Death of a Murderer

by Rupert Thomson

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he said. It seemed to be what she expected to hear.

  She nodded, but said nothing.

  Later, when they were sitting on the sofa, he leaned over and put his head on her lap. He tried to work out how many times he had made love to her. It wasn’t much more than ten. Less than twenty, certainly. It startled him when he realised quite how little he’d been happy with. He was facing out into the room, his cheek resting against her thigh. The taut yet supple curve of muscle. The flutter of a heart somewhere above.

  He felt her hand on his head, pushing it away.

  “You’re too heavy,” she said.

  “I miss you,” he said.

  None of their sentences fitted together.

  They met up one last time. A beautiful evening in Liverpool. Above St. George’s Hall the clouds were edged in gold like invitation cards or pages from the Bible. Outside the station he thought he smelled tar and ropes, as though a tall ship had sailed past just minutes earlier; the air still had ripples in it, all that remained of the wake. He had travelled into the city with a desolate lightness in his heart. The fact that she was prepared to meet him in a public place could mean only one thing.

  “It’s over,” she said.

  She had to repeat the words because it was so noisy in the pub. Half-five, and people had just left work. Everyone excited. Summer here at last.

  “I don’t love you,” she said.

  “You never did,” he said.

  She sighed and looked away.

  “Well, did you?” He leaned forwards, moving his face into her eye-line.

  “If you’re going to make a scene,” she said.

  He leaned back again.

  He picked up his drink, but found he couldn’t swallow it and pushed it to one side. He had never been able to look at her without wanting her. He had never had enough of her, nowhere near. Was it any wonder that he was upset? In giving him so little, she had bound him to her all the more closely. Didn’t she realise that?

  “What were you doing with me, anyway?” he said.

  Once again, she had no answer.

  He consoled himself with this one thought, which was unworthy, if not downright cruel: she would never know the truth about her father’s death. She may have talked to Billy about revenge and furnished him with the name and address, but she had no way of proving that he had actually done anything. She didn’t know that he had driven out to the Wirral. She knew nothing of the eleven minutes he had spent in George McGarry’s house. Had his unexpected visit brought about her father’s death, or would it have happened anyway? No one could possibly say, not even Billy, and he found a certain comfort in that element of doubt.

  As he reviewed their brief history, a smile spread across his face. Ironically, the very aspect of their relationship that he had most resented was now providing him with a measure of protection. No one was aware that they had slept with each other. No one had ever seen them together. No one even suspected that they might be friends. In the eyes of the world there was no connection between them whatsoever, and never had been.

  “What’s so funny?” Venetia asked.

  On that warm night, in that loud pub just down the road from Lime Street station, he looked across at her and saw her father. That mouth, those eyes. You can fuck right off. He shook his head.

  How he had loved her, though.

  37

  With the end of his shift less than an hour away, Eileen Evans looked in on him, and he was grateful to her for making the effort. She didn’t know what it meant to him to have some company. For the past twenty minutes, he had been fighting an overwhelming desire to go to sleep. He had no coffee left, not even a drop. All he could do was stay on his feet. Pace up and down. If he rested his head on his arm for so much as a second he’d be gone. Out cold.

  Taking a seat, he bent over the scene log and noted Eileen’s arrival in the mortuary. While he was writing, he asked whether she’d seen Phil.

  “He went home a couple of hours ago,” she said. “He’ll be back at eleven.”

  Billy put his pen down, then sat back in the chair. Eileen was leaning against the radiator with her arms folded across her chest.

  “What about you?” he said. “Have you had any sleep?”

  “Not really.” She gave him a look that he remembered from when he met her, in reception; it was searching and yet resigned, as if she believed that the quality she hoped to find in him was unlikely to be there, as if she’d grown used to such disappointments. “It’s been a long night.” She lifted a hand to smother a yawn. “Another long night, I should say.” She yawned again. “Still—excuse me—it’s nearly over now.”

  “I’ll be glad, actually,” he said. “I meant to have a nap yesterday afternoon, but somehow I never got round to it. It’s been pretty hard to stay awake.”

  “Have you got far to go?” she said. “When you leave, I mean?”

  He told her where he lived. “It’s a village. Near Ipswich.”

  “I don’t think I know it.”

  He began to describe the place for her. It was only small, he said, and most of it was arranged along a single road. He told her about the allotments at the back of the house, and about Harry Parsons and his secret hoard of beer, and he told her about the field where, only a few months ago, his daughter had gone wandering at night. He wouldn’t have seen her if she hadn’t had her glasses on. He laughed softly when he realised how that sounded, and Eileen laughed with him.

  “Was she sleepwalking?” Eileen said.

  “She’s got Down’s,” he said. “She just hasn’t got it up here.” He tapped one side of his head with his index finger. “She hasn’t got a clue, really.”

  He found himself talking about the time Emma went missing in a shopping centre. When Sue rang him, he thought at first that she was calling from the swimming-pool. The background acoustics were the same: voices, laughter, shouting, everything echoing and merging in the huge, hollow space behind her voice.

  “I’ve lost Emma,” she said.

