But infidelity could be subtler than that, and more contaminating. Though he was in the mortuary, he could no longer smell formaldehyde or disinfectant; now it was jasmine suddenly, a heady, cloying cloud of jasmine shot through with the much keener scent of lemons, and he found himself remembering the holiday he’d had with Sue and Emma in Newman’s villa in the hills above Cannes, and in particular the night when he met Newman’s girlfriend—if that was the word…
Billy had only agreed to go because Newman wasn’t there, but Newman called halfway through their holiday to say that he would be returning earlier than expected, and though Billy tried to reassure himself—in the five years since Newman’s surprise visit to the house, perhaps he would have mellowed—the thought of spending forty-eight hours in Newman’s company filled him with unease, if not with dread. “We should have left the moment we heard,” he told Sue later. “We should have booked into a hotel.” Sue thought he was overreacting. It hadn’t been that bad, she said. She didn’t know, though, did she?
Billy was in their bedroom high up in the house when Newman arrived. Through the open window he heard the murmur of a car on the drive, and then voices, Newman’s to start with, silky but authoritative, followed by a woman’s. Hers had a blur to it, and he sensed right away that English wasn’t her first language.
He didn’t meet her until shortly before dinner. He was sitting on the terrace with Emma, drinking a beer, when a young woman appeared in the doorway. She had long black hair, and wore a sheer black dress that clung to her body. She was from somewhere like Japan, he thought. As she was about to venture out on to the terrace, Emma sprang forwards, blocking the doorway with one arm.
“Password,” she said sternly.
“Emma, it’s all right,” Billy said. “I think you can let her through.”
Emma grudgingly lowered her arm.
When the woman came over, Billy explained that Emma was just playing a game. If you didn’t know the secret password, it meant you were the enemy. You would have to be locked up. Put in the tower. The woman had been watching Emma, but now she turned her depthless black eyes on Billy, giving him a look that was somehow both startled and intrigued, and seemed to bear little or no relation to what she’d just been told. Her name was Lulu, he learned when they sat down, and she was Korean. She worked in a casino.
Emma had never met anyone like Lulu before—Ipswich had a fair number of Bengalis and Iranians, Iraqis too, but very few people from South-East Asia—and she was utterly besotted. Perhaps that was why the evening went so smoothly. Newman seemed relaxed, almost benign, chuckling over Emma’s sudden infatuation.
After dinner, Lulu let Emma brush her hair.
“Beautiful.” Standing behind Lulu, brush in hand, Emma’s whole face appeared to be radiating light.
“No, you’re beautiful,” Lulu said over her shoulder.
“No, you!” Emma boomed. She’d never been able to stand being contradicted.
Later, when it was time for bed, Emma took Lulu by the hand and led her away. After a while, Billy went upstairs to help Lulu out, only to meet her on the landing. She had started telling Emma a story, she said, but Emma had fallen asleep almost immediately.
“She gets very tired,” Billy said.
“How do you call it,” Lulu said, “what she has?”
“Down’s syndrome.”
“She’s very different…”
“There isn’t a cell in her body that’s the same as yours or mine.” The moment the words had left his mouth, Billy felt as if he’d said something oddly intimate.
Lulu only nodded. “Like a dolphin,” she said, then glanced at him quickly.
“It’s all right.” Billy grinned. “I think I know what you mean.”
When they returned to the dining-room, there was a CD playing, some French singer Billy had never heard of, but Sue and her father were nowhere to be seen. Lulu poured Billy a glass of champagne, and they sat out on the terrace. The warm air shifted; the leaves of a palm tree scraped against each other. He asked Lulu about her job. It paid well, she told him, but the hours were long. The dresses they wore didn’t have pockets, which was supposed to stop them stealing chips, but one girl had a special technique; though Lulu didn’t go into any detail, Billy was left in little doubt as to what this might involve. She said she wasn’t allowed to give out her phone number, or even accept tips. Men were always hitting on her—that was the phrase she used—sometimes women too, but fraternisation with the patrons was strictly forbidden.
“So Peter’s not a gambler, then,” Billy said slyly.
Lulu sipped her champagne. “I met him at a party,” she said. “On a yacht.”
As they were talking, Newman appeared in the garden below, stepping backwards, then sideways, a woman in his arms. It took Billy a few moments to realise that it was Sue, and he felt an instant surge of resentment. There was no reason why they shouldn’t dance together, of course—for all he knew, it was a ritual of theirs—and yet, somehow, everything Newman did seemed calculated to exclude him. No, it was more pointed than that. He behaved as though he was quite unaware of Billy—as though Billy didn’t actually exist.
“Fathers and daughters,” Lulu said, following his gaze. “Always special.”
Billy looked at her smooth face—the wide cheekbones, the eyes that seemed so bottomless, the luscious crushed rose of a mouth.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“You’re lovely,” he told her.
He was speaking as an older man, and not one who wanted anything from her, and she understood this perfectly.
“Thank you,” she said. “Would you like to dance as well?”
He shook his head. “I’d only tread on your toes.”
“Maybe I should open more champagne.”
“Now you’re talking.”
