Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  As they crossed the swing-bridge, Emma walked with her head tilted back and her mouth open, watching the seagulls as they wheeled, shrieking, above the harbour. The path to East Cliff was steep, and paved with slippery flagstones, but the two of them took it slowly, holding hands. By the time they reached the top, a cold wind was blowing in off the sea. It was a weekday, out of season; they were the only people there.

  When Emma saw the abbey, she turned to Sue, her eyes glinting behind her spectacles. “Like Hunchback,” she said.

  Billy grinned. “She loves that video.”

  Later, as they explored the graveyard, Sue told Emma the story of Count Dracula. This was where he’d landed, she said, here in Whitby, during a ferocious storm. She led Emma towards the cliff-edge, thinking they might be able to work out where the vampire’s ship had run aground. Leaning forwards from the waist, hands clenched and pressed against her hips, Emma peered down—she was imagining how Dracula had changed into a great black dog and leapt ashore, perhaps, or else she was simply hypnotised by the rhythmic creasing and folding of the waves—and in that moment, as they stood next to each other, no more than twelve inches from the edge, Sue thought, She could fall, and then, without a beat, I could push her. It was a drop of at least two hundred feet. She wouldn’t have survived. Couldn’t have. I could push her now, Sue thought, and that would be the end of it. She hesitated for several seconds, then she took a step backwards. She was behind Emma now, but near enough to be partly covered by her shadow. All our troubles would be over. She stood in her daughter’s shadow, and she came so close to reaching out that her hands seemed to throb.

  A terrible accident. A tragedy.

  And since they were alone on that bleak cliff-top, who would have been able to prove otherwise?

  She stepped back so abruptly that she bruised her leg on a gravestone. “Emma,” she said, “I think we should leave now.”

  “Leave,” Emma said. “Go down.”

  “That’s right, my darling. It’s lunchtime.” Sue reached for Emma’s hand and gripped it tightly.

  “Fish and chips.”

  Sue smiled. “If you like.”

  In half an hour they were sitting in a restaurant on the waterfront, their cheeks glowing from the wind.

  Sue’s eyes fixed on Billy’s face. “I came that close.” She measured a gap with her thumb and forefinger. A very narrow gap.

  “It’s not just you,” Billy said. “I’ve thought the same thing.”

  She pulled away from him. “You have?”

  He poured another glass of wine. “Not exactly the same,” he said. “I just used to wish that she hadn’t been born.”

  Except no, he thought, as soon as he had spoken, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Emma never came into it, not as a person. It was much more abstract than that. What he wished was that they’d been dealt a different hand. But Sue’s eyes had already drifted to the kitchen wall. She looked infinitely sad, and he knew that she was thinking about her only child—her brightness, and her burden. If Sue was ever out for very long, he would find Emma sitting by the window in the lounge, watching the road. Waiting for Mummy, she would say, and her voice would have something of the goose’s honk about it, as always. But Mummy’s going to be late, he’d say. She would glare malevolently at him through her thick spectacles. Put you in the tower.

  “It hasn’t exactly been easy,” he said. “If we didn’t have thoughts like that sometimes, we wouldn’t be human.”

  He wasn’t sure he was right, actually. It was just something to say. But at least they were equally at fault.

  “The main thing is, you didn’t do it,” he said.

  “I could have,” she said. “I almost did.”

  She didn’t want him to dismiss the urge she had felt as a one-off, an aberration—the exception to the rule. It was serious, and real, and it was there all the time. That was what she was trying to tell him. It’s there all the time.

  “You didn’t, though,” he said again, more gently. “You haven’t.” He left a silence, and then he took a risk. “You won’t.”

