Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  “I know,” he said. “I know it does.”

  “Maybe we could go away for a bit.”

  “You mean a holiday?”

  “We could get a ferry over to Holland. We could drive around like we used to—stay in places…”

  He lifted his head again and looked at the silver birches, the bark peeling back in delicate scrolls to reveal dark patches underneath. We could drive around. With Emma, though? In late November? Sue’s wishes were becoming more and more fanciful. It was as if, in having failed to take her to India or Thailand when she was young, in having persuaded her into a different life, one that was more pedestrian, he had accrued a debt. The tasks she set him now would be harder to fulfil—and yet he owed it to her, didn’t he, to try?

  “I’ll be home in the morning,” he said. “We’ll talk about it then.”

  Sue was reaching into her pocket. “I nearly forgot.” She took out a black stone on a thin leather cord and passed it to him. He held it in the palm of his hand. The stone gave off a dull, dark gleam, but seemed oddly difficult to see. Like a piece of the night itself. “It’s jet,” she said. “It will protect you.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Wear it. You can put it round your neck, under your uniform.” She smiled at him. “No one will know it’s there.”

  “All right.” He passed the cord over his head.

  “It doesn’t absorb the bad things,” Sue said, “it repels them. It doesn’t let them get too close.”

  “OK,” he said.

  As he tucked the stone down inside his collar, he was reminded of something he had read about the early years of the woman’s imprisonment, in Holloway. Apparently, the guards used to argue over who was going to take her meals in to her. No one wanted to do it. They didn’t like the idea of being near her. They weren’t physically afraid of her; the fear was spiritual.

  “One more thing.” Sue brought a second stone out of her pocket. “You’ll need to carry this as well.”

  He took it from her. It was lighter in colour, and much smoother. More pleasing. “What’s this one?”

  “Celestine. It complements the jet. It will put you in touch with the purest part of yourself.”

  He slipped the crystal into his breast pocket. “I hope you haven’t got any more,” he said. “I’ll never be able to get up off this bench otherwise.”

  “No,” she said, almost jaunty now, “that’s it.”

  He checked his watch. “You should get back, or Jan will worry.” He took his mobile out. “Why don’t you give her a call and let her know you’re on your way?” Punching in the number, he handed her the phone. The moment she said, “Jan? It’s me,” he stopped listening.

  The wind picked up; trees shifted overhead. He thought about the guards, and how they were believed, at times, to have drawn lots outside the woman’s cell. He wondered what they’d used. Matches, perhaps—or keys. Yes, keys. And the tray set down on the floor, the food going cold…Had the woman known what effect she’d had on those around her? What would it be like to know that?

  Once Sue had finished with the phone, he walked her back to Janet’s car. Even in the short time it had been standing there, condensation had formed on all the windows, and he went round with a packet of tissues, making sure that Sue would be able to see out. Ever since her accident, he worried when she got behind the wheel. She had crashed into the playground wall at Emma’s school, knocking down a twenty-foot section, the car rolling over and then sliding, upside-down, on to the road again. Only when he saw the car the next day, in the scrapyard, its roof savagely gouged and crushed almost to the level of the steering-column, did he realise how lucky she had been, not just to have escaped uninjured, but to have survived at all.

  “Take care on the road,” Billy said. “I should be home around eight.”

  She looked up at him through the half-open window, her lips black in the dim light. “Sorry to be such a nuisance,” she said, then her face seemed to clear and she gave him a mischievous grin. “At least I can still surprise you.”

  “I love you,” he said. “Drive carefully.”

  He watched the tail-lights until they disappeared behind the trees, then started back towards the hospital. He had been firm with her. At the same time, he had tried to tell her what she needed to hear, and she had gone away happier. But he should take her somewhere. She had a birthday coming up. Maybe then.

  Will we be all right?

