Gallows View

by Peter Robinson

  “Have you looked?”

  “The lab boys have been brought in on every incident. I’m sure if it was there they’d find it.”

  “Okay. It doesn’t really matter. I suppose his pants would act as a prophylactic—either that or he stores the image and masturbates later.”

  “What kind of person are we talking about?”

  “His personality?”

  “Yes.”

  “Again, I’m going to have to be a bit vague. He could be an introvert or an extrovert, tall or short, thin or fat . . .”

  “That’s certainly vague.”

  Jenny laughed. “Yes, it is. Sorry, but there’s no one type. In a way, it’s much easier to describe the true psychopath—a sex murderer, for example. A voyeur—the scientific term is scopophiliac, by the way—is not simply a grubby loner in a dirty mac. Our man’s actions are caused by frustration, basically. Intense frustration with life in general and with relationships in particular. It might be that the most meaningful early sexual experience he had was voyeuristic—he saw something he shouldn’t have seen, like his parents making love—and since then everything’s been a let-down, especially sex. He’d certainly have difficulty handling the real thing.

  “What makes voyeurism, or ‘scopophilia,’ what we call ‘abnormal’ is simply that the scopophiliac gets all his gratification from looking. Nobody would deny that looking is an integral part of the sex act. Lots of men like to watch their partners undress; it excites them. Plenty of men like to go to strip-clubs too, and whatever the women’s movement thinks of that, nobody would seriously consider such men to be clinically abnormal. The scopophiliac, though, gets stuck at the pre-genital stage—his development gets short-circuited. Whatever relationship he’s living in—alone, with a wife or a dominating mother or father—it’s essentially a frustrating one, and he probably feels great pressure, an intense desire to break through.

  “It’s unlikely that he’s married, but if he is, there are serious problems. In all probability, though, he’s living alone. His sexuality wouldn’t be mature enough to deal with the demands of a real, flesh-and-blood woman, unless she’s a particularly unusual person herself.”

  “I see,” said Banks, lighting a cigarette. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy, does it?”

  “No. It never is when it comes to people. We’re all such incredibly complex beings.”

  “Oh? I always thought of myself as simple and straightforward.”

  “You’re probably one of the most complex of the lot, Alan Banks. First off, what’s a nice man like you doing in the police force?”

  “Earning a living and trying to uphold the law. See? Simple.”

  “Would you uphold a law you didn’t believe in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if the law said that anyone caught stealing a loaf of bread should lose his or her hand? Would you actively go looking for people stealing bread?”

  “I think that, in that kind of society, I wouldn’t be a policeman.”

  “Oh, what an evasive answer!”

  Banks shrugged. “What can I say? At least it’s an honest one.”

  “All right, what about the drug laws? What about students smoking pot?”

  “What are you asking me?”

  “Do you pester them? Do you think people should be prosecuted for smoking pot?”

  “As long as it’s against the law, yes. If you want to know whether I agree with every law in the country, the answer’s no. There’s a certain amount of discretion allowed in the enforcement, you know. We don’t tend to bother students smoking pot so much these days, but we are interested in people bringing heroin up from London or the Midlands.”

  “Why shouldn’t a person take heroin if he or she wants to? It doesn’t hurt anyone else.”

  “I could well ask why shouldn’t a man go around watching women get undressed. That doesn’t hurt anyone, either.”

  “It’s not the same thing and you know it. Besides, the woman is hurt. She’s shocked, degraded.”

  “Only the ones who know.”

  “What?”

  “Think of it this way. So far, four incidents have been reported. How many do you think have gone unnoticed? How many times has he got away with it?”

  “I never really thought of that,” Jenny admitted. “And by the way, I’m not going to forget our discussion of a few moments ago, before you so cleverly sidetracked me back to work.” She smiled sharply at him as he went off to buy two more drinks.

  “I suppose,” she said when Banks returned, “that he could actually do it every night, though I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Most sexual activities, normal or perverted, require a kind of gestation period between acts. It varies. The pressure builds again and there’s only one way to relieve it.”

