“What about you?” the woman said.
He brought his eyes back to her again. She was always turning the tables on him—or trying to. The result, perhaps, of half a lifetime of being questioned by parole boards, psychologists, criminologists and priests…If she temporarily deflected attention away from herself, she would have time to marshal her thoughts, to dissemble, to conceal. Or perhaps she was simply brighter than he was. After all, she did have a degree from the Open University, which was more than he would ever have.
“Who did you love most?” she said, her face seeming to tighten around her cigarette as she inhaled.
“I’m not dead,” he said.
“So far, in your life”—and she drew the words out, mocking him for being so pedantic—“who did you love most?”
He could have said his mother too, but that didn’t seem to be the point of the question. At the same time, he felt he ought to be quick, like her. The answer wouldn’t come, though, and the longer he hesitated, the more difficult it became. He ought to know, surely. He shouldn’t have to think.
“Oh dear,” the woman said. She had a triumphant smile on her face, a smile that was almost lascivious, as if it excited her to identify weakness and uncertainty in others. “Maybe I should help you,” she said, “by mentioning a few names.”
“Like who?”
“Venetia.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, you’re wrong.”
“You were mad about her. Anyone could see that.”
“It wasn’t love. It was—”
“You worshipped her. You would have done anything—”
“Shut up a minute, will you?”
Her look of triumph returned. He had shouted. Lost control.
“You’re not giving me a chance to think,” he said. “All this talking, all these questions.”
“Oh?” she said. “And whose idea was this?” She leaned over and dropped her cigarette into the drain. “I don’t know why I’m asking, really,” she said, straightening up again, her face a little flushed. “I already know the answer.”
“What is it, then?” If Billy sounded defiant, it was only because he was without resources; it was pure bluster.
“Raymond,” she said, looking off to one side, as though it was so obvious, so plain for all to see, that she didn’t even have to meet his gaze. “Raymond Percival.”
Billy let out a brief, explosive laugh, but even as he was ridiculing the idea, he saw Raymond walking ahead of him towards the reservoir, his bare back in shadow, his skin as cool and pale as peeled fruit.
“You followed Raymond everywhere,” the woman went on. “You did everything he said.” She lit another cigarette. She took her time. “You were so obedient. Even dogs aren’t that obedient.”
He shook his head, but knew that it was true.
“The way you looked at him sometimes. The thoughts you had. You never actually put them into words, but they were there, weren’t they?” She broke off to inhale. “You behaved just like a bloody girl,” she said, then laughed bitterly. “I should know.”
He stood up quickly, the legs of his chair screeching on the tiled floor. His face was burning. He could feel her watching him to see what he would do next. She was feasting on his embarrassment, his shame.
“The way you looked at him,” she said.
Turning to face the mortuary doors, he noticed a wedge-shaped gash at about waist-height. The door-frame was varnished wood, but the dent was sufficiently deep to reveal the wood’s true colour, palest yellow, not unlike unsalted butter. He touched it with his fingertips, feeling the sharp edge, the cleft. A porter had misjudged the width of the trolley he was wheeling, or a funeral director had been too cavalier with a coffin. You’d think someone could have repaired the damage, though; it wouldn’t have taken much.
Now he knew why it seemed familiar, this rough-and-ready space, so stark and practical, and so neglected: it was like all the places he had rented when he first left home, places he had shared with strangers, or else lived in by himself.
“I love my wife and daughter most,” he said.
He was silent for a moment, his fingers still touching the damaged door-frame.
“My daughter,” he said.
“Well,” she said, and her voice was rasping and dismissive, “I suppose you got there in the end.”
33
Three months ago, in August, there had been a night when he had woken suddenly. Not sure what had disturbed him—a noise? a dream?—he went to the bedroom window and looked out. Darkness filled the garden. To his right was the cornfield, its contours barely visible. He could see how it sloped upwards from right to left, though, and how it curved down again as it approached the woods. How, like a wave, it gathered itself and then appeared to break. But why had he woken? As he peered out into the field, something glinted, and he knew at once that Emma was there. She must have turned her head, the lenses of her glasses catching what little light there was. She had wandered out of her bedroom before, many times, but she’d never left the house. They were always careful to lock up at night. This time they must have forgotten, or else she had managed to open one of the doors herself—and yet she wasn’t usually capable of such initiative. Should he call out? No, that might startle her. He should go down, though—and quickly. If she went beyond the confines of the field, it could be dangerous. In the woods, he would never find her—and then there was the road. It was very straight, and people always drove too fast. He turned from the window.
“Who’s that?” Sue called out from the bed.
“It’s only me, love,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”
He hurried out of the room and down the stairs, stopping by the back door to pull on a pair of wellingtons. At the side of the house, he paused again. The night smelt musty, thrilling. Cow parsley, fox fur. The breath of owls.
Pushing through the long grass at the far edge of the track, he stumbled into the remnants of a wire fence. His T-shirt snagged on a post as he climbed over. He freed it and then stood still. There she was, about fifty yards away, the dark shape of her head and shoulders showing above the corn.
He began to walk through the field. “Emma?”