  There are things you don’t forget. You can’t wipe them out, or pretend they never happened. You wish you could, though. God, how you wish you could. Some of them seem fairly innocuous, and yet they stick—Newman’s jibe about him lacking commitment, for instance—but others take place at the very centre of your life and alter every atom, every thought. Like the spring evening when he held his baby daughter’s hand for the first time.

  Looking at her tiny red palm, he noticed a line that ran across it from one side to the other. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but he knew enough to suspect it wasn’t normal. Then the doctor told them.

  A slow smile spread over Sue’s face. “Oh, that’s a shame,” she murmured. “What a shame.”

  Almost before he was aware of it, Billy had risen to his feet and turned away. How can you be so fucking stupid? Sue, he meant. And for a moment he was afraid that he had said the words out loud. Just to have had the thought was shocking enough, though, and he stared blindly into the corner of the room. He was feeling so many things at once. Most of all, he wanted desperately to be somewhere else. A pub where no one would talk to him, or even realise that he was there. A pub where he wasn’t a regular.

  “Billy?” The doctor laid a hand on his shoulder.

  The air blurring around him, Billy muttered “toilet,” then he left the room.

  But he hurried straight past the toilet and down the stairs. One flight, then another, legs chattering like teeth. A wonder he could walk at all. He didn’t stop until he reached the road outside the hospital. He stood on the kerb; a cold wind cut through his shirt. April the 4th. He looked at the brown sky and saw a plane up there, bits of cloud sucked into its landing lights like flung rags. He could hear the uneven rumble of the engines. “Don’t let this happen,” he was whispering to himself. “Oh God, don’t let it happen.”

  He was behaving as if it were all just a remote possibility. He was acting as though he had a choice. But the world had already made up its mind. Here. This is yours. He was thirty-seven, almost thirty-eight. Sue was thirty. They’d been trying to have a baby for years.

  A bus went past, its wheels surging through a deep puddle. Dirty water splashed across his trousers. Standing at the edge of the main road, he watched the water dripping off him and began to laugh.

  When he walked back into the delivery room, he made sure there was a smile on his face.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  He leaned over Sue and kissed her. Her forehead was clammy, sour.

  The doctor spoke about the baby’s heart. Billy kept on smiling. It was as if he were being photographed. Not just once, though. Again and again.

  During the days that followed—and they were long days, the longest he had ever known—he thought that it was all his fault. There was something not quite right about him. A lack of clarity or definition. He locked the bathroom door and put his face close to the mirror. He studied himself for minutes on end, trying to catch a glimpse of it. The weakness, the ugliness. The fatal flaw. It must always have been there, he thought. Other people had seen it, perhaps. If they had, they’d said nothing: it wasn’t the kind of thing you could talk about. It had taken the birth of a child to establish it beyond all doubt. To bring it out into the open.

  After a while, though, the blame spread sideways, and he began to see the damaged baby as a verdict on their marriage. They couldn’t have been intended for each other. They had made a terrible mistake. They’d flown in the face of nature. The sense of familiarity that he had felt at the outset h
ad been a trick after all, a trap, and he had walked right into it, fool that he was. Or perhaps he was being punished for all the things that he had done and hadn’t done…He would wake in the night, and the heat coming off him was unbelievable. On his side of the bed, the sheets would be soaked through.

  It was Sue who put an end to these morbid imaginings. Not that she said anything. No, it was all in her manner, her behaviour: the way she knuckled down. We’ve been chosen to look after this little girl, she seemed to be telling him, so we might as well get on with it. This was a side of Sue he hadn’t seen before, this practicality, this grit. Full of admiration, humbled by her, in fact, he began to try and follow her example. Still, there were times when he wished it was just a bad dream and he could wake up and it would all be over. No baby—or a different baby. A baby that was ordinary, not special. Oh Billy, Billy, he would whisper to himself in some damp church.