  Getting up off his chair, Billy shivered suddenly and rubbed his arms. He thought he understood why Sue had begged him not to go to work that evening. She was aware of the fragility of things. Their life together. Their foothold in the world. She might feel neglected, undermined as well. She might even suspect him. Not that he was driving down to the Orwell estuary and sitting in a parked car on his own—though that was bad enough, maybe—but simply that there was often an hour in his schedule that wasn’t accounted for. Perhaps she imagined he was seeing someone…And now this job with so much grief and terror surrounding it, and so much rage—the way that could eat into your thoughts without your knowing. Something might give, something might crumple or blow, and then all the horrors would descend. She was afraid for him, for herself—for the whole family. The wall protecting them was so very thin. In fact, it was a miracle that it had held for as long as it had.

  17

  There was half an inch of coffee in the bottom of his cup, and though he knew it would have gone cold ages ago he drank it down, then leaned back in his chair and stretched, a loud, creaky sigh coming out of him, the kind of sound you don’t make unless you’re alone. It had taken him forty minutes to complete Rebecca’s continuation sheets—Nickname(s)/ Alias(es)… Becky, Becca—and it had only confirmed his anxieties.

  When Billy walked into the Williamses’ house on Sunday afternoon, the radiators were icy, and there was dirt everywhere. On his way to the lounge, he glanced into the kitchen. Food had been thrown on the floor, and the sink was piled high with washing-up. Rubbish hung from the door-handles in Asda bags. There was something rotting in the microwave. It looked like part of a pizza.

  The mother’s boyfriend, Gary Fletcher, objected when Billy announced that he would have to search all the rooms in the house, but Billy told him that he was required to do so under Section 17 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe them; it was the law. When children were reported missing, he said, they often turned out to be at home, or else somewhere in the vicinity, at the house of a neighbour, or a friend. He told them the story he always told, how once, a few years ago, a boy of four had been found hiding inside a sofa in his own front room. If Rebecca had really disappeared, though, a search was crucial, since it might offer some clue as to her intentions or her whereabouts. Had she left a note? Were any of her clothes missing? Had she taken a coat with her? Also—and this he didn’t say, for obvious reasons—a search would give the police a picture of the family: what type of people they were, how they lived.

  After he had been through every room, Billy had talked to the couple in the lounge. During the interview Fletcher drank three cans of Special Brew. He used to work at B & Q, he said, but he’d been fired. One of the supervisors had stitched him up. Karen Williams was nodding, but Billy didn’t think she had heard a single word; the gesture was just a reflex, a habit, a way of taking part without attracting attention to herself or having to make a real contribution. He wondered if she was on drugs. She had the brittle, washed-out look of someone who was barely coping. There were two other children, a nine-year-old boy called Dwight, and a girl of two. Neither of them was anything to do with Fletcher. Nor, presumably, was Rebecca. The toddler—Chantelle—had a nappy on, and nothing else. In an unheated house. In November.

  Sitting in the mortuary, Billy leant over the misper form and studied the school photo that he had glued into the space provided. Rebecca had a plucky air about her, but he saw a certain apprehension too. Her lips were pale-mauve, and her teeth had a greyish cast to them. Her smile was forced and unconvincing; she’d had very little to put into it. Her hair hadn’t been brushed. She was close to being at the end of her resources.

  Some of her classmates had been picking on her, Karen revealed, late on in the interview, as if she had only just remembered. Once, Rebecca had been tied to a tree and left there. Another time, two boys h
ad whipped her. They’d used a car aerial, apparently. Marks/Scars/ Tattoos/Body Piercings… Scars on legs and buttocks. Two–three inches long. Billy asked whether they had lodged a formal complaint with the school authorities. They’d gone down there, Fletcher said, but the head teacher wouldn’t see them. Bastard. Fletcher was one of those people who think of themselves as permanently wronged: he took no responsibility for anything, and nothing was ever his fault. The dynamic between him and Karen was tense but lacklustre. There was almost no eye contact, and Karen deferred to Fletcher constantly in a way that made Billy wonder whether Fletcher hit her. On another day, he might have been taking Fletcher down to the station to be charged. Different paperwork in that case, of course. A Domestic Violence/Incident report.

  Billy asked if there was anything that Rebecca particularly liked doing. Shrugging, Fletcher reached for another can, opened it and tossed the ring-pull on the table.

