Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  His parents had told him that there were people called “strangers,” and that they might offer him a bag of sweets, or a ride in their car, and that he should always say “No, thank you,” but somehow, that afternoon, he forgot everything he’d been taught. Oddly enough, it was the woman’s harshness that drew him across the pavement. She didn’t make the slightest attempt to be friendly, let alone seductive. On the contrary. If he couldn’t be of any use to her, she would have to find somebody else, and he could see that thought annoyed her.

  “I wondered later,” Trevor said, his eyes wide now, “whether she might have been nervous, you know?” He paused. “I mean, what if I was one of the first?”

  At this point, Billy still wasn’t quite sure what Trevor was talking about, but he decided not to interrupt.

  Trevor went on. When he stopped at the kerb, the woman told him that she was lost. Did he know the area? He nodded. Good, she said. If he would just get into the car, maybe he could show her the way. Once again, there was no subtlety in her approach, nothing remotely clever or ingratiating. He asked her where she was going. He called her “Miss.” Instead of answering, she cocked her head, appraising him, and then said something about him looking bright as a button: if he couldn’t help her, she said, nobody could. Only then did he feel a flicker of misgiving. It was because she had flattered him. The hardness, the impatience—they were believable; they seemed real, and he trusted them. But the flattery felt different, like something shiny that wasn’t actually worth anything. So why did he get into the car? He didn’t have an explanation. It still puzzled him, even today. Round the front he went, her made-up eyes tracking him across the windscreen. When he reached the passenger’s side, the door was already open. All he had to do was climb in and pull it shut.

  “Give it a good slam,” the woman told him. “We don’t want you falling out now, do we?”

  Trevor looked away into the room. “Fuck,” he murmured, then reached for his drink and finished it. He poured himself another glass, right up to the brim, and held the bottle out to Billy, but Billy shook his head. He’d had enough.

  “It was so quiet,” Trevor said. “I don’t remember any noise at all.” He paused again. “No, wait, that’s wrong. Once, on a bend, I heard a motorbike. That was him, of course. He was following.”

  Only now did Billy understand what Trevor had been telling him, and he leaned forwards in his chair, clear-headed suddenly, as though all the alcohol had drained out of his body. “So you saw him too?” he said.

  Trevor closed his eyes. “We haven’t got to that bit yet.”

  They drove on for a while, and the woman kept her eyes fixed on the road. She braked, she indicated; everything was so normal that he forgot what he was doing there. Then he came to. She hadn’t asked him for directions; she hadn’t spoken to him at all, in fact. He glanced at her, and it wasn’t her nails or her hair that he saw, but her blunt nose and her jutting chin. Any glamour there might have been had gone, and he was beginning to suspect that something might be wrong.

  “I thought you were lost,” he murmured.

  The woman didn’t seem to hear him.

  Some time later, he said, “You haven’t asked me which way to go.”

  “We’re going to my gran’s house first,” she told him. “I forgot my gloves.”

  She parked in an area he didn’t recognise. It looked poorer than where he lived. Rubbish was blowing about: bubble-gum wrappers, pages from the paper, plastic bags. On the roof of a nearby house a TV aerial quivered. It was windy out that day. He brought his eyes back down. A brown bottle rolled across the pavement, then stopped and rolled the other way. He remembered the sound of that bottle with such clarity that it might have happened half an hour ago. But it was thirty years now, thirty years…

  “Come inside for a second,” the woman said. “Come and help me find those gloves.”

  He knew what she was up to. She was trying to make something that was actually a chore sound like a game—grown-ups were always doing that—but she wasn’t very good at it. There was no warmth in her voice, no sense of adventure or intrigue. He thought he’d better play along, though. If he didn’t she would only get cross.

  She came round to his side of the car and opened the door, then she took him by the hand and pulled him out. She hadn’t used his name, he realised. She hadn’t even asked him what he was called.

  “My name’s Trevor Lydgate,” he said. “What’s yours?”