  “I see. Would once or twice a week be too much?”

  “For who? You or me?”

  “Don’t distract me. For our man.”

  “No. I’d say once a week might do him fine, two at the most.” She broke into a fit of laughter and covered her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. I get a bit gigglish sometimes. I think you must make me nervous.”

  “It comes with the job. Though I sometimes wonder which came first. A chicken or egg thing. Do I make people nervous because I’ve learned to do it unconsciously through dealing with so many criminals, or was I like that in the first place? Is that why the job suited me?”

  “Well?”

  “I didn’t say I knew the answer, only that I wonder sometimes. Don’t worry, when you get to know me better it won’t bother you.”

  “A promise?”

  “Let’s get back to business.”

  “All right.” Jenny wiped her eyes, full of tears of laughter, sat up straight and once again broke into a laughing fit. Banks watched her, smiling, and soon the others in the pub were looking. Jenny was turning as red as her hair, which was shaking like the fire in the grate. “Oh, I’m sorry, I really am,” she said. “Whenever I get like this it’s so hard to stop. You must think I’m a real idiot.”

  “Not at all,” Banks said drily. “I appreciate a person with a sense of humour.”

  “I think it’s better now,” she said, sipping cautiously at her half of bitter. “It’s just all those double entendres. Oops,” she said, putting her hand to her chest. “Now I’ve got hiccups!”

  “Drink a glass of water in an inverted position,” Banks told her. “Best cure for hiccups I’ve ever known.”

  Jenny frowned at him. “Standing on my head?”

  “No, not like that.” Banks was just about to demonstrate to her, using his pint glass, when he sensed a shadow over the table and heard a polite cough. It was Fred Rowe, the station desk-sergeant.

  “Pardon me for bothering you, sir,” Rowe said quietly, pulling up a chair, “but there’s been some trouble.”

  “Go on,” Banks said, putting down his glass.

  “It’s an old woman, sir, she’s been found dead.”

  “Cause?”

  “We can’t say yet, sir, but it looks suspicious. The friend who reported it said the place had been robbed.”

  “All right. Thanks, Fred. I’ll get right over. Address?”

  “Number two, Gallows View. That’s down by—”

  “Yes, I know it. Look, get onto Sergeant Hatchley. He’ll be in The Oak. And get Dr Glendenning and the photographer out there, and as many of the Scene-of-Crime boys as you can rustle up. Better get DC Richmond along too. Does the super know?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fine. Tell him I’m on my way, then.”

  Sergeant Rowe returned to the station and Banks stood up to leave, making his apologies to Jenny. Then he remembered that Sandra had taken the Cortina.

  “Dammit,” he cursed, “I’ll have to go over and sign out a car.”

  “Can’t I drive you?” Jenny offered. “I know where Gallows View is.”

  “Would you?”

 
; “Of course. You’re probably over the limit, anyway. I’ve only been drinking halves.”

  “You’ll have to keep out of the way, stay in the car.”

  “I understand.”

  “Right, then, let’s go.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jenny said, saluting him.

  FOUR

  I

  It had stopped raining only an hour earlier, and the air was still damp and chilly. Trevor held his jacket collar tight around his neck as he set off across The Green thinking over what Mick had said. Past the Georgian semis, he crossed the fourteenth-century bridge and spat in the water that cascaded over the terraced falls. Then he strode through the riverside gardens, and took the road that curved around Castle Hill to the market square.

  Sometimes Mick scared him. Not his physical presence, but his stupidity. There would be no increased percentage from Lenny, Trevor was certain, because Mick wouldn’t even dare ask him. Trevor would. He wasn’t frightened of Lenny, gun or no gun. The gun didn’t really interest him at all; it seemed more like a silly toy for Mick to show off about.

  It was the pills, most likely. Them and natural stupidity. Trevor was sick of seeing Mick sweating and ranting on, hopping from one foot to the other as if he wanted to piss all the time. It was pathetic. He hadn’t tried them himself, though he thought he might do one day. After all, he wasn’t Mick; they wouldn’t affect him the same way.