  She sounded so calm that he thought he must have heard it wrong.

  “I came out shopping with her,” Sue said, “and now she’s disappeared.”

  He asked Sue where she was. In Tower Ramparts, she said. By the lift. He told her to stay put. It was only half a mile from the police station to the shopping centre, and he ran the whole way. When he pushed through the gilt-and-glass doors, his shirt was sticking to his back. He saw Sue immediately. She was the only person in the place who wasn’t moving. In the context of a shopping centre, her stillness looked unnatural, suspicious.

  He took her by the arm. “You didn’t do something, did you?”

  “Do something?” she said. “What?”

  After all their years together, you’d think they would be on the same wavelength, but they often had difficulty understanding one another; there were none of the short cuts that a long relationship ought to have brought with it.

  “Sue,” he said quietly, “did you do something?”

  She shook her arm free. “Would I look like this if I’d done something?”

  Well, yes, he wanted to say. Maybe. Because her face was drained of colour except for beneath her eyes, where the skin had darkened, and her irises were lighter than usual, as they often were if she was frightened.

  “When did you last see her?”

  “I don’t know. About twenty minutes ago.”

  “She was here? Beside you?”

  “Oh God.” Sue turned in a slow circle, as if she were in a trance; she didn’t seem to be able to make any sense of her surroundings.

  He told her to start looking on the first floor, and in the various restaurants, while he searched the ground floor and the exits. They agreed to meet by the lift again in ten minutes.

  “What’s she wearing?” he asked.

  Sue told him.

  Unable to find any security guards, Billy ran upstairs to the Centre Management Suite and asked the m
an in charge to broadcast the following announcement at regular intervals: Would anyone who sees an eight-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome please accompany her to Centre Management immediately? She has shoulder-length blonde hair, and she is wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans. Her name is Emma Tyler.

  Having checked all the exits, he began to cover the shops systematically, one by one, ridding his mind of everything but Emma’s hair, her spectacles, and the distinctive, slightly tilted angle at which she often held her head. He talked to himself constantly under his breath so as to stop thoughts forming. Come on, Emma. Please. Where are you? In particular, he was trying not to think about the parents of children who had gone missing. He didn’t want to become one of them. He wouldn’t be able to bear it. “Come on,” he murmured to himself. “Where are you?”

  What hellish places these shopping centres were, with their piped pop music, and their groups of sullen teenagers, and their endless bloody discounts and bargains. Every vertical surface had been fitted with mirror-glass, which made the public spaces look twice as busy as they really were, and he kept catching glimpses of himself, a big man, hot and anxious. The glass shop-fronts gleamed. So did the gold rails. Everything reflecting, distorting, confusing.

  Once, as he passed a record store, he thought he heard her. That unmistakable tuneless booming sound she made whenever she joined in with West Side Story or Beauty and the Beast. He rushed into the shop, calling her name, but stopped before he reached the end of the first aisle. A girl with Down’s was standing at a listening post with a pair of headphones on, singing along to what was obviously one of her favourite CDs. She was older than Emma. Her hair was brown. He saw how oblivious she was to the world around her. Emma would be no different. It was unlikely she’d be feeling abandoned or lost. She probably wouldn’t even have realised she was on her own.

  When he met Sue by the lift, as arranged, she was shaking her head.

  “I can’t do this any more,” she said.

  He told her to wait where she was.

  On his third circuit of the ground floor, he noticed a door marked fire exit. It opened on to a windowless space that had the dimensions of a warehouse, a vast interior of poured concrete and metal stacking-systems, and there under the stark lights, there among the cleaning equipment and the fire extinguishers, was a girl in a pink T-shirt and jeans. Arms in the air, she was swaying to the piped music, but her eyes were on her feet, checking that they were doing what they were supposed to. He wondered whether she had noticed the announcements. If she had, she would probably have imagined that there was a direct connection between the repetition of her name and the songs that were being played. She would probably have assumed that the music was for her. She would have felt special, and that would have encouraged her to go on dancing. In her mind, she was at a party, or in a show. Certainly, she seemed quite unaware of how inhospitable, how inappropriate, her surroundings were. For a few moments, the sight of her held Billy where he was, fifty yards away.

  Sue was waiting by the lift when Billy appeared with Emma. At first, she didn’t react—she hadn’t believed that he would be successful, perhaps—but then she dropped to her knees.

  “Emma, Emma,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I was dancing,” Emma said.

  Sue had her arms around her daughter now, and she was holding her tight. “I thought you were lost. I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Naughty.” Emma had adopted a strict expression, which she had copied from a teacher at school.

  A brief, involuntary laugh came out of Sue, then she began to cry.

  Billy could see Emma’s face over Sue’s right shoulder. The strictness faded, and a look of sympathy, almost of pity, took its place. One of Emma’s hands lifted into the air, then faltered. Peering at the side of Sue’s head from close up, she started, rather clumsily, to stroke Sue’s hair.

  “There,” she said.

