Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  They didn’t invite Susie’s father to the wedding. Billy wouldn’t allow it. “He’d ruin everything,” Billy said, and then added, somewhat hysterically, “It’s him or me,” which made Susie laugh. “My father won’t be coming either,” Billy told her. He didn’t know where his father was living, or even if he was still alive. “Let’s invite Harry Parsons instead,” he said. The wedding took place in Stockport, and Susie’s stepfather, the car-dealer, paid for everything. They’d been married for less than a year when Susie became pregnant again, and this time she didn’t lose the baby.

  In the coroner’s office the phone started ringing, and the sound brought Billy swiftly out of his chair. Stepping into the cramped room, he picked up the receiver.

  “PC Tyler,” he said.

  The woman on the other end told him that her name was Marjorie Church, and that she was the charge-hand porter. “We’ve got a body to bring down,” she said.

  Five minutes later, Billy heard a knock, and when he opened the mortuary doors a short, solid woman in a blue shirt and dark trousers was standing in front of him.

  “Marjorie?” he said.

  “That’s me.”

  Behind her were two men with a trolley. One of the porters was middle-aged and bald, with clownish tufts of hair protruding from both sides of his head; the other one was younger, in his twenties.

  Billy stood aside to let them in, making sure the doors were properly bolted after them. He would have to write their names down in the scene log, he said.

  The younger porter blew some air out of his mouth. “Is that really necessary? We’re only going to be a moment.”

  “It’s standard procedure,” Billy said. “It applies to everyone, me included.”

  “You like your job, do you?”

  The number of times Billy had heard that.

  He looked at the porter. “You can take it up with the sergeant if you want.”

  “There’s other people dying round here,” the porter said, “not just her.”

  “His name’s Peter Baines,” said the porter with the clown’s hair. “I’m Colin Wilson.”

  The young porter scowled at him.

  “Thanks, Colin.” Glancing at Billy, Marjorie raised both her eyebrows, then she moved over to the bank of fridges and opened one of the doors.

  Using his right foot, Wilson pumped up the trolley until it was on a level with an empty compartment, then Baines helped him slide the body on to a steel shelf. The body was wrapped in a whitish shroud, but the head was uncovered, and Billy glimpsed the crown of an old man’s head, the scalp mottled and waxy.

  Marjorie closed the fridge door. “No need to lock this one in,” she said.

  Billy smiled faintly. He watched as she took a black marker pen out of her pocket and wrote the dead man’s name on the fridge door, then he returned to the log and recorded what had just occurred.

  Moments later, Wilson wheeled the trolley off down the corridor, with Baines walking behind, still grumbling. Marjorie went to follow them. On reaching the doorway, though, she paused and then turned round.

  “It’s that woman,” she said. “She upsets people.”

  “I understand that,” Billy said.

  “It’ll be good when she’s gone. When things are back to normal.”

  Billy nodded.

  Her face brightened suddenly, as if whatever had been awkward or difficult was now over. “Anything I can get you?” she said. “A cup of tea?”

  “No thanks, Marjorie,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  9

  Alone again, Billy noticed something on the floor under the table. Bending down, he picked up a metal nail file with a handle of pearly white plastic. He doubted that Marjorie would have brought a nail file to the mortuary—and besides, the iridescent handle didn’t seem in character—so he could only assume that it belonged to the young blonde constable who had preceded him. He turned the nail file slowly in his hand. If he had asked the constable what she thought of the woman in the fridge, what would she have said? What would she have made of it all, born as she undoubtedly had been in the early seventies? Would she have wanted to try and understand how it was possible for a woman who had once been a trusted babysitter to become involved in the torture and murder of children? Or would she simply have repeated what the tabloids were telling her, and what most people in the country appeared to believe, namely that the woman was inhuman, evil, a monster?

  In the autumn of 1999, Billy had spent some time in a newspaper library, reading up about the murders, and one story in particular had stayed with him. When the woman was a girl of fifteen, she’d been friends with a boy two years her junior. He was delicate, apparently, and she’d taken it upon herself to protect him. One day he asked her if she would come swimming. She told him she couldn’t. That afternoon he went up to the local reservoir on his own and drowned. For weeks afterwards, she was inconsolable. She wore nothing but black. The boy had always been a weak swimmer, and yet she had refused to go with him. She was to blame for his death. She couldn’t forgive herself. Some people said it was then that she first turned to the Catholic Church. There are moments in your life when something’s taken from you, and once you’ve lost it you don’t get it back. What you were before is neither here nor there. You’re different now.

  Billy didn’t pretend to be an expert—what did he know, really, except for what he had picked up on the streets?—but he couldn’t help wondering whether that boy’s death by drowning wasn’t a defining moment, a kind of turning-point. Supposing somewhere deep down in her there was the feeling that she had killed, and not a stranger either, but somebody who was dear to her, somebody who had—and this detail always sent a shiver through him—the same initials as she did? If that was the case, if that was how she had felt, did the psychopath from Glasgow see that abyss in her, that bottomless pit, the belief that she had nothing left to lose? Could that be what had attracted him? She’d done it once. She could do it again. What difference would it make? She was already guilty. And having more experience than he did, she could even, maybe, guide him, show him the way…It wasn’t an apology or an excuse. It might just be a fact, though. And that eerie coincidence with the initials…When the boy died in the reservoir, did part of her die with him?