He was smiling now. The same smile. Apart from that one flash of jealousy, which Lulu had extinguished with just five words, the evening had been marked by a rare innocence, an utter lack of subterfuge. Something so unusually pure about the whole experience.
It didn’t last.
In the morning he woke when Sue got up, but lulled by the crisp, plump sound of a tennis ball being knocked about on the court next door he dropped back into a deep sleep, and by the time he dressed and went downstairs, Sue and Emma had gone out. In the dining-room, Newman and Lulu were having breakfast.
Newman waited until Billy was seated, then fixed him with a gloating look. “You ever had a Korean?”
Billy glanced across the table at Lulu, but she was paying close attention to the kiwi fruit on her plate. Slicing the end off, she carefully peeled the rough brown skin. The sleeve of her robe had fallen back on her right forearm, and he could see a raw red mark encircling her wrist.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Newman said.
Gazing out into the garden, Lulu placed a segment of fruit in her mouth. She gave the impression that she was alone at the table—or that she didn’t understand the language that was being spoken.
“If you’re interested,” Newman went on, “I’m sure I could set something up…”
There are certain people who have to be treated with extreme caution, or else avoided altogether. They’re like toadstools, or coral snakes—all bright colours on the surface, and poison underneath.
Billy wanted to apologise to Lulu, but he didn’t have the chance to speak to her again. She left that morning, and didn’t say goodbye—not even to Emma, whose face crumpled when she was told. She stood all alone on the drive in the brilliant sunlight, head thrown forwards, fingers splayed. “Lulu,” she bellowed. “Want Lulu.”
It took most of the day to console her.
The following evening they flew back to England.
Afterwards, Billy would often wonder if Lulu had been coerced. Could she have been drugged, for instance, or blackmailed? Or had she been a willing participant? She could have been trying to please Newman, he supposed, she could have
done it out of love for him—though she didn’t have the look, at breakfast, of somebody in love…It was always possible, of course, that she’d been paid. How much would that cost, he wondered, on the Côte d’Azur? Then again, what if it was something Lulu had specifically requested? It was what excited her. She needed it. The situation was so ripe with ambiguity that Billy never felt he got any closer to a definitive interpretation. In the end, all he could be sure of was the extent of Newman’s corruption, and the ambivalent, insidious nature of the world he inhabited, how it could both repel you and seduce you.
He glanced at his watch. Only twenty minutes to go, and then he’d have an hour off. He was nearly halfway through his shift. He could afford to relax a little.
19
He couldn’t remember leaving the hospital, but clearly he was no longer there. He didn’t panic, though. He wasn’t even anxious. Instead, he seemed to give himself up to his new surroundings. He was sitting at a wooden table. In front of him was a tin ashtray and a lighted candle in a red glass dish. Near the ashtray was a small dark ring where somebody had put a drink down. The brightly coloured paper-chains that looped above his head told him that it would soon be Christmas. People stood in groups all round him, talking and laughing. It was the saloon bar in a pub, he thought, or the private-function room in a hotel. Or, possibly, it was the back room in a working-men’s club. What had he come here for? And who with? He didn’t know; he had no memory of having arrived. There was a loud crackling sound, then an early Beatles number blared out of the speakers that were mounted on brackets halfway up the wall. He recognised the song. He even knew some of the words. A young woman in a floral print dress leaned down and spoke to him, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Was she asking him to dance? He watched as she stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and turned away from him.
As he sat there, enjoying the music—it was years since he had listened to the Beatles—a couple stepped out on to the dance floor. They were young, no more than twenty or twenty-one. The man wore a grey suit with wide lapels. His complexion was pasty, and there was something loose and twisted about his mouth. The girl’s hair was a bright-blonde beehive, and she was dressed in a pink sleeveless blouse, a white skirt decorated with small pink squares, and white-leather boots that almost reached her knees. They danced rock-and-roll-style. The man held the girl at arm’s length, bringing her in close and twirling her round, then allowing the gap between them to open up again, but no matter how fast they moved, no matter how recklessly they whirled and spun, his right hand never let go of hers. The contact was always there.
Once, though, halfway through a song, the girl spoke into the man’s ear, then broke away from him. Walking to the edge of the dance floor, she picked up a cigarette that was already alight, tapped a length of ash off the end of it and brought it to her lips. The man watched her from where he was, feet shifting in time to the music, loosely clenched hands held close to his chest. A lock of hair fell across his forehead. He reached up to push it back. The girl took a long, slow drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke in his direction. Almost immediately, she inhaled again, the tip of the cigarette a vivid red now. She lit a new cigarette from the old one, which she crushed out beneath the heel of her boot, then she rested the new cigarette on the rim of an ashtray and moved back towards her partner, smoke pouring from her nostrils. They went on dancing as before, stepping close to each other, then stepping back, the distance between them tense and yet elastic, the connection plain for all to see…
Then, without any warning, there was a shriek as the needle was roughly snatched from the record. Someone switched the house lights on. The young couple came to a standstill, his right hand gripping hers, their faces motionless, and bleached of all expression by the harsh white glare. It was so quiet that Billy thought he could hear them panting. Smoke lifted casually from the cigarette she’d balanced on the ashtray.
