by Rod Madocks
“Just talking to my friend Annie,” she said a little too quickly as she let me in.
There were evenings after that and lovemaking too, but there were too many spaces between us. Although our bodies moved together we had somehow lost our touch.
* * *
Pinsent reappeared, like a portent of what was to come, just as I was working out my last months before transfer to the hospital. I had seen him about a year before: a gangly youth with lost, blue eyes. He had soft, white hands and a whispery voice; his forehead and cheeks were pocked with acne scars. He was well known to psychiatric teams in the city because he suffered from an unnameable anxiety that drove him to turn up in hospital casualty at inconvenient hours, usually in distress in the middle of the night. He would be tearful, demanding help but unable to explain what was bothering him. Sometimes he would drink in order to rid himself of his dread, and his troubles were written off as being alcohol-induced by some clinicians. There was something uncannily determined about him, despite his quiet, cringing manner, and he would stand in reception rooms unspeaking yet irreducibly there until staff saw him and reassured him enough for him to melt away back to his lonely city flat. I remember him in the summer of that year standing by a water dispenser, meek but incredibly stubborn, in a busy outpatient’s reception. The other patients moved around him. His hands hung by his side and his pale eyes calmly passed over the people around him. He kept asking the receptionist the same question every few minutes speaking quietly with a passive, lowered head.
“Am I going to be seen now miss?” and again, “When will I be seen miss?”
The harassed receptionist tried to placate him, rolling her eyes to her colleagues when she thought Pinsent wasn’t looking. The duty registrar that day was a friendly career doctor heading for a comfortable consultancy. We had often passed each other in the nurses’ home and in local bars (for we both dated nurses). He treated me as a fellow roué and would generally greet me with genial bonhomie. This time I saw him in the clinic and he beckoned me into the consulting room. We tipped back the moulded plastic chairs and shared a cigarette despite the hospital rules about smoking. We bitched about work and about the autocratic consultants. After flicking his spent butt expertly through the air vents into the car park below, he turned to a heap of clinic notes on his desk for the afternoon patient list and showed me Pinsent’s thick file.
“What are we going to do with him then? A real heartsink patient.”
I looked briefly through the heavy notes with mild curiosity as the registrar told me about his demanding stubborn presence, opening the door a crack to point out Pinsent standing at the end of the corridor. The file held numerous duplicate sheets of accident and emergency contacts, follow-up letters and reports from liaison psychiatrists. Pinsent complained of a fear of something horrible happening, he sought reassurance that this wasn’t going to happen but could not name what it was that frightened him. He lived alone in the city, his parents were separated, his father an alcoholic. His mother was disappointed with his lack of purpose, but she was also wary of him. She had reduced contact, insisting he leave home and live independently and was reluctant to be involved in his care. She was sometimes rung up by casualty staff asking if he could stay with her to help him through his numerous crises and sometimes she would reluctantly allow that for a few days. Diagnostically he was mostly written off as having a personality disorder, or as having an idiopathic anxiety syndrome with alcohol dependence. He was a difficult man to help and rarely responded to follow up appointments. Most doctors pacified him with a two week course of benzodiazepines and a chat to ventilate his fears. My friend the registrar announced, “I often think that when men come to see me complaining of anxiety they are actually depressed. I tend to prescribe a course of antidepressants. You can rarely go wrong with that.”
I shrugged and slid the notes back on his table.
“Oh well,” he yawned and stretched in his plastic bucket chair, “I suppose I had better see the chappie or else he’ll drive our receptionist bonkers.”
As I left I remember seeing Pinsent looking down the corridor towards the consulting room, waiting to be freed from his terror.