She swung round, her head at an angle. She seemed curious, or even sceptical, as if he were a second-rate magician and she was intent on seeing through his tricks.
“Daddy,” she said, “what are you doing?” She sounded surprised, but also disapproving.
He came to a halt a few feet from her. At times she appeared so sure of herself that she completely wrongfooted him. He had imagined that she might feel disorientated, even scared, and that he would lead her back to the safe haven of her bedroom. As often happened, though, she saw things differently. In her eyes, he was the hopeless one, the one who was out of place. He was the one who needed help.
“I came to look for you.” He didn’t sound very convincing, even to himself. He had already taken on the character she’d given him.
She extended an arm in front of her and drew it in a slow, majestic semicircle through the air. “Night,” she said, as if she owned it. As if, without her to tell him, he might not have known what it was called.
“It’s very late,” he said. “You should be asleep.”
She muttered a few rebellious words, which he didn’t quite make out, then steered a look towards the woods, her jaw jutting and determined, like an explorer preparing to strike out into uncharted territory. Billy glanced back at the house, but there was no sign of Sue. He would have to do this alone.
“Where’s Parsons?” Emma said.
“He’s at home in bed,” Billy said, “like everybody else.”
He looked away in case she noticed he was grinning. He was just thankful that she was there, that she was all right, that she was herself—so indisputably, uniquely, herself. What if he hadn’t woken? Who knows where she might have ended up? She didn’t realise that bad things could happen. She had no fear. He had to feel it for her. In the last days o
f 1999, when he climbed up on to that deserted moor, he had imagined a man leading a boy along a shallow gully. He had been able to see it all, almost as if it were happening in front of him—two figures walking away, hand in hand, one in a dark coat, the other in shorts—and in that moment he had thought of Emma and how vulnerable she was. She was even more trusting. She knew even less. She wouldn’t have had the first idea. That was what he had thought, and then he’d felt awful, because Emma was still alive…
After several failed attempts, he finally managed to lure her back into the house with the promise of a midnight feast. Once she had devoured her biscuits and chocolate milk, he tucked her in and kissed her on the forehead. She had to go to sleep, he told her. He would see her in the morning.
“Sing,” she said.
Though tired, his grin returned. Not for nothing did he call her “Captain”—or even, sometimes, “Chief Inspector.”
He sang a few numbers from musicals to start with—Mary Poppins and West Side Story—and he followed those with a medley of his all-time favourites, including “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” “Waterloo Sunset,” “Massachusetts” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” He even sang songs he didn’t know he knew, songs they used to play in tacky Greek and Spanish discos when he was young: “Una Paloma Blanca,” “Sweet Caroline” and “Lady in Red.” He went on singing long after Emma had fallen asleep. He was singing because he was worried. He was singing because he was relieved. He sang until his voice hurt, then he kissed Emma one last time and crept back across the landing. As he pulled off his wellingtons, he noticed that Sue was awake. He could see a glint on the pillow where her eyes were.
“You’re a dark horse,” she said.
His heart beat high in his throat. Had he let something slip? What had she found out?
“All these years we’ve been together,” she said, “and you never told me you liked Neil Diamond.”
She could still make him laugh, even at half-three in the morning.
“I don’t like Neil Diamond actually,” he said as he slid beneath the duvet.
“Liar,” she said.
He held on to that fragment of conversation. He would go back over it when he was parked down by the river, setting it against all their anxieties and disagreements, wanting it to weigh more.
You’re a dark horse, he would say to himself as he turned the car around and started for home.
Or, Liar.
34
Venetia, though. Nothing had prepared him for the effect that she would have on him. Even her name. It was unlikely, expensive—the sort of name one of Raymond’s girlfriends might have. Born to a Scottish father and an Indian mother, she had spent most of her childhood in Glasgow, only moving to Liverpool when she was fourteen, and her voice had something of both cities in it, with the lilt or rhythm of Bombay underneath. Three ports, one voice. Was it the sound of her that he fell in love with? Perhaps. But the sight of her, on Lacey Street, was enough to bring him to a standstill. For a few seconds, he forgot to breathe. Her hair so black and shiny that he could almost see himself in it. Her eyes as well. Her skin was dark too, but also lemony, somehow, as if yellow had been overlaid with a patina of translucent black.
Venetia McGarry.
The first time he saw her, she was driving a white Ford Fiesta. She had pulled up at the junction with Victoria Road and was signalling right. She looked him in the eyes, but only for a moment, then she leaned forwards in her seat to see whether anything was coming. She had a bald tyre, he noticed. Front left. For some reason, he didn’t book her, though; he simply stepped back from the kerb so she could look beyond him. Once she had established that the road was clear, she smiled at him, and he waved an arm out sideways, meaning not just that he was letting her go first, but that she should go with his blessing. The whole incident lasted fifteen seconds at the most, and though he thought about her on and off for the rest of the day, he certainly never expected to run into her again.
