Death of a Murderer (4 page)

8

Glancing at his mobile on the table, Billy was reminded of the text Sue had sent. Sometimes, when she bombarded him with messages, each one more desperate and abbreviated than the last, or when she asked the impossible of him, as she had that afternoon, he would wonder why he put up with it. Where had Susie Newman disappeared to? And when?
Don’t go travelling,
he had said, and she hadn’t. She had got a job with a firm of marketing consultants, and later, in October of that year, she had moved in with him. They’d lived in his little two-room flat on Frederick Street, just round the corner from the police station. Christ, the sex they’d had back then. The love they’d had. He used to run home from work to see her. Actually run. But he had never taken her to India or Thailand; he hadn’t paid enough attention to her dreams. Fourteen years had passed, and certain possibilities had slipped through their fingers, and now she was turning into somebody he didn’t recognise. He would get flashes of how she used to be, but it was as if he were trying to tune into a foreign radio station with a weak signal; mostly all he received was interference, static, nothing he could make any sense of. What about the feeling of familiarity he’d had, though, when he stood in Murphy’s garage on that sunny morning in 1988? Had that been an illusion, some sort of trick? Or had he failed to look after what he’d been given? And if it was gone, was it gone for ever, or could it be recovered?

He was going round in circles.

He saw her again, standing by the front door in the cold, her face lowered, her arms folded tightly across her chest. There were days when he couldn’t seem to please her, no matter what he did or didn’t do, and it would occur to him that she might simply have grown tired of him, that he might be less than she had imagined him to be, less than she’d wanted. Certainly there were those who took that view. Her father, for one. Peter Newman never missed an opportunity to let Billy know that she deserved better. Not that Newman was such a great advertisement for marriage: he had left Susie’s mother when Susie was just thirteen.

Billy first met Peter Newman in a wine bar in Manchester in the summer of 1989. Though wine bars were no longer a novelty—they had started appearing in the north-west at least five years earlier—Billy had never set foot in one before, a fact that Newman seemed to intuit almost immediately. Newman had a couple of business associates with him. The three men wore double-breasted suits with padded shoulders, which made them look American, and Billy was painfully aware of his cheap black shoes and the soiled bandage on his right hand, an injury sustained while arresting a drunk at a rugby-league game the previous Saturday.

When the waitress came over, Newman and his colleagues ordered glasses of wine. So did Susie. Billy said he would have wine too.

“Really?” Newman said. “You wouldn’t rather have a pint?”

“No, I’ll have some wine,” Billy said. When, actually, a beer was what he wanted. But he felt clumsy in the company of these business people; he felt the way he’d felt when he failed his sergeant’s exam.

To begin with, Newman talked about a project he was investing in—a luxury resort on a Greek island—but gradually he steered the conversation round to Susie, and the fact that she was going out with a policeman.

“‘Scruffy Tyler,’ they call him,” Newman told his colleagues.

The two men laughed softly and nodded. This piece of information didn’t seem to surprise them in the least.

“It’s ‘Scruff,’” Billy said, “not ‘Scruffy.’”

“I still don’t get it,” Newman said. “How on earth did you two meet?”

Billy did his best to ignore the slight. “Susie was working in a garage in Widnes,” he said. “It’s a place I often call in at when I’m—”

Newman talked right over him. “Of course, I’ve seen her with all sorts,” he said, addressing his business associates again. “I mean, she’s not exactly particular.”

Newman’s cronies leered at Susie, as if they too might be in with a chance of having her. Susie was staring down into her glass.

For a few moments, Billy couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard. Then he took hold of his wine-glass, which was still half-full, and pushed it away from him into the middle of the table.

“You ought to watch your mouth,” he said.

“Oh dear”—Newman was talking to the two men, but his eyes were on Billy—“I think we could be looking at another case of police brutality.”

A smirk on his face. On the faces of his colleagues too. One of them took a long, slow mouthful of wine, watching Billy over the rim of his glass.

Billy reached for Susie’s hand. “Come on. It’s getting late.”

Outside, he stood on the pavement, trembling. A cold wind, streets all red and grey. Manchester.

“Sorry about that, Billy,” Susie said.

He turned to her with a kind of desperation. “How could you just sit there?”

She smiled at the ground. “That was nothing. You should hear some of the—”

“No, don’t. Please. I don’t want to know.”

Later, on the train, he said, “It’s not true, is it?”

Susie was staring out of the window. “No,” she said. But she had put no effort into her answer, as if she wasn’t sure, or didn’t care.

“Susie?” He leaned closer.