  “Imagine,” Trevor said, putting a hand up to his forehead. “Imagine if she’d told me. Not that it would have meant anything to me. It wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone, not then.” He laughed a precarious laugh, high and thin, and then continued.

  Her hand still gripping his, they walked along a path next to a white fence. Her gran’s house was on the corner, at the end of the row. The woman opened the front door and pushed him into a narrow hallway. A cigarette-machine was fixed to the wall. He caught sight of his face in a chrome panel. He looked like someone pretending to be Trevor Lydgate, and had to turn away quickly because it made him feel strange. There was no sign of the woman’s gran. Maybe she’d gone out. He heard the motorbike again, much louder this time, and glanced over his shoulder to see where it was, but the woman was blocking his view. She seemed bigger now she was standing up. She seemed to fill the hall. As he tried to look past her, she gave him another push.

  “They’re probably upstairs,” she said.

  The gloves, she meant.

  Up they went. Him first, her following behind.

  She took him to a small room at the back of the house. There was hardly any furniture, just a two-bar electric fire and a single bed with a bare mattress. There was no carpet. Only boards. On the mattress was a Kodak camera. The curtains were drawn, but light from outside filtered through the flowery material, enough to see by. On the floor were some magazines, with men and women doing things to each other.

  The woman nodded when she saw that he had noticed them. “Have a look, if you like.”

  He shook his head.

  She seemed to have forgotten all about the gloves. She was just staring at him, and there was greed on her face, and also a kind of pride, an expression that he didn’t understand until much later.

  The air in the room was motionless and stale, and smelled of something vaguely familiar, but private, secret. It was a smell he knew, but not too well, and he couldn’t quite identify it. Mostly, he was trying not to look at the magazines.

  “It’s cold in here,” the woman muttered, and she bent to plug in the electric fire.

  A door opened and closed downstairs. He heard footsteps in the hall. The woman’s back stiffened, as if she were anxious or fearful, and that was when he panicked.

  The next few seconds were hard to piece together. What he saw wasn’t continuous. It came to him in vivid fragments. Flashes and splinters. As though the film of his life had been slashed to ribbons and then taped back together. He didn’t really know how he managed to get away. There were times when he found it impossible to believe. There were times when he thought he must have been in that room for longer, but part of him had shut down, blotting those bits out. There were times when he searched his body for traces of the things they must have done to him. There were times too when he felt that he might still be in there, and that all this—he waved a hand to indicate the room, the hotel, and everything outside and beyond—all this was just fantasy or wishful thinking.

  The woman was bent over, by the fire. He moved suddenly and fast, slipping past her, even though she was between him and the door. She let out a cry, as if, in attempting to escape, he had hurt her. Her hand clawed at him, but he eluded it. Then he was on the landing. A yellow wall, music coming from below. Through the banisters, he saw somebody walking up the stairs. A man. Head lowered, the man hadn’t noticed him. Trevor rounded the corner and hurled himself down the stairs so hard that he knocked the man off balance.

  He reached the front door without seemi
ng to have crossed the hall. The door flew inwards, hit the wall. Something shattered. He didn’t look back, and yet he had a memory of the man in the doorway, mouth crooked, one hand bleeding.

  He ran off down the street. The houses all looked the same. He had no idea where he was. An old lady came up the road towards him, but he was worried she might be the gran. He tore past her, as fast as he could go. He thought he heard the motorbike start up. Quick. Hide. He found a dustbin round the back of someone’s house and climbed inside. Luckily, it was almost empty. It still stank, though. When he opened the lid again, it was dark, and the streetlights had come on. Standing on the pavement, he hesitated. Tried to guess which way was home. His stomach twisted, and he did some diarrhoea. All down one leg. All runny. He stood there in his shorts, not knowing what to do.

  Some time went by. A woman turned the corner with a shopping bag. She wanted to take him home and clean him up, but he said he wasn’t allowed to go into strangers’ houses. He asked if she could telephone his parents and tell them where he was. He recited his number for her, the number he had learned by heart, then he stood out on the street and waited.