  Once again, Billy couldn’t bring himself to move. Mother and daughter in each other’s arms, and strangers passing on either side, their heads turning, sensing a drama, perhaps, but knowing nothing of the real story—and him just standing near by, watching…

  Things like that were always happening, it seemed, or on the point of happening. He turned to Eileen as if seeking confirmation, but carried on before she could open her mouth. Sometimes it got too much for him, he told her, and he would drive to the Orwell estuary after work. The thought of going home frightened him. Or exhausted him. He didn’t know which. Maybe both. He had a hard time working out whether he was lucky or unlucky. He had no clear view of the value of his life. Usually, he was down by the river for an hour or more, trying to cobble something together, some new version of himself. Not that it would last. Well, not for more than a couple of days, anyway—or sometimes it fell apart the moment he walked through the front door. Some days he’d sit in the car, not think at all. He would just switch off. Or he would read about the birds that passed through the area, and it would occur to him that he wasn’t so very different, the way he stopped by the water, gathering his strength, and then moved on. He felt Eileen’s silence near him in the room. He couldn’t decide what he should tell and what he shouldn’t tell. There didn’t appear to be any barriers or boundaries. When he touched his cheek, he found that it was wet.

  Eileen walked over and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” He smiled at her through his tears. “It’s just that it’s difficult sometimes, and no one’s very strong, really, are they?”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “Thank you, Eileen. Christ.” He used both hands to wipe his face. “I didn’t sleep yesterday, that’s all it is. Normally, I have a nap in the afternoon.”

  “You must get some rest when you go home,” Eileen said. “We all must.” She took her hand off his shoulder and stepped over to the wall again.

  “I suppose I’ve been thinking too much,” he said, “imagining things…” His eyes moved to the locked fridge. “Phil said you had the key.”

  She nodded, then patted her jacket pocket. “It’s in here.”

  “But you’re not allowed to open the fridge, are you?”

  “Not unless I’m authorised.”

  “So you couldn’t open it for me?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought. It makes you curious, though, sitting here all night…”

  A silence fell between them, and Eileen made no attempt to fill it.

  “Did you ever see her?” Billy said at last.

  “Once or twice.” Eileen gave him a look that he had already noticed on the faces of other people who were closely involved in the operation. There was wariness in it, and a fear of being indiscreet, both perfectly understandable in the circumstances, but there was also a hunted quality, a coating of guilt, as if merely to have been associated with that murderer of children, no matter how innocently, was to have laid oneself open to suspicion or recrimination, or even to have committed a kind of crime oneself.

  “What was she like?” he asked.

  “Well,” and now Eileen’s eyes drifted away, towards the far end of the room, “I was never with her for more than a couple of minutes at a time, and never on my own.” She paused, as though trying to summon one clear image. “She seemed, I don’t know, very frail…” Another long pause, and then she looked directly at Billy. “If I hadn’t known what she’d done—”

  “You would’ve thought she was normal,” he said.

  “Normal. Yes.” Eileen seemed surprised that he had been able to assist her. Grateful too. But then she took a step backwards, and one of her hands shot out in front of her, the fingers spread, as though she were trying to keep something at bay. Her other hand had risen towards her face.

  “Eileen?” Billy said. “Are you OK?”

  She waved at him with the hand that was sticking out, but didn’t look at him, the rest of her body rigid, braced, quite motionless. Then she sneezed fo
ur times, in rapid succession.

  “Bless you,” Billy said.

  She took out a tissue and blew her nose. “I don’t know what came over me,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s cold in here—colder than the rest of the hospital, anyhow.”

  “Yes,” she said, turning towards the door, “that’s probably it.”

  Though his observation might well have been true, he had the odd feeling that he was covering for her—or even, perhaps, for both of them. Equally oddly, she appeared to be colluding with him. There was the sense, for a few short moments, that they had found themselves in a dangerous predicament, and that, if they had survived, it was only because they had, at some level, joined forces and because they had stood firm.

  He stooped over the scene log.

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” he said. “About me getting—you know…”

  She was sideways-on to him, by the door. “I don’t think there’s any need, do you?”

  In sounding offhand, and choosing not to look at him when she spoke, she had allowed him to save face, and he liked her immensely for that.

  He saw her out, then glanced at his watch. Thirteen minutes to go.

  38

  “So what’s it like?”

  Virus Malone stood just inside the mortuary with his hands in his pockets, rocking slightly on his heels.

  “There’s a ghost,” Billy said.

  Virus looked at Billy placidly, as if it was only a matter of time before he retracted his statement.

  “When she appears,” Billy said, “keep calm. She’ll try and talk to you. Don’t answer. Oh, and tell her she’s not allowed to smoke. No smoking in the mortuary. It’s against regulations.”

  “Same old Billy.” Virus shook his head.

  Though the two men had worked together in the mid-nineties, Virus had been transferred to the other side of the county just before the millennium, and they hadn’t seen each other in quite a while.

  “So how’s Newmarket?”

  “The racing’s good—and, you know, it’s a bit quieter. You’re not there, for a start…” Looking at the floor, Virus grinned and rubbed the back of his neck—for some reason, making jokes had always embarrassed him—then his eyes travelled round the room again. “So what’s it been like,” he said, “really?”