Death of a Murderer (10 page)

He glanced at his watch. Only twenty minutes to go, and then he’d have an hour off. He was nearly halfway through his shift. He could afford to relax a little.

19

He couldn’t remember leaving the hospital, but clearly he was no longer there. He didn’t panic, though. He wasn’t even anxious. Instead, he seemed to give himself up to his new surroundings. He was sitting at a wooden table. In front of him was a tin ashtray and a lighted candle in a red glass dish. Near the ashtray was a small dark ring where somebody had put a drink down. The brightly coloured paper-chains that looped above his head told him that it would soon be Christmas. People stood in groups all round him, talking and laughing. It was the saloon bar in a pub, he thought, or the private-function room in a hotel. Or, possibly, it was the back room in a working-men’s club. What had he come here for? And who with? He didn’t know; he had no memory of having arrived. There was a loud crackling sound, then an early Beatles number blared out of the speakers that were mounted on brackets halfway up the wall. He recognised the song. He even knew some of the words. A young woman in a floral print dress leaned down and spoke to him, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Was she asking him to dance? He watched as she stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and turned away from him.

As he sat there, enjoying the music—it was years since he had listened to the Beatles—a couple stepped out on to the dance floor. They were young, no more than twenty or twenty-one. The man wore a grey suit with wide lapels. His complexion was pasty, and there was something loose and twisted about his mouth. The girl’s hair was a bright-blonde beehive, and she was dressed in a pink sleeveless blouse, a white skirt decorated with small pink squares, and white-leather boots that almost reached her knees. They danced rock-and-roll-style. The man held the girl at arm’s length, bringing her in close and twirling her round, then allowing the gap between them to open up again, but no matter how fast they moved, no matter how recklessly they whirled and spun, his right hand never let go of hers. The contact was always there.

Once, though, halfway through a song, the girl spoke into the man’s ear, then broke away from him. Walking to the edge of the dance floor, she picked up a cigarette that was already alight, tapped a length of ash off the end of it and brought it to her lips. The man watched her from where he was, feet shifting in time to the music, loosely clenched hands held close to his chest. A lock of hair fell across his forehead. He reached up to push it back. The girl took a long, slow drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke in his direction. Almost immediately, she inhaled again, the tip of the cigarette a vivid red now. She lit a new cigarette from the old one, which she crushed out beneath the heel of her boot, then she rested the new cigarette on the rim of an ashtray and moved back towards her partner, smoke pouring from her nostrils. They went on dancing as before, stepping close to each other, then stepping back, the distance between them tense and yet elastic, the connection plain for all to see…

Then, without any warning, there was a shriek as the needle was roughly snatched from the record. Someone switched the house lights on. The young couple came to a standstill, his right hand gripping hers, their faces motionless, and bleached of all expression by the harsh white glare. It was so quiet that Billy thought he could hear them panting. Smoke lifted casually from the cigarette she’d balanced on the ashtray.

Billy half rose out of his chair, unable to work out where he was or what had happened. The green of the mortuary doors, the smudged white of the fridges. The intermittent beeping of the answer-machine…Ah yes. Yes, of course. He grinned almost foolishly, then blinked and rubbed his eyes. What time was it? Three minutes to midnight. Lowering himself back down into his chair, he waited for somebody to come and relieve him.

20

Billy zipped up his anorak, then walked out on to the road that ran past the front of the hospital. There were fewer reporters now, and they ignored him. They knew he wasn’t authorised to speak to them—and besides, he didn’t have anything to say. Since Friday afternoon the body of Britain’s most notorious woman had been lying under police guard in the West Suffolk hospital. That was all the news there was. In the morning Phil would brief the press on the details and timing of the funeral. He would inform them that he had arranged for the hearse to slow down on one particular bend in the hospital grounds so they could get the photographs they needed. In return for this concession, he hoped they would agree not to disrupt or in any way interfere with the progress of the cortège.

