by Rod Madocks
Hobman’s new face caused some unease to the nursing staff at the unit, as did his angry moods and threats to other patients. Observations were increased. He once even spoke about his voices and his anger, his longing for his sister and about his wish to kill, to kill a priest and by killing to transform himself. He told it to a junior occupational therapist, an older woman who had taken the trouble to befriend Hobman and listen to his rambling concerns. A good-hearted person who wanted to help, she gave Hobman a book that was found on him after the killings. It was Winnicott’s The Child, the Family and the Outside World. The OT was worried about his fantasies and wrote them down in a report which was naïve but detailed. No one read it or paid much attention to it on the clinical team because she was not respected and her voice carried no weight.
Hobman remained free during the daytime to roam and the White Lady said to him in her cool insistent voice, “killeristic, serialistic, feed the serpent now.” It was two weeks before Christmas; Hobman helped put up the ward decorations then he was given day leave to wander the outside world. He was never to return.
The Maitlands were a retired couple living in a bungalow half a mile from Hobman’s father’s cottage. They lived next door to the church and Mr Maitland spent the day moving jumble items from his garage to the church in preparation for a Christmas bring-and-buy. Hobman must have been there watching with his illuminated face on that day. He had connected the Maitlands to the church and marked them out as his prey according to the delusional correspondences of his internal world. He had slipped into the house when Mr Maitland left the back door open. Hobman carried a Bowie knife with a compass in the handle. He went upstairs and lay on their bed and drew the covers over him and waited as the Maitlands went about their day, unknowing of his presence in their home. Mr Maitland washed the car and ran errands until evening came on. Hobman threw back the covers and watched the full moon rise from the bedroom windows before descending the stairs to find them. He surprised them making tea in the kitchen and he had to subdue Mr Maitland by hitting him on the head with the knife handle. He tied them both with scarves and tights taken from upstairs and led the elderly, trembling woman upstairs to her bedroom and left the husband bound on the kitchen floor. He strangled Mrs Maitland first with a scarf and then went to the kitchen and ate some of their food where it lay set out. He smoked a Red Band cigarette while looking down at Mr Maitland on the floor. He then strangled him. Before each one died, Hobman told them their spouse would die also and now it was their turn, leaning over them with his painted face, wanting them to know.
Hobman had still not finished, he took a little money and food and went out in the early morning to his father’s house. Later, the police logged sightings of him in the locality. He was easy to remember with that face. The Maitlands’ bodies were found by their son later that day and Hobman was reported missing by ward staff when he did not return. News of the killings spread quickly but Hobman was not immed - iately linked to the event. His father may have sensed something however because Hobman later reported that he seemed afraid of him. The police called at his father’s Victorian cottage in a leafy village cul-de-sac in the afternoon looking for Hobman, because of his absconding from hospital. He stood upstairs watching them from behind the curtains, as his father denied seeing him to the police, who stood in the doorway but did not enter the property.
Hobman strangled his father later that night with a tie. He must have surprised his father as he was still quite a powerful man and was likely to have put up a struggle. A radio was playing a quiz program at the time and afterwards Hobman told investigators that after strangling his father, he had yelled out, “Answer the question! You can’t answer, why not Dad?”
Two days passed until forensics produced Hobman’s prints on a plate in the Maitland house and they found a Red Band stubbed out in a plant pot. They broke in to his father’s house to find Hobman watching TV. His father’s head was discovered in a kitchen cupboard and the torso on the bed. Hobman seemed confused and disorientated. He had stopped hearing the White Sister’s voice from the time he entered the Maitlands’ house.
That had all happened ten years ago. Hobman had then entered hospital time and had been shaped by the limbo of assessment wards, by dialectical behaviour therapy and by great quantities of antipsychotic medication. His case had been presented to conferences under the heading “Mad or Bad? An Atypical Presentation”. No one visited Hobman from the outside world. He had spent two long years on Dove after he attacked a nonce with some batteries wrapped in a sock, because he hated those who hurt children. Now he had fetched up on Eaton, seemingly burned-out but still possessing a residual menace to staff and patients. His long hair was prematurely streaked with grey, although he was not yet forty. He was now a little stooped due to scoliosis and the face was lined below the vivid tattoos, but he was still very strong in his upper body. Staff had reported seeing him doing press ups in his cell at night.
He now sat before us in the review, Bartram trying to engage him, asking about Lazaro and the incident at breakfast and about why that might have happened. But Hobman politely denied any difficulties and parried any attempt to acknowledge that he might have played an active part in provoking Lazaro, “What can I say? These things happen here, people get ill,” he said blandly with a ghost of a smile, and he made a cupped hands gesture to signify a displacement of any sense of responsibility while catching my eye with an ironic glint in his stare, which could almost have been a wink. Eventually Bartram dismissed him and wound up the review with the agreement that Hobman should be put on close observations.