  When he saw them drive up in the car, he thought how innocent they looked. It was as if he was the parent and they were the children. He felt they needed to be protected. The fact that he had diarrhoea was useful because it gave them all something to talk about. He never told his parents the real story about that day. Not then, not ever. When they asked him what he was doing in Hattersley, he said he’d got on the wrong bus.

  “Then you were scared,” his mother said, “because you didn’t know where you were.”

  He looked at her gratefully. “Yes,” he said, and he was relieved that she had taken on the burden of thinking up a lie. He wasn’t sure he could have done it on his own.

  “Yes, I was scared,” he said.

  “You were lost,” his mother said.

  He nodded. He bit his bottom lip. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

  Trevor wiped his face with one hand, then reached for his wine. “I was in that house.” Unable to believe it, he shook his head, then glanced across at Billy. “The black hair. It was a wig, you see?” The skin on his face seemed to have tightened. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand,” Billy said, though he wasn’t quite sure how to react.

  Trevor finished his drink, but held on to the empty glass. “I’ve only told three people in my life,” he said. “My brother, my wife—and now you.”

  Billy was staring at the carpet, but he could feel Trevor’s eyes on him. Did Trevor expect something from him? If so, what? And why had Trevor told him, anyway? Because they’d got drunk together? Because he was a policeman? Because, once upon a time, they had been friends?

  The silence lasted. Billy felt hot. Leaning sideways, he looked at the radiator on the wall. The dial was set to 5. He turned it down to 2.

  “When did all this happen?” he asked eventually.

  “Nineteen sixty-four,” Trevor said. “November.”

  A child had been murdered at around that time, Billy thought, though he couldn’t remember which one.

  “I still think about that little boy,” Trevor said, “you know, the boy who wasn’t found.”

  Billy nodded.

  “I think of him lying in that lonely place,” Trevor said. “I just hope someone finds him one day. I’d hate to think he just stayed up there for ever, on the moors.”

  He fell silent again.

  “Most of all, though, I feel guilty,” he went on after a while, looking down into his empty glass. “Nothing happened to me. I got away.”

  “You were lucky—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Trevor said, cutting in with a kind of savagery. “I’m linked to them for ever, those children. The ones with the names we all know. Sometimes it’s like I can sense their presence—somewhere near by…”

  Billy watched as Trevor slowly lowered his face into his hands and began to cry again. There was another level to Trevor’s guilt, he realised. Not only had Trevor survived, but he had also kept the fact of his survival to himself. If he had told his parents what had happened—the woman in the white car, the man on the motorbike—if he had identified the house, it was possible that lives could have been saved. Billy rather hoped this thought hadn’t occurred to Trevor. It would be hard for him to bear.

  Now Trevor had started crying, he couldn’t stop. He was hunched over, only his hands separating his forehead from his knees. Billy sat beside him on the bed and put an arm round his shoulders. Trevor’s body felt rigid, as though every muscle had been stretched to breaking-point.

  Then, little by little, his breathing deepened. He had cried himself to sleep, just as a child might. Billy still had his arm round Trevor, though Trevor was leaning against him now. Trevor smelled of deodorant and alcohol. Once or twice, he jerked so violently that Billy was afraid they might both be thrown to the floor.

  The next time Billy glanced at the clock on the TV, it said two twenty-five. He must have dozed off for a while. Trevor was facing away from him now, lying across the bottom of the bed, the soles of his shoes pressed against Billy’s thigh. One of his hands was curled into a fist and held close to his mouth. Billy did a quick calculation in his head. Northampton was still a good two hours’ drive away, and he was due in court at ten. He would have to be up by seven—at the latest.

  He took off Trevor’s shoes and socks, then his trousers, and shifted him until he was lengthways on the bed. Trevor still hadn’t stirred. Billy couldn’t help noticing that Trevor’s legs were smooth and white, and utterly without hair. Somehow this seemed in keeping with the story he had told, the horror he had so narrowly escaped. Gently, Billy drew the covers over him.