Passing Rheumatology, Billy followed the road down to the picnic area where he and Sue had had their conversation earlier. It was colder now, and the treetops stirred in the wind. He sat on the same bench, facing out into the dark. He had dozed off, perhaps only for a minute, but he had seen the two lovers. The two murderers. He had gate-crashed a Christmas party that was being held by the chemical firm that had employed them, the party at which they were supposed to have met properly for the first time, and the Beatles song that had been playing in his dream had stayed with him—its bright voices and its crisp, slightly gawky guitar:

When your bird is broken

Will it—

At that point, the needle had skidded across the record, and the music had cut out. In his dream he had imagined that someone had collided with the turntable. A moment of clumsiness or tipsiness. Now, though, half an hour later, he saw it differently. He thought it more likely that part of him had needed to stop the couple before they could go any further. He’d brought the whole thing to an end while they were still free of guilt. It was as if he couldn’t bear to see any more.

He leaned back, the edge of the picnic table pressing against his spine.

“It wasn’t like that,” came a voice.

He turned slowly. At first, there was only the table’s splintered surface, and the slender trunks of silver birches, and an unlit building just beyond…But then he saw a figure standing twenty feet away, half-hidden by the trees, a red dot glowing at about head height. Glowing, then fading. Glowing again.

“It wasn’t that dramatic.”

Oddly enough, he didn’t feel frightened, or even surprised. At some level, perhaps, he had been prepared for something like this—or else he was still in the dream’s soft grip, and normal reactions had no purchase. He looked back towards the hospital. Lights shone in the windows; a group of reporters huddled by the entrance to A and E. He thought about calling the control room on his radio. What would he have said, though?

“Do you like my suit?” came the voice again. “I got it from a catalogue.”

A Manchester accent—even after all these years…

He turned round again. She had left the shadows, and was standing on the pavement, under a streetlamp. The suit was a lilac colour, and her blouse was white with a scalloped collar. Her hair was a dull dyed brown.

“You must be cold,” he said.

She seemed to look at him steadily, then she began to laugh.

Rising to his feet, he moved off in the opposite direction, up the slope. The bones in his legs felt spongy. There was the smell of pine needles and damp bark. He took a deep breath. As he let it out, he heard her speak again.

“Everyone was dancing, not just us.”

When he reached the path that would take him down the west side of the hospital, he hesitated, then glanced over his shoulder. There was nobody under the streetlamp, or in among the trees.

There never had been.

There couldn’t have been.

21

The wind eased. In the silence a firework burst softly, gold sparks dropping through the darkness to his right. But November the 5th was more than a fortnight ago…Strange how people cling to things. That woman under the street lamp. The murderer. A trick of the mind, of course—he had been talking to himself—and yet there had been a kind of authenticity about the experience. An attention to detail. The lilac suit, the dull brown hair. She’d even had a cigarette with her. He could hear her speaking, the voice flat, curiously deep and coarsened by years of heavy smoking.

It wasn’t like that.

Well, of course not. How could he possibly have known what it was like? And anyway, it had been a dream. He was exhausted, under pressure. He was not himself. If only Sue had let him have his nap…Instead, they had argued. Again. And nothing had been resolved.

He circled round behind the hospital. Parked cars, draughty doorways. To his left was the administration block where Eileen Evans had an office. Most of the windows were showing lights. Nobody was sleeping tonight—or not for too long, anyway.

Everyone was dancing, not just us.

In a brick bicycle shed opposite the Day Surgery Unit, he found some shelter from the wind, and taking out his mobile, he pressed “Contacts” and then “Neil.” When Neil answered, Billy could hear people shouting in the background. Gunshots too.

“Hold on,” Neil said, “I’ll turn it down.”

From the slur in his voice, it sounded as if Neil was drinking again. When he was thrown out of the force, he had lost everything, even his pension. “I gave them half my life,” he had said when Billy visited. “All those fucking years, and for what?” The last Billy heard, Neil was on the books of a firm that supplied security guards.

“Not working tonight?” Billy said.

“No. You?”

Billy told Neil where he was.

“Christ!” Neil said. Billy imagined him sitting up a little straighter on his lumpy sofa. “What’s it like? What’s happening?”

“Actually,” Billy said, “it’s pretty quiet.”

He could sense Neil’s disappointment. Neil was one of those bobbies who like there to be something always going on. He would have wanted scuffles and clashes at the very least, if not a full-scale riot. He would have wanted batons, long shields. Water cannon. Stepping out of the bike shed, Billy turned into the wind. It roared across the mobile’s mouthpiece, which gave him an excuse not to speak for a moment. He had rung Neil, his best friend, because he needed to talk to somebody about what he had seen, but now he had the chance he didn’t think he could do it. He didn’t know how to describe what had happened without sounding a bit unhinged. He wasn’t even sure he could describe it at all. It occurred to him that he might be able to tell his brother—Charlie was a good listener—but it was mid-afternoon in San Francisco, and Charlie would be at work. Besides, he didn’t have enough credit on his phone for an international call.