  He hadn’t tried sex either. Mick kept boasting about having it off with some scrubber up against an alley wall, but Trevor was unimpressed. Even if it was true, it wasn’t the kind of fun he was interested in. He would do it all: drugs, sex, whatever. All in his own sweet time. And he would know when the time was right.

  As for the new idea, it made sense. Old people seemed to have nothing worth much these days. Probably had to pawn all their old keepsakes just to keep them in pabulum. Trevor laughed at the image. The first time it had been fun, a change from dipping, or mugging the odd tourist—“Just doing my bit for the Tourist Board, your honour, trying to make the New Yorkers feel at home”—it was exciting being able to do whatever you wanted in somebody else’s house, break stuff, and them too feeble to do a thing about it. Not that Trevor was a bully; he would never touch the old women (more out of disgust than kindness, though). That was Mick’s specialty—Mick was a bully.

  This would be something different. The old folks’ houses all smelled of the past: lavender water, Vicks chest rub, commodes, old dead skin. This time they would be in the classy homes, places with VCRs, fancy music centres, dishwashers, freezers full of whole cows. They could take their time, enjoy it, maybe even do some real damage. After all, they wouldn’t be able to carry everything away. Best stick to the portables: cash, jewellery, silver, gold. He could just imagine Mick and Lenny being stupid enough to try and sell stolen colour tellys and videos at Eastvale market. These days everyone wrote their bloody names and postcodes on everything from microwaves to washing-machines with those ultraviolet pens, and the cops could read them under special lights. He hoped Mick was right about burglar alarms, too. It seemed that people were becoming very security-conscious these days.

  He crossed the south side of the deserted market square and walked through the complex of narrow, twisted streets to King Street. Then he cut through Leaview Estate towards Gallows View. The terrace of old cottages stood like a wizened finger pointing west to the Dales.

  As he passed the bungalows and crossed Cardigan Drive to the dirt track in front of the cottages, Trevor noticed some activity outside the first house, number two. That was where the old bag, Matlock, lived. He walked by slowly and saw a crowd of people through the open door. There was that hotshot copper from London, Banks, who’d got his picture in the local paper when he’d got the job a few months back; that well-known local thug, Hatchley, who looked a bit unsteady on his pins; and the woman standing in the doorway. What on earth was she doing there? He was sure it was her, the one who lived in the fancy Georgian semis across The Green from the East Side Estate, the one Mick was always saying he’d like to fuck. Maybe she was a cop, too. You never could tell. He walked into number eight to confront his father once again over homework not done.

  II

  Jenny, who had disobeyed Banks’s orders and stood unobserved in the doorway, had never seen a corpse before, and this one looked particularly bad. Its wrinkled bluish-grey face was frozen in a grimace of anger and pain, and pools of dark blood had coagulated under the head on the stone flags of the room. Alice Matlock lay on her back at the foot of a table, on the corner of which, it appeared, she had fractured her skull while falling backwards. These were only appearances, though, Jenny realized, and the battery of experts arriving in dribs and drabs would soon piece together what had really happened.

  Despite the horror of the scene, Jenny felt outside it all, taking in the little details as an objective observer. Perhaps, she thought, that was one of the qualities that made her a good psychologist: the ability to stand outside the flux of human emotions and pay careful attention. Outside looking in. Perhaps it also made her not so acceptable as a woman—at least one or two of her lovers had complained that however enjoyable she was in bed and however much fun she was to be with, they felt that they couldn’t really get close to her and were always aware of themselves being studied like subjects in a mysterious experiment. Jenny brushed aside the self-criticism; if she didn’t conform to men’s ideas of what a woman should be—fainting, crying, subjective, irrational, intuitive, sentimental—then bugger them.

