by Ruth Rendell
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 these jokes about queens and queers and then they’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?’
‘A bit. It was a long time ago.’ Wexford tried to remember titles and recalled one. ‘Our Lady of the Flowers.’
‘Querelle of Brest was what I had in mind. Genet, more than anyone, makes you understand gay men can be as tough and as ruthless as the heterosexual sort. Tougher, more ruthless. They can be killers and thieves and brutal criminals as well as dress designers.’
‘Are you saying Jem Hocking is one of those?’
‘Jem doesn’t know about closets, being in them or coming out of them, but one of the reasons he wanted to come here was to talk openly to other men about his homosexuality. Talk about it day after day, unchecked, in 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 rested on the red blanket were dark blue with tattoos.
‘How are you?’ Wexford said.
Hocking made no immediate reply. He put one blue-configured finger 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 bald 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 truth is. And, “I want to die but I’m fucking scared of dying.”’ He drew a breath. ‘I know I’m dying. I’ll get another bout of what I’ve had but a bit worse and then a third and that one’ll carry me off. It might be quicker than that. It was a fucking sight quicker for Dane.’
‘Who’s Dane?’
‘I reckoned on telling you before I died. 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, mudslinging 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 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?’
Jem Hocking just looked at him. It was a look full of hatred and pain. Wexford thought the hatred was due to the fact that the man couldn’t embarrass him. Perhaps the sole purpose of the exercise, this ‘confession’, was to cause an embarrassment in which Hocking had hoped to revel.
‘Died of AIDS, I guess,’ he said, ‘and not long after.’
‘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.’
‘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 fucking helpless,’ said Hocking. ‘The world’s helpless against a dying man.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. There’s nothing in the law to say a dying man can’t be charged with murder and robbery.’
‘You wouldn’t!’
‘I certainly will,’ said Wexford, leaving.
The train took him back to Euston in pouring rain. It was raining all the way down from Victoria to Kingsmarkham. As soon as he got in he tried to phone Sheila and got her Lady Macbeth voice, the one that said, ‘Give me the daggers’, asking callers to leave a message.
Chapter Fifteen
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, Mr Harrison. Did you see Mrs 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 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 return to Tancred. He was driving himself and he took the Pomfret Monachorum road. This was only the second time he had been this way. After yesterday’s rain it was a fine mild day and the woods were full of life, the quiet, stirring, fresh life of early spring. The road wound as it ascended the shallow wooded hill to Tancred. It was too soon for the trees to show leaf except for the hawthorns which were already misted all over with green. Blossom hung on the wild plums like white spotted veils.
He drove slowly. As soon as his mind emptied of Fred Harrison and his anxieties, Sheila came in to fill it. He could almost have groaned aloud. Every angry word that had been uttered during that hideous interchange was fresh in his memory, was persistently repeating itself.
‘. . . you were determined to hate anyone I loved. And why? Because you were afraid I’d love him better than you.’
Driving on through the wood where aconites grew in yellow rings like patches of bright sunlight, he opened the car window to feel the sweet air against his face, the equinoctial air of the first, or maybe the second, day of spring. Last night, with the rain lashing against the windows, he had tried to ring her, and Dora had tried. He wanted to apologise to her and ask her forgiveness. But the phone rang and rang unanswered and when he tried again, despairing, at nine and again at nine thirty, her answering-machine voice came on. Not one of her characteristic messages: ‘If that’s someone offering me the female lead in the Scottish play or wanting to take me to dinner at Le Caprice . . .’ ‘Darling’ – the actress’s universal darling that would serve for him or Casey or the woman who cleaned – ‘Darling, Sheila’s had to go out . . .’ It was neither of those but, ‘Sheila Wexford. I’m out. Leave a message and there’s a chance I’ll get back to you.’ He hadn’t left a message but at last had gone to bed, sick at heart.
He thought, I’ve lost her. It had nothing much to do with her going six thousand miles away. Casey would have taken her from him in the same way if they had both decided to buy a house and settle down in Pomfret Monachorum. He had lost her and things would never be the same for them again.
The lane made its last wind, coming to the straight and the level ground. On either side stretched acres of young trees, planted perhaps twenty years before, their slender branches that reached for the light a bright russet colour, the hawthorn and blackthorn amongst them bouquets of misty green and snow white. The ground between, strewn with dry brown leaves, was dappled with spots of sunlight.