When he saw her the second time, in a pub in Liverpool, more than six months had passed, and she had no memory of ever setting eyes on him before, not even when he told her exactly what had taken place and where. She was surprised that he remembered it all in such detail. Flattered too. Later, she said that although she found his story extremely convincing she didn’t believe it, not for a moment. She assumed he was making the whole thing up. Though that, in itself, was quite charming, she thought. Romantic even. That he should go to the trouble of inventing a previous encounter. Not at all the kind of chat-up line she was used to. Spooky that he’d guessed the colour of her car, though. What was he? A mind-reader? Giving her an ambiguous smile, he looked away. Had he not remembered seeing her and been able to describe it, had he not been equipped with that memory, it was quite possible that nothing would ever have happened between them. As it was, he could turn back to her and tell her something else: her front left tyre had hardly any tread on it.
“It was illegal,” he said, “but I decided to let you go.”
“Wasn’t that dangerous?” she said.
And with those words something began.
Three months on, when it was all over, he couldn’t rid himself of the suspicion that she had remembered more than she had led him to believe. That morning in Widnes, as she looked through her car window, she would have noticed the uniform he was wearing. The idea could have occurred to her there and then. Not that she necessarily thought she would run into him again. Someone like him, though. A policeman. But if that was true, it undermined every moment they had spent together, and no matter how sceptical he felt, or how bitter, he couldn’t bring himself to admit that the entire relationship might have been a sham. It was just too much to lose.
Billy had gone to Paradise Street with Neil Batty, and when Neil left the pub at around nine, he started talking to Venetia, who was sitting at the next table. She had friends with her—Simon, her flatmate, and Beryl, who was on the dole—and after a while the four of them went upstairs. On the first floor was a bar that had a pool table. Something by the Specials was playing as they walked in, Terry Hall’s voice floating high above a typically nervy but hypnotic beat. Venetia was drinking Southern Comfort on the rocks. He was captivated by her, but paralysed; as in a dream he felt that if he reached for her she’d always be an inch beyond his fingertips. All he could do was gaze at her when she wasn’t looking. He couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t gazing at her. She was that gorgeous. Then, without any warning, she moved towards him through the smoke-filled air, and suddenly she was up against him, sideways-on, like a conspirator, and he felt a heavy object drop into his jacket pocket.
“That’s for you,” she said.
Off she went again, with her long hair pouring down her back and her double Southern Comfort on the rocks. Halfway across the bar, she turned and smiled at him over her shoulder.
Christ.
He fell in love with her right then—or was it moments later, in the privacy of the Gents, when he reached a hand slowly, tentatively, into his pocket and watched it emerge with the black ball from the pool table?
The most important ball in the game. The one that’s worth more than all the others. The difference between winning and losing.
“Where the fuck’s the black?” a man yelled.
Nobody knew. The ball had disappeared.
It was a mystery.
The second he took that ball out of his pocket he knew what it meant: she had decided she was going to sleep with him. His heart jerked, as if his body had been speeding and he had just stamped on the brakes, and he stayed in the Gents for longer than he needed to. He was putting off returning to the bar, delaying the look that would surely pass between them, and the understanding they would have.
But nothing happened that night. In fact, nothing happened until the following Tuesday, and even as she left his flat on Wednesday morning she told him not to get used to anything because it might not happen again. Her life, she said, was complicated enough a
lready. Though disappointed, wounded too, somehow he had seen this coming. He knew he was lucky to have been with her at all, and he was already grateful for the little he’d received. At the outset, then, she learned a couple of things about him: one, he didn’t feel that he deserved her, and two, he was entirely at her disposal.
She would visit his flat. He was never allowed to visit hers, though. She didn’t want her friends to see them together. She wouldn’t meet his friends either. She gave him her phone number, but didn’t tell him where she lived. She didn’t let him take any pictures of her and wouldn’t even go into a photo booth with him; she didn’t want their relationship recorded. What went on between the two of them was to remain private, secret. Hidden. If the world found out, pressure would be brought to bear on them, and that, she said, would be the end of it. He did his best to abide by her rules, but as the weeks went by it began to seem unnatural, stifling, even cruel. When he tried to tell her how he felt, she interrupted.
“Look, this isn’t serious,” she said. “We’re just having fun.”
He nodded gloomily. Fun.
Once, in early March, she let him take her away for the weekend. To spend two consecutive nights and days with her was unheard of, but even as he counted his blessings he knew the weekend would never be repeated, so his mood as they drove up the motorway that Friday evening was one of thinly disguised despair. It was late when they arrived at the hotel, and the bar was already closed. Luckily, Venetia had brought some champagne with her. After the long drive north, he needed a drink, but the simple act of following her into an unfamiliar room excited him so much that he had to make love to her immediately, before they could even open the bottle. In the past, she had always insisted on having the lights off and the curtains closed, as if she belonged to a different generation, another time. That night, though, they did it with the TV on, and he could see her as she lay beneath him on the quilted counterpane, her narrow, boyish hips, her thin legs, almost stick-like, and her surprising breasts, which were out of proportion to the rest of her. Her body seemed more voluptuous than usual, in fact, and he wondered if she was having a period, but when he was inside her, it didn’t feel like it. Afterwards, she smeared his sperm over her nipples with the tip of her forefinger. “I like the feeling when it dries,” she said. “It goes all tight.” And he was so tired and dreamy that he barely noticed this veiled reference to previous experience, other men.
Death of a Murderer Page 16