Reginald Hill - Death

When Ellie had protested, her mother had reminded her of a ruined Christmas Day when, aged twelve, Ellie had decided she was going to send all her presents plus her Christmas dinner to Oxfam. That was only one of many times,' she'd concluded.

'Your father's right out of it now. It's my place to be with him on Christmas Day. It's yours to be at home.'

Good for her! Pascoe had applauded internally. But he had tried not to let it show.

Now seated alone with another mug of coffee, he glanced at his watch, groaned to see that though his body-clock told him it must be dinner-time, its hands told him it was still only nine forty-five, then reached out and picked up Dark Cells.

He skipped through the introduction in which the author assured him that this was a serious in-depth analysis of the relationship between penological theory and the practicalities of incarceration, a claim somewhat at odds with that made on the jacket sleeve where he was invited to be titillated by a riveting account of evil unmasked and a disturbing analysis of the failure of our prison system to contain it. Do not read this book unless you feel strong enough to meet some of the worst men in our society. Be prepared to be shocked, to be scandalized, to be terrified!

A perfect antidote to Christmas, he thought. He went out to the hall and from a shelf in the cupboard under the stairs he took his private Roote file. Dalziel's gaze had noted it on his office desk, and doubtless noted too the drawer into which he'd slipped it. The drawer had a sturdy lock as did the office door, but Pascoe would not have bet sixpence against the Fat Man breaking through. So that same day he had brought the file home.

He sat down again and from the file he took Roote's first letter and glanced through it. Here it was… I am Prisoner XR pp193-207…

He picked up Dark Cells and turned to page 193, where sure enough the author began her case history of Prisoner XR.

After giving details of crime and sentence, Ms Haseen got straight down to her sessions with Roote.

His recorded responses during the investigation, the psychological assessment prepared in concurrence with his trial, and the whole raft of subsequent and consequent reports I had read of his reactions and behaviour since sentence all contained significant indices that here was a highly intelligent man sufficiently in control of himself to use that intelligence to make his stay in prison as comfortable and as short as possible, and, though I am very aware of the need to proceed with great caution in matters of analysis, in his case I felt within a few minutes of our first meeting fairly sanguine that the proposed course of analysis would affirm the accuracy of those advance impressions.

God, this was turgid stuff! No wonder the book had been remaindered!

From the start he was keen to demonstrate, and to underline in case I missed the point, that he was accepting these sessions absolutely on my terms. Unlike many of the others (see Prisoner JJ pp! 04ff and Prisoner PR pp! 84 ff) he never showed any overt sexual awareness of me, nor when my investigation touched on matters pertaining to his sexuality did he see this as an opportunity to indulge in self-titillating sex talk (see Prisoners AH and BC pp209 ff). Yet despite this strict propriety, I often felt the atmosphere between us was highly charged, sexually speaking.

You can bet your sweet ass it was! thought Pascoe.

This fitted in very well with my developing judgment that Prisoner XR was going to be a difficult case to put under the magnifying glass of detailed analysis.

He was dearly determined to provide me with no insight into his psyche that might be at odds with what he saw as the only truly important objects of our sessions viz. his rapid transfer from Chapel Syke to an open prison, and subsequently his early parole.

She may be a lousy writer, old Amaryllis, thought Pascoe, but at least she got that right. Let's see if she managed to get under his guard at all. Though, remembering that it was Roote himself who'd drawn his attention to her book, it didn't seem likely.

Our first few sessions therefore were in the nature of preliminary skirmishes whose main function in his eyes was to establish that he was in charge while I endeavoured to persuade him that I was unaware of his efforts so to do. Once past that point, though he always remained on a high level of vigilance, I was able to utilize his greater relaxation to make contact with him at a deeper level than hithertofore.

Hithertofore! He smiled, then, recalling what a sad Christmas this must be for the woman, he stopped smiling and read on.

Lot of background stuff. No names or identifying details, of course, but he fitted these in from his own researches.

Family background: mother and stepfather; the latter a well-heeled businessman called Keith Prime who married Mrs Roote when Franny was six and clearly didn't take long to decide it was worth spending a little of his wealth on keeping his stepson out of his hair.

Boarding schools from age seven – first a prep school, then Coltsfoot College, a progressive public school near Chester. At some point, apparently for business reasons, the Primes had set up home in the Virgin Isles and most of young Franny's vacations were spent staying with friends in England, a practice continued when he went to Holm Coultram College of Liberal Arts where his and Pascoe's paths had first crossed.

Thereafter the vacation problem was solved by residence at HMP Chapel Syke.

His mother, according to Pascoe's own records, had visited her son once during pre-trial custody, thereafter pleading poor health as reason for not attending the trial. Prime had never appeared. There was no record of the mother ever visiting her son in the Syke, but her claim to physical debility was supported the hard way when she died during his second year of detention. She was buried in the Virgin Isles. No application was made by Roote to attend the funeral. No contact with Keith Prime was recorded.

It was evident that Amaryllis Haseen had been fascinated by the relationship between Roote and his mother and father and stepfather, which must have made it easy for him to jerk her around with fictitious memories of the father he couldn't recall at all.

XR was clearly father-fixated to a degree which must have been psychologically disabling till he developed techniques of control, though not without detriment to other more conventional emotional procedures. His obviously enhanced memories of incidents involving his father all tended to stress qualities which made the dead man a worthy object of admiration and affection, yet underpinning them always was that syndrome in which the subject's sense of being abandoned by the object, even though the cause of abandonment is death, manifests itself in angry and abusive resentment.

An example of the exaggerated memory was the following, being an account of an incident when the subject was four or five years old.

XR: we were walking through the park one day, me and my dad, when this big guy jumped out of a bush brandishing a knife. He grabbed me by the hair and put the knife to my throat and said to my dad, 'Here's the deal, give me your wallet and the kid lives.'

And my dad reached into his jacket and pulled out this huge pistol and he said, 'No, here's the deal, let go the kid and you live.'

And the big guy said, 'Hey man, no need to get heavy,' and let me go. And my dad jumped forward and smashed him across the side of his head with the gun, and when he fell down my dad stamped on the hand carrying the knife till he dropped it.

And the big guy lay on the ground screaming, 'I thought we had a deal, man!'

And my dad said, 'The deal was, you get to live, but I didn 't say anything about you living healthy.'

That an incident occurred in which the subject as a small boy was frightened in a park and was defended by his father is possible. In this and other recollections the father is always referred to as 'my dad', the possessive and the familiar abbreviation being together indicative of a deep sense of loss and an almost painful desire for repossession. The gun-toting Dirty Harry accretions have probably been developed over many years of creative recollection and it is likely that the subject is by now completely persuaded of the truth of this version. It is interesting to note that the qualities this embellished narrative stresses have less to do with the kind of story-book heroism which might have appealed to a young boy and more to a cold and calculating self-sufficiency. It would have been interesting to hear the version of this story that the subject was telling at the ages of, say, ten, and then again at fifteen. Alongside this let us set the subject's response when it was suggested to him that he must have missed his dead father greatly.