Death of a Murderer (5 page)

10

The image of Baines, the young porter, lingered—his gelled hair, his slouch, his barely concealed sneer.
Like your job, do you?
There were certain people who couldn’t resist having a go at you, and though Billy was used to it—after twenty-three years, how could he not be?—he was closer to losing control these days than at any other stage in his career. But he was acutely conscious of what had happened to his friend, Neil Batty. A couple of years ago, Neil had beaten a suspect so badly that the man had ended up in hospital, and in spite of an exemplary record, Neil had been thrown out of the force. Billy couldn’t help but sympathise. There had been moments when he, too, had been tempted: a Friday night in the mid-nineties, for instance.

He had come home from work to find an unfamiliar car parked outside his house. It was exactly the sort of car that Sue’s stepfather, Tony, would put on his showroom forecourt—long, sleek, unnecessarily fast. But as Billy pulled up behind it he saw a chauffeur behind the wheel—he could make out the shape of a peaked cap above the head-rest—and, knowing only one man who’d be likely to have a chauffeur, he almost drove away again. At that moment, Newman came round the side of the house and moved languidly across the pavement. He was wearing a dark-blue suit and light-brown shoes, and his hands were in his pockets. His face was tanned. In the seven years that had passed since their first and only encounter, Newman didn’t appear to have aged at all.

Billy slowly opened his car door and got out.

“Still a constable, I see,” Newman said.

Billy locked the door, then straightened up.

Newman was standing on the narrow strip of grass next to the kerb, hands still in his pockets. “Failed our sergeant’s exam, did we?”

“I failed that before I even met you,” Billy said.

Newman shook his head.

Billy glanced at the house. It was after ten o’clock at night, but there wasn’t a light on anywhere. “No one here,” he said, half to himself.

“No.” Newman’s expression was expectant, sly, even faintly humorous, as if Billy was about to deliver the punchline to a joke.

“Well, you’d better come in, I suppose,” Billy said eventually.

Newman had a word with his driver, then followed Billy up the short drive. At the front door Billy paused, fumbling in his pocket for his keys.

Once through into the hall, he stood still for a moment, listening. When he came home from work, he usually walked in on some kind of disaster; it was almost never calm or tidy. He wondered if Newman could sense that. He was aware of the man behind him, alert, quiet, mocking. Like an assassin.

“Sue?” His voice sounded thin, plaintive, and he wished he hadn’t opened his mouth.

There was no reply.

He was angry with her for not being home to deal with her father—but perhaps she hadn’t known he was coming. It was probably Newman’s style to spring surprises.

He showed Newman into the lounge. Newman picked up a framed photograph of Emma as a one-year-old, and then put it down again almost immediately.

“Your granddaughter,” Billy said.

Newman looked at him steadily, but didn’t speak. Billy watched Newman’s gaze shift to the wedding pictures on the sideboard. There was Billy, with his top hat and his toothy smile—
I can’t believe my luck
—and there was Sue, in cream satin, a bunch of white and yellow flowers held at waist-level. She had the flushed, exultant look of somebody who had been proved right.
I always knew this day would come, and now it has.
Billy wondered how Newman had felt about not having been invited.

Newman turned and sat down on the sofa, one arm stretched along the back. “So where’s Sue?”

Like most successful people, he gave you the feeling that you lived too slowly, without sufficient clarity or focus. He didn’t waste any time on subjects that didn’t interest him.

“I’ve no idea,” Billy said. “Do you want to wait?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Would you like something to drink?”

“What have you got?”

“Tea, coffee. Beer.” Billy moved towards the kitchen. “I’m going to have a beer.”

“I’ll have beer too.”

Billy fetched two cans of Heineken from the fridge, then walked back into the lounge and handed one of them to Newman.

“Do you have a glass?” Newman said.

Billy hesitated, then went out to the kitchen again. The cupboard where the glasses were kept was empty—they would be in the dishwasher, which Sue never ran until last thing at night—so he chose a plastic beaker with Pooh and Piglet on the side. One of Emma’s. He took it into the lounge and handed it to Newman. Newman looked at the beaker, and Billy saw him decide not to comment. Opening his beer, Billy dropped heavily into the armchair by the fire. It had been a long day: a wife beaten by her husband, a stolen motorbike, two drunk builders fighting in a pub…

“I thought your house might look a bit like this,” Newman said after a while.