  During this time, he became more than usually sensitive to his surroundings, and everything he noticed appeared to be commenting on his predicament, not only songs on the radio, but newspaper headlines, fragments of overheard conversation, even the names of racehorses. It was, ironically, like being in love. Once, scrawled on a wall in a nightclub toilet, he saw a piece of graffiti that said simply lamentations 3:7. Lamentations—well, that, too, was obviously for him. The word was enough in itself, but when he got home he couldn’t resist looking up the reference. He hath fenced me about, that I cannot go forth; he hath made my chain heavy.

  He was determined not to leave, though. He didn’t want to do what his father had done, even if it was in his blood. He had felt the urge, not in the delivery room, but on the road outside the hospital. To run, and keep on running. To hide. To die, even. Every muscle in his body braced for flight. But he remembered the promises that he had made. For better or for worse.

  For worse, he thought.

  He had drawn the short straw. The chickens had come home to roost. It was a bitter pill to swallow. There were a hundred little phrases to describe him now, and none of them were cheerful.

  What he dreaded most were visitors. The way they went all soft and holy when they saw the child. Fake soft, though. Fake holy. And the way they looked at him—with sympathy, or with a kind of heartiness, as if they wanted to jolly him along. He knew it was difficult for them, but he just couldn’t take it. He told black jokes—the blacker, the better—and watched their body language change. They weren’t sure whether to laugh or disapprove. It’s all right for you, he wanted to shout, his spit landing on their faces. You don’t have to live with it.

  What a relief when Neil Batty came to stay. Neil waited until Sue had left the room, then he turned to Billy and said, “Well, this is a right fucking mess, isn’t it?” He could have hugged Neil for that. Neil who had joined the force at the same time as he had. Neil who had been his best man the year before…

  It was a mess, and it would probably get messier. It wasn’t going to go away, that was for sure.

  And that was all he knew, when it came down to it.

  Those were the facts.

  Turning down the corridor that led to the mortuary, he thought of the crystals Sue had given him. He reached into his breast pocket and took out the pale-blue stone. It would connect him with the purest part of himself, Sue had said, but how much purity did he have in him after everything that he had been through?

  16

  When Billy pressed the mortuary bell, Fowler opened the door and then looked past him, into the corridor, as if he expected Billy to have brought his wife with him.

  “Everything all right?” he said.

  Billy nodded. “Everything’s fine.”

  “You took your time.”

  “Sorry. Nothing I could do.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Fowler said. “She wasn’t any trouble.”

  Billy suspected that this line had been rehearsed, but he gave Fowler the obligatory smile. To most people, a bobby’s sense of humour would seem tasteless, if not actually sick, but then most people didn’t have to cope with what bobbies had to cope with. Billy thought of the time Neil gave the kiss of life to a man who had been thrown through a windscreen. Thanks to Neil, the man survived, though his entire face had to be reconstructed. Neil won a commendation from the Chief Superintendent, and his name appeared in the local paper. He didn’t make a big song and dance about it. In fact, he only mentioned it once, and that was later that night, in the equipment room. “I don’t know much about that bloke,” Neil said, “but I can tell you one thing: he’d had an Indian.” Neil paused to allow the laughter to die down. “Chicken Madras, I think it was.” A sense of humour. You wouldn’t be able to carry on without one. It’s how you protect yourself.

  Taking over as loggist, Billy saw that he’d been gone for more than half an hour. Fowler had been right to draw his attention to it. He would have to tell Sue not to turn up like that again. It made him look unprofessional. It was humiliating too.

  “Well,” Fowler said, “back to those corridors.”

  “Thanks very much for filling in,” Billy said. “I appreciate it.”

  Fowler looked at his feet and nodded, then he lifted his head again and gave Billy a lopsided grin.