Billy half rose out of his chair, unable to work out where he was or what had happened. The green of the mortuary doors, the smudged white of the fridges. The intermittent beeping of the answer-machine…Ah yes. Yes, of course. He grinned almost foolishly, then blinked and rubbed his eyes. What time was it? Three minutes to midnight. Lowering himself back down into his chair, he waited for somebody to come and relieve him.
20
Billy zipped up his anorak, then walked out on to the road that ran past the front of the hospital. There were fewer reporters now, and they ignored him. They knew he wasn’t authorised to speak to them—and besides, he didn’t have anything to say. Since Friday afternoon the body of Britain’s most notorious woman had been lying under police guard in the West Suffolk hospital. That was all the news there was. In the morning Phil would brief the press on the details and timing of the funeral. He would inform them that he had arranged for the hearse to slow down on one particular bend in the hospital grounds so they could get the photographs they needed. In return for this concession, he hoped they would agree not to disrupt or in any way interfere with the progress of the cortège.
Passing Rheumatology, Billy followed the road down to the picnic area where he and Sue had had their conversation earlier. It was colder now, and the treetops stirred in the wind. He sat on the same bench, facing out into the dark. He had dozed off, perhaps only for a minute, but he had seen the two lovers. The two murderers. He had gate-crashed a Christmas party that was being held by the chemical firm that had employed them, the party at which they were supposed to have met properly for the first time, and the Beatles song that had been playing in his dream had stayed with him—its bright voices and its crisp, slightly gawky guitar:
When your bird is broken
Will it—
At that point, the needle had skidded across the record, and the music had cut out. In his dream he had imagined that someone had collided with the turntable. A moment of clumsiness or tipsiness. Now, though, half an hour later, he saw it differently. He thought it more likely that part of him had needed to stop the couple before they could go any further. He’d brought the whole thing to an end while they were still free of guilt. It was as if he couldn’t bear to see any more.
He leaned back, the edge of the picnic table pressing against his spine.
“It wasn’t like that,” came a voice.
He turned slowly. At first, there was only the table’s splintered surface, and the slender trunks of silver birches, and an unlit building just beyond…But then he saw a figure standing twenty feet away, half-hidden by the trees, a red dot glowing at about head height. Glowing, then fading. Glowing again.
“It wasn’t that dramatic.”
Oddly enough, he didn’t feel frightened, or even surprised. At some level, perhaps, he had been prepared for something like this—or else he was still in the dream’s soft grip, and normal reactions had no purchase. He looked back towards the hospital. Lights shone in the windows; a group of reporters huddled by the entrance to A and E. He thought about calling the control room on his radio. What would he have said, though?
“Do you like my suit?” came the voice again. “I got it from a catalogue.”
A Manchester accent—even after all these years…
He turned round again. She had left the shadows, and was standing on the pavement, under a streetlamp. The suit was a lilac colour, and her blouse was white with a scalloped collar. Her hair was a dull dyed brown.
“You must be cold,” he said.
She seemed to look at him steadily, then she began to laugh.
Rising to his feet, he moved off in the opposite direction, up the slope. The bones in his legs felt spongy. There was the smell of pine needles and damp bark. He took a deep breath. As he let it out, he heard her speak again.
“Everyone was dancing, not just us.”
When he reached the path that would take him down the west side of the hospital, he hesitated, then glanced over his shoulder. There was nobody under the streetlamp, or in among the trees.
There never had been
.
There couldn’t have been.
21
The wind eased. In the silence a firework burst softly, gold sparks dropping through the darkness to his right. But November the 5th was more than a fortnight ago…Strange how people cling to things. That woman under the street lamp. The murderer. A trick of the mind, of course—he had been talking to himself—and yet there had been a kind of authenticity about the experience. An attention to detail. The lilac suit, the dull brown hair. She’d even had a cigarette with her. He could hear her speaking, the voice flat, curiously deep and coarsened by years of heavy smoking.
It wasn’t like that.
Well, of course not. How could he possibly have known what it was like? And anyway, it had been a dream. He was exhausted, under pressure. He was not himself. If only Sue had let him have his nap…Instead, they had argued. Again. And nothing had been resolved.
He circled round behind the hospital. Parked cars, draughty doorways. To his left was the administration block where Eileen Evans had an office. Most of the windows were showing lights. Nobody was sleeping tonight—or not for too long, anyway.
Everyone was dancing, not just us.
In a brick bicycle shed opposite the Day Surgery Unit, he found some shelter from the wind, and taking out his mobile, he pressed “Contacts” and then “Neil.” When Neil answered, Billy could hear people shouting in the background. Gunshots too.
“Hold on,” Neil said, “I’ll turn it down.”
From the slur in his voice, it sounded as if Neil was drinking again. When he was thrown out of the force, he had lost everything, even his pension. “I gave them half my life,” he had said when Billy visited. “All those fucking years, and for what?” The last Billy heard, Neil was on the books of a firm that supplied security guards.
“Not working tonight?” Billy said.
“No. You?”
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