I next saw him in the autumn of the following year on one of my last jobs before I transferred to the hospital. I had been called to see him at Central police after he had killed his mother. It was the same Pinsent, sitting, eyes closed, in a glass-fronted cell in blue paper overalls after his clothes had been removed for forensics because they were entirely bloodsoaked. His face was blue-tinged in the overhead light, his acne pits grey. I was shown in to the cell and his eyes flicked open, pale gooseberry in the light. I moved quietly towards him, feet sinking into the soft, rubber flooring of the restraint cell. We sat facing each other on a low bench. There was a smell of cleaning fluid and soap from him. The police had allowed him to shower after his arrest. He answered my questions with no change in expression, speaking in a well-educated, low voice. He denied psychotic symptoms or mood disorder. I could elicit no gross symptoms of illness although there was a strange impression of absence and emptiness from him. He did not want to talk about the killing.
“I don’t know what happened. It just happened,” he said.
He shrugged, moving his hands slightly. I could see a tattoo of a crab on his forearm. Pinsent turned his gaze on me for a moment, saw where I was looking then said, “That’s my star sign, cancer, the crab.”
He was willing to be interviewed and didn’t want a solicitor. The police asked me to attend as an appropriate adult in the interview, as they thought he might be mad. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act required an appropriate professional to be present and I was always happy to be contacted and to trawl the police stations in the night.
We entered one of the interview rooms. Perhaps it was the same one where I was questioned soon after Rachel disappeared the previous year. I ran my eye over the blank walls, the bare deal table, the ranks of recording machines and lists of instructions to staff from the custody sergeant. There was a single mirror high on the wall. Two CID entered, well groomed, smelling of expensive aftershave and dressed in identical suits. They were superficially friendly and solicitous towards their prisoner, yet making it perfectly clear in their formal manner that this was a man already separated from his fellows. Pinsent sat through the ritual introductions at the start of the taped interview, calmly sitting close to me, his thin fingers interlaced.
He was at first cautioned, “You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court … Do you understand?”
Pinsent looked perplexed. “No,” he said, “I don’t understand.” The detective repeated the caution very slowly. Pinsent again looked puzzled and shrugged, “No. I don’t get it.”
The detective then recapitulated in a different way: “If you do not tell us something, then if you mention it in court later, it may be viewed as harmful to your defence.”
It was clear that Pinsent could not grasp this obscure warning at all. He hesitated, looking to me to throw him a lifeline but I averted my gaze.
With a sigh he said, “Yes I understand,” and the interview proceeded.
The police described the events of that afternoon as they knew it. Pinsent had been drinking wine with his mother at lunchtime at her home in the Meadows area, a riverside estate in the city. It was his mother’s birthday. The two had had a problematic relationship but things were getting better. At some point he had taken a kitchen knife and stabbed his mother forty times, then phoned the emergency services to report what he had done. Then he had run out into the quiet suburban street shrieking, kicking cars and waving the bloodied and bent knife at passers-by. He had been arrested by an armed response team after a tense standoff in the street. The CID asked Pinsent for an explanation of events, but he shrugged listlessly, “I can’t really remember … I don’t know.”
One of the dapper, smooth-faced CID officers said, “Pe
rhaps this will help you remember Mr Pinsent? We are now going to play a tape of a recording of your 999 call to emergency services earlier today.”
He leaned forwards and inserted a cassette into another tape machine I noticed that Pinsent had tightened his hands into tangled bunches in his lap. The tape began.
There was the sound of indistinct knocking, static, then a sudden low voice, indisputably that of Pinsent saying, “I have killed my mother,” then the female operator saying “What service do you require?” then an unearthly roar rising to a shriek, “I haaaave killed my MAAATHER!” Then the clack, donkety donk sound as the phone was dropped and dangled on its wire, and a low distant booming sound, probably the noise of Pinsent slamming his mother’s front door as he ran out onto the street.
“Are you there, caller?” the operator’s voice sounded again then the end of the tape clicked shut. One of the detectives switched off the tape machine.
Pinsent closed his eyes for a moment and rocked a little. He was asked if he wanted a glass of water. He shook his head.