Snow fell more thickly through the day. I peered through the bars from my second floor office window, watching it cling to the black wire, layering the rounded parapet on the wall and capping the camera hoods on their poles. It drifted round the blocks, covering the litter of paper, excreta, soiled underwear and old shoes flung out of the windows by patients. The snow muted the constant cawing of the rooks and the clanging of the lodge flagpole in the wind. Even the air raid howl of the hospital escape siren, which cranked up every first Wednesday of the month as a test, sounded muffled and distant that afternoon. I watched as the snow-plough rolled out and made a sweep of the drive to ensure access, for the hospital planned for all eventualities. The great boiler house thrummed on maximum power, heating the long corridors, the workshops, the smoky day rooms and the shuttered seclusion cells where naked men writhed beneath rip-proof canvas sheets.
The advent of snow meant that I would stay over in hospital accommodation, as I often did now, preferring this place, and being close to Kress. Here I felt unreachable, far from phone calls from Louie and from direct reminders of Rachel and the past. In one sense I had been preparing for years to exist in this place, this vacuum with no love. I remember in particular that night, lying in bed, fingering the ridged, fresh scars on my chest and belly, listening to reports on the radio in my little hospital room that at first were confused, telling of a fire, a crash, a plane down in the border town of Lockerbie, the enormity of it being grasped slowly through the night. When I eventually slept I dreamt of falling into a limitless abyss.
* * *
Kress had been in the blocks eight months by the time I got near him. He came into the assessment unit, on the B block wards that were called Brunel, Beatty and Burton. Kress came into Brunel or B3, an admission ward situated on the third floor top of the block for higher security. The ward looked like a long corridor with a projecting nursing station at the centre. Here a close eye was kept on the new admissions, who were encouraged to keep to their cells until staff got to know their propensities.
Kress was happy enough in his narrow room where he could touch each wall with his outstretched arms. He had few possessions: some cheap clothes, a few food items from the hospital shop and a picture he had torn out of a magazine that he had found on the day unit. It showed a photograph of a sailing ship at sea under full rig. His transient psychosis had settled with chlorpromazine. The t
ablets had also made him lethargic and his body had begun to grow heavy. In association time he sat smoking in the day room. Other patients gathered near the wall-mounted cigarette lighters; personal lighters were forbidden. They clustered together there like pigeons at a feeding tray. Lying through the endless days and nights on his bed, listening to the constant tread and key-chink of the warders outside, he began to croon to himself. The medication made him dribble, stiffened his arms and made them jerk involuntarily, yet he was content on his own, with only his body to explore. His belly burned hot from the hospital fare, his farts delighted him and he revelled in his homely, personal stench. He would spend hours gazing at the crawling shadows on his ceiling, his tongue flicking around his palate, exploring the mossed relics of his crumbling dentition, sniffing his armpits, or picking at his toe nails that grew with incredible vigour and independence, curling and digging into the skin of his toes.Yet Kress himself remaining immured, static, barely moving.
He had been subjected to all the filtration processes of entry into High Secure, being first gone over by security in a holding cell with hand-held detectors and his few possessions screened. All his clothes were taken away, scanned, laundered and returned. Having made sure that he had not ingested anything metallic, he was led down the corridors to Brunel, in a paper boiler suit with a posse of staff on each side of him. He was told his rights, had a visit from the chaplain, received a talk from security and had his photo taken by a large format camera. His tattoos and scars were also recorded. They found and noted an image of an infant with a halo and underneath the name “Annie” on his left arm and the spider web inked onto his right elbow. He was no stranger to institutional regimes and he settled to the numbing hospital routine, morning tea, med rounds, breakfast, staff utensil count, dead time, the sun moving beyond dusty barred windows, the TV in a puddle of blue colour high on a wall, sound turned down low, bleached faces staring up at it from worn chairs in the day room.
Kress would gaze at the other patients to pass the time. He would watch as patients roared and kicked at staff who would swiftly overpower them, sometimes using the 444 security emergency squad with shields and helmets who would drag the patient to the muffled seclusion rooms where they would exist for hours or days, then cautiously be let out again on four man unlock, moving unsteadily back down the corridors. Kress had few diversions, only the weekly ward quiz, run by a female OT, her rump rippling under a blue nylon trouser suit, while twenty-four pairs of sex-hungry eyes burned her up with their combined gaze. There was also the weekly ward outing down the corridor block to the shop where he could buy small necessities with an allowance token. Here there were remembered bright colours and familiar names from the outside world to be seen in the front covers of the magazines, and the familiar packaging of Wills Gold Flake, Park Drive, Maltesers and red and white tubes of Colgate toothpaste.
My remit did not include Brunel, yet I had to see him and in my first month in the hospital I invented a research project where I proposed to screen assessment patients for suitability for psychological work. Lax, burned out Dr Colt, my supervisor, turned over my memorandum proposal and growled, “Alright laddie, if you haven’t got enough work to do already, go ahead.”