  Ssshh…fast asleep.

  Although he very much doubted that Trevor would wake, he still didn’t feel he could leave. Not after what he’d heard. Switching off the lights, he loosened his tie and dropped into the chair by the window. It was a small modern armchair, with a low back, but he had slept in more uncomfortable places. Through the curtains behind him came a dim glow, citrus yellow, and Trevor’s story came with it—the bare mattress, the camera, the dirty magazines. Billy emptied his mind, then folded his hands over his stomach and shut his eyes. In the sealed hush of the hotel room, he could hear Trevor’s breathing, deep and ragged.

  He woke what felt like moments later to see Trevor standing in front of the tall, thin mirror near the door. Though it was still dark, the spill of light from the bathroom allowed him to watch Trevor as he tied his tie. Trevor was wearing a suit and humming quietly to himself. He behaved as if he was on his own in the room.

  Billy yawned and stretched, making more noise than was strictly necessary.

  “I can’t sleep sitting up,” Trevor said. “I can never sleep on planes, for instance.”

  “In my job you get used to it.” Billy yawned again. “What’s the time?”

  “Nearly seven.”

  Billy stood up and parted the curtains. The sky was a dull grey-blue. He could just make out a smooth grass bank and the section of main road that lay beyond. “I’m going back to my room,” he said. “I need a shower.”

  “Yeah,” Trevor said, then sighed.

  He seemed the less embarrassed of the two. He had humiliated himself, and that gave him a kind of edge. As for Billy, he was keenly aware of the need to be delicate. He knew too much—more, he suspected, than Trevor had intended to tell him—and he had to imagine, for the time being, that what he’d heard was just a story. Certainly he had to forget how he had held Trevor in his arms while Trevor cried himself to sleep. They were two old friends who had run into each other by chance, and they’d had too much to drink, as old friends often do. That was all there was to it. Should they ever run into each other again, there would be nothing to say. They would probably act as if they hadn’t seen each other. What had happened the night before could never be repeated, or referred to, or even reme
mbered—not out loud, anyway.

  Billy moved towards the door. One hand on the handle, he turned and looked back into the room. Trevor was opening his briefcase. Billy watched as Trevor took out a sheet of paper and frowned at it. He had the distinct impression that Trevor was only pretending to be busy, and that, as soon as he was alone, he would sit down on the bed and simply stare into space.

  “Maybe see you at breakfast,” Billy said.

  Trevor looked round quickly, as if he had forgotten Billy was there. “What?” he said. “Oh, sure. OK.”

  But Trevor would have finished his breakfast before Billy appeared in the food barn. Trevor would make certain of that. He might even skip the meal altogether. Just get in the car and drive.

  “Take care,” Billy said.

  They both knew they would never see each other again.

  Everything was silent in the mortuary. Billy realised that the answer-machine was no longer beeping; someone must have listened to the message while he was on his break. In the distance, on the very threshold of hearing, he thought he could detect the soothing hum of a floor-polisher—in hospitals, as in airports, cleaners nearly always worked at night—and he pictured a man with a blank look on his face guiding the machine from side to side, its brushes revolving briskly, smoothly, an endless series of tiny circles, each new circle covering a slightly different area from the last, but all the circles overlapping, and the floor becoming shinier and shinier until it existed only as a perfect reflection of what surrounded it.

  25

  Whenever Billy thought about Trevor, he was overtaken by an intense feeling of regret. He couldn’t help feeling there was more he could have done. He hadn’t asked for Trevor’s phone number, for instance, or his address—surely Trevor would’ve had business cards in that briefcase of his—nor, on returning home, had he tried to trace his old friend using the one piece of information that he’d picked up. After all, there couldn’t have been too many people called Lydgate in a small town like Stone…They had parted at the door of room number 8, and just as Billy had predicted, Trevor didn’t appear for breakfast. Their paths had crossed for the first time in thirty years, but they had chosen not to benefit from the coincidence.