“I want to go to my cell now, take me back please.” He kept on repeating that calmly and stubbornly as the police attempted to ask him if that was his voice on the tape. As the questions went on he began to scratch at his hair and scalp. I noticed my table notes and sleeve darkening and saw that a thick drizzle of dried blood flakes, which must have lodged in his hair despite being washed, were dropping as he scratched, speckling everything around him. I shifted away from the contamination. He did not appear to notice. The questions went on but little more could be got from him. He had retreated to an inner world. His terror, having at last come to pass, had now left him a hollow man.
He was photographed and finger printed and cooperatively gave a DNA mouth swab, a new procedure in that year, opening obediently as one detective dabbed at his gums with a spatula. He stood meekly, listening with lowered head as the custody sergeant read out the charge.
“That you, at number 23 Meadow Lane, the Meadows, on the 25th day in November this year in the jurisdiction of the Crown Court did murder Alice Elisabeth Pinsent contrary to Common Law.”
Pinsent nodding and saying “Yes, yes, I understand.”
Pinsent was later assessed by successive forensic consultants and was pronounced schizophrenic. He came before the courts and was transferred to the High Secure hospital under the Criminal Procedure Insanity Act. So not tried by reason of mental incompetence. One way to look at him was to see that it was a disease process by which the whispery, occult voices nagged at him, tormented and commanded him to destroy, and it was these that he had fled from over all the years beforehand.
I was less disposed to see Pinsent’s crime in that way for I was following a different trail, studying at night during Louie’s increasing absences, reading up on forensic history, thinking about Kress and about how to follow the trail of the deviant male. I fed my ideas by reading how Francis Galton discovered fingerprints, and recognised in the loops, arches and whorls, the signature of heredity and of race and predetermined paths. I read about Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry in Histoire Naturellement de L’Homme and his threefold measuring system of the portions of the body of the criminal. And, of course, towering Lombroso who identified the stigmata of the atavistic essence of the criminal while doing autopsies in the 1870s in Italian asylums and prisons. I read how he noted asymmetries, peculiarities and anomalies, the marks by which the stigmatic can be recognised. I delved into the indexicality of the photograph, lingering over copies of early Bertillon register photos of the New York police, kept in the reference sections of the hospital library. These registers showed rank upon rank of images of criminal men depicting a thousand expressions, except those of joy. Often the photographs showed lowered faces and distorted features as the men attempted to prevent the camera from recording their likenesses. To me these faded photos were the phantom spoor of the nature of evil. I used to stare at the rows of them, flicking through the pages of the photographic registers again and again as if trying to locate something precious there.
I looked at the Tattoo Index of Scotland Yard from the 1880s by which they logged criminals by the marks on their bodies, because Galton, Lombroso and Lacassagne had all identified the tattoo as the mark of the criminal. Tattoo, tatu in Polynesian, meaning an indelible mark or as some have said, the word itself representing the tapping of a little wooden hammer driving the ink-primed bone needle into the skin. How I loved the passage from Lombroso’s work on the savage origins of tattooing, when he comments that on the left arm of a prisoner there was found the words, commemorating a vanished lover, “Quand la neige tombera noire/B… sortira de ma memoire.” I delved into more modern work, reading Kretschmer’s Physique and Character, or the American psychologist Sheldon’s work on criminalogenic body shapes, and later still on XYY chromosomes, the genetic markers for violence and sociopathy.
Thus I prepared for my entry to the hospital in pursuit of Kress and his kind. Sometimes I would set aside the medical library volumes at home, in my chair, next to the hissing gas fire and I would conjure up both those faces: Kress in the court, Pinsent under the cell light. Then sometimes, I would stand up and go to look at my own face in the old, art deco mirror above the fireplace. I would look at my reflection which stared back at me while I traced with one finger, the curve of my cheek, the domed forehead, my skin still young then, elastic, as my finger prodded, finding the bone beneath the mask of flesh, murmuring to myself, “quand la neige tombera noire…”
* * *
Louie hadn’t been ringing me much and so my nights were long and solitary. Somehow it had begun to matter more to me and I would lie in bed imagining what she was doing with her gangster lover. One night she made my heart race by ringing late, sounding distressed from a pay phone saying, “I’m in such shit, I can’t tell you,” then rang off abruptly. The following evening I called round unexpectedly to find her getting ready to go out. She dismissed the upsetting call on the previous night.
