Right to Kill

by John Barlow

  ‘Penny-farthings and coal mines!’

  ‘You know,’ he said, finding himself kissing her on both cheeks, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt so old!’

  Her face was warm, and she smelled of perfume and wine.

  ‘Anyway, how are things going?’ she said, as if they’d known each other for years.

  He stopped, thought about it, then realized that he was far too close to her.

  ‘I’m, well—’ he stuttered, taking a half-step backwards, ‘in the last thirty-odd hours I’ve had one hour’s sleep, one meal, and been kicked off a murder inquiry. Two, as good as.’

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘A new team has taken over the inquiry, different police district. I was literally in the wrong place at the wrong time. The second murder, I don’t know whether you heard?’

  ‘Yes, it’s terrible. And now you’re not involved?’

  ‘I’m still on the first one.’

  ‘But not the whole thing? That must be frustrating. It’s getting pretty high-profile,’ she said, nodding to her phone, which was sitting on the bar in front of her.

  ‘Have you been following it?’

  ‘Not really. But I’m old enough to remember the Yorkshire Ripper. A serial killer really grabs people’s attention. Can you imagine the Ripper now, with social media?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s gotta be three for a serial killer. This one’ll be behind bars before then.’

  She took a long drink from her glass, which was now almost empty.

  ‘Shall we change the subject? You must be sick to death of the whole thing!’

  Her hand sprang out, grabbing his forearm.

  ‘God, did I just say that? Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘Good idea. Do you want another?’

  ‘I can wait for you.’

  He considered the full pint of Bitter that had just arrived on the bar for him.

  ‘This won’t take long. Let’s get another round in. I need to unwind pretty urgently.’

  ‘I’m all for that!’

  For an hour they sat at the bar and went through the script. Potted biographies woven discreetly into a loose, non-committal sort of conversation. It was supposed to be an interview, but they both forgot that quickly enough. They talked naturally, calmly, nothing strident, a lot of stepping softly around each other’s opinions, feeling their way tentatively towards each other. She was modest about the classes at the library, but also rather proud, he suspected. Teaching people to do something for themselves. It was all so logical, the way she described it, so generous and practical.

  As they moved gradually away from generalities, a nervousness became apparent beneath her air of easy sociability. She would jump in energetic agreement with something, then seem to withdraw, to pull back and look in on herself. It was as if she was playing a part for the first time, playing herself. Perhaps they both were. Is this how it starts? he wondered. Testing the water, seeing where the attraction might lead? Or was it the opposite, the defensiveness of people too hurt to try again? This is what it must be like, he told himself, recalling that his last taste of romance had been massively drunken farewell sex with his ex-wife over a year ago.

  ‘This is a great pub,’ he said, starting in on his third pint, or was it his fourth?

  He’d begun to relax now. In her company it wasn’t difficult. She was an attentive listener, lively in a way, but also coy, guarded. Plus, she was matching him drink for drink.

  ‘I live just down the road. I come here from time to time, but not regularly.’

  ‘Cheaper to drink at home.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it is…’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just something I heard the other day. A woman told me she drank on her own at home because it was cheaper.’

  ‘Part of the investigation? No, forget that, I shouldn’t ask.’

  Joe took a drink. He felt the beer coursing down his throat and into his stomach. The bar had become noisier and hotter. For a moment he was overcome by a wave of dizziness.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter now,’ he said, pressing his eyes closed for a moment. ‘I’m not heading the inquiry anymore.’

  ‘And the woman?’

  The image of Jane Shaw came to him. The cigarettes. The vomit on the carpet. Mourning her son alone in that house behind the Brick.

  ‘I dunno, it seemed so sad, her sitting at home drinking alone because a pub’s too expensive.’

  ‘Was she a victim? I mean, perhaps she was scared to go out.’

  He looked at her, confused.

  ‘Sorry,’ she added, so close to him now that their shoulders touched. ‘I really shouldn’t ask.’

