Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  As he set the folder aside, he became aware of a smell—or not so much a smell, maybe, as a prickling in his nostrils, a slight sense of irritation—and he remembered what Phil Shaw had said. That’s death. Turning in his chair, Billy stared at the fridge Phil had pointed out for him. Like the others, it was white, but the wipe-clean board where the identity of the deceased would normally be recorded had been left blank. There was nothing to indicate that anyone was there at all.

  A name came floating into his mind. Trevor Lydgate. It had been surfacing ever since he heard the news on Friday afternoon. Once again, he had to push it away. He didn’t want to think about Trevor, not now.

  He stared at the blank space on the fridge until he too began to feel blank.

  No names, no thoughts…

  The inside of his head felt hollow, scooped out, smooth as an empty eggshell.

  7

  A couple of years ago, in that sluggish, soporific time between Christmas and New Year, Billy had driven to the place where the murderers had buried their victims. He had left Sue and Emma with his mother, saying that he was going to visit his friend, Neil, in Widnes. Snow had fallen overnight in Yorkshire and Humberside, but Cheshire was bright and sunny when he started out, and his spirits lifted, as if he were embarking on an adventure. As the M60 curved through Manchester, though, he caught his first glimpse of the moors, a looming shoulder of high ground to the east, treeless and primitive, and he felt something sink inside him, and a slow burning around his heart. It was all he could do not to drive straight back to his mother’s house.

  Soon after turning on to the A635, he became aware that he was now following in the murderers’ footsteps. This was the road they would have taken—there was no other—and he doubted very much had changed since the sixties. Chinese restaurants probably wouldn’t have existed then, not in the small towns, nor would shops that sold computers, but everything else looked at least a century old. The rows of terraced housing, the factories, the stations, the churches: he was seeing what the two murderers would have seen. And the moors always there above the rooftops, their brooding presence softened that day by a sprinkling of snow…

  On the high street in Mossley he passed a car coming the other way. The driver was a woman with blonde hair, the top half of her face hidden by a lowered sunshield. Only the blunt curve of her chin was visible, and a hard mouth made even harder by her bright-red lipstick. That scorched sensation round his heart again. The urge to hurry home.

  After Greenfield, the road began to climb, and in no time at all he was up on the moor, the land stretching away on either side, wild and deserted. The air thickened, and turned white. Sometimes the sun pressed through the murk—a silver disc, sharp-edged but misty, dull. He parked in a lay-by, then put on gloves, a woolly hat and wellingtons. He stood quite still beside the car. A silence that was eerily alive, like the silence when you answer the phone and there’s someone on the other end not talking. He set off down a track, making for an outcrop of rocks known as the Standing Stones. One of the victim’s bodies had been found near by.

  Before long the track narrowed, and he struck out across open country, thinking it would be more direct, but the yellow grass was coarse and wiry, which slowed him down, and the light covering of snow hid lethal troughs and hollows. He could sprain an ankle if he wasn’t careful, or even break it. As he walked, he noticed that he kept looking over his shoulder. He needed to be able to see his car, he realised, and the further he went, the greater this need became. He felt nervous, almost distressed. In these icy conditions, the countless slabs of rock that pushed up through the moor looked black. His car was black too, and merged with the landscape perfectly. Once, as he glanced behind him, he trod in a boggy hole, and his right leg sank in up to the knee. He had to tug and tug to get it out.

  Not until he was returning from the Standing Stones did he feel easier in himself. The fog had thinned. A weak sun shone. He began to think about the boy whose body was still missing, and fell into such a strange, trance-like state that when the ground seemed to leap up in front of him, he let out a cry and jumped backwards. He watched, startled, as a huge, ash-grey hare bounded away, its black ears showing clearly against the frost-encrusted grass. When the hare had vanished, he studied the place where it had been crouching, a patch of crumbly, peat-dark earth beneath an overhang. Before he knew it, he was scraping at the soil with his boot. The hare was a marker, he felt, like a cross on a map: if he dug here, something might come to light—a pair of spectacles, a shoe…He stood back. What was he thinking? The moor had been searched again and again, by hundreds of people. Besides, the top layer had shifted over the years; areas of peat that had been exposed in the sixties would now be thoroughly grassed over. But a miraculous discovery, he realised, was what he had been hoping for. That, in part, was why he’d come.

  Before he left the moor, he crossed the road and climbed up to Hollin Brown Knoll, another of the murderers’ favourite spots. Stopping for breath, he saw three men with rifles striding towards the Standing Stones, a black dog with them. He thought of the hare and hoped that it was safe. On the knoll itself was a rock that was the same height as a chair, and slightly concave too, but when he sat down on it he had such a powerful sense of the woman’s presence that he instantly got up again and moved away.