“Are you outside?” Neil said.

“I’m on my break,” Billy said, shielding the phone again. “How’s Linda?”

“She left me,” Neil said. “She didn’t like me being a security guard. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Don’t you feel safe?’ She didn’t think that was very funny.”

They talked for another five minutes, then Billy said he should be getting back.

“Hang on in there, Billy,” Neil said. “Don’t blow it.” And then, with some of his old sharpness, “What were you calling about, anyway?”

“Nothing, really,” Billy said. “I just wanted to say hello. It’s been a while.”

“Maybe I’ll come down and see you sometime.”

“That’d be good.”

“I’ll do it,” Neil said. “I’ll come and see you.”

Just before Neil hung up, the voices and the shooting came back, even louder than before.

Billy put his mobile away and started walking. In the distance he could hear a siren. It seemed to be drawing closer, and then, quite suddenly, it faded. The wind lifted again. Leaves shook on their branches. Feeling the cold now, Billy quickened his pace.
Hang on in there.
Neil had given him the encouragement he needed without even being asked. Friends could do that.

22

Back in A and E, everything was peaceful, just the low-level droning of the hospital itself, the sense of being inside a vast, benevolent machine. He nodded at Fowler, who was guarding the entrance, then walked on through reception. The cafeteria was closed—a security grille had been lowered over the counter—but there were still plenty of places to sit. He removed his anorak and hung it over the back of a chair, then sat down facing the corridor. Opening his bag, he looked for his sandwiches. To be on the safe side, he had made himself four rounds. He always got hungry on nightshifts. It was the boredom. As he took his first bite, he remembered an evening in Paris when he was seventeen, Raymond handing him one small tomato and a toe-end of stale French bread.

Following the break-in at Weston Point, he had avoided Raymond, and Raymond too had turned his attention elsewhere. For the next three years, Billy only ever saw Raymond from a distance, and always in the company of older boys, but then, inevitably, the chain that seemed to bind them tightened again. A few days after O levels, he was standing outside the school gates when Raymond sauntered over.

“Any plans for the summer, Billy?”

Lighting a cigarette, Raymond tossed the match into the gutter.

“No,” Billy said warily. “Not really.”

He did have plans, though. He was all lined up to work at the animal-feed business his uncle ran. Later, in the autumn, he wanted to take an HGV test. You could make decent money driving lorries. Or he might even apply to the police. His friend, Neil, was thinking of applying too. Their reasons were the usual ones. They thought they might be able to make a difference. Do some good. But these weren’t the kind of things that you could say to somebody like Raymond.

“Why don’t we go travelling,” Raymond said, “in Europe?”

Billy stared at him. “Europe?”

“There’s no need to worry about money,” Raymond said. “I’ve got enough for both of us.”

Billy remembered the fiver Raymond had offered him. It came back so vividly that he could almost feel the stitch he’d had from cycling up the hill without stopping.

“Athens, Venice, Copenhagen.” Raymond’s arms opened wide, as if he might actually conjure one of those great cities out of the air. “Monte Carlo…”

On the last day of July they crossed the Channel by ferry, then caught a train to Paris, and it was there, in a park called Buttes-Chaumont, that Billy began to understand what he had let himself in for. He looked over at Raymond, who was stretched out on his back under a tree. Raymond wore a dark-blue suit with chalk pinstripes—it had once belonged to a drug dealer from Moss Side, or so Raymond claimed—and tipped down over his eyes was the grey fedora he’d found in a flea market the day before. Beside him, on the grass, lay a small leather suitcase with gold catches. Raymond wouldn’t have been seen dead with a rucksack. Rucksacks were for students. Billy had a rucksack, of course. His mother had bought it for him when he told her about the trip. She couldn’t afford to buy him presents, especially now Charlie had gone to medical school, but she had wanted to please him.
It’s a good one, Billy.
He could still hear her saying that. And yet, in Raymond’s presence, the rucksack was an embarrassment, and he took no care of it. Sometimes, as he threw it on to a hostel floor, or kicked it across a railway station concourse, he imagined his mother watching, and shame would sweep over him. He felt an awful, nameless sadness about the way people treat each other.