In the distance he saw a movement. Someone was walking towards him, along the lane, a long way head, someone young, a young girl. More and more was revealed as he approached and she approached. It was Daisy. Unlikely as it was that she should be here, in this place, at this time, it was undoubtedly Daisy.
She stopped when she saw the car. Of course, from that distance, she could have no idea who the driver was. She wore jeans and a Barbour jacket, the left sleeve empty, a bright red scarf wound twice round her neck. He knew the precise moment when she recognised him by the way her eyes widened. She remained unsmiling.
He stopped and wound down the window. She didn’t wait for the question.
‘I’ve come home. I knew they’d try to stop me so I waited till Nicholas had gone off to work and then I said, I’m going home now, Joyce, thank you for having me, and that was it. She said I couldn’t, not on my own. You know how she talks, “I’m sorry, dear, but you can’t do that. What about your luggage? Who’ll look after you?” I said I’d already phoned for a cab and I’d look after myself.’
The thought came to Wexford that she had never in fact done much of that and, as in the past, Brenda Harrison would be looking after her. But she only had the kind of illusions all the young have. ‘And now you’re taking a walk round your domain?’
‘I’ve been out long enough. I’m going back. I soon get tired.’ The bleak look was back in her face, her sorrowful eyes. ‘Will you give me a lift?’
He reached across and opened the passenger door. ‘Now I’m eighteen,’ she said, though not enthusiastically, ‘I can do as I like. How d’you do up this seat belt? My sling and all this padding get in the way.’
‘You needn’t put it on if you don’t want to. Not on private land.’
‘Really? I never knew that. You’ve got yours on.’
‘Force of habit. Daisy, are you planning to stay here on your own? To live here?’
‘It’s mine.’ Her voice was as grim as it could get. It became bitter. ‘It’s all mine. Why shouldn’t I live in what’s mine?’
He didn’t answer. There was no point in telling her things she already knew, that she was young and a woman and defenceless, and things she might not have realised, that it might very well be in someone’s interest to finish off the job he had begun two weeks before. If he took that seriously he would have to p
ut a day and night guard on Tancred, not alarm Daisy with his fears.
Instead, he reverted to a subject they had discussed when he last saw her at the Virsons. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard from your father?’
‘My father?’
‘He is your father, Daisy. He must know about all this. There’s no one living in this country could have missed it on television and in the papers. And unless I’m much mistaken, it’ll revive today with the funeral all over the dailies. I think you should expect him to get in touch.’
‘If he was going to, wouldn’t he have already?’
‘He wouldn’t have known where you were. For all we know, he’s been ringing up Tancred House every day.’
Suddenly he wondered if it was this man she had looked for in vain at the funeral. That shadowy father no one talked of but who must exist. He parked the car beside the pool. Daisy got out and stared into the water. Perhaps because the sun was shining, several fish had come close to the surface, white, or colourless rather, with scarlet heads. She lifted her face to the statuary, the girl metamorphosed into a tree, a sheath of bark enclosing her limbs, the man closing upon her with uplifted yearning face, with arms outstretched.
‘Daphne and Apollo,’ she said. ‘It’s a copy of the Bernini. Supposed to be a good one. I wouldn’t know, I don’t really care about things like that.’ She made a face. ‘Davina loved it. She would. I suppose the god was going to rape Daphne, don’t you think? I mean, they have nice words for it, make it sound romantic, but that’s what he was going to do.’
Saying nothing, Wexford wondered what event in her own past prompted this sudden savagery.
‘He wasn’t going to court her, was he? Take her out to dinner and buy her an engagement ring? What fools people are!’ She changed tack as she turned from the pool with a little toss of her head. ‘When I was younger I used to ask Mum about my father. You know how kids are, they want to know all that. She had this way, had my mother, if there was something she didn’t like talking about she’d tell me to ask Davina. It was always, “Ask your grandmother, she’ll tell you.” So I asked Davina and she said – you won’t believe this but it’s what she said – “Your mother was a soccer groupie, darling, and she used to go and watch him playing football. That’s how they met.” And then she said, “Not to put too fine a point on it, he was among the low life.” She liked those expressions, sort of trendy slang, or what she thought was trendy slang, “soccer groupie” and “low life”. “Forget him, darling,” she said. “Imagine you were born by parthenogenesis like the algae,” and then she explained to me what parthenogenesis was. Typical of her, that was, to turn everything into a lesson. But it didn’t exactly make me feel much love or respect for my father.’
