Pascoe's Ghost by Reginald Hill

Author:Reginald Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Rio de Janeiro Paper

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It has been the custom at the International Criminological Conference to save the best for the last. At least this was the policy pursued by your committee before ill health forced my resignation from it. I think of the men who have occupied this spot in years gone by and I tremble at my effrontery. But perhaps today there is no need. Perhaps during my recent illness the policy has been changed and the last full session of Conference is now reserved for broken-down old professors on the edge of retirement!

Forgive my flippancy. I am deeply moved by the honour you have accorded me. And more than a little scared. Not that I don’t like the view from up here. Through that huge window at the back of the hall I can see right across the harbour. The Sugar Loaf seems but a step away and I fancy that if I cared to strain my eyes just a bit, in this clear air, I could see clean across to Africa. It’s really quite splendid.

It’s only when my gaze drops to take in your own politely expectant faces that I begin to feel afraid.

But I have spoken elsewhere of the psychology of terror and that is not my subject today.

No, today I want to examine a simple proposition that seems to me to derive naturally from any serious criminological study of modern society and one which has implications which must be relevant to all your specializations.

It is that every husband would like to see his wife dead.

Let me start by being non-scientific.

How many married men sitting here in this hall can look into their own hearts and say they have never felt personally the truth of this proposition?

Come on. Don’t be shy. There are no hidden cameras spying on you. Two, three. I can see three. No; four. Thank you, sir. Definitely four. Well, I am disappointed. I had hoped to find greater powers of self-deception among so many eminent men!

So, it seems there might be some popular support for this proposition, every husband would like to see his wife dead. Certainly, as I’m sure that Captain Ribeiro of the Rio de Janeiro Police Research Bureau, whose stimulating paper caused so much debate on Tuesday, would confirm, if you show a policeman a female corpse the first thing that comes into his mind is, where’s the husband? Cherchez le mari! I can’t manage it in Portuguese!

I think Dr. Egermann in his excellent paper on Women’s Liberation and the Crime of Violence put it succinctly when he said that men are killed for many reasons, but women usually because they are women.

In other words because of sex.

Lust, jealousy, disgust, frustration; potency fears, mother fixations, homosexual repression, transvestite envy—you will all recall Dr. Egermann’s list of the sources of sexual violence. And is it not self-evident that the marriage relationship as it is understood in Western society, reinforces all these causes where they exist, creates many of them where they do not, and provides, in E.

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