  He leant against the bar, feeling himself sink into it. He thought about her, couldn’t stop himself: Jane Shaw on her own, a can of cheap cider in her hand, cigarettes, a TV screen for company.

  ‘Her son died,’ he said. ‘Now she’s got nobody. She’s at home getting pissed on her own.’

  ‘Joe,’ she said, reaching down and squeezing his hand, ‘this is work. You don’t have to talk about it.’

  He let her hand remain there. It felt good. The fingers were bare, no rings. He wondered whether there ever had been. All the usual shit that goes through a bloke’s mind. Yet the thought of Jane Shaw, alone in her house, tonight, every night, was impossible to forget.

  He downed the rest of his pint in one, the way he used to do with Andy when they were younger, always keen to be onto the next, slamming the empty glasses down on the bar like trophies. She gestured to the barman and ordered another round.

  ‘Son was a drug dealer,’ he said. ‘Gets himself killed. She feels guilty, like the whole thing’s her fault. Helpless.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘He’s dead. What can she do?’

  ‘I dunno. It must be difficult. I mean, to know what to do.’

  He looked at her, not quite understanding. Her eyes held his gaze. They were not cold, but part of her had disappeared from view. Whoever she was, this woman he hardly knew, something had drained from her in an instant. Or perhaps he was reading too much into things. Perhaps that was always his problem.

  The barman arrived with two drinks. She waved a card above the contactless device, waited for him to leave. And still she said nothing. Joe sensed no malice. She had withdrawn, but not, it seemed, because she wanted to.

  ‘I’ve got a son,’ he said, just to fill the silence. ‘If anything happened, I dunno what I’d do.’

  Without thinking, he got out his phone and checked for messages. Nothing new from Sam.

  ‘Let’s have a look at him, then,’ she said, leaning so far in to him that he could feel loose strands of her hair against his face.

  ‘I…’ he said, fumbling with his phone, ‘y’know, I don’t think I have any. It’s a new phone. Haven’t got around to…’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Sam? He’s studying Medicine in Edinburgh. First year.’

  She pulled out her own phone.

  ‘What’s his number?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Come on, it’ll be fun!’

  She typed the number in as he recited it from memory.

  ‘Past nine?’ she said, putting the phone to her ear. ‘He’ll be in the student bar.’

  Then she held up a hand.

  ‘Hello? Is that Sam Romano? Hi, my name’s Chris Saunders. I’m getting drunk in a pub with your dad.’ She listened, laughed. ‘I know! But I’ve got him here now, so I’m making the most of it! Anyway, here’s the thing. Is there a woman there? A female friend? Right, could you pass the phone to her, just for a second?’

  Joe looked on, helpless and incredulous.

  ‘Gemma? You’re a friend of Sam’s? Lovely. Listen, Sam’s dad is such a lame brain with tech that he doesn’t even have a photo of his own son on his phone. Would you be a darling and take one, then send it to me?’ She stopped, listened. ‘Yes, I know
! Men, they just can’t, though!’

  Even Joe could hear the hilarity that this was causing among Sam’s friends.

  ‘They’re taking one now,’ she explained, unnecessarily.

  She held up her glass and they toasted the moment.

  Her phone pinged.

  ‘Thanks, Gemma! Ask Sam if he wants to speak to his dad.’

  A moment later Joe was talking to his son. Their conversation was brief and slightly embarrassing, overheard as it was by an amused audience at both ends. He asked about the university accommodation, about how the course was going. It really felt like there was little more to say, with so many people listening.

  Even as he ended the call, he could feel the tears welling up in his eyes. He slipped down from the stool and rested his forearm lightly on her shoulder as they looked at the newly arrived image of Sam on her phone: the young Romano, a sheepish grin on his face, sitting among a bunch of friends and holding up a pint of lager.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, giving her shoulder a brief squeeze before retreating to the gents’.

  When he got back, she was hunched over her phone.

  ‘I sent you the image,’ she said. ‘Oh, another thing. Come here.’