“Just going out with the girls tonight, alright love?” She said as I watched her open a pack of Bruce Oldfield sheer black stockings, pulling them up one after the other and clipping them to the suspenders against her white thigh. As she was doing this, one of her friends, another nurse in curlers with a face pack, lingered at the doorway saying, “Someone’s in for a treat tonight.” She giggled then saw me and said, “Oops sorry.”
I drove Louie into town for her assignation and after she’d jumped out of the car with her purse to buy cigs from a newsagent, I rummaged in her handbag as I waited with the engine running. I found mascara sticks, Kleenex, a pack of condoms in a gold and white pack marked “fetherlite with sensitol”, an atomiser and a key ring which I did not recognise with a tiny teddy bear and an attached label reading “love is forever”. Louie clattered back in the car. There was a flash of her gold anklet chain as she folded herself into her seat. She was chatty and breezy, giving me a quick peck on cheek before leaving to merge with the thronging clubbers on the street.
I felt sick after she had gone, thinking of how I had taken her to see her pin-eyed lover. I wanted to displace these feelings and find something for myself so I forsook my studious nights and returned to a bar near the hospital where I had first met Louie. There, in the clamour and the blue-ringed smoke I encountered Lisa, another nurse. We had chatted and flirted a few months before and I had spent an evening listening to her pour her heart out about being ill-treated by a neglectful lover. Afterwards she sent me a garish card with a cartoon of a piglet on it bearing the message “To my Special Friend”. She was a sweet, plump, Geordie girl with an ash-blonde bob and conspicuous black roots. I had felt a passing erotic curiosity in her but had been wary of her submissive neediness. This time I was pleased to see her and she was happy to join me.
She gamely tried matching me drink for drink. We raced away in a taxi to the blues clubs of Radford and ended up at The TomTom; a Caribbean den where ranks of black women in long dresses and headscarv
es gyrated slowly to the reggae beat while their men lounged by the walls in a haze of ganja smoke. I bought some grass from two snickering Rastas, and got them to roll up spliffs for me then smoked them ostentatiously with Lisa puffing away inexpertly. We swayed groggily to the music, my arms wrapped around her solid waist. Back in a taxi home she clung to me with hot little hands whispering in her slurred Geordie accent: “Maybes we can get hitched, have a life.” She accompanied me to my place following me blindly, obviously drunk and ill, a sweaty sheen on her face yet still stubbornly clinging to me. I felt a hostile curiosity and uneasy squeamishness about her and asked her, “Are you staying?”
“Aye, I will,” she said softly blinking, almost in tears. Perching on my narrow bed she asked me for a shirt as a nightie. I gave her one of my white work shirts which later I pulled up to her shoulders in the darkness, heaving myself onto her, her head turned away as if in pain as I drove at her. Poor Lisa, in the morning tugging her tights on over her thighs, her calves red and mottled and puffy from the drinking, sliding her feet into shabby wide pumps and combing her hair in my austere bedroom. She humbly asked for a lift back.
“Well, I doan know if we will be seein each oother again?” she said. I gave a non-committal reply and dropped her off at the nurses’ home, looking up at Louie’s curtained windows as I stopped the car. I knew that gossip ran like a bush fire in that place.
I got some angry calls from Louie at work later that day, saying she wanted to talk to me. I made excuses, wanting to avoid a confrontation, then as she raged on at me over the phone, I attacked her back, snarling about her infidelity. She slammed the phone down. I returned home late, still feeling angry, having stopped off at another bar that evening, not wanting to go home. I knew at once that someone had been in my place. Louie had evidently come to the house that night. On the mirror above the fireplace was scrawled a message in carmine lipstick: “FUCK OFF YOU TWAT!”