My first step was to obtain access to his files. This was easy, for copies of all current documents went to Medical Records. Hospital files at that time usually contained a rich haul of depositions, evidential letters, trial reports, prosecution correspondence, details of next-of-kin as well as the usual clinical reports of my colleagues. I experienced an expectant thrill as an indifferent secretary handed me Kress’s already heavy file, which I carried up to a reading cubicle. It contained the expected array of information and a few laconic notes from Dr Virdee, the consultant on Burnet.
It seems that Kress was born in Canvey Island in 1949. There was a family history of poverty, alcoholism and subnormality. “Heavy genetic loading,” commented Dr Virdee in slanting, green ink on the margin of a psychology report. Kress was one of two siblings living with his parents in a council bungalow on the low-lying island. Their cluster of council houses looked on to an earth sea wall, then the estuary mudflats, and beyond that the North Sea. His father was a seasonal worker in the fairgrounds, who also helped run the Punch and Judy stall and deckchair concession along the front. Just after midnight on the 1st February 1953, a tidal surge, driven by a high wind, topped and breached the sea wall and torrented down Anderson Crescent, flooding the Kress home and killing sixty of their neighbours. His father got the family out onto the roof where they huddled together in their night clothes. The army came in three ton Bedfords through the brown wash at dawn to rescue them, but Kress’s sister Annie was by then dead in her pyjamas, killed by the cold. Kress had little memory of it all. The family were rehoused on the mainland, then settled back home six months later when the sea wall had been raised. Back in the repaired house, his mother sunk into a depression and his father took to drink. She eventually killed herself by putting her head in the gas oven after wrapping up his school sandwiches for the following day.
Nine year old Kress and father lived on together in the house. Kress became difficult at school, lagging in his lessons and sometimes being sent home for punching the other children. He developed a morbid fascination with the memory of his dead sister, confiding in her guiding spirit which followed him protectively. He was a dim boy who could barely read, doing well only at the Canvey Island Boys and Amateur Boxing Club. Eventually the authorities noticed his failure to thrive and he was taken into care for a year in Rochford. He enjoyed the ordered regime there, but deteriorated again when he was returned home at the age of fifteen. The following year, he set the entrance arcade of the island’s miniature cinema alight with a milk bottle of petrol siphoned from his father’s car. Kress had been taunted by some other boys there because he would not dare ask a girl to hold his hand in the back row. His revenge was to set the place alight, dancing with sexual glee as the island’s firemen struggled to put out the flames with their antiquated appliances.
He was caught and sent to High Secure, which was then called “Special Hospital”, at Ashworth Adolescent Unit near Liverpool. He was discharged at the age of twenty-two, angry and drifting, and soon committed other offences: assaults, drunkenness and an attack on a woman whom he apparently just picked up in the street in a sort of bear hug. Perhaps this was a half-hearted attempt to abduct her — something that Beekeeper enquiry had not managed to discover. Later he was sacked as a labourer on a building site because he had been found to have constructed a niche, which he had filled with bones and skulls grubbed out from a run-down Victorian cemetery nearby. He had punched the building site foreman when he tried to remove the bones, and was sent to prison again. His disastrous career continued with more prison time, assaults on others and from others, release, then prison again for a lengthy sentence for armed robbery, which was actually a pathetic attempt to hold up a betting shop with a plastic toy Uzi in a paper bag. When released he drifted for six months up to the time of Rachel’s disappearance.
He had said nothing about Rachel to the clinical team. He had retracted his admissions to the city CID, saying that it was all a cry for help and he didn’t know anything about disappeared women. Disappointed, I waded on through pages of reports. His transient psychosis had been resolved with medication. He had undertaken the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire, the Hare Psychopathy scale, the Wechler Adult Intelligence Test and other measuring devices. What was revealed, in the flat reductive language of psychiatry and psychology, was that he fell into an abnormal personality syndrome congruent with antisocial personality disorder. His WAIT score indicated that his overall IQ was a shade above learning disability. His psychosis was considered likely to be a transient phenomenon, a decompensation in response to the stress of imprisonment.
The recommendation was of therapy, time, containment, further assessment, and that he be maintained on antipsychotics in case he had a schizophrenic illness. He was detained in
the hospital, not due to offences but, because of his mental state and potential for harm. He was rated a risk to women with an abnormal interest in children and in particular little girls. There was some evidence that he had hung about schools in the past and had tried to speak to children, but he resisted any exploration of this. The notes revealed that CID, from the Beekeeper enquiry, had interviewed him and I was thankful that I had not run into detectives Canter or Hedgepeth in one of the hospital corridors for they might have asked awkward questions as to why I was in this place.
I felt disappointed after so much anticipation of what could have been in the notes. There was no acknowledgement here of how this man’s malign presence could have come up against Rachel’s track through life, nothing about his thoughts and desires as he bumbled and blundered his dangerous way through the city at night. There had been plenty of serial murderers who were more incompetent than he. And if he had not taken Rachel then why did he claim a hand in her disappearance? I wanted to know all about him before I finally dealt with him. I had a powerful sense of wanting retribution for the distress that he had caused. There was no alternative; I had to see him myself.