  She pulled him close, their heads touching, and took a photo. There was a firmness in the way she drew him to her, a resolve that he hadn’t expected, something more than he would have dared to show himself.

  ‘Gemma asked me to send her a picture of us,’ she said.

  She tapped her phone. Across the skies it went, to another city.

  ‘I’ll send you it, as well.’

  ‘Please do.’

  It was only a matter of decorum which led them to untangle themselves and retake their seats at the bar. Joe was entering the stage of pleasant euphoria which meant that he should stop drinking, but which he knew meant that he wouldn’t. The inevitability, as usual, was as intoxicating as the alcohol.

  He wanted to take her in his arms, he told himself, as he stared at the bar in front of him, the rest of his surroundings now a dull murmur. He wanted to embrace her, to make the grand, romantic gesture, Hollywood style. But he held back. It wasn’t embarrassment. There was something else, and he couldn’t get it out of his head: the thought of a dead son and the mother left behind, of Jane Shaw sitting alone, facing the unimaginable horror of losing her only child, the rest of her life without him, without anybody.

  He sucked his beer down. Huge mouthfuls, a third of the pint, more. It was the only thing that made any sense now, the familiar sensation of a gently spinning world easing its way into his consciousness. And still Jane Shaw came to him. The thought of losing a child was unimaginable. His own sadness, by contrast, was nauseating in its triviality, the self-pity of the divorce, of coming back to England, the sense of professional failure. Add the death of Sam to that and where would he be? What would that do to him?

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, realizing he’d been staring blankly for far too long. ‘I was thinking about that woman, sitting on her own, her son gone. Just gone.’

  ‘These things, they bother you, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, still do. Always have. You say it as if they shouldn’t?’

  ‘But it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ she said, her mouth pulled off-centre, the beginnings of a sneer that she couldn’t hide. ‘The world is pathetically, horrifically cruel, Joe. It’s just… I mean, isn’t that your job?’

  ‘My job?’

  ‘The police. To see the evil?’

  ‘We see it, yes.’

  ‘But to set the world right, Joe? It’s your job? Isn’t it? Joe?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Or do you just log it down, add it to the stats? Perhaps that’s the bloody problem, the… I…’ She grabbed the edge of the bar and with some difficulty got to her feet. ‘I’ve drunk too much. I’m sorry.’

  He didn’t want to embrace her now. He wanted to sleep, to sober up, to see his son. He wanted to go home. And the feeling appeared to be mutual.

  They stood outside the pub waiting for Joe’s taxi. He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the alcoholic fug from his mind, and did his best to stand upright. Meanwhile, the cold evening air had instantly restored her to sobriety. Her face was composed, with that same confident smile that had been so captivating yesterday in the library.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve lived in Leeds most of my life, and I’ve never really got to know many of these old villages. They crop up everywhere. And the valleys, the rolling hills, the whole thing. It’s a beautiful place. My family weren’t much for the countryside.’

  ‘Well, now you know this one.’ She looked out across the cricket field, and to the open grassland that rose steadily beyond. ‘There are plenty more. I’ll have to show you. Oh, by the way,’ she added, as a taxi pulled into the entrance, ‘weren’t you supposed to be interviewing me tonight?’

  ‘It went clean out of my mind. We can do it another time.’

  She kissed him lightly on the lips.

  ‘I can take you home,’ he said. ‘Drop you off, I mean.’

  For a second they thought about it, both of them, standing so close that he could feel the warmth of her body, his hand dithering at his side.

  ‘I think I’d like to walk.’

  So that, he told himself as he slumped into the back seat of the cab and felt it move off into the darkness, was dating in middle age.

  31

  As the taxi came to a stop he roused himself from a fitful, half-nauseous doze. He paid the driver and hauled himself arse-first out of the car, taking care not to slam the door.

  It took him a moment or two to acclimatize: a dull suburban street bathed in watery green light so insipid that it felt like he’d stepped into some random CCTV footage.

