Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  In the last few months he had stopped going straight home after work. The first time it happened, in February, it had been an accident. He knew the roundabout well—he used it most days—so there was no reason why he should have taken the first exit instead of the second, and even once he’d made the mistake he could easily have pulled into the side of the road and turned round. But he didn’t. He carried on. And there was a distinct lightness about the way he drove after that, a detached quality, as though the decision was not only one that had been made for him, but also one that he didn’t have the power either to challenge or to overturn. He wondered if that was how his father, Glenn Tyler, had felt when he walked out on his pregnant wife in 1956. That lightness, that detachment. Things shaken off—for ever, in his father’s case.

  From that day on, even after his transfer to Stowmarket had come through, Billy would go back to that same roundabout, and he would follow the road that curved under the Orwell bridge and out along the river. He would always park in the same lay-by. If it was raining, he would listen to the radio, or read the local paper. From time to time, he would switch the wipers on and peer through the windscreen, but there was nothing much to see, just the dark twist of the road ahead of him, and the grass verge to his left and, beyond that, the river’s dull grey surface. If the weather was fine, though, and the tide was out, he would walk across the mud-flats, eyes lowered, as if searching the ground for something he had lost. He only engaged with what lay directly in front of him—seaweed, nails, bones, feathers, shells. The rest of his life he was able, for a while, to keep at bay. He saw all sorts of people. Lonely types mostly. There was a man who carried a white bucket and a long stick with a spoon taped to the end of it. Employed by a nearby farm, he had taken it upon himself to poison the rats that were breeding on the riverbank. There was also a man who dug up ragworms and razorfish, which he would use as bait. Like most keen fishermen, he didn’t have too much to say. And there was a frizzy-haired woman who fed the swans—with biscuits, usually, or stale buns. Another woman, older, would stare out over the water, one hand pressed against her collarbone, as if waiting for a lover to arrive by boat. They would exchange a few words, or nod at each other, but that was about it. Nobody came down to the estuary to make new friends. Sometimes he would read the notice that had been erected on the grass verge. He learned about the various birds that visited the area—the godwit, the redshank, the dunlin. They would spend the summer in Norway or Greenland or Russia, and then, when the temperature began to drop, they would fly south. Those names, though: they sounded like characters from myth or legend. Redshank the warrior, soaked in blood. Godwit the jester, the holy fool…And beyond the notice, of course, there was always the view. There were two cargo ships moored against the far bank, their hulls rusted ginger and listing in the water. There were yachts too, tacking upriver, their sails paunchy with the wind. Behind them lay the Nacton foreshore, where people often went to have sex or smoke dope, and away to his left, the bridge itself, its giant concrete span so high that it looked precarious, almost unsafe. Only the westbound lane was visible from where he stood, the cars and lorries sliding endlessly and steadily from right to left like targets in a fairground rifle-range. Above all, though, there was a sudden immense resource of space and light. It had sufficient power to absorb him, he felt. It was something he could vanish into if he wanted, and that notion gave him solace, making it possible for him, after a while, to turn his car round and drive back home.

  Billy sat down again, then leaned forwards, the points of his elbows on his knees. Placing the palms of his hands on his forehead, with his fingers reaching up into his hair, he stared down at the metal grating that covered the drain. He was aware of the pulse beating on the inside of his right wrist. Years ago, when he was sixteen or seventeen, he had imagined all kinds of scenarios, but never anything so obvious or so difficult. He had met people here and there, people who could make things happen. Somehow none of it had quite come off. Life could surge away from you at great speed, leaving you bobbing dumbly in its wake. His friend, Raymond Percival, for instance, who had tried to persuade him to move down south, to London. We could get a squat. Go on the dole. There’ll be parties, girls… Raymond who always said he wanted to be an arms dealer—where was Raymond now? And what about Venetia? He would have married her in two seconds flat, but marriage had been the last thing on her mind. Venetia with her hair flowing over her shoulders, like black treacle poured out of a tin…