  Further on, the land levelled out, and he came across several shallow gullies that meandered off in a northerly direction. The streams had frozen over; black water squirmed through narrow channels beneath the ice. While up there, he saw a tree, its twisted trunk growing along the ground as if seeking shelter, then veering up into the air, the thin grey branches trembling. Once again, he had the feeling there was something to be discovered, but it was like having a word on the tip of your tongue and knowing you would never remember it. There were things here that couldn’t be grasped or squared away—not by him, in any case. He stared off into a gully, imagining a man leading a small boy by the hand. After a minute, only the man’s head and shoulders showed above the bank, and the boy wasn’t visible at all…

  The snow had blown in from the east the night before, and now it was coming again, the air closing in, surrounding him, a whirl of tiny flakes.

  He turned and started back towards the car.

  8

  Glancing at his mobile on the table, Billy was reminded of the text Sue had sent. Sometimes, when she bombarded him with messages, each one more desperate and abbreviated than the last, or when she asked the impossible of him, as she had that afternoon, he would wonder why he put up with it. Where had Susie Newman disappeared to? And when? Don’t go travelling, he had said, and she hadn’t. She had got a job with a firm of marketing consultants, and later, in October of that year, she had moved in with him. They’d lived in his little two-room flat on Frederick Street, just round the corner from the police station. Christ, the sex they’d had back then. The love they’d had. He used to run home from work to see her. Actually run. But he had never taken her to India or Thailand; he hadn’t paid enough attention to her dreams. Fourteen years had passed, and certain possibilities had slipped through their fingers, and now she was turning into somebody he didn’t recognise. He would get flashes of how she used to be, but it was as if he were trying to tune into a foreign radio station with a weak signal; mostly all he received was interference, static, nothing he could make any sense of. What about the feeling of familiarity he’d had, though, when he stood in Murphy’s garage on that sunny morning in 1988? Had that been an illusion, some sort of trick? Or had he failed to look after what he’d been given? And if it was gone, was it gone for ever, or could it be recovered?

  He was going round in circles.

  He saw her again, standing by the front door in the cold, her face lowered, her arms folded tightly across her chest. There were days when he couldn’t seem to please her, no matter what he did or didn’t do, and it would occur to him that she might simply have grown tired of him, that he might be less than she had imagined him to be, less
than she’d wanted. Certainly there were those who took that view. Her father, for one. Peter Newman never missed an opportunity to let Billy know that she deserved better. Not that Newman was such a great advertisement for marriage: he had left Susie’s mother when Susie was just thirteen.

  Billy first met Peter Newman in a wine bar in Manchester in the summer of 1989. Though wine bars were no longer a novelty—they had started appearing in the north-west at least five years earlier—Billy had never set foot in one before, a fact that Newman seemed to intuit almost immediately. Newman had a couple of business associates with him. The three men wore double-breasted suits with padded shoulders, which made them look American, and Billy was painfully aware of his cheap black shoes and the soiled bandage on his right hand, an injury sustained while arresting a drunk at a rugby-league game the previous Saturday.

  When the waitress came over, Newman and his colleagues ordered glasses of wine. So did Susie. Billy said he would have wine too.

  “Really?” Newman said. “You wouldn’t rather have a pint?”

  “No, I’ll have some wine,” Billy said. When, actually, a beer was what he wanted. But he felt clumsy in the company of these business people; he felt the way he’d felt when he failed his sergeant’s exam.

  To begin with, Newman talked about a project he was investing in—a luxury resort on a Greek island—but gradually he steered the conversation round to Susie, and the fact that she was going out with a policeman.

  “‘Scruffy Tyler,’ they call him,” Newman told his colleagues.

  The two men laughed softly and nodded. This piece of information didn’t seem to surprise them in the least.

  “It’s ‘Scruff,’” Billy said, “not ‘Scruffy.’”

  “I still don’t get it,” Newman said. “How on earth did you two meet?”

  Billy did his best to ignore the slight. “Susie was working in a garage in Widnes,” he said. “It’s a place I often call in at when I’m—”

  Newman talked right over him. “Of course, I’ve seen her with all sorts,” he said, addressing his business associates again. “I mean, she’s not exactly particular.”

  Newman’s cronies leered at Susie, as if they too might be in with a chance of having her. Susie was staring down into her glass.

  For a few moments, Billy couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard. Then he took hold of his wine-glass, which was still half-full, and pushed it away from him into the middle of the table.

  “You ought to watch your mouth,” he said.

  “Oh dear”—Newman was talking to the two men, but his eyes were on Billy—“I think we could be looking at another case of police brutality.”

  A smirk on his face. On the faces of his colleagues too. One of them took a long, slow mouthful of wine, watching Billy over the rim of his glass.

  Billy reached for Susie’s hand. “Come on. It’s getting late.”

  Outside, he stood on the pavement, trembling. A cold wind, streets all red and grey. Manchester.

  “Sorry about that, Billy,” Susie said.