  10

  The image of Baines, the young porter, lingered—his gelled hair, his slouch, his barely concealed sneer. Like your job, do you? There were certain people who couldn’t resist having a go at you, and though Billy was used to it—after twenty-three years, how could he not be?—he was closer to losing control these days than at any other stage in his career. But he was acutely conscious of what had happened to his friend, Neil Batty. A couple of years ago, Neil had beaten a suspect so badly that the man had ended up in hospital, and in spite of an exemplary record, Neil had been thrown out of the force. Billy couldn’t help but sympathise. There had been moments when he, too, had been tempted: a Friday night in the mid-nineties, for instance.

  He had come home from work to find an unfamiliar car parked outside his house. It was exactly the sort of car that Sue’s stepfather, Tony, would put on his showroom forecourt—long, sleek, unnecessarily fast. But as Billy pulled up behind it he saw a chauffeur behind the wheel—he could make out the shape of a peaked cap above the head-rest—and, knowing only one man who’d be likely to have a chauffeur, he almost drove away again. At that moment, Newman came round the side of the house and moved languidly across the pavement. He was wearing a dark-blue suit and light-brown shoes, and his hands were in his pockets. His face was tanned. In the seven years that had passed since their first and only encounter, Newman didn’t appear to have aged at all.

  Billy slowly opened his car door and got out.

  “Still a constable, I see,” Newman said.

  Billy locked the door, then straightened up.

  Newman was standing on the narrow strip of grass next to the kerb, hands still in his pockets. “Failed our sergeant’s exam, did we?”

 
; “I failed that before I even met you,” Billy said.

  Newman shook his head.

  Billy glanced at the house. It was after ten o’clock at night, but there wasn’t a light on anywhere. “No one here,” he said, half to himself.

  “No.” Newman’s expression was expectant, sly, even faintly humorous, as if Billy was about to deliver the punchline to a joke.

  “Well, you’d better come in, I suppose,” Billy said eventually.

  Newman had a word with his driver, then followed Billy up the short drive. At the front door Billy paused, fumbling in his pocket for his keys.

  Once through into the hall, he stood still for a moment, listening. When he came home from work, he usually walked in on some kind of disaster; it was almost never calm or tidy. He wondered if Newman could sense that. He was aware of the man behind him, alert, quiet, mocking. Like an assassin.

  “Sue?” His voice sounded thin, plaintive, and he wished he hadn’t opened his mouth.

  There was no reply.

  He was angry with her for not being home to deal with her father—but perhaps she hadn’t known he was coming. It was probably Newman’s style to spring surprises.

  He showed Newman into the lounge. Newman picked up a framed photograph of Emma as a one-year-old, and then put it down again almost immediately.

  “Your granddaughter,” Billy said.

  Newman looked at him steadily, but didn’t speak. Billy watched Newman’s gaze shift to the wedding pictures on the sideboard. There was Billy, with his top hat and his toothy smile—I can’t believe my luck—and there was Sue, in cream satin, a bunch of white and yellow flowers held at waist-level. She had the flushed, exultant look of somebody who had been proved right. I always knew this day would come, and now it has. Billy wondered how Newman had felt about not having been invited.

  Newman turned and sat down on the sofa, one arm stretched along the back. “So where’s Sue?”

  Like most successful people, he gave you the feeling that you lived too slowly, without sufficient clarity or focus. He didn’t waste any time on subjects that didn’t interest him.

  “I’ve no idea,” Billy said. “Do you want to wait?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “What have you got?”

  “Tea, coffee. Beer.” Billy moved towards the kitchen. “I’m going to have a beer.”

  “I’ll have beer too.”

  Billy fetched two cans of Heineken from the fridge, then walked back into the lounge and handed one of them to Newman.

  “Do you have a glass?” Newman said.

  Billy hesitated, then went out to the kitchen again. The cupboard where the glasses were kept was empty—they would be in the dishwasher, which Sue never ran until last thing at night—so he chose a plastic beaker with Pooh and Piglet on the side. One of Emma’s. He took it into the lounge and handed it to Newman. Newman looked at the beaker, and Billy saw him decide not to comment. Opening his beer, Billy dropped heavily into the armchair by the fire. It had been a long day: a wife beaten by her husband, a stolen motorbike, two drunk builders fighting in a pub…

  “I thought your house might look a bit like this,” Newman said after a while.

  “Not what you’re used to, I imagine.”

  Newman laughed unpleasantly.

  Lose your temper, and you lose, Billy thought. It was a lesson he had learned over the years. Another lesson: don’t say any more than you have to. He raised his can to his lips and drank.

  “Actually, to be honest,” Newman said, “I thought it might be even worse. You know, more depressing…”

  Through the closed window Billy heard the clank of a bicycle. That would be Harry Parsons, riding home from the allotments. Harry had recovered from the fall he’d had not long after Billy and Sue moved in, and he was up there most days, whatever the weather. The last time they had spoken, Harry had told him that he was thinking of growing delphiniums. A beautiful flower, Harry had said. Beautiful colour. Not blue, but not purple either. Somewhere in between.