  When the constable had left, Billy sat down at the table. It was still almost two hours until his first real break, but he didn’t feel like doing any paperwork. He poured himself another coffee. Half a cup. The lights on the ceiling gave off a faint mechanical sound, somewhere between a whine and a buzz, and a regular but spaced-out beep-beep-beep was coming from the coroner’s office, which meant that Fowler had failed to answer the phone, and somebody had left a message. The noise didn’t irritate Billy, as his young blonde colleague had assumed it would; if anything, he found it comforting, like a heartbeat, a vital sign. Sue would be on the A14 by now, he thought. The road would be quiet. Just the occasional lorry heading east to catch the night ferry.

  He took out his mobile. If he sent Sue a text, it would seal the rare good note on which they had parted. Hope u got home safely, he wrote. Lets have b/fast 2gether. Billyx. He hoped she had finally resigned herself to the fact that he had gone to work, as ludicrous as that sounded. After all, he was a policeman; he couldn’t pick and choose between assignments. And certainly, when they sat side by side at the picnic table, she had seemed contrite, realising, perhaps, that she had overstepped the mark. But these recent, wild mood-swings troubled him. Following the birth of Emma, she had shown such courage, such application, and he had drawn strength from her example. He’d come to rely on her to keep things stable. Now, though, he wasn’t sure if she was so reliable…

  Last spring, he had returned to the house at midnight to find her sitting in the kitchen. He could see from her eyes that she’d been crying. A bottle of wine stood on the table, half of it already gone. She had smoked a cigarette too, which was unlike her. He should have been home much earlier—his shift had ended at ten—but he had driven down to the estuary. He had sat in the dark with the heater on and listened to jazz. He’d been thinking about his father. The usual unfinished thoughts. Looking at Sue’s tear-stained face, he felt a certain guilt—or a sense of regret, at least—but he knew he would do the same again. He hung in the kitchen doorway, his arms held slightly away from his sides, as if he had fallen in the river and his uniform was wet.

  “I’m terrible,” Sue said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She glanced at him, and then away again. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

  Though tired, he pulled up a chair. “Tell me about it.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. Really.”

  He poured some wine into her glass and drank it. “Tell me, Sue,” he said. “It can’t be as bad as some of the things I’ve done.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed, but dubious as well, then lowered her head again.

  “Just tell me what’s troubling you,” he said. Then we can go to bed was the rest of the sentence, but he left it unspo
ken.

  She put both hands up to her face, using the middle finger of each hand to smooth the tears from beneath her eyes. “You remember when I went to Whitby last year?”

  “Yes. You took Emma with you.”

  “I almost killed her.” Sue kept quite still, her hands in her lap now, not daring to look at him. “I don’t mean accidentally.”

  He stared at her lowered head, the white line of her parting.

  “I didn’t plan it,” she went on. “At least, I don’t think I did. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.” She glanced at him quickly, through her hair, then let out a short, oddly resonant laugh.

  He wasn’t sure what to say to her, but he also realised that he couldn’t leave too long a silence, and he knew he couldn’t judge.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said quietly.

  The journey north took longer than she’d expected, Sue told him, but it was only when they arrived at their hotel that Emma started playing up.

  “She would have been tired by then,” Billy said.

  Sue nodded. “You know how she gets.”

  She was in the car-park, trying to unload the car, and Emma kept wandering out into the road. She spoke to Emma calmly, warning her, then she tried to bribe her, then she shouted. None of it worked. In the end, she had to half carry, half drag Emma up to their room, with Emma bellowing the whole way, that awful, almost inhuman bellowing she did, and all in front of the other guests, who were watching from the lounge.

  “Sometimes you want to punch her on the jaw,” Sue said. “Just knock her out. Like they do in films.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Billy said.

  “Well,” Sue said, “you’d know, I suppose.”

  They stayed in their room that evening and ate the sandwiches and chocolate that were left over from the journey; she couldn’t face the dining-room, not with all those people staring. Next morning, the weather was bright and clear. She stood at the window in her pyjamas, trying to shut the jabber of cartoons out of her head. Sun slanted across the hotel car-park. They would climb up to East Cliff, she decided. Visit the ruined abbey.