  ‘I chose to live here?’ he asked himself, his sluggish eyes running up and down the lines of modest post-war semis in search of the particularly modest one he’d rented.

  The front door stuck slightly. It needed a bit of shoulder-work to open it, just as it had when the estate agent showed him and Sam around last year. Hadn’t seemed like much of a problem at the time. Still wasn’t.

  The central heating was on and the hall smelled of airing clothes. It wasn’t the kind of smell he enjoyed coming home to, but at least it was domestic. There were a few envelopes on the mat. He stepped over them and headed for the living room.

  Pale laminated wooden flooring, off-white walls, Swedish furniture in greys and creams. To mitigate the sense of living in a mid-priced furniture catalogue he’d hung a framed Kandinsky print over the fireplace, and between two Nordic armchairs by the window he’d set a small table with a glass vase containing half a dozen oversized balsa-wood tulips, hand-painted in bright colours. A moment of madness, bought in a rush, like everything else.

  He let himself drop onto the bizarrely uncomfortable sofa. For a while he lay there, trying to focus on the light switch by the kitchen door, then on the door handle, any fixed point… but the room kept on spinning. Normally he would have dragged himself upstairs, forced down three or four glasses of water, and crawled into bed. But tonight was different.

  Willing the effects of the beer to subside, he reached down to the floor and got his laptop. As Windows booted up with its irritatingly cheerful jingle, he tried to get comfy, letting himself slither down until he was almost lying there. Then he did what any self-respecting person would do in the circumstances: he googled her.

  The school’s website contained nothing about its teachers. No images. No names. He tried to imagine her in front of a class of rowdy teenagers. She’d be serene, in control, managing to keep things in order as she slowly explained some mathematical conundrum. Would she be patient? he asked himself. Yes, he thought, up to a point.

  General web searches for Christine Saunders also proved ineffective: there were way too many people with the same name. Finally, he tracked her down on Facebook. In her portrait photo she was every bit as attractive as she’d been tonight, her smile bright and
confident, but steely; not quite guarded, but almost. He scrolled through her timeline. The posts were mainly about activities at school, chess club, humorous references to the glories of algebra and trigonometry. There were no posts about family, and the account itself was only seven years old.

  Then there were maps. Lots of them. She clearly enjoyed long walks in the West Yorkshire countryside, each one plotted on a small, in-set map courtesy of an exercise app. That explained why she’d chosen to live in a village like Tong. The simple pleasures of the outdoors. He’d been missing it all. The magnificence of the valleys, the splendour, the greenness! He’d been missing every bit of it, for his entire life. Perhaps he’d found someone to share it with.

  With a pang of shame, he began exploring her list of friends, clicking here and there, hardly knowing what he was doing. He hadn’t been on Facebook much since he got back from France, and there were several hundred messages and friend requests on his account. He’d forgotten how to delete them. Plus, he was pissed. The icons were tiny, and they danced about in duplicate, however much he screwed up his eyes to focus on the screen. His head was beginning to feel heavy on his shoulders, and staring at the computer was not helping.

  Friend request sent.

  Shit. He’d clicked it by mistake. He pulled the laptop closer to his face, tried to work out what he’d done, how to delete the request. He couldn’t find anything. His finger dithered on the touchpad, hardly daring to click anything now. She’d know he’d been snooping.

  ‘Shit!’

  He needed to sober up. But getting off the sofa proved to be harder than he’d imagined. His body was a dead weight, and the best he could do was to lower himself down onto the floor, then hoist his upper body onto the coffee table. From there, with one monumental push of his arms and legs, he was able to struggle upright.

  Kitchen. Coffee. He looked around as he waited for the kettle to boil. It was not unlike the kitchen in Jane Shaw’s house, only this didn’t feel like his kitchen. Didn’t feel like anyone’s. Its fixtures were tasteful yet bland. Even the mugs lined up on the worktop surface were cloyingly anonymous in their sameness. The bottle of fancy Italian olive oil and a half-eaten baguette hardly lifted the tone.