“Let’s go and eat, Raymond,” he said.

They’d had nothing since breakfast, and it was already early evening.

Raymond pushed the brim of his hat up with one finger. “Did you say something?”

“What are we going to eat tonight?”

“I bought a couple of tomatoes,” Raymond said, “and there’s half a baguette left over from yesterday. That should do us.”

So that was supper.

Afterwards, Raymond declared himself quite full—“replete” was the word he used—and Billy couldn’t bring himself to disagree.

Over the next few days, as they journeyed south, Raymond subjected Billy to a series of lectures on food. It was his belief that food both dulled perception and extinguished desire. Raising his voice above the clatter of the train, he recited lines from Baudelaire, then he talked about how Jean Genet had written most of his books while hungry. He quoted a letter in which William Burroughs describes finding an inch of fat on his stomach and being repulsed by it. He quoted some Chinese poets as well. The only image Billy could remember later was that of an old man surviving on the leaves that fall from a locust tree. He hoped to God there were no locust trees in Monte Carlo. Food breeds laziness, Raymond said. It breeds complacency. Food’s dangerous. If the trip they were making was to be worthwhile, if they wanted to see things, really
see things,
they should be careful not to eat too much.

“Dangerous?” Billy said in a quiet voice. “Food?”

“Oh yes,” Raymond said. “The danger cannot be overestimated.”

Billy watched a field of vivid lavender float by. “So we have to starve?”

“Think of Rimbaud in Ethiopia,” Raymond said. “Think of St. Francis in that cave outside Assisi.”

In part, Billy brought it on himself, since he deferred to Raymond constantly. It was Raymond who decided where they stayed—doss-houses every time, for their “atmosphere”—and it was Raymond who came up with the itinerary. But then the whole trip had been Raymond’s idea in the first place, so what was Billy to do? Although he did have a little money of his own, he felt awkward using it—and besides, it wouldn’t have been enough to make a real difference. He was dependent on Raymond, in more ways than one, and Raymond knew it.

In a spirit of defiance, Billy walked over to the snack bar’s vending-machines and bought a packet of crisps and an orange Fanta. He imagined Raymond’s lip curling at this display of weakness. The conversations in the park and on the train had happened at the beginning of their holiday, and it wasn’t until the last night that Billy finally rebelled. It was late afternoon when they arrived in Ostend, and the ferry didn’t leave until eleven. Billy had already imagined a farewell dinner—nothing fancy, just some fried fish and a bottle of local wine—but Raymond had other ideas. He thought they should eat on the boat, or else wait till morning.

Before Raymond could finish outlining his plan for the evening, Billy interrupted. “I need a bit of money.”

Raymond gave him a look that was both baffled and sly, and then took a step backwards. It was possible that he had known Billy would react in this way; in fact, maybe this was the effect he’d been after.

“Please give me some money, Raymond,” Billy said. “I’m starving.”

Before Raymond could walk away, Billy reached out and grabbed him by the collar. As Raymond tried to jerk himself free, his suit jacket split right down the back. Letting out a string of swearwords, he hit Billy on the side of the head with the back of his hand. Billy felt a flicker of triumph: Raymond so rarely lost control. He still needed money, though. As they wrestled on the quay, Raymond’s ankle turned on the cobbles, and he fell over. One knee on Raymond’s chest, Billy pinned him to the ground. Raymond stopped struggling and closed his eyes. Billy found Raymond’s wallet and removed a few notes, then stood up quickly and dropped the wallet next to Raymond’s outstretched hand.

Raymond lay quite still for a few seconds, then opened his eyes and shouted, “Thief!”

At first Billy thought he must be joking—it was Raymond’s sense of humour exactly—but then he saw the fear and hostility in Raymond’s eyes, and in that moment he had the feeling that he didn’t know Raymond at all, that the two of them had never met before and that he had, in fact, attacked and robbed a total stranger.

Raymond shouted the word again, in French this time, and Billy stared in disbelief as Raymond sat up and pointed an accusing finger. Passers-by were looking at Billy now, and at the money in his hand; some of them seemed to be about to intervene. Snatching up his rucksack, Billy started running.

That night he ate by himself, and the old couple who owned the bistro let him sleep in a small room next to the kitchen. The following morning he caught the ferry to Dover. He was home by midnight. He didn’t see Raymond again for years.