  “I’m sure you do your best,” Newman was saying. “It’s just that she wants more from life. More than you can offer, anyway.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t have to. I’m her father.”

  “You left her when she was thirteen.”

  “I left her mother.”

  Billy shrugged. “Same thing.”

  Newman watched him from the sofa.

  “You know, when I first knew Sue,” Billy said, “she never mentioned you at all. I used to think her father must be dead. He must have died when she was very young, I thought—or maybe he died before she was even born—”

  “Are they teaching you psychology now? Is that what they’re teaching on those training courses?” Newman studied his beer. He still hadn’t taken so much as a sip.

  In that moment, a curious vibration went through Billy, a sort of flutter or crackle, as though his body were full of tiny people clapping. He had just realised that Newman was a man he could kill, and he would feel no qualms about it. He could use the onyx clock Sue’s mother had given them when they got married. He could see Newman on the carpet, one arm trapped beneath his body, the other pointing at the door. Battered to death with a present from his ex-wife. There was a nice symmetry to that.

  “I’m not sure I get the joke,” Newman said.

  This would be one of the very few times that Billy managed to turn the tables on Sue’s father, and he wanted to make it last. No qualms, he thought, and no remorse. None whatsoever.

  Standing up, he stepped over to the mantelpiece and adjusted the position of the clock, not because it needed adjusting, but because he wanted to feel the weight of it, the heft. Oh, this would do, he said to himself. This would be perfect.

  Not exactly the perfect murder, though.

  As he put the clock down and turned away, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung opposite the fireplace. For several seconds he stood quite still, struck by a thought he’d never had before. In Ipswich there was a man—a local character—who’d had his entire face tattooed in an attempt to stop himself committing crimes. Billy would see him sometimes, on Westgate Street or Norwich Road, his eyes appearing to stare out from behind a jungle of Celtic swirls and flourishes. Granted the man was mentally ill, but the measure did have a certain logic to it. If he ever broke the law, there would be no problem identifying the culprit. It was the bloke with the tattoos. He did it. Looking at himself in the mirror, it occurred to Billy that he might have joined the police for the same reason, to prevent himself from doing wrong. Not to protect other people, then, but to protect himself. His uniform was a sane version of the tattooed face. It hadn’t worked, though, had it? Even with his uniform on, he had done things he shouldn’t have; if anything, in fact, the uniform had helped. He thought of Venetia’s father, and the memory came to him so forcefully that the wet-hay smell of the old man’s breath seemed present in the room.

  “You know, a few years ago—” Billy checked himself. This wasn’t something he should ever talk about, and least of all with Newman listening.

  “A few years ago what?” Newman said softly.

  Billy shook his head. “Another drink?”

  Newman looked at his plastic beaker. “I’ve got plenty.”

  When Billy returned from the kitchen with a second beer, he went and stood by the window. He saw Newman’s chauffeur fold a newspaper and place it on the dashboard. He wondered how the chauffeur felt about his employer. He imagined walking outside and telling him Newman was dead. I killed him. Just now. With a clock. And the chauffeur nodding, smiling, maybe even patting him on the back—

  “It’s not that you’re stupid exactly,” Newman said.

  To the west, the sky was streaked with violet and gold. Summer nights—the way the light never seems to go…

  “It’s just that you lack drive.”

  Billy watched as a
car came into view further down the road.

  “You’d rather avoid things,” Newman said, “than really take them on.”

  When the car pulled up level with the house, Billy saw that it belonged to one of Sue’s friends from the school gates.

  “You’re frightened,” Newman said.

  Above the car’s roof was a row of trees, arranged along the horizon. Billy knew that they were poplars, and that they grew in the field beyond the railway line, but in the slowly fading light they looked like an ancient curse written in a language he could not decipher. They had the same qualities as Newman’s words: spiteful, insidious—black as the wrong kind of magic.

  The car door opened, and Sue got out with Emma in her arms. Emma’s legs hung straight down, which meant she was probably asleep. Sue glanced at her father’s car, then turned back and watched her friend drive off, freeing one hand so she could wave. She hadn’t noticed Billy in the window, and somehow he felt she ought to have done. That lack of awareness, that apparent self-sufficiency didn’t say much for their relationship—or rather, it said everything.

  “What do you think, Scruffy?” came Newman’s voice. “Do you think that’s unfair?”

  11

  Billy stood up suddenly and walked down to the far end of the mortuary. He would have liked some air, a change of scene, but it was still hours until his break. Newman’s voice had been so gentle and considered, as if he were dispensing valuable advice, each sentence carefully shaped and weighted so as to lodge in Billy’s memory. Billy rubbed at his face with both hands. Had he avoided things? He didn’t think he had. Sue had wanted security, and he had done his utmost to provide it. He had worked unceasingly to try and build a life that seemed worth living, and now, after fourteen years together, they had more or less everything they were supposed to have—a house, a child, a car, a job, a pension—but nothing felt secure at all, and nothing felt quite real either.