Death of a Murderer (3 page)

5

The double doors that led to the mortuary were pale-green and set deep into the wall. To their left was a notice that said for entry please push bell once. Another notice close by said staff only. Fixed high up on the wall was a circular convex mirror in which both Billy and the sergeant featured as thinner, more alien versions of themselves. Bulbous heads, bodies tapering away to nothing. Like tadpoles. Behind him, Billy could see a wide passage or ramp that sloped up to a large, cavernous area. Parked at the top, and motionless amid the constant, low-level grinding of generators, were several small-scale fork-lift trucks that were known as tugs. Phil told him they were used for ferrying the patients’ dirty linen to the back of the hospital. The woman’s bedding had been brought here too, though it had been treated not as laundry but as non-chemical waste. The moment her body was wheeled out of the private ward where she had spent her last days, her sheets and pillowcases had been disposed of, as had anything else that she had come into contact with. All such items would inevitably be viewed as souvenirs, he said, and that sort of temptation had to be removed.

Billy watched as Phil pressed the mortuary bell. The door opened from the inside, and a young blonde constable let them in. Billy didn’t know her. They were using officers from a number of different stations. Whoever they could get hold of, really.

“You next, is it?” she said, looking at Billy.

He nodded.

“It’s all right.” Her face angled back into the room. “Just boring, that’s all.”

Billy followed Phil through the doorway. Putting his bag down on a chair, he noted the bank of fridges that reached from floor to ceiling.

“Is there anything I should know about?” he asked the constable.

She thought for a moment, her small mouth twisting to one side. “If the phone rings in the office,” she said, “it’s best to answer it. Otherwise it starts making a weird beeping sound that’ll end up getting on your nerves.”

“Anything else?”

“It smells a bit.”

“That’s death,” Phil said. “Nothing you can do about that.”

Billy watched the constable bend over the scene log and sign herself out. If he had been asked to guess her age, he would have put it somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-one. When the murders happened, in other words, she wouldn’t have been born, or even thought of.

She straightened up and ran one hand through her short blonde hair. “Well, that’s me done.”

“Have you got far to go?” Billy asked her.

“I live near Cambridge.”

“That shouldn’t take you too long.”

“Seen me drive, have you?” She grinned at him, then reached for her belongings.

When she had gone, Phil called Billy over. Billy recorded the fact that he was now the loggist, and that Detective Sergeant Shaw was present, then he wrote the date and time in the left-hand column, signed the entry and leaned back against the radiator, which was only faintly warm.

“Where is she?” he said. “Just so I know.”

“That one.” Phil pointed to the fridges marked police bodies, just to the right of the door that led to the postmortem room. “It’s locked.”

“Who’s got the key?”

“The woman you met by the main entrance. Eileen Evans.”

“Are there any others?”

“No.”

Prompted by Billy’s questioning, no doubt, Phil went over and tested the door of the fridge he had just identified. It didn’t budge.

“You’ve seen her, haven’t you?” Billy said. “Dead, I mean.”

Phil spoke with his back still turned. “Yes, I’ve seen her.”

“What did she look like?”

Now Phil’s head swung round—he suspected Billy of being ghoulish, perhaps—but obviously he saw nothing in Billy’s face to warrant such suspicions because he went ahead and answered. “She looked like she smoked too much,” he said. “She looked old. Older than sixty.”

“You ever think about what she did?”

“No. To me she’s just another sudden death.”

Billy nodded. “All the same,” he said. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was driving at, and yet he couldn’t seem to let the subject drop.

Phil walked over to another fridge, one that had a brown envelope taped to it, and inspected the names of the deceased. Once again, he spoke without looking at Billy. “Put it like this. When people die, I reckon they deserve a bit of respect—no matter what they’ve done.”

Billy thought Phil might have a point, though there would be many who would disagree. In this particular case, at least.

“And anyway,” Phil went on, still studying the names, “I think something goes out of people when they die, even someone like her. They stop being who they were.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Billy said, “but yes, I suppose that makes sense.”

“In the end, she’s just another code two-nine, you know?” Phil turned to face him.

Billy nodded, then opened his hold-all and took out a plastic folder. Behind with his reports, he had seen the twelve-hour shift as an opportunity to do some catching up.

“No chance of you getting bored,” Phil said.

Billy gave him a steady look, then the two men smiled at each other. Most police officers hated all the paperwork that came with the job—and there was so much more of it than there used to be. A lot had changed since 1984, when the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was introduced, and none of it for the better.

“Brought any refs with you?” Phil asked.

Billy reached into his bag again, producing a large package wrapped in silver foil. “Wiltshire ham,” he said, “with plenty of Colman’s.”

“If you need anything else,” Phil said, “there’s a cafeteria near the front entrance. You’ll get your first break at midnight and another one at about four.”

“OK, sarge. Thanks.”

Phil took one last look round the room, then left.

6

Once Billy had secured the double doors and made a note of Phil’s departure in the scene log, he sat down and stretched out his legs, one ankle crossed over the other, the heel of his left boot resting on the drain in the middle of the floor. He flipped the folder open and began to leaf through his paperwork. The third form he came to had the words missing child/youth printed in bold black type across the top. His throat tightened, and he let the folder fall shut. He had spent most of Sunday afternoon in a council house out near Cherry Tree Road, interviewing a couple whose daughter, Rebecca, had been missing since the day before. Thankfully, Rebecca had called home as Billy was driving back to the station that evening, but since he felt a follow-up enquiry might be in order he had held on to his report, and he now needed to complete the continuation sheets, which would prove invaluable if she were to go missing again. “Misper” forms took time—they were exceptionally detailed—and they always filled him with foreboding. Even though seven years had gone by, the memory of Shena Coates still haunted him. One summer morning, while her parents were out shopping, Shena had left her house by the back door. She was wearing a velvet dress and a pair of high heels, and carrying her brand-new vanity set. She locked herself in the garden shed, applied lipstick, rouge, eye-shadow and mascara, and then hanged herself. She was eleven years old. You could see her hand-prints on the window where she had tried to clean the glass. She had needed more light, in order to do her make-up properly…You’d think a seasoned police officer would have got used to occurrences like these, tragic though they were, but, if anything, the opposite was true: they seemed to affect him more as time went by, the way an allergy might, so much so that he began to wonder whether they might not actually kill him in the end. One of the reasons why he’d put in for a transfer to Stowmarket at the beginning of the year was because it was such a sleepy little town, and the crime would be gentler, more trivial. That was the theory, anyway. Rebecca’s story might be over—for the time being, at least—but the bad associations were still there. He would deal with the report later on, he told himself, when he had the stomach for it.

As he set the folder aside, he became aware of a smell—or not so much a smell, maybe, as a prickling in his nostrils, a slight sense of irritation—and he remembered what Phil Shaw had said.
That’s death.
Turning in his chair, Billy stared at the fridge Phil had pointed out for him. Like the others, it was white, but the wipe-clean board where the identity of the deceased would normally be recorded had been left blank. There was nothing to indicate that anyone was there at all.

A name came floating into his mind.
Trevor Lydgate.
It had been surfacing ever since he heard the news on Friday afternoon. Once again, he had to push it away. He didn’t want to think about Trevor, not now.

He stared at the blank space on the fridge until he too began to feel blank.

No names, no thoughts…

The inside of his head felt hollow, scooped out, smooth as an empty eggshell.

7

A couple of years ago, in that sluggish, soporific time between Christmas and New Year, Billy had driven to the place where the murderers had buried their victims. He had left Sue and Emma with his mother, saying that he was going to visit his friend, Neil, in Widnes. Snow had fallen overnight in Yorkshire and Humberside, but Cheshire was bright and sunny when he started out, and his spirits lifted, as if he were embarking on an adventure. As the M60 curved through Manchester, though, he caught his first glimpse of the moors, a looming shoulder of high ground to the east, treeless and primitive, and he felt something sink inside him, and a slow burning around his heart. It was all he could do not to drive straight back to his mother’s house.