“Not what you’re used to, I imagine.”

Newman laughed unpleasantly.

Lose your temper, and you lose, Billy thought. It was a lesson he had learned over the years. Another lesson: don’t say any more than you have to. He raised his can to his lips and drank.

“Actually, to be honest,” Newman said, “I thought it might be even worse. You know, more depressing…”

Through the closed window Billy heard the clank of a bicycle. That would be Harry Parsons, riding home from the allotments. Harry had recovered from the fall he’d had not long after Billy and Sue moved in, and he was up there most days, whatever the weather. The last time they had spoken, Harry had told him that he was thinking of growing delphiniums. A beautiful flower, Harry had said. Beautiful colour. Not blue, but not purple either. Somewhere in between.

“I’m sure you do your best,” Newman was saying. “It’s just that she wants more from life. More than you can offer, anyway.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“She didn’t have to. I’m her father.”

“You left her when she was thirteen.”

“I left her mother.”

Billy shrugged. “Same thing.”

Newman watched him from the sofa.

“You know, when I first knew Sue,” Billy said, “she never mentioned you at all. I used to think her father must be dead. He must have died when she was very young, I thought—or maybe he died before she was even born—”

“Are they teaching you psychology now? Is that what they’re teaching on those training courses?” Newman studied his beer. He still hadn’t taken so much as a sip.

In that moment, a curious vibration went through Billy, a sort of flutter or crackle, as though his body were full of tiny people clapping. He had just realised that Newman was a man he could kill, and he would feel no qualms about it. He could use the onyx clock Sue’s mother had given them when they got married. He could see Newman on the carpet, one arm trapped beneath his body, the other pointing at the door. Battered to death with a present from his ex-wife. There was a nice symmetry to that.

“I’m not sure I get the joke,” Newman said.

This would be one of the very few times that Billy managed to turn the tables on Sue’s father, and he wanted to make it last. No qualms, he thought, and no remorse. None whatsoever.

Standing up, he stepped over to the mantelpiece and adjusted the position of the clock, not because it needed adjusting, but because he wanted to feel the weight of it, the heft. Oh, this would do, he said to himself. This would be perfect.

Not exactly the perfect murder, though.

As he put the clock down and turned away, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung opposite the fireplace. For several seconds he stood quite still, struck by a thought he’d never had before. In Ipswich there was a man—a local character—who’d had his entire face tattooed in an attempt to stop himself committing crimes. Billy would see him sometimes, on Westgate Street or Norwich Road, his eyes appearing to stare out from behind a jungle of Celtic swirls and flourishes. Granted the man was mentally ill, but the measure did have a certain logic to it. If he ever broke the law, there would be no problem identifying the culprit.
It was the bloke with the tattoos. He did it.
Looking at himself in the mirror, it occurred to Billy that he might have joined the police for the same reason, to prevent himself from doing wrong. Not to protect other people, then, but to protect himself. His uniform was a sane version of the tattooed face. It hadn’t worked, though, had it? Even with his uniform on, he had done things he shouldn’t have; if anything, in fact, the uniform had helped. He thought of Venetia’s father, and the memory came to him so forcefully that the wet-hay smell of the old man’s breath seemed present in the room.

“You know, a few years ago—” Billy checked himself. This wasn’t something he should ever talk about, and least of all with Newman listening.

“A few years ago what?” Newman said softly.

Billy shook his head. “Another drink?”

Newman looked at his plastic beaker. “I’ve got plenty.”

When Billy returned from the kitchen with a second beer, he went and stood by the window. He saw Newman’s chauffeur fold a newspaper and place it on the dashboard. He wondered how the chauffeur felt about his employer. He imagined walking outside and telling him Newman was dead.
I killed him. Just now. With a clock.
And the chauffeur nodding, smiling, maybe even patting him on the back—

“It’s not that you’re stupid exactly,” Newman said.

To the west, the sky was streaked with violet and gold. Summer nights—the way the light never seems to go…

“It’s just that you lack drive.”

Billy watched as a car came into view further down the road.

“You’d rather avoid things,” Newman said, “than really take them on.”

When the car pulled up level with the house, Billy saw that it belonged to one of Sue’s friends from the school gates.

“You’re frightened,” Newman said.

