Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  Almost exactly a year later, in the autumn of 1999, a woman called Mary Betts left a message on Billy’s answer-machine at home. She had some news for him, she said. Though he didn’t recognise the name or the voice, he called her back that evening. She told him that she’d been a classmate of his at primary school. They hadn’t known each other very well, she reassured him, so he didn’t have to pretend he remembered her. He laughed.

  “Before we go too far,” she said, “it’s not good news, I’m afraid. Trevor Lydgate’s dead.”

  Standing in the lounge, next to the window, Billy thought of the brownish-pink grab-rails in Trevor’s hotel room. In their colour and their smoothness, in their curiously glossy quality, they had reminded him of something you might find inside a body. Organs of some kind. Intestines.

  It’s no different, really.

  “I just thought you might like to know,” Mary Betts said, “since you were once a friend of his.”

  The funeral was in two days’ time, she said. She was sorry not to have given him more notice. He told her he would do his best to be there. Later that night, he phoned Maureen, his mother. She hadn’t seen Trevor since he was a little boy, she said, but she would try to attend the funeral, if only for Betty’s sake, her dear Betty Lydgate who had died some years before. At work the next day Billy applied for compassionate leave, claiming that he and Trevor had been cousins.

  It was a four-hour drive from Suffolk, and he arrived at the church a few minutes late, but he was able to slip into a pew at the back without anybody noticing. The church was less than half-full. When the service ended, he remained in his seat, watching the mourners file past. There was Trevor’s wife, a big, dumpy woman with long hair and glasses, and there were the four children Trevor had talked about, at least three of them already in their teens. The church doors had been thrown open, and the faces of the bereaved were brutally exposed by the white autumn light. Billy could see shock and lack of sleep, but he could also see the strange, self-conscious, almost narcissistic sense of loss that often accompanies an unexpected death in the family. They walked down the aisle as if dragging heavy weights, and the youngest child, a boy, was looking from side to side, embarrassed by all the attention, but fascinated too. The man supporting the widow was much stockier than Trevor, and had more hair, including a closely trimmed beard and moustache, yet he was clearly recognisable as Trevor’s brother. These, then, were the other two bearers of the secret.

  Outside, Billy caught up with his mother, who was searching in her handbag for a tissue.

  “It’s a mercy Betty’s not here to see this,” Maureen said. “She would have been heartbroken. Heartbroken.”

  The crematorium was only five minutes’ drive away, and this time Billy sat near the front, watching as Trevor’s coffin slid through a dark-blue curtain. The music played during its short and slightly jerky trip was a top-ten hit from the eighties:

  Look at me standing

  Here on my own again—

  Billy remembered dancing to the song with Susie once, in a nightclub in Manchester, a slow shuffle of a dance during which they kissed non-stop. It had sounded oddly mournful even then, as though the singer was trying to convince people that he was happy when, actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. Now, in the context of a funeral, his plaintive voice seemed almost too much to bear, and Billy’s mother wasn’t the only person in tears.

  No need to run, and hide

  It’s a wonderful, wonderful life—

  When the ceremony was over, the priest announced that refreshments were being served in a nearby hotel, and that everyone was welcome. Billy said goodbye to his mother outside the crematorium—she had to be getting home, she said, having always hated driving in the dark—and although he, too, had a long journey ahead of him, he decided to put in an appearance, if only to offer his condolences to Trevor’s wife.

  The room they’d booked had green flock wallpaper and windows that gave on to a stagnant pond. There were plates of sandwiches and cups of tea laid out on trestle tables. There was a bar too. Billy bought himself a pint, then turned and looked for Mrs. Lydgate, but before he could single her out, the stocky man with the beard walked up to him.

  “Billy Tyler?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re the policeman.”

  “And you must be Trevor’s brother.”

  “I’m Steve.”

  After shaking hands, Steve Lydgate turned his eyes to the window, then took a deep breath and blew the air out loudly.

  “I’m very sorry,” Billy said.

  Steve looked at him again. “Did you come far?”

  “I drove up from Ipswich.”

  Steve nodded, as if the strength of one’s support could be measured by the distance travelled. “Listen, thanks for making the effort.”

  It was Billy’s turn to avert his eyes. The room had filled up, with most people under fifty preferring alcohol to tea. You always get drunk fast at funerals. There’s that inappropriate hilarity, that giddy feeling of relief. It wasn’t me this time. It wasn’t me.

  “I take it you know about Trevor…”

  Billy studied Steve across the rim of his glass. “Know what?”

  “He killed himself.” Steve took a gulp from his pint in exactly the same way that Trevor would have done, with a kind of ferocity, so much so that a speck of foam leapt up on to his cheek.

  “Oh. I see.” Billy nodded slowly, sadly.

  Steve was staring at him. “You don’t seem very surprised.”

  Lowering his voice, Billy started telling Steve about his encounter in Huntingdon the year before.

  “Trevor got upset that night,” Billy said. “He was haunted by what had happened to him, and he felt guilty too, but I didn’t think it would drive him to—”

  “Guilty?” Steve said. “What do you mean, guilty?”

  “He survived—not like the others. He was lucky.”

  “Not that fucking lucky.”

  Biting his lip, Billy stared at the floor. “That was tactless of me. Sorry.”

  “If they ever let her out,” Steve said, “I’m going to kill her, I swear to God. I’m going to hunt her down and kill her. I’ll serve time for it. I don’t care.”

  Only after his outburst did he seem to remember what Billy did for a living, and he mustered a defiant, self-righteous look, as if challenging Billy to arrest him there and then.

  But Billy hardly noticed. An idea had just occurred to him for the first time. “Do you think Trevor was telling the truth?”

  “What are you saying?” Steve said.

  Had the woman—that woman—really taken Trevor home with her, Billy thought, or was there another interpretation?

  “What are you on about?” Steve’s face was suddenly closer than Billy would have liked, and his eyes had hardened. “Why would he lie?”

  Billy thought it wise not to go any further. In fact, it was possible that he had already gone too far. Trevor’s suicide only made sense to Steve if he believed the story his brother had told him, and believed it one hundred per cent. That was all he had to hold on to. For Billy to suggest that it might have been a fabrication, or even that Trevor might have been exaggerating, was disrespectful, if not downright insulting, especially on a day like today, and clearly Steve wouldn’t hesitate to defend his brother’s honour. Billy had already noticed Steve’s knuckles. They were red and glossy, blurred-looking, and Billy knew what that meant: Steve was someone who liked to hit people. Even as Billy stood in front of him, he could feel the violence. It came off Steve in waves.

  “There’s Trevor’s wife,” Billy said.

  Before Steve could speak or otherwise detain him, Billy moved away. Crossing the room, he introduced himself to Mrs. Lydgate as Trevor’s childhood friend and told her how sorry he was. He didn’t live in the area, he said, but if there was anything he could do…He talked about his friendship with Trevor, and the adventures they used to have.

  “Ha
ppier days,” she said with a weak smile.

  He nodded. “Yes.” And then added, “For all of us,” though he wasn’t sure why he’d said that, or what he meant by it.

  Soon afterwards he left.

  Only when he was on the road did he realise that he had never got to meet Mary Betts.

  Sitting up straighter in his chair, Billy rubbed his face quickly, then forced himself up on to his feet. The mint-green mortuary doors, the tube-lights fizzing softly overhead…Memories kept coming, and none of them gave him any respite. If only he could just switch off. Christ. What time was it?

  26

  The smell of cigarettes first, then the smoke rising, grey-blue, in the corner of his eye. Then, finally, the voice: “I had nothing to do with it.”

  She sat across from him, a cigarette in her right hand, her left arm resting on the table. Britain’s most hated woman. She was wearing a suit again, only this time it was darker. Maroon, he thought, or burgundy. In front of her was a packet of Embassy filter, with a box of matches on top. There were chocolates too. He remembered reading somewhere that she had a sweet tooth.

  “That friend of yours,” she said. “I never saw him before in my life.”

  As she shifted on her chair, the lights on the ceiling picked out coppery tints in her hair. According to one of the newspapers, she was so pampered while in Highpoint that she’d had her own crimpers. He watched as she carefully selected another cigarette. She acted as if each cigarette was slightly different and uniquely delicious. It wasn’t the behaviour of someone who’d been pampered. She struck a match and lit the cigarette, then put the used match back in the box and placed the box on top of the cigarette packet. The years she had spent in prison were evident in every movement, no matter how small. When she touched ordinary objects, they seemed to acquire new value, greater substance.

  “He was making the whole thing up,” she said.

  “Why, though?” Billy wasn’t surprised by her denials; on the contrary, they were entirely consistent with the thought he’d had on the day of Trevor’s funeral, a thought that had lingered in the back of his mind ever since, ghostly, unconfirmed. “Why would he do that?”

  “How would I know?” Eyebrows raised, mouth a little pinched, she held the cigarette away from the table and tapped it twice with her index finger. Ash fell silently into the drain.

  “Maybe he was having some kind of breakdown,” Billy murmured.

  In the excitement of that chance encounter, he had over-looked the most important factors: Trevor had a large family—four children—and was about to lose his job. He would have been under enormous strain.

  The woman took another long drag and looked off into the distance, beyond the white doors of the fridges, beyond the hospital walls. “You want to know about breakdowns?” she said. “I’ll tell you about breakdowns.” She began to describe her life in Holloway, and then in Cookham—the insults, the beatings, the constant degradation. She talked about being kicked unconscious by a fellow inmate, and how her appearance had altered. Bones had been broken in her face. She wasn’t asking for pity. She was just saying. Billy realised that he was only half listening.

  “There’s no way you’d ever admit to it,” he said, bringing her back to the original subject. “You can’t afford to.”

  “Oh?” she said. “And why’s that?”

  “If you own up to abducting Trevor, then it’s like saying there were others—and that’s my question, actually, since you wanted me to ask you a question: not ‘Why did you do it?’ but ‘How many more?’”

  “How many more?” she said.

  “How many more,” he said, “that we don’t know about?”

  She looked at him steadily, smoke rising in a thin spiral past her eyes. “You’re quite a clever-clogs, aren’t you?”

  Even if she was in possession of certain knowledge, she wasn’t about to share it with him. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. She’d rather torture him by leaving all his accusations hanging in the air. But he had noticed a twitch in the skin under her right eye.

  “You killed people,” he said. “Children.”

  She held his gaze. The twitch became irregular, then vanished.

  “Most of the time I wasn’t even there,” she said.

  Most of the time. She had no idea how chilling those words sounded.

  “Once, I sat on a rock,” she said. “Another time I waited by the car. I wasn’t there.”

  “That’s what happens in a war,” Billy said. “That’s what generals do. They watch from a distance while their soldiers do the—”

  Her expression hardened into one of thinly suppressed contempt. “So that’s your theory, is it? You think I was in charge?”

  Well, why not? he thought. A female general. In her knee-length boots and her helmet of blonde hair.

  The people who spoke in her defence tended to claim that her lover was both evil and deranged, and that she had fallen under his influence. Had she never met him, they argued, she would have led a perfectly normal life. But supposing the opposite was true? Supposing he had fallen under her influence? What if her presence alone had been enough to unleash the wickedness in him, to spur him on to greater and greater acts of savagery? What if she not only allowed him, but encouraged him—no, required him—to explore that side of himself?

  “Are you denying it?” he said.

  Sighing, she stubbed out her cigarette in the lid of her cigarette packet. “I didn’t have anything to do with your friend.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you.” He leaned over the table, feeling that he had her now, that he was finally getting somewhere. “Why should I believe you?”

  She too leaned over the table. He was aware of her hands, pale and plump, carefully manicured, and he thought of her lover, and what she was supposed to have said about him: The first man I ever met who had clean fingernails. Billy shuddered. Then she took what he’d been thinking and she put it into words:

  “If he was in that house,” she said, “you really think he would have got out again?”

  27

  During the weeks that followed Trevor’s death, and prompted at least in part by his unfinished conversation with Trevor’s brother, Billy had found himself researching the murders, casually at first, but then with increasing vigour and intensity. He was curious to see whether there were any references to children who had got away—and, oddly enough, he found one: a boy called Sammy whose photograph had turned up among the murderers’ possessions subsequent to their arrest. There was no mention of a Trevor Lydgate, however, nor was there any suggestion that other children had had narrow escapes. But if there had been one, then surely it was possible…As a result, Billy had to ask himself why he had doubted the story in the first place. Partly, he supposed, because it was so extraordinary. To fall into the clutches of two such dangerous people and yet live to tell the tale. To be lured into that house—actually into the house—and then to make a getaway. It sounded like a bizarre fantasy, or a much embroidered version of a far less terrifying event. Which brought him to the second reason for his scepticism. At some level he thought that what he had heard had all the trappings of a story that was being told to cover another story, one that had to remain secret. There might well be three stories, then: the story Trevor had told his parents—I got lost—the one he told his wife, his brother, and his childhood friend—I was abducted—and the one he kept to himself, or even, possibly, hid from himself. This third story had never been revealed, probably because it was too close to home. Perhaps it even involved members of his family. The advantage of the version he had told Billy was that it allowed him to unburden himself without actually giving anything away.

  At the time, the details had seemed authentic enough, but Trevor could easily have invented them. Billy wouldn’t have known the difference, nor would most people. Equally, Trevor could have gleaned certain facts from newspapers, or documentaries, or one of the innumerable books written on the subject, and then, over the years
, he could have internalised those facts, made them his own. The motorbike, the wig—the cigarette-machine…If Billy’s theory was correct, it showed how deeply that series of murders had embedded itself in the nation’s psyche. No one who had been alive at the time could ever be entirely free of it. It was one of those rare news items against which you defined yourself.

  When Billy visited the moors just before the millennium, he had been attempting to put Trevor’s story into some sort of context—the very one that Trevor himself had claimed for it—but his journey had also been undertaken in a spirit of recognition. In a sense, he had been demonstrating solidarity, paying tribute. The pictures of the murdered children that appeared in the papers looked like the pictures his mother had taken of him and Charlie when they were little—the same dated black-and-white, all shadows and smudges, an eerily prophetic pattern of erasure and concealment. Those children belonged to the same generation as he did. They were his exact contemporaries. We were all damaged by what happened, he thought. We were all changed.

  28

  Imagining he heard a sound outside, Billy moved across the mortuary and listened at the doors, then he undid the locks, pulled the right-hand door open and put his head into the gap. It was late now, after three in the morning, and the corridor had a deep stillness, an almost supernatural hush: if he had seen a fish sliding soundlessly through that watery green air, somehow he wouldn’t have been surprised—or the boy in the black swimming-trunks, his skinny body doubled over, hair dripping…As Billy stood in the doorway, Raymond’s voice came to him, Raymond in that pub in Cheshire, talking to the beautiful girl. I almost drowned him once.