A Commonplace Killing (24 page)

H
e was tired and the night air was muffled with gasometers and traffic and dereliction. The moon was far away and misty. He listened to a few gramophone records and drank a glass of Scotch, but it didn’t help him to sleep.

He was thinking of the boy. Usually murderers seemed unreal to him, distant. He could push them away: the wide boys, the cosh-boys. He had dealt with a few in his time and some of them had deserved to hang, whereas others had been victims of circumstance. This boy was different somehow. What he had done was the end result of one long suicide attempt; attempt at self-murder, intended to scratch out the botched part of himself; the part that the war had gouged out of his brain.

Cooper tried not to think of the boy lying awake in the condemned cell on his last night on earth. It would be so hard to die like that, he thought; knowing the precise moment. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. To have death steal up on you knowingly, expectantly. He imagined that all you can do in such circumstance as that would be to deny that it is going to happen; believe that there will be a reprieve – even up to the last second. He thought of the poor kid, too terrified to sleep, waiting for the final creak of the cell door, the warden asking what he would like to eat. “You can have anything you fancy, son.”

That last act of kindness. In an hour you will be dead; a healthy sentient being, dead; with the doctor leaning over you listening for a heartbeat. It was dawn before he fell into a
troubled
fractured sleep, against the first stirring of the birds over in Clissold Park, with images of a shuddering mortal in the grip of terror populating his brain – just such a one as he had been. Jaws clenched. Shoulders rigid. Tears streaming down his face.

The deep black well of sleep was shattered by the jangle of the telephone. He stumbled through to the hall. It was Lucas. “Just thought you’d like to know Belcher is dead. They need you at Pentonville to identify the body.”

 

The body was quite sound – apart from the marks of
suspension
. Cooper duly signed the form. The man of whose body I have had the view was Dennis Belcher. He asked the warder if there had been a last-minute confession. There hadn’t.

And that was that.

It was a crisp early-autumn morning when Cooper stepped outside the prison; clear blue skies with not a cloud to be seen. He started walking towards Stoke Newington High Street, to division HQ. He had the feeling that he had once done
something
worthwhile, something good, but he had forgotten
whatever
it was and now would never remember it. It had been a very long time ago.

The streets were shabby in the bright light; grey and covered in a thin layer of dust. He walked on past hoardings inviting him to buy things he had no need of, but which were impossible to get in any case.
Cadbury means quality. Don’t be vague, ask for Hague. Vote Communist
. He thought how tired everybody looked, how drawn and haggard; how threadbare. It was as if the childish hope that it would be alright, somehow, some day, when things were like they used to be, had been extinguished, and they had become conscious that it had not all been a bad dream from which they would all awaken.

He couldn’t face the office, so he went to Clissold Park instead. He was looking for affirmation there under the golden brown trees. Little children skipping. Dogs running after sticks. He sat down on a bench and told himself that if there was doubt then there would have to be faith too, in among the mangled steel and splintered wood and dark alleys and greasy cafés. There had to be some reason to keep going. He wondered if it were enough simply to desire faith. There were tears in his eyes as he closed them and tried so hard, to imagine a better future.

 

Siân Busby was an award-winning writer, broadcaster and film maker. She published four books, including
The Cruel Mother
, a memoir of her great-grandmother which won the Mind Book Award in 2004; and a novel,
McNaughten
, which was published to critical acclaim in 2009. She was married to the BBC Business editor, Robert Peston, and had two sons. She died in September 2012 after a long illness and will be much missed.