  The house was oppressive. Not just because of the all-pervading presence of death, but because it was absolutely cluttered with the past. The walls seemed unusually honeycombed with little alcoves, nooks and crannies where painted Easter eggs and silver teaspoons from Rhyll or Morecambe nestled alongside old snuff boxes, delicate china figurines, a ship in a bottle, yellowed birthday cards and miniatures. The mantelpiece was littered with sepia photographs: family groups, stiff and formal before the camera, four women in nurses’ uniforms standing in front of an old-fashioned army ambulance; and the remaining wall space seemed taken up by framed samplers, and watercolours of wildflowers, birds and butterflies. Jenny shuddered. Her own house, though structurally old, was sparse and modern inside. It would drive her crazy to live in a mausoleum like this.

  She watched Banks at work. As she had expected, he was professional and efficient, but he often seemed distracted, and sometimes a look of pain and sadness crossed his features when he leaned against the wall and gazed at the old woman’s body. The photographer popped his flash from every angle. He looked far too young, Jenny thought, to be so matter-of-fact about death. The doctor, one of those older, cigarette-smoking types who pay house calls when you have flu or tonsillitis, busied himself with thermometers, charts and other tools of his trade. Out of decency, Jenny turned away and tried to name the wildflowers depicted on the walls. She felt invisible, standing by the doorway, arms folded across her breasts. Everyone seemed to think she had come with Banks. Nobody even paid her the slightest bit of attention; no one, that is, except the slightly squiffed detective she had seen earlier on her visit to the station, who occasionally cast lecherous glances in her direction. Jenny ignored him and watched the men at work.

  Also in the midst of this routine, robotic activity sat Ethel Carstairs, who had discovered the body. Though trembling and white with shock as she sipped the brandy a police constable had brought her from Alice’s medicinal bottle in the kitchen, she had regained enough control to talk to Banks.

  “Alice was supposed to call on me this evening,” said Ethel in a weak, shaky voice. “She always comes on Sundays and Tuesdays. We play rummy. She’s not on the phone, so when she didn’t come there wasn’t much I could do. As time went on I got worried, then I decided to walk over and see if she was all right. She was eighty-seven just last week, Inspector. I bought her that sugar bowl broken on the floor there.”

  It looked as if someone had pulled all the drawers out of the old o
ak sideboard, and a pretty, rose-patterned sugar bowl lay in several places on the flags.

  “She always did have a sweet tooth, despite what the doctor told her,” Ethel went on, pausing to wipe her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.

  “Is this exactly how you found her?” Banks asked gently.

  “Yes. I didn’t touch a thing. I watch a lot of telly, Inspector. I know about fingerprints and all that. I just stood in the doorway there, saw her and all the mess and went to the box on the corner of Cardigan Drive and phoned the police.”

  Banks nodded. “Good, you did exactly the right thing. What about the door?”

  “What?”

  “The door. You must have touched it to get in.”

  “Oh yes, silly of me. I’m sorry but I did have to open the door. I must have smudged all the prints.”

  Banks smiled over at Vic Manson, who was busy dusting the furniture with aluminium powder. “Don’t worry, Mrs Carstairs,” Manson assured her. “Whoever it was probably wore gloves. The criminals watch a lot of telly these days, too. We have to look, though, just in case.”

  “The door,” Banks went on. “Was it ajar, open, locked?”

  “It was just open. I knocked first, then when I got no answer, I tried the handle and it just opened.”

  “There’s no sign of forced entry, sir,” added Detective Constable Richmond, who had been examining the doorframe beside Jenny. “Whoever it was, she must have let them in.”

  Hatchley came down from his search of the upper rooms. He wasn’t irredeemably drunk, only about two sheets to the wind, and like most professionals, he could snap back into gear in a crisis. “It’s been gone over pretty thoroughly,” he said to Banks. “Wardrobe, drawers, laundry chest, the lot.”

  “Do you know if Mrs Matlock owned anything of value, Mrs Carstairs?” Banks asked.

  “It’s Miss Matlock, Inspector. Alice was a spinster. She never married.”

  “So she has no immediate family?”

  “Nobody. She outlived them all.”