  “Karen?” Billy said.

  “She’s always on at us to take her to the zoo,” Karen said, “but we can’t afford it, can we.” She sent a wary, hunted look in Fletcher’s direction, which he affected not to notice, then she lit a cigarette.

  From the back of the house came the sound of glass shattering. Fletcher jerked upright in his chair. “Dwight?” he shouted. “Come here!” Billy looked at the doorway, but the boy didn’t appear.

  Ash from the end of Karen’s cigarette landed on the carpet. Fletcher sank back, scowling, and lifted his can towards his mouth. “Little fucker,” he muttered, and then drank.

  Back at the station that evening, the phone rang. It was Karen Williams, calling to tell him that she had spoken to Rebecca.

  “So, you know,” Karen said in her sloppy, distant voice, “no need to do anything.”

  “Where was she?” Billy asked.

  “At her cousin’s—I think…”

  Leafing through his report again, Billy checked that he had ticked the High Risk box. A few moments later, he took the piece of jet from around his neck and placed it on the photo of Rebecca, just below the V-neck of her school jersey. It will protect you. After work on Sunday he had driven straight home, needing company, distraction, but he had forgotten that Sue was going to the cinema with friends, and that he had agreed to babysit. When he walked in through the front door, she was facing him across the hall, one arm already in her coat, the other bent behind her and searching blindly for the opening.

  “Don’t forget that Emma needs a bath,” she said, “and I haven’t given her any supper yet.”

  That night, when he had sung Emma to sleep, he poured himself a large vodka and sat down at the table in the kitchen. He kept returning to the section on the form that said Other unlisted factors the officer believes should influence the level at which this assessment is weighted. Rebecca had been missing for most of Saturday, but Karen hadn’t bothered to call the police until late on Sunday morning. She said she thought Rebecca was in her room. She hadn’t checked, though. If a girl Rebecca’s age went missing, and she had wild friends or a history of truancy, the police would start worrying only when she had been gone for two days, but with a quiet girl like Rebecca, you’d start worrying much sooner. In the end, he wasn’t sure he believed what Fletcher and Karen had told him. Who was to say that the abuse they’d described hadn’t taken place at home? Fletcher unemployed, frustrated, drinking; Karen on drugs, or in denial…They could easily have made up that story about the two boys and the aerial. It would be interesting to find out if there was any record of their visit to the school.

  The following day, the Monday, when the phone-call turned out to be for him, Billy thought it might be the community officer—he had left a message for her outlining his concerns—but it was Phil Shaw, about another job entirely…

  Though Billy had put the report away, the look Rebecca had in the photograph still haunted him. I’ve tried, her face seemed to be saying, I really have, but it’s no use. He let his mind wander in the hope that it might offer him a strategy, a course of action that would guarantee her safety. It depressed him to think that he might already have done everything he could, just as it had depressed him on Sunday night. When Sue got back from the cinema, she found him sitting in the kitchen with his head in his hands, the vodka bottle nearly empty.

  18

  “I was planning to look in earlier,” Phil said when Billy opened the door, “but things kept coming up.”

  Stepping into the mortuary, he seemed to scour the air with his nose, as if he relied on his sense of smell for a reading of the situation. There was a distinctly feral aspect to the sergeant, now Billy thought about it. There always had been.

  Phil put both hands flat on the table, on either side of the scene log, and studied the recent entries. “I heard Sue was here.”

  Billy swore under his breath. He’d been hoping to keep that from Phil. “She stopped in about an hour ago,” he said. “There was a problem with Emma.”

  “It’s sorted now, though?”

  “Yes.”