  He last saw Raymond in Cheshire. It was October 1993, and he had driven up to the north-west to visit his mother who’d just celebrated her sixty-eighth birthday. Sue was three months pregnant with Emma, and Billy’s father, Glenn Tyler, had died a few weeks earlier, in Germany. It was a strange time, full of events that were enormous but concealed, remote. He found it hard to work out what he was feeling. He just kept going, without thinking too much, and tried to do the ordinary things as efficiently as he could. On the Saturday night he took his mother out to dinner in a country pub where the food was supposed to be good, and as he went up to the bar for the second time, to fetch more drinks, somebody called his name. He glanced over his shoulder, and there, unbelievably, was Raymond Percival, sitting at a candlelit table with a girl.

  “Billy Tyler,” Raymond said, not getting up. He was wearing a fawn leather jacket that looked expensive, and his skin was lightly tanned.

  “Raymond! What are you doing here? I thought you’d be in London.”

  “Oh, you know,” Raymond said. “I get around.”

  He had the same mocking smile that he’d had as a teenager. It had been amusing then, even necessary, as much a part of his image as his haircut or his flared trousers, but in a man approaching forty it looked much more like provocation. It didn’t seem as if Raymond knew that, though—or perhaps he just didn’t care.

  “So,” Billy said, “how are you?”

  “Could be worse. What about you?”

  “Not bad.”

  “I almost drowned him once,” Raymond told the girl, his eyes still moving over Billy’s face. The girl’s mouth opened a fraction, then she laughed quickly and reached for her champagne.

  For a moment Billy saw the water, almost black, and seeming to slope uphill, away from him.

  “I suppose you’re running Scotland Yard by now,” Raymond said.

  Billy smiled faintly. “Something like that.”

  So Raymond knew what he did. He was sure Raymond found it not only ludicrous but incomprehensible. After everything they had been through together, he would be bound to see it as a betrayal too. But that was years ago, all that…

  Raymond introduced him to the girl. Her name was Henry, Raymond said. When Billy stared at her, she smiled and told him it was short for Henrietta. They shook hands, hers cocked slightly at the wrist, and bright with rings. She had a pair of sunglasses in her hair. Billy thought she was probably a model.

  He turned back to Raymond, his eyes dropping briefly to Raymond’s jacket. “You look as if you’re doing all right for yourself,” he said. “Nothing illegal, I hope.”

  Raymond laughed. “You want to join us, Billy? You want to pull up a chair?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. I’m with someone.”

  Raymond looked past him. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

  “My mother,” Billy said.

  They both smiled, but their smiles didn’t reach their eyes.

  “Well, anyway,” Raymond said, brisker now, “good to see you.” You’d think they ran into each other all the time. It had been twenty years, though. Maybe more.

  “Take it easy, Raymond,” Billy said, then he turned to Henrietta. “Nice to have met you.”

  He walked over to the bar. As he ordered the drinks, he heard Raymond and the girl start laughing. On his way back, he passed their table again and nodded, but he didn’t stop, focusing instead on the two glasses he was carrying, as if worried they might spill.

  Sometime later, he looked through the window and saw
Raymond standing near a low-slung sports car. The girl was with him. Though it was already dark, she had her sunglasses on. Out of habit, he made a mental note of Raymond’s number plate. BOY 1DA. If Raymond wanted to, he could drive to London tonight with that beautiful girl beside him. Or Paris. He could do anything.

  “Are they friends of yours?” Billy’s mother asked.

  “That’s Raymond,” Billy said. “Raymond Percival.”

  “You were at school with him, weren’t you?”

  Billy nodded. “I went on holiday with him as well. We travelled all round Europe.”

  “I remember.” His mother’s eyes lingered on Raymond as he climbed into the car. “Good-looking boy.”

  Billy smiled to himself.

  “Your father had something of that about him,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “He was glamorous.” She took a sip of wine, then put the glass back on the table. She kept her hand on it, though, and twisted it from time to time. “Imagine falling for a musician…”

  They both watched through the window as the sports car moved noisily out on to the road.

  “Was he ever violent?” Billy asked.

  “He got drunk sometimes. I was frightened of him then.” She looked across at Billy. “He never hit me, if that’s what you mean.”

  Billy stared at the table. His father had been drinking the night he died, apparently. A tram had knocked him down. In Hamburg. When Billy thought about the death, all he could see was a saxophone lying on a cobbled street, the bell tinted red by strip-club neon, the octave key bent out of shape. His father, the musician…Had he been playing live that night? Where had he been living, and who with? What had happened to the saxophone? The questions came to him in a leisurely, almost sluggish way, as though aware that answers were unlikely to materialise. They had more to do with a kind of nostalgia than with any real curiosity. He had seen his father just twice in his entire life.

  “Why do you ask?” his mother said, and he could sense her eyes on him.

  “No reason,” he said, still staring at the table.

  “You’re not in trouble, Billy, are you?”

  “No.” And he wasn’t. But he felt as if he was.

  12

  He couldn’t remember actually meeting Raymond Percival. There had been no fanfare, no shaft of light, no thin blade through his heart—nothing to let him know how deeply he would fall under Raymond’s spell. He thought they must have been in the same year at school, but it wasn’t the classroom that Billy saw when he brought Raymond to mind. He didn’t see a uniform either. Somehow Raymond always appeared in the clothes he put on after school, or at weekends. It was the late sixties, and Raymond dressed in long-sleeved T-shirts that were too tight under the arms, usually with a picture of an album cover or a group on the front. He wore flared jeans too, often with a triangle of fabric sewn into the lower leg to make them wider still. His hair was cut shorter than everybody else’s, a style that only came into fashion more than twenty years later, in the early nineties. Ahead of his time, Raymond was. Naturally.

  The first conversation Billy remembered had to do with fathers. As a boy, Billy would never admit that his father had walked out—he had invented an alternative reality involving things he didn’t understand, like record deals and gigs—so when Raymond asked him whether it was true that his father was a musician, Billy gave his standard reply:

  “He plays jazz. I don’t see much of him, though. He’s always away, on tour.”

  Raymond sent him a look that tilted through the air towards him like a flying roof-tile in a gale. “I heard he left before you were even born.”

  Perhaps because he was so shocked, Billy reverted to the truth. “So what? Have you got a dad?”

  “He’s a nobody,” Raymond said. “I’m never going to be like him.” He kicked a stone into the gutter, then said, “Anyway, he’s dead.”

  “I think my dad might be dead too, actually.” Billy had no reason to say that. It just came out.

  “Do you care?” Raymond asked.

  Billy shook his head. “No.”

  Raymond seemed to approve of Billy’s answer. The speed of it. The frankness.

  Raymond’s father had died of cancer, but Raymond wouldn’t talk about it except to say that he’d like to fucking blow up ICI. His father had worked at ICI for thirty years. His uncle still did, and now he had cancer too. One evening Raymond took Billy into a field that overlooked the plant. A few horses stood about, tearing at the grass with big stained teeth; against the mass of spotlit pipes and tanks, they looked incongruous, primitive, oddly out of date. Coming to a halt in the middle of the field, with Castner Kellner and Rocksavage glittering below him and the River Mersey in the distance, Raymond threw his arms out wide and made a loud exploding sound. The horses scattered, eyes rolling, their hooves thudding across the lumpy turf. One of them almost ran Billy down. He murmured in protest, but Raymond was hunched over with his hands wrapped around his head, and Billy understood that debris from the dynamited factories was falling from the sky. If you said ICI had brought jobs to the area, Raymond would tell you it had brought pollution too. If you mentioned the recreation club and the sports facilities, he would smile sourly. “That’s just guilt,” he’d say. He was unshakeable. Raymond always slept with his windows shut on account of the toxic gases that were released into the atmosphere at night. He didn’t trust anything that was produced locally. He only ever drank soda water, which he stole from the Co-op, and he refused to eat fruit and vegetables unless they came from somewhere far away like Israel or Costa Rica.