  He turned to her with a kind of desperation. “How could you just sit there?”

  She smiled at the ground. “That was nothing. You should hear some of the—”

  “No, don’t. Please. I don’t want to know.”

  Later, on the train, he said, “It’s not true, is it?”

  Susie was staring out of the window. “No,” she said. But she had put no effort into her answer, as if she wasn’t sure, or didn’t care.

  “Susie?” He leaned closer.

  When she turned to him, she looked desolate, her skin stretched thin and drained of all its colour. “No, Billy,” she said. “It’s not true.” She held his gaze for a moment longer, and then, finally, some humour crept back. “I’m not exactly a virgin, though, either…”

  The mortuary radiator clanked once, then gurgled. Billy reached out and put a hand on it, but it was no warmer than the last time. He shifted in his chair. After that awkward evening in Manchester, he had refused to have anything to do with Susie’s father. The man was only interested in making what they had seem grubby. If Newman ever rang up to suggest a drink or dinner—though based in the South of France, he was always travelling to England, it seemed, on business—Billy would claim to be working. “But you go,” he would say to Susie. “You go.” When she was offered a job in Suffolk and asked Billy whether he’d consider leaving the north-west, he surprised her by saying yes. He surprised himself too—he had never seen himself living anywhere else—but perhaps, in the back of his mind, he thought a move to the other side of the country would put them out of Newman’s reach. He worried about his mother being on her own—his older brother, Charlie, had moved to America the year before—but she made light of it, telling him that, after all, there were such things as cars and he could always drive up and see her now and then. Once Susie had accepted the offer, Billy requested a transfer to the Suffolk Constabulary—luckily, they had a vacancy for an officer with his experience—and by the spring of 1990 he and Susie were renting a neat modern flat in the centre of Ipswich.

  At first he missed the buzz of Widnes, the muck and stink of it. The huddled red-brick terraces and the towering, tangled heaps of scrap metal. The bloody fights that broke out every five minutes for no good reason. Sometimes you’d find teeth in the gutter, or a clump of hair. When Widnes played arch-rivals Warrington at Naughton Park, the coaches bringing in the visitors would have to run a gauntlet of stones and bottles, and the police took dogs along to keep the two sets of fans apart. Then the game itself, with half the players on amphetamines, the tackling so brutal that Billy’s bones would shudder—and he was only watching…Afterwards, he and a few other bobbies would call in at the pie shop, pork-and-apple fillings or hamburger-and-baked-beans. You’d get stomach-ache just looking at those pies, but you’d still have two, and you’d wash them down with tea that had brewed so long you could have used it to stain furniture. Later, there would be trouble at one of the nightclubs, the Landmark or Big Jim’s, and they’d go down there mob-handed to sort it out. The women were even more ferocious than the men, especially if they’d had a drink. “Don’t let them get you on the floor,” a sergeant told him early on. “You won’t get up again.” There was the night three pubs spilled out at the same time, and an almighty punch-up started in front of the chip shop on Victoria Road. Billy tried to nick somebody in a black shirt who was only about half his height. The bloke turned out to be some sort of martial-arts expert, and Billy came away with one side of his face swollen up like a melon and his left arm fractured in two places. But the way the bobbies pulled together, Neil and Terry and Vomit Molloy and the Perv and Dad, even Light Duties Livermore, everybody looking out for everybody else, that was really something…Ipswich felt tame by comparison, less vivid. If asked, though, Susie could explain exactly what was better about their lives. She seemed happier, and that was Billy’s one great wish, to make her happy.

  But before the year was out, Susie began to feel that something was missing. She wasn’t homesick for the north; it was more like a kind of restlessness or hollowness, the sense that she hadn’t fully occupied the space around her. The space inside her too: in early 1991, she’d had a miscarriage, and she was frightened she might not be able to have children. Words like “security” and “the future” crept into her conversation; she worried about what she called “missing the boat.” These were things that mattered to her, and he considered it his duty to provide them. After months of searching, they found a property a few miles out of town. It was a small place, semidetached, the end house in a row of eight, and there was noise from the railway line on the far side of the road, but it would be their first real home. Billy waited until they had settled in—the house had needed painting inside and out, and it took weeks to clear the garden—and then, on a cloudy, drowsy afternoon in late July, he reached for Susie’s hand and led her out into the field. “Where are you taking me?” He wouldn’t say. Only when they g
ot to the middle did he stop. The corn waist-high, and seeming to whisper, even though there wasn’t any wind. Then, holding Susie’s hand in both of his, he knelt in front of her and asked her to marry him. She looked away into the sky, and a dreamy smile rose on to her face, as if he’d reminded her of something that had happened a long time ago, in her childhood. When she said, “Yes, I’d love to,” he was still on his knees, invisible to everybody in the world but her. Anyone watching would have thought she was talking to herself.