  Still bent over the scene log, Phil looked at Billy across one shoulder, and Billy saw a question form: Is everything all right at home? He also knew this was a question that Phil probably wouldn’t ask. The last time he’d had Phil over to the house, they had got drunk in the garden, and when Sue went to bed, Phil had started talking about his life—his wife had walked out, no children luckily—and there had been no bitterness in him, just a wistful quality, a kind of disbelief: that it should happen to him…On that occasion Billy hadn’t pried, or pressed for details; he had simply waited until Phil had finished, then murmured, Fuck and poured Phil another drink. There was nothing else to say. If you were in the police, you rarely asked about each other’s marriages because you knew what the answer was going to be. All right? It was almost never all right. Police officers worked anti-social hours. They drank too much and slept too little. They ate junk. They were society’s dustmen, always cleaning up, dealing with the rubbish that no one else wanted to deal with. Most of them had gone into the job with good intentions, thinking they could be of use, but they soon realised that the task was well nigh impossible. If you closed one crack house down, a new one sprang up somewhere else. Book one prostitute, and three more would be doing business round the corner. As for burglary, forget it. Recently, a constable in his fifties had told Billy that he was now arresting the sons and grandsons of people he had arrested when he first started out. The crime figures might go up or down, but nothing changed, not really. The pressure on police officers was immense, and their home lives suffered. Phil knew that better than anyone.

  “You need a break, Billy?” Phil said. “You want to go outside and stretch your legs?”

  With those words, Billy understood that, as far as Phil was concerned, the matter was closed.

  “I’ll wait till midnight, sarge,” he said. “It’s not long now.” He watched Phil yawn, then rub his eyes. “You’re probably the one who needs a break.”

  “When this is over, I’m going to sleep for a week.”

  “A week? They’ll never give you a week.”

  “Right.” Jaw clenched tight, Phil smiled another of his grim smiles.

  When Phil had gone, Billy returned to his chair. Yes, the pressures were immense. It wasn’t just the long hours, the bad food and the lack of sleep. It was all the temptations that came your way as well. Women often threw themselves at police officers. Was it because police officers were confident, decisive characters who knew how to handle themselves? Or was it because they were supposed to represent the straight and narrow, and there was a kind of thrill in leading them astray? Or was it just the uniform? He didn’t know. It definitely happened, though. On Saturday nights, when he parked outside a club like Pals at closing time, women would dance in front of the police van, taking off half their clothes. The previous summer, a dark-haired girl in a short skirt had leaned over the bonnet and given the windscreen a long, slow kiss. Tongue and everything. Sooner or later, most policemen weakened. They had one-
night stands, quick flings—full-blown affairs. They would bring their lovers to parties in the police station and leave their girlfriends or their wives at home. They would claim to be on a training course and all the while they’d be on holiday with another woman. If you met a bobby who told you he’d never been over the side you didn’t entirely trust him. Nobody could be that bloody perfect.

  Once, in the mid-nineties, Billy had been called to Sir Alf Ramsay Way on a grade-one response. A prostitute had thrown a brick through the plate-glass window of a car showroom. Jade was known to the Ipswich police; she was a good-looking girl when she wasn’t on the smack. Poor old Sir Alf, Billy thought as he drove across town; he’d turn in his grave if he knew that the street named after him was now a red-light area. By the time he arrived at the scene, Jade had a friend with her. The friend’s name was Carly, and she caught Billy’s eye the moment he stepped on to the pavement. He wasn’t making excuses, but Shena Coates had killed herself a week or two before, and then, a few days later, in a hostel, a dead baby had been found at the bottom of a bed. As a policeman, there were times when your life was so sickening and brutal that you felt you’d earned whatever came along, and Carly had such a cheeky, dirty look about her…For the six weeks it lasted, she always wanted him to do it the same way—from behind. By the end, he knew the back of her head like the back of his own hand. The soft groove that ran vertically from the top of her spine into her dyed blonde hair, the smooth curve of bone behind each ear. The smell of her neck: Anais Anais and the sweat of guilty fucking…“You’re rubbish, you are. You should be at home, with your wife.” Though she had been wearing very little when she said that. She’d been sitting on the bed and she’d given him a steady look that came up at him through her eyelashes, and then she’d moved her knees apart ever so slightly, not so he could see anything, but so he thought about it, what was there. Carly. Seven years on, he could still remember the taste of her earlobes, faintly metallic where they’d been pierced…