  One particular afternoon from that time stood out in Billy’s memory. He would have been about fourteen. It had been a hot, sticky couple of days in an otherwise dismal summer, and when Raymond turned up at Billy’s house, he didn’t have a shirt on, only a pair of mulberry-coloured loon pants, the backs frayed where they dragged along the ground. Raymond’s dogs swirled about on Billy’s small front lawn, growling and snapping at each other. One of them was called Cabal, which had been the name of King Arthur’s dog. The other one was John. John the dog. Raymond thought that was funny. When Billy answered the door, Raymond held up a plastic bag and swung it from side to side. The contents clinked. Billy knew then that they would be getting drunk together. Raymond would have conned somebody into buying alcohol for him, or maybe he’d been shoplifting again. If you stole something and got away with it, you were innocent. That was Raymond’s philosophy. You were only guilty if you got caught, and Raymond never got caught: people would look into his face and see nothing but honesty in it.

  “I’m going out for a bit,” Billy called back into the darkness of the house. He heard his mother’s voice, but Raymond was already turning away, so he shouted, “See you later,” and then slammed the front door shut. Once on the pavement, he glanced up and saw a bent head in the upstairs window. His brother Charlie, reading. Charlie’s A level results were due any day now, and they were all expecting great things.

  That afternoon Raymond and Billy did what they usually did. To get to the park, most people would have walked along the road, a distance of less than a mile, but Raymond and Billy would cut across the open fields, which took them past the brine reservoir. Billy was fascinated by the warning signs—drowning hazard, corrosive liquid—and he was drawn, too, by the mysterious square brick huts. As for Raymond, he had his own personal agenda. The reservoir belonged to the company he held responsible for his father’s death, and he would be muttering threats and curses as they approached the padlocked gates. He seemed to like this route to the park. It kept his hatred fresh.

  There was a place where the path narrowed, and they had to walk in single file. Raymond went first, the dogs running on ahead. A high hedge shielded them from the sun; the air cooled suddenly. As he followed Raymond, he noticed the paleness of Raymond’s back, more like the inside of something than the outside, as if the skin had already been peeled away and this was the fruit, the goodness, the part that you
could eat. He felt himself blushing, and he lagged behind, feigning interest in a discarded cigarette packet.

  Later, they lay side by side on the warm grass. They started with barley wine. There was a kind of thickness to the liquid in those small brown bottles; you could taste how strong it was. Drink three and you’d see double. They drank two each, then switched to vodka.

  “You want to do something?” Raymond said.

  Billy was staring up into a sky that was so smoothly blue, so absolutely free of clouds, that it made him feel dizzy, and when he heard the words “do something,” his heart turned over.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  And then, when Raymond didn’t speak, he said, “Like what?”

  “Come on.” Raymond got to his feet. Two fingers in his mouth, he whistled to the dogs, then he began to walk.

  “Where are we going?” Billy asked.

  Raymond didn’t answer.

  They circled back past the brine reservoir and ducked through a wire fence, coming out on to the footpath that led to Raymond’s house. When they arrived, his sister, Amanda, was lying on her stomach in the front garden, reading a comic. She was wearing a lime-green bikini and sunglasses with pink plastic frames. She was only eleven, but she already had breasts.

  “You’re burning,” Raymond said as he passed her.

  Amanda gave him a V-sign without even lifting her eyes off the page.

  Billy grinned, but she didn’t notice. They were all the same, he thought, these Percivals…

  Once they had locked the dogs in the back yard, they got two bikes out of the shed and cycled down the hill to Weston Point. They had to wait at the level crossing while a train laboured past. Billy counted eighteen wagons, each one filled with chemicals. The gates lifted, and the two boys cycled on. The village streets were deserted. All the shops looked shut, even though they weren’t. You could feel the heat rising off the tarmac in ghostly waves.