Above the car’s roof was a row of trees, arranged along the horizon. Billy knew that they were poplars, and that they grew in the field beyond the railway line, but in the slowly fading light they looked like an ancient curse written in a language he could not decipher. They had the same qualities as Newman’s words: spiteful, insidious—black as the wrong kind of magic.

The car door opened, and Sue got out with Emma in her arms. Emma’s legs hung straight down, which meant she was probably asleep. Sue glanced at her father’s car, then turned back and watched her friend drive off, freeing one hand so she could wave. She hadn’t noticed Billy in the window, and somehow he felt she ought to have done. That lack of awareness, that apparent self-sufficiency didn’t say much for their relationship—or rather, it said everything.

“What do you think, Scruffy?” came Newman’s voice. “Do you think that’s unfair?”

11

Billy stood up suddenly and walked down to the far end of the mortuary. He would have liked some air, a change of scene, but it was still hours until his break. Newman’s voice had been so gentle and considered, as if he were dispensing valuable advice, each sentence carefully shaped and weighted so as to lodge in Billy’s memory. Billy rubbed at his face with both hands. Had he avoided things? He didn’t think he had. Sue had wanted security, and he had done his utmost to provide it. He had worked unceasingly to try and build a life that seemed worth living, and now, after fourteen years together, they had more or less everything they were supposed to have—a house, a child, a car, a job, a pension—but nothing felt secure at all, and nothing felt quite real either.

In the last few months he had stopped going straight home after work. The first time it happened, in February, it had been an accident. He knew the roundabout well—he used it most days—so there was no reason why he should have taken the first exit instead of the second, and even once he’d made the mistake he could easily have pulled into the side of the road and turned round. But he didn’t. He carried on. And there was a distinct lightness about the way he drove after that, a detached quality, as though the decision was not only one that had been made for him, but also one that he didn’t have the power either to challenge or to overturn. He wondered if that was how his father, Glenn Tyler, had felt when he walked out on his pregnant wife in 1956. That lightness, that detachment. Things shaken off—for ever, in his father’s case.

From that day on, even after his transfer to Stowmarket had come through, Billy would go back to that same roundabout, and he would follow the road that curved under the Orwell bridge and out along the river. He would always park in the same lay-by. If it was raining, he would listen to the radio, or read the local paper. From time to time, he would switch the wipers on and peer through the windscreen, but there was nothing much to see, just the dark twist of the road ahead of him, and the grass verge to his left and, beyond that, the river’s dull grey surface. If the weather was fine, though, and the tide was out, he would walk across the mud-flats, eyes lowered, as if searching the ground for something he had lost. He only engaged with what lay directly in front of him—seaweed, nails, bones, feathers, shells. The rest of his life he was able, for a while, to keep at bay. He saw all sorts of people. Lonely types mostly. There was a man who carried a white bucket and a long stick with a spoon taped to the end of it. Employed by a nearby farm, he had taken it upon himself to poison the rats that were breeding on the riverbank. There was also a man who dug up ragworms and razorfish, which he would use as bait. Like most keen fishermen, he didn’t have too much to say. And there was a frizzy-haired woman who fed the swans—with biscuits, usually, or stale buns. Another woman, older, would stare out over the water, one hand pressed against her collarbone, as if waiting for a lover to arrive by boat. They would exchange a few words, or nod at each other, but that was about it. Nobody came down to the estuary to make new friends. Sometimes he would read the notice that had been erected on the grass verge. He learned about the various birds that visited the area—the godwit, the redshank, the dunlin. They would spend the summer in Norway or Greenland or Russia, and then, when the temperature began to drop, they would fly south. Those names, though: they sounded like characters from myth or legend. Redshank the warrior, soaked in blood. Godwit the jester, the holy fool…And beyond the notice, of course, there was always the view. There were two cargo ships moored against the far bank, their hulls rusted ginger and listing in the water. There were yachts too, tacking upriver, their sails paunchy with the wind. Behind them lay the Nacton foreshore, where people often went to have sex or smoke dope, and away to his left, the bridge itself, its giant concrete span so high that it looked precarious, almost unsafe. Only the westbound lane was visible from where he stood, the cars and lorries sliding endlessly and steadily from right to left like targets in a fairground rifle-range. Above all, though, there was a sudