Death of a Murderer (17 page)

32

This time she didn’t startle him. He sensed that he could rouse her simply by letting his thoughts drift in a particular direction. When he turned to face her, he saw that she was wearing the lilac suit again. Her eyebrows were plucked, and brown lines had been drawn on in their place. On the table in front of her were two packets of cigarettes. She must be thinking of staying for longer than usual. She’d come prepared.

No, he wasn’t startled, nor did he feel nervous. He had never appeared on TV, or on the front page of a national newspaper. The media were not in the habit of discussing his fate. He was an ordinary person, and yet her fame—her notoriety—had no impact on him.

“I’m ordinary too,” she said, little puffs of cigarette smoke emerging with the words. “If I hadn’t met him, I would have gone on being ordinary.”

That was debatable, of course. But it was the first time she had referred directly to the man who had been her lover, her mentor, the man who was now serving a life sentence in Ashworth, a high-security prison for the criminally insane. He had outlived her, even though he had been on a hunger strike for the past three years, and was being force-fed through a tube. He had outlived her, even though he was the one who wanted to die. He wouldn’t have been too happy when he heard the news.

“I’ve got a question for you,” Billy said. “Another question.”

Half an inch of ash teetered on the end of her cigarette. “Still no ashtray?” she said, looking round the room. “Oh well.” She held her cigarette over the drain and flicked the filter with her thumb. The ash tumbled softly through the air and disappeared. She turned back to him again, her pencilled eyebrows raised, which gave her a raffish, faintly sarcastic air.

“Who did you love most?” he said.

“My mother.” She hadn’t given herself time to think. She hadn’t needed to, perhaps. Either she had seen the question coming, or she had simply told the truth. She was still watching him, waiting to see how he would react to her answer, daring him to make something of it.

“What about your father?” Billy said.

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

Her father had been away fighting in the war until she was three. When he returned, she was sent to live with her grandmother. Later, crippled by an accident at work, he became a drinker, moody and violent.

“Your mother…” Billy nodded slowly. “I thought you might say that.”

“You don’t believe me?”

He looked away. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her. It was just that the answer seemed predictable. He had somehow known that she wouldn’t be able to admit to loving the man with whom she’d committed those atrocities, the man whose name was now linked eternally, inextricably, with hers. From a distance of thirty years, she would have found that love hard to credit, let alone acknowledge. She would have had to call it something else—something less idealistic or more extreme. An obsession. A madness. She might even have blotted it out altogether. The knee-high boots and miniskirts. The nickname he had given her. The sado-masochistic sex. What’s more, she’d probably been in love with people since. That fellow inmate, for instance, the one who was a singer—and there were rumours of affairs with prison guards as well. The love she remembered, though, was the one that came first. A daughter’s love. He tried to imagine the woman as a little girl, but it made him feel uncomfortable. It was as if he were placing her on the same footing as her victims; it seemed insensitive at best, at worst a kind of violation. Yet there must have been a time, mustn’t there, when she was innocent? People didn’t want to think about that, of course. There was one image of her in the popular mind—the dyed-blonde hair, the brooding gaze—and that was it. There was no before, no after. No childhood, and no old age. Those photos taken in various prisons over the years—who were they supposed to fool? All those different hairstyles. That wasn’t her…And as he sat there at the table it suddenly occurred to him that he had never seen a picture of her as a child, not even one. Didn’t her mother have any? If not, what had happened to them? Had they been suppressed? Destroyed? It was a strange absence, unsettling, almost unjust, though he thought he understood the need for it.

“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 of 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.