When she turned to him, she looked desolate, her skin stretched thin and drained of all its colour. “No, Billy,” she said. “It’s not true.” She held his gaze for a moment longer, and then, finally, some humour crept back. “I’m not exactly a virgin, though, either…”

The mortuary radiator clanked once, then gurgled. Billy reached out and put a hand on it, but it was no warmer than the last time. He shifted in his chair. After that awkward evening in Manchester, he had refused to have anything to do with Susie’s father. The man was only interested in making what they had seem grubby. If Newman ever rang up to suggest a drink or dinner—though based in the South of France, he was always travelling to England, it seemed, on business—Billy would claim to be working. “But you go,” he would say to Susie. “You go.” When she was offered a job in Suffolk and asked Billy whether he’d consider leaving the north-west, he surprised her by saying yes. He surprised himself too—he had never seen himself living anywhere else—but perhaps, in the back of his mind, he thought a move to the other side of the country would put them out of Newman’s reach. He worried about his mother being on her own—his older brother, Charlie, had moved to America the year before—but she made light of it, telling him that, after all, there were such things as cars and he could always drive up and see her now and then. Once Susie had accepted the offer, Billy requested a transfer to the Suffolk Constabulary—luckily, they had a vacancy for an officer with his experience—and by the spring of 1990 he and Susie were renting a neat modern flat in the centre of Ipswich.

At first he missed the buzz of Widnes, the muck and stink of it. The huddled red-brick terraces and the towering, tangled heaps of scrap metal. The bloody fights that broke out every five minutes for no good reason. Sometimes you’d find teeth in the gutter, or a clump of hair. When Widnes played arch-rivals Warrington at Naughton Park, the coaches bringing in the visitors would have to run a gauntlet of stones and bottles, and the police took dogs along to keep the two sets of fans apart. Then the game itself, with half the players on amphetamines, the tackling so brutal that Billy’s bones would shudder—and he was only watching…Afterwards, he and a few other bobbies would call in at the pie shop, pork-and-apple fillings or hamburger-and-baked-beans. You’d get stomach-ache just looking at those pies, but you’d still have two, and you’d wash them down with tea that had brewed so long you could have used it to stain furniture. Later, there would be trouble at one of the nightclubs, the Landmark or Big Jim’s, and they’d go down there mob-handed to sort it out. The women were even more ferocious than the men, especially if they’d had a drink. “Don’t let them get you on the floor,” a sergeant told him early on. “You won’t get up again.” There was the night three pubs spilled out at the same time, and an almighty punch-up started in front of the chip shop on Victoria Road. Billy tried to nick somebody in a black shirt who was only about half his height. The bloke turned out to be some sort of martial-arts expert, and Billy came away with one side of his face swollen up like a melon and his left arm fractured in two places. But the way the bobbies pulled together, Neil and Terry and Vomit Molloy and the Perv and Dad, even Light Duties Livermore, everybody looking out for everybody else, that was really something…Ipswich felt tame by comparison, less vivid. If asked, though, Susie could explain exactly what was better about their lives. She seemed happier, and that was Billy’s one great wish, to make her happy.

But before the year was out, Susie began to feel that something was missing. She wasn’t homesick for the north; it was more like a kind of restlessness or hollowness, the sense that she hadn’t fully occupied the space around her. The space inside her too: in early 1991, she’d had a miscarriage, and she was frightened she might not be able to have children. Words like “security” and “the future” crept into her conversation; she worried about what she called “missing the boat.” These were things that mattered to her, and he considered it his duty to provide them. After months of searching, they found a property a few miles out of town. It was a small place, semidetached, the end house in a row of eight, and there was noise from the railway line on the far side of the road, but it would be their first real home. Billy waited until they had settled in—the house had needed painting inside and out, and it took weeks to clear the garden—and then, on a cloudy, drowsy afternoon in late July, he reached for Susie’s hand and led her out into the field. “Where are you taking me?” He wouldn’t say. Only when they got to the middle did he stop. The corn waist-high, and seeming to whisper, even though there wasn’t any wind. Then, holding Susie’s hand in both of his, he knelt in front of her and asked her to marry him. She looked away into the sky, and a dreamy smile rose on to her face, as if he’d reminded her of something that had happened a long time ago, in her childhood. When she said, “Yes, I’d love to,” he was still on his knees, invisible to everybody in the world but her. Anyone watching would have thought she was talking to herself.

They didn’t invite Susie’s father to the wedding. Billy wouldn’t allow it. “He’d ruin everything,” Billy said, and then added, somewhat hysterically, “It’s him or me,” which made Susie laugh. “My father won’t be coming either,” Billy told her. He didn’t know where his father was living, or even if he was still alive. “Let’s invite Harry Parsons instead,” he said. The wedding took place in Stockport, and Susie’s stepfather, the car-dealer, paid for everything. They’d been married for less than a year when Susie became pregnant again, and this time she didn’t lose the baby.

