Death of a Murderer (18 page)

34

Venetia, though. Nothing had prepared him for the effect that she would have on him. Even her name. It was unlikely, expensive—the sort of name one of Raymond’s girlfriends might have. Born to a Scottish father and an Indian mother, she had spent most of her childhood in Glasgow, only moving to Liverpool when she was fourteen, and her voice had something of both cities in it, with the lilt or rhythm of Bombay underneath. Three ports, one voice. Was it the sound of her that he fell in love with? Perhaps. But the sight of her, on Lacey Street, was enough to bring him to a standstill. For a few seconds, he forgot to breathe. Her hair so black and shiny that he could almost see himself in it. Her eyes as well. Her skin was dark too, but also lemony, somehow, as if yellow had been overlaid with a patina of translucent black.

Venetia McGarry.

The first time he saw her, she was driving a white Ford Fiesta. She had pulled up at the junction with Victoria Road and was signalling right. She looked him in the eyes, but only for a moment, then she leaned forwards in her seat to see whether anything was coming. She had a bald tyre, he noticed. Front left. For some reason, he didn’t book her, though; he simply stepped back from the kerb so she could look beyond him. Once she had established that the road was clear, she smiled at him, and he waved an arm out sideways, meaning not just that he was letting her go first, but that she should go with his blessing. The whole incident lasted fifteen seconds at the most, and though he thought about her on and off for the rest of the day, he certainly never expected to run into her again.

When he saw her the second time, in a pub in Liverpool, more than six months had passed, and she had no memory of ever setting eyes on him before, not even when he told her exactly what had taken place and where. She was surprised that he remembered it all in such detail. Flattered too. Later, she said that although she found his story extremely convincing she didn’t believe it, not for a moment. She assumed he was making the whole thing up. Though that, in itself, was quite charming, she thought. Romantic even. That he should go to the trouble of inventing a previous encounter. Not at all the kind of chat-up line she was used to. Spooky that he’d guessed the colour of her car, though. What was he? A mind-reader? Giving her an ambiguous smile, he looked away. Had he not remembered seeing her and been able to describe it, had he not been equipped with that memory, it was quite possible that nothing would ever have happened between them. As it was, he could turn back to her and tell her something else: her front left tyre had hardly any tread on it.

“It was illegal,” he said, “but I decided to let you go.”

“Wasn’t that dangerous?” she said.

And with those words something began.

Three months on, when it was all over, he couldn’t rid himself of the suspicion that she had remembered more than she had led him to believe. That morning in Widnes, as she looked through her car window, she would have noticed the uniform he was wearing. The idea could have occurred to her there and then. Not that she necessarily thought she would run into him again. Someone
like
him, though. A
policeman.
But if that was true, it undermined every moment they had spent together, and no matter how sceptical he felt, or how bitter, he couldn’t bring himself to admit that the entire relationship might have been a sham. It was just too much to lose.

Billy had gone to Paradise Street with Neil Batty, and when Neil left the pub at around nine, he started talking to Venetia, who was sitting at the next table. She had friends with her—Simon, her flatmate, and Beryl, who was on the dole—and after a while the four of them went upstairs. On the first floor was a bar that had a pool table. Something by the Specials was playing as they walked in, Terry Hall’s voice floating high above a typically nervy but hypnotic beat. Venetia was drinking Southern Comfort on the rocks. He was captivated by her, but paralysed; as in a dream he felt that if he reached for her she’d always be an inch beyond his fingertips. All he could do was gaze at her when she wasn’t looking. He couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t gazing at her. She was that gorgeous. Then, without any warning, she moved towards him through the smoke-filled air, and suddenly she was up against him, sideways-on, like a conspirator, and he felt a heavy object drop into his jacket pocket.

“That’s for you,” she said.

Off she went again, with her long hair pouring down her back and her double Southern Comfort on the rocks. Halfway across the bar, she turned and smiled at him over her shoulder.

Christ.

He fell in love with her right then—or was it moments later, in the privacy of the Gents, when he reached a hand slowly, tentatively, into his pocket and watched it emerge with the black ball from the pool table?

The most important ball in the game. The one that’s worth more than all the others. The difference between winning and losing.

“Where the fuck’s the black?” a man yelled.

Nobody knew. The ball had disappeared.

It was a mystery.

The second he took that ball out of his pocket he knew what it meant: she had decided she was going to sleep with him. His heart jerked, as if his body had been speeding and he had just stamped on the brakes, and he stayed in the Gents for longer than he needed to. He was putting off returning to the bar, delaying the look that would surely pass between them, and the understanding they would have.

But nothing happened that night. In fact, nothing happened until the following Tuesday, and even as she left his flat on Wednesday morning she told him not to get used to anything because it might not happen again. Her life, she said, was complicated enough already. Though disappointed, wounded too, somehow he had seen this coming. He knew he was lucky to have been with her at all, and he was already grateful for the little he’d received. At the outset, then, she learned a couple of things about him: one, he didn’t feel that he deserved her, and two, he was entirely at her disposal.

She would visit his flat. He was never allowed to visit hers, though. She didn’t want her friends to see them together. She wouldn’t meet his friends either. She gave him her phone number, but didn’t tell him where she lived. She didn’t let him take any pictures of her and wouldn’t even go into a photo booth with him; she didn’t want their relationship recorded. What went on between the two of them was to remain private, secret. Hidden. If the world found out, pressure would be brought to bear on them, and that, she said, would be the end of it. He did his best to abide by her rules, but as the weeks went by it began to seem unnatural, stifling, even cruel. When he tried to tell her how he felt, she interrupted.

“Look, this isn’t
serious,
” she said. “We’re just having fun.”

He nodded gloomily. Fun.

Once, in early March, she let him take her away for the weekend. To spend two consecutive nights and days with her was unheard of, but even as he counted his blessings he knew the weekend would never be repeated, so his mood as they drove up the motorway that Friday evening was one of thinly disguised despair. It was late when they arrived at the hotel, and the bar was already closed. Luckily, Venetia had brought some champagne with her. After the long drive north, he needed a drink, but the simple act of following her into an unfamiliar room excited him so much that he had to make love to her immediately, before they could even open the bottle. In the past, she had always insisted on having the lights off and the curtains closed, as if she belonged to a different generation, another time. That night, though, they did it with the TV on, and he could see her as she lay beneath him on the quilted counterpane, her narrow, boyish hips, her thin legs, almost stick-like, and her surprising breasts, which were out of proportion to the rest of her. Her body seemed more voluptuous than usual, in fact, and he wondered if she was having a period, but when he was inside her, it didn’t feel like it. Afterwards, she smeared his sperm over her nipples with the tip of her forefinger. “I like the feeling when it dries,” she said. “It goes all tight.” And he was so tired and dreamy that he barely noticed this veiled reference to previous experience, other men.

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?”