Soon after turning on to the A635, he became aware that he was now following in the murderers’ footsteps. This was the road they would have taken—there was no other—and he doubted very much had changed since the sixties. Chinese restaurants probably wouldn’t have existed then, not in the small towns, nor would shops that sold computers, but everything else looked at least a century old. The rows of terraced housing, the factories, the stations, the churches: he was seeing what the two murderers would have seen. And the moors always there above the rooftops, their brooding presence softened that day by a sprinkling of snow…

On the high street in Mossley he passed a car coming the other way. The driver was a woman with blonde hair, the top half of her face hidden by a lowered sunshield. Only the blunt curve of her chin was visible, and a hard mouth made even harder by her bright-red lipstick. That scorched sensation round his heart again. The urge to hurry home.

After Greenfield, the road began to climb, and in no time at all he was up on the moor, the land stretching away on either side, wild and deserted. The air thickened, and turned white. Sometimes the sun pressed through the murk—a silver disc, sharp-edged but misty, dull. He parked in a lay-by, then put on gloves, a woolly hat and wellingtons. He stood quite still beside the car. A silence that was eerily alive, like the silence when you answer the phone and there’s someone on the other end not talking. He set off down a track, making for an outcrop of rocks known as the Standing Stones. One of the victim’s bodies had been found near by.

Before long the track narrowed, and he struck out across open country, thinking it would be more direct, but the yellow grass was coarse and wiry, which slowed him down, and the light covering of snow hid lethal troughs and hollows. He could sprain an ankle if he wasn’t careful, or even break it. As he walked, he noticed that he kept looking over his shoulder. He needed to be able to see his car, he realised, and the further he went, the greater this need became. He felt nervous, almost distressed. In these icy conditions, the countless slabs of rock that pushed up through the moor looked black. His car was black too, and merged with the landscape perfectly. Once, as he glanced behind him, he trod in a boggy hole, and his right leg sank in up to the knee. He had to tug and tug to get it out.

Not until he was returning from the Standing Stones did he feel easier in himself. The fog had thinned. A weak sun shone. He began to think about the boy whose body was still missing, and fell into such a strange, trance-like state that when the ground seemed to leap up in front of him, he let out a cry and jumped backwards. He watched, startled, as a huge, ash-grey hare bounded away, its black ears showing clearly against the frost-encrusted grass. When the hare had vanished, he studied the place where it had been crouching, a patch of crumbly, peat-dark earth beneath an overhang. Before he knew it, he was scraping at the soil with his boot. The hare was a marker, he felt, like a cross on a map: if he dug here, something might come to light—a pair of spectacles, a shoe…He stood back. What was he thinking? The moor had been searched again and again, by hundreds of people. Besides, the top layer had shifted over the years; areas of peat that had been exposed in the sixties would now be thoroughly grassed over. But a miraculous discovery, he realised, was what he had been hoping for. That, in part, was why he’d come.

Before he left the moor, he crossed the road and climbed up to Hollin Brown Knoll, another of the murderers’ favourite spots. Stopping for breath, he saw three men with rifles striding towards the Standing Stones, a black dog with them. He thought of the hare and hoped that it was safe. On the knoll itself was a rock that was the same height as a chair, and slightly concave too, but when he sat down on it he had such a powerful sense of the woman’s presence that he instantly got up again and moved away.

Further on, the land levelled out, and he came across several shallow gullies that meandered off in a northerly direction. The streams had frozen over; black water squirmed through narrow channels beneath the ice. While up there, he saw a tree, its twisted trunk growing along the ground as if seeking shelter, then veering up into the air, the thin grey branches trembling. Once again, he had the feeling there was something to be discovered, but it was like having a word on the tip of your tongue and knowing you would never remember it. There were things here that couldn’t be grasped or squared away—not by him, in any case. He stared off into a gully, imagining a man leading a small boy by the hand. After a minute, only the man’s head and shoulders showed above the bank, and the boy wasn’t visible at all…

The snow had blown in from the east the night before, and now it was coming again, the air closing in, surrounding him, a whirl of tiny flakes.

He turned and started back towards the car.