew a breath. "I know

'- '^% ^"^

||wn dying. I'll get another bout of what I've had wt a bit worse and then a third and that one'11 me off. It might be quicker than that. It a fucking sight quicker for Dane." ?Who's Dane?" "I reckoned on telling you before I died.

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ested on the red blanket were dark blue with ;* tattoos.

Might as well. What can I lose? I've lost everything except my life and that's on the way out." Hocking's face narrowed and his eyes seemed to draw closer together. He suddenly looked one of the nastiest customers Wexford had ever come across. "D'you want to know something? It's the last pleasure I've got left, talking to people about me dying. It embarrasses them, see, and I enjoy that, them not knowing what to say."

"It doesn't embarrass me."

"Well, fucking Bill, what can you expect?"

A nurse came in, a man in jeans and a short white coat. In Wexford's youth he would have been called a 'male nurse'. That was what they said then: 'male nurse' and 'lady doctor'. There was nothing particularly sexist about it, but it shed a lot of bright illumination on people's expectations of the sexes.

The nurse heard Hocking's last words and said not to be rude, Jem, there was no call for that, mud-slinging didn't help, and it was time for his antibiotics.

"Fucking useless," said Hocking. "Pneumonia's a virus, right? You're all fuckwitted in here."

Wexford waited patiently while Hocking took his pills under feeble protest. He really looked very ill. You could believe this was death's threshold. He waited till the nurse had gone, hung his head, contemplated the designs on his blue hands.

"Who's Dane? you said. I'll tell you. Dane was my mate. Dane Bishop. Dane Gavin David Bishop, if you want the lot. He was only

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twenty-four." 'I loved him' hung unspoken in the air. Wexford could see it in Hocking's face, "I loved him, but he wasn't a sentimentalist, especially about killers, especially about the kind who hammer old women. So what? Does loving someone redeem a man? Does loving someone make you good? We did the Kingsmarkham job together. But you knew that. You knew that before you came or you wouldn't have come."

"More or less," said Wexford.

"Dane wanted money to buy this drug. It's American but you can get it here. Initials it goes by, doesn't matter."

"AZT."

"No, as a matter of fact, clever cop. DDI it's called, stands for Di-deoxy-innosine. Not available on the fucking NHS, needless to say."

Don't give me your excuses, Wexford said to himself. You ought to know better. He thought of Sergeant Martin, foolish and foolhardy but quite bright by turns, a good man, an earnest, well-intentioned good man, the salt of the earth.

"This Dane Bishop, he's dead, is he?" s Jem Hocking just looked at him. It was a look lull of hatred and pain. Wexford thought the hatred was due to the fact that the man couldn't fembarrass him. Perhaps the sole purpose of the exercise, this 'confession', was to cause an

ibarrassment in which Hocking had hoped

revel.

a "Died of AIDS, I guess," he said, "and not 'Ug after."

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"Dead before we could get the drug. It took him fast at the end. We saw that description you put out, spots on his face, all that. That wasn't fucking acne, that was Kaposi's Sarcoma."

Wexford said, "He used a gun. Where did he get it?"

An indifferent shrug from Hocking. "Are you asking me? You know as well as I do, it's easy to get a shooter if you want one. He never said. He just had it. A Magnum, it was." The sly sidelong look came back. "He chucked it away, threw it down, getting out of the bank."

"Ah," said Wexford almost silently, almost to himself.

"Scared to be found with it. He was ill then, it makes you weak, weak like an old man. He was only twenty-four but he was weak as water. That's why he shot that fuckwit, too weak to keep up the pressure. I got us away, I wasn't even in there when he shot him."

"You were concerned with him. You knew he had a gun."

"Am I denying it?"

"You bought a car in the name of George Brown?"

Hocking nodded. "We bought a vehicle, we bought a lot of things with cash, we reckoned we could sell the vehicle again on account of we never dared keep any of the notes. I wrapped them in newspaper and stuffed them in a dump. We sold the vehicle -- not a bad way of handling things, was it?"

"It's called laundering money," Wexford said coldly. "Or it is when done on a grander scale."

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"He died before he got the drug." ^ "You told me before."

* Jem Hocking heaved himself up in bed. "You're a frozen bastard, you are. If it was anywhere else in the system I was doing bird they wouldn't have left you alone with me."

Wexford got up. "What could you do, Jem? I'm three times your size. I'm not embarrassed and I'm not impressed."

"Just rucking helpless," said Hocking. "The world's helpless against a dying man."

"I wouldn't say that. There's nothing in the pounds law to say a dying man can't be charged with

* murder and robbery." i, "You wouldn't!"

j "I certainly will," said Wexford, leaving. I The train took him back to Euston in pouring | rain. It was raining all the way down from H Victoria to Kingsmarkham. As soon as he got f||:'.in he tried to phone Sheila and got her Lady Jl Macbeth voice, the one that said, 'Give me the daggers', asking callers to leave a message.

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15

IT was a job Barry Vine might have done, or even Karen Malahyde, but he did it himself. His rank seemed to frighten Fred Harrison, a nervous man who looked an older and shorter version of his brother. Wexford asked him when he had last driven Joanne Garland to Tancred House and, looking through his book, he named a date four Tuesdays before.

"I wouldn't have touched her with a bargepole if I'd known it was going to lead to trouble," Fred Harrison said.

In spite of himself and his wretched feelings, Wexford was amused. "I doubt if it's going to lead to trouble for you, Air Harrison. Did you see Airs Garland or hear from her on Tuesday 11 March?"

"Nothing, not a dicky-bird since whenever it was, what I said, 26 February."

"And on that evening, what happened? She phoned you and asked you to drive her to Tancred House at -- what? Eight? Eight fifteen?"

"I'd not have taken her anywhere if I'd known it was going to lead to trouble. You've got to believe that. She rung up like she always did around seven, said she had to be at Tancred by half eight. I said like I always did I'd pick her up a few minutes after eight, be ample time, but she said, no, she didn't want to be late, and

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to come at ten to. Well, I fetched up at Tancred eight ten, eight fifteen. Going the shortest way. I'd be bound to, but she never listened, she was scared stiff of being late. That always happened. Sometimes I'd wait for her, she'd ask me to wait, she'd be an hour, and I'd take the opportunity to pop in and see my brother."

Wexford was uninterested in this. He persisted. "You're sure she didn't phone you on 11 March?"

"Believe me, I'd make a clean breast of it. Trouble's the last thing I want."

"Do you think she ever used another taxi service?"

"Why would she? She's nothing to complain about with me. Time and time again she's said, I don't know what I'd do without you, Fred, to come to my rescue. And then she'd say I was the only one round here she'd trust to drive her.".

There seemed no more to be got out of the nervous Fred Harrison. Wexford left him to teturn to Tancred. He was driving himself and fetook the Pomfret Monachorum road. This was only the second time he had been this way. 40M& yesterday's rain it was a fine mild day and w� woods were full of life, the quiet, stirring, fcesh life of early spring. The road wound as it ascended the shallow wooded hill to Tancred. It %as too soon for the trees to show leaf except for the hawthorns which were already misted all over pwith green. Blossom hung on the wild plums like