In the coroner’s office the phone started ringing, and the sound brought Billy swiftly out of his chair. Stepping into the cramped room, he picked up the receiver.

“PC Tyler,” he said.

The woman on the other end told him that her name was Marjorie Church, and that she was the charge-hand porter. “We’ve got a body to bring down,” she said.

Five minutes later, Billy heard a knock, and when he opened the mortuary doors a short, solid woman in a blue shirt and dark trousers was standing in front of him.

“Marjorie?” he said.

“That’s me.”

Behind her were two men with a trolley. One of the porters was middle-aged and bald, with clownish tufts of hair protruding from both sides of his head; the other one was younger, in his twenties.

Billy stood aside to let them in, making sure the doors were properly bolted after them. He would have to write their names down in the scene log, he said.

The younger porter blew some air out of his mouth. “Is that really necessary? We’re only going to be a moment.”

“It’s standard procedure,” Billy said. “It applies to everyone, me included.”

“You like your job, do you?”

The number of times Billy had heard that.

He looked at the porter. “You can take it up with the sergeant if you want.”

“There’s other people dying round here,” the porter said, “not just her.”

“His name’s Peter Baines,” said the porter with the clown’s hair. “I’m Colin Wilson.”

The young porter scowled at him.

“Thanks, Colin.” Glancing at Billy, Marjorie raised both her eyebrows, then she moved over to the bank of fridges and opened one of the doors.

Using his right foot, Wilson pumped up the trolley until it was on a level with an empty compartment, then Baines helped him slide the body on to a steel shelf. The body was wrapped in a whitish shroud, but the head was uncovered, and Billy glimpsed the crown of an old man’s head, the scalp mottled and waxy.

Marjorie closed the fridge door. “No need to lock this one in,” she said.

Billy smiled faintly. He watched as she took a black marker pen out of her pocket and wrote the dead man’s name on the fridge door, then he returned to the log and recorded what had just occurred.

Moments later, Wilson wheeled the trolley off down the corridor, with Baines walking behind, still grumbling. Marjorie went to follow them. On reaching the doorway, though, she paused and then turned round.

“It’s that woman,” she said. “She upsets people.”

“I understand that,” Billy said.

“It’ll be good when she’s gone. When things are back to normal.”

Billy nodded.

Her face brightened suddenly, as if whatever had been awkward or difficult was now over. “Anything I can get you?” she said. “A cup of tea?”

“No thanks, Marjorie,” he said. “I’m fine.”

9

Alone again, Billy noticed something on the floor under the table. Bending down, he picked up a metal nail file with a handle of pearly white plastic. He doubted that Marjorie would have brought a nail file to the mortuary—and besides, the iridescent handle didn’t seem in character—so he could only assume that it belonged to the young blonde constable who had preceded him. He turned the nail file slowly in his hand. If he had asked the constable what she thought of the woman in the fridge, what would she have said? What would she have made of it all, born as she undoubtedly had been in the early seventies? Would she have wanted to try and understand how it was possible for a woman who had once been a trusted babysitter to become involved in the torture and murder of children? Or would she simply have repeated what the tabloids were telling her, and what most people in the country appeared to believe, namely that the woman was inhuman, evil, a monster?

In the autumn of 1999, Billy had spent some time in a newspaper library, reading up about the murders, and one story in particular had stayed with him. When the woman was a girl of fifteen, she’d been friends with a boy two years her junior. He was delicate, apparently, and she’d taken it upon herself to protect him. One day he asked her if she would come swimming. She told him she couldn’t. That afternoon he went up to the local reservoir on his own and drowned. For weeks afterwards, she was inconsolable. She wore nothing but black. The boy had always been a weak swimmer, and yet she had refused to go with him. She was to blame for his death. She couldn’t forgive herself. Some people said it was then that she first turned to the Catholic Church. There are moments in your life when something’s taken from you, and once you’ve lost it you don’t get it back. What you were before is neither here nor there. You’re different now.

Billy didn’t pretend to be an expert—what did he know, really, except for what he had picked up on the streets?—but he couldn’t help wondering whether that boy’s death by drowning wasn’t a defining moment, a kind of turning-point. Supposing somewhere deep down in her there was the feeling that she had killed, and not a stranger either, but somebody who was dear to her, somebody who had—and this detail always sent a shiver through him—
the same initials as she did?
If that was the case, if that was how she had felt, did the psychopath from Glasgow see that abyss in her, that bottomless pit, the belief that she had nothing left to lose? Could that be what had attracted him? She’d done it once. She could do it again. What difference would it make? She was already guilty. And having more experience than he did, she could even, maybe, guide him, show him the way…It wasn’t an apology or an excuse. It might just be a fact, though. And that eerie coincidence with the initials…When the boy died in the reservoir, did part of her die with him?