Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  Rousing himself at last, he popped the cork on the champagne and poured her a glass. Later, he sat on the floor beside her while she had a bath. From the bedroom came the lurid, almost delirious soundtrack of a Hammer horror film. When she stretched out in the water, with her head resting against the side of the bath nearest to him, her black hair hung over the edge, and he touched the ends of it without her knowing. Violins played a high, thin note. A woman screamed, then screamed again. Venetia’s hair balanced on the palm of his hand like something standing upright. He still thought she was holding back—even in that moment, when he seemingly had everything he could possibly have hoped for. Was she just too lavish for him? Or was she only giving a part of herself, the least she could get away with? Even before that weekend, he had started hoarding items that belonged to her—lip salve, nail varnish, a pair of laddered tights. She didn’t notice: she was always losing things. He even kept some split ends that she had cut off in his bathroom when she was drunk one night. If she had known that he had some of her hair in a plastic film canister, and that he opened it from time to time and smelt it, she would probably have called him a weirdo and left him on the spot. But he was only trying to fill the gaps, get closer. We’re just having fun. He didn’t want it to be fun. He wanted it to be for ever.

  Waking early the next morning, he turned in the bed and ran his right hand over the curve of her hip and down between her legs. She leaned sideways and took something from her bag on the bedside table. At first he thought she was going to pass him a condom, but then he saw her fit a mask over her eyes. The mask was beige, with the words air india on it.

  “You’re not going to wear that, are you?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said coolly. “Do you mind?”

  Though startled, he could already envisage the erotic possibilities—how her blindness might give him licence. “Well,” he said, “if that’s what you want…”

  After they had finished making love, she told him that he had gripped her so tightly when he came that she felt as if he had somehow reached through her skin, all seven layers of it, right into her muscles, even her bones, as if he had penetrated her body all over, and not just in the one place.

  “I didn’t hurt you?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I liked it.”

  Later that morning, they walked along a short stretch of the Pennine Way. As he stared off into the distance, the shadows of clouds blue-black on the smooth sides of the fells, he asked her about the eye-mask. What was it exactly, he said, that she didn’t want to see?

  “I’m shy,” she said.

  He laughed. “You? Shy?”

  She was standing knee-deep in rough grass, a piece of saxifrage in the palm of her hand.

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked.

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Is it me?”

  Her hand closed over the small white flower, and she gave him a look that came at him straight and level. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

  This was both succinct and ambiguous—was she telling him not to overestimate his own importance, or was she trying to reassure him?—but he also sensed a kind of shakiness or trepidation, and he knew he’d stumbled on something that might help him to explain her. She wouldn’t elaborate, however, and he decided not to press her. Instead, he took her hand, which he would never have dared to do if they hadn’t been the only people for miles around. She affected not to notice, but he thought her fingers tightened around his. Rare though they were, such moments gave him hope: in time, perhaps, she might go a little easier on him…

  That evening they drank pints of Guinness in the hotel bar, served by a man from the Midlands. In his early forties, with a gold tooth and a wicked tongue, he was soon making Venetia laugh with tales of local scandal, and Billy saw that for all the intimacies of the past twenty-four hours he had no hold over her, no claim whatsoever.

  At dinner Venetia took charge of the wine list, ordering a white to go with their starters, then switching to red for the main course.

  Billy shook his head. “It’s amazing, the amount you drink.”

  “It must be the Scottish side of me,” she said. “My father—” She checked herself. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

  What he learned that night would alter him for ever. Certain stories lodge like rusty hooks in the soft flesh of the mind. You cannot free yourself.

  Sitting in the mortuary with his eyes shut, Billy heard the rasp of a lighter.

  “You’d know all about that, of course,” he said.

  35

  His eyes still closed, he saw the woman not in lilac or maroon, not in a suit at all, in fact, but in a kind of gown. Shapeless it was, and hooded. Brown or black.

  “They’ll never forgive me, will they,” she said, “not even now I’m dead?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think they will.” He paused, and then decided that he might as well tell the truth. “It’s strange, but I think people hate you even more now. It’s like what you did has got worse with the passing of time—or maybe it’s taken this long for the full horror of it all to sink in.”

  She fell silent, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her before. At times, he wasn’t sure whether she was still there, but then he would hear a swift, sharp intake of breath as she inhaled, or the faint scrape of a shoe against the floor as she altered the position of her legs. Though he was in danger of falling asleep, he resisted the temptation to open his eyes. He didn’t want to see her again. He had already seen enough of her, he felt, to last a lifetime.

  “Sometimes I dream I’m standing in a crowd,” she said at last, “or else I’m walking along, surrounded by hundreds of people. I don’t know any of them. They’re all strangers. But it feels like—like luxury.” There was another silence. He imagined a cigarette butt falling in slow-motion through the air and vanishing between two bars of the drain’s dark metal grille.

  “To be part of a crowd,” she said. “You don’t know how I long for that.”

  “They’d probably tear you to pieces,” he said.

  “In my dream, no one recognises me. They’ve never heard of me. They don’t notice me at all.”

  “You did something people couldn’t bring themselves to think about. You forced them to imagine it. You rubbed their noses in it.”

  That was what they meant, he realised, when they called her a monster. She had shown them what a human being was capable of. She had given them a glimpse of the horrific and terrifying acts that lay within their grasp. She had reminded them of a truth that they had overlooked, or hidden from, or lied to themselves about.

  “That’s why they can’t forgive you,” he said. “I mean, maybe if you’d broken down in court—”

  She let out a short, sardonic laugh. “I’m not a bloody actress.”

  “They needed something.”

  “They wouldn’t have believed me.”

  He thought about that. Over the years, there had been a number of people who had taken her side. They saw her continuing imprisonment as political, driven not by the rule of law but by popular opinion. Other murderers were freed when they had served their sentences—why not her? Clearly, she was no danger to society. In fact, the opposite was true: were she to be released, society would be a danger to her. And here was the savage irony: taxpayers’ money would have to be used to protect the woman from what the taxpayers themselves would try and do to her. No government would willingly put itself in the position of having to defend such a policy. Instead, the responsibility for her fate was handed swiftly from one Home Secretary to another, like a particularly hazardous game of pass-the-parcel.

  “You’re probably right,” he said. “I don’t think there was any way back from what you did. They’d never have let you out, not in a million years.”

  “It already feels like a million years.” He heard her light another cigarette. “I smoked myself to death,” she said. “What else was I going to do?”

  “You did make it
worse for yourself, though,” he said. “You made mistakes.”

  “Mistakes? What mistakes?”

  “Afterwards, I mean. You said things you shouldn’t have. To journalists.”

  He thought she might bridle at that, but she kept quiet.

  “And that picture they took of you when you got your degree,” he said, “the one that appeared in the papers.”

  “What about it?”

  “You shouldn’t have smiled.”

  “So now I’m not allowed to smile…” She sounded crestfallen, even defeated, but when she spoke again, a few moments later, her voice had all its old bluntness. “And you,” she said, “are you so innocent?”

  36

  Billy went over to the stainless-steel sink in the corner and brought handfuls of cold water up to his face. He had been honest with her, brutally so, and she had put up very little resistance, though she had hit back towards the end, when he was least expecting it, but now that she had gone, he was left with an uneasy feeling. He’d talked too much. He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t paid attention and, as a result, he felt there was something he had failed to understand. He turned off the tap, then tore off a couple of paper towels and dried his face and hands. Failure, he thought. Firstly, she had failed to realise what she was getting into. Then she had failed to object, to disassociate herself. Something was lacking in her, and it had made her lethal. But what about me? he thought as he dropped the sodden paper towels in the bin. Am I so innocent?

  Almost twenty years had passed, but he could still see Venetia sitting across from him in that prim, drab hotel dining-room in the North Pennines.

  “If I tell you—” Venetia said, then stopped.

  “What?” he said.

  “It might change everything…”

  “You decide.”

  She took a breath and then began. When she was a little girl, she said, she hardly saw her father. He was always off somewhere—at work, or out with clients, or travelling. She would long to spend time with him, fantasising endlessly about all the things they might do together. Grimacing, she tipped more wine into her glass. George McGarry was his name, she went on, and he was the chief executive of a shipping company—a man of great energy and charm, by all accounts. In his forties he married a lively but delicate woman from Bombay. They had two daughters. Margaret was four years older than Venetia, taller, and more reserved.

  “I always felt she should have said something,” and now Venetia looked away, into the room. “But I suppose it was asking too much. Besides, I probably wouldn’t have believed her. I wouldn’t have wanted to believe her.”

  Billy felt as if the contents of his stomach were beginning to go sour, and he reached for some water.

  “I didn’t really see my father until I was eight or nine,” Venetia went on, “and then suddenly, from one day to the next, he seemed to realise that I existed. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. This was my dream, and I’d almost given up on it. He started calling me V. V, darling. V, my sweet. He would pick me up after school and we would go to the cinema, or if it was summer we would drive out into the country. He had a beautiful car. A Daimler, I think it was—all soft leather and polished wood. It was like his work, the secret, glamorous side of him—the part of him I’d never been allowed to see.”

  She looked across the table at Billy, and the expression on her face was one he didn’t recognise. She seemed to be pleading with him, but he wasn’t sure what she wanted. To change the past, perhaps. Impossible, then. The look had a nearness about it too, a confidentiality, and for the first time, possibly the only time, he felt properly included in her life, and it hurt him in a way that was almost physical, both because of the unexpected beauty of the moment, and because he was certain that it wouldn’t last.

  “It keeps coming out wrong,” she said. “Do you want me to go on?”

  Staring down at the tablecloth, he nodded.

  “Promise me something,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Promise you won’t feel sorry for me.”

  “If I feel anything,” he said, “it won’t be that.”

  Her face was drawn to the dark window. “The first time it happened, we were in his car. We had been to a museum, I think, but he took a different route home, and we ended up on a quiet road that ran through woods…”

  One of her hands lay on its side on the table, the fingers curled. Her head, angled away from him, was absolutely still, as if the story she was telling was an animal that could be frightened off by even the slightest of movements.

  “He parked the car, then turned and looked at me,” she said, “and I thought he was going to talk about school, how I hadn’t been doing very well, and I had all my excuses ready, but then I noticed that there was something in his eyes that I couldn’t remember seeing before, something strange and glittery, and his breathing was noisier than usual. I could hear each breath, and when he spoke, his voice was husky.”

  She gazed down into her drink. Billy wanted to reach out, put his hand against her cheek or stroke her hair, but he knew it would be wrong to touch her.

  “It was husky, almost as if he had a cold, or he was going to cry. ‘You know I love you, don’t you, V?’ he said, and suddenly I didn’t want him to call me V any more. ‘Venetia,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You’re too grown-up for nicknames, aren’t you?’ He looked through the windscreen for a while, then he turned to me again. ‘I love you so much,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Of course I do,’ I said. I wanted to come out with a joke and make him laugh, but his eyes still had that weird glitter, and the air in the car had gone all thick. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he said. ‘Of course,’ I said. And that was when he reached down and undid his flies…”

  Her face was still lowered.

  “It went on for six years,” she said.

  “Venetia,” Billy said.

  He couldn’t say anything else. He felt, oddly, as if he was implicated in her father’s behaviour, as if he was also guilty. Because he was a man, perhaps.

  Fathers, though, he would think a few years later: they were like the poppies that appeared in the summer, so vivid against the new ripe yellow of the corn, so handsome, but if you pressed their petals between finger and thumb the red went black and wet.

  Back upstairs, he lay next to Venetia on the bed and watched TV. He fell asleep without meaning to. When he woke, it was two thirty in the morning and Venetia had gone, but there was a strip of light under the bathroom door, and he could hear a tap running.

  “Are you all right?” he called out.

  She didn’t answer.

  Leave her, he thought. Let her be. Throwing off his clothes, he climbed beneath the covers and was asleep again before she reappeared.

  On Sunday, as they drove back to Liverpool, he asked her whether she ever saw her father. Sometimes, she said. On special occasions. Though he was quite ill now, with angina. He’d been put on a strict diet and wasn’t allowed any excitement. Two months ago, on his seventy-first birthday, she had bought him the richest cake she could find. She thought that if he ate enough of it he might die. She cut him slice after slice, and because he loved her so much he kept on eating.

  “It didn’t work, though,” she said. “He’s still around.”

  Billy took his eyes off the road and looked at her. She wasn’t joking.

  After that weekend, things were different between them. He no longer felt sidelined or short-changed. He didn’t see her for ten days, but he wasn’t jealous of the time she spent away from him. He now had a sense of what he might be worth to her.

  On the Wednesday evening, she rang his bell at half past six. She was wearing a white blouse and a dark-grey pencil skirt, which told him she’d come straight from work; she was temping at a firm of stockbrokers that month, and they insisted that she dress conservatively.

  “Whisky,” she said, handing him a bottle of Famous Grouse. Then she held up a bag of ice. “Rocks.”
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  As the drink took hold, they returned to the subject of her father. He had called recently, she said. Accused her of neglecting him. How could she be so inconsiderate, so heartless? Did she have no feelings for him whatsoever? In the end, she had to unplug the phone. If she’d let him go on any longer, he would have lost his temper—or else he would have started crying.

  Towards midnight, they began to try and think of ways of killing him. Obviously they couldn’t afford to be caught, nor did they want to incriminate themselves; it had to look natural, or like an accident—or, at the very least, like a crime that had no motive. What they were saying was so terrible that they got completely carried away, each attempting to outdo the other, their ideas becoming ever more lurid and unrealistic. At some point, though, Venetia’s face went still, and she covered her mouth with one hand. She was looking at Billy’s uniform, which hung on the back of the door.