Kissing the Gunner's Daughter Read Free

Sharon Fraser, who had known Martin, came out into the bank and knelt beside him, weeping and twisting her hands, crying out for justice, for retribution.
    "Oh God, oh God, what have they done to him? What's happened to him? Help me, someone, don't let him die ... "
    But by then Martin was dead.
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    MARTIN'S Christian name appeared in the newspapers. It was spoken aloud that evening on the BBC's early evening news and again at nine o'clock. Detective Sergeant Caleb Martin, aged thirty nine, married and the father of one son.
    "It's a funny thing," said Inspector Burden, "you won't credit it, but I never knew he was called that. Always thought he was John or Bill or something. We always called him Martin like a first name. I wonder why he had a go? What got into him?"
    "Courage," said Wexford. "Poor devil."
    "Foolhardiness." Burden said it ruefully, not unkindly.
    "I suppose courage never has much to do with intelligence, does it? Not much to do with reasoning or logic. He didn't give the pale cast of thought a chance to work."
    He had been one of them, one of their own. Besides, to a policeman there is something peculiarly horrible in the murder of a policeman. It is as if the culpability is doubled and the worst of all crimes compounded because the policeman's life, ideally, is dedicated to the prevention of such acts.
    Chief Inspector Wexford did not expend more effort in seeking Martin's killer than he would have in the hunt for any other murderer, but he
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    felt more than usually emotionally involved. He hadn't even particularly liked Martin, had been irritated by his earnest, humourless endeavours. 'Plodding' is an adjective, pejorative and scornful, often applied to policemen, and it was the first which came to mind in Martin's case. 'The Plod' is even a slang term for the police force. But all this was forgotten now Martin was dead.
    "I've often thought," Wexford said to Burden, "what a poor piece of psychology that was on Shakespeare's part when he said that the evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Not that poor Martin was evil, but you know what I mean. It's the good things about people that we remember, not the bad. I remember how punctilious he was and how thorough and -- well, dogged. I feel quite sentimental about him when I'm not bloody angry. But God, I'm so bloody angry I can hardly see out of my eyes when I think of that kid with the spots shooting him in cold blood."
    They had begun with the most careful in depth interviewing of Brian Prince, the manager, and Sharon Fraser and Ram Gopal, the cashiers. The customers who had been in the bank -- that is, those customers who had come forward or whom they had been able to find, were seen next. No one was able to say exactly how many people had been in the bank at the time.
    "Poor old Martin would have been able to tell us," Burden said. "I'm sure of that. He knew,
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    but he's dead, and if he wasn't none of it would
    matter."
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    Brian Prince had seen nothing. The first he knew of it was when he heard the boy fire the shot that killed Martin. Ram Gopal, a member of Kingsmarkham's very small Indian immigrant population, of the Brahmin caste from the Punjab, gave Wexford the best and fullest description of both men. With descriptions like that, Wexford said afterwards, it would be a crime not to catch them.
    "I watched them very carefully. I sat quite still, conserving my energy, and I concentrated on every detail of their appearance. I knew, you know, that there was nothing I could do but that I could do, and I did it."
    Michelle Weaver, on her way at the time to work in the travel agency two doors away, described the boy as between twenty-two and twenty-five, fair, not very tall, with bad acne. The mother of the baby, Airs Wendy Gould, also said the boy was fair but a tall man, at least six feet. Sharon Fraser thought he was tall and fair but she had particularly noticed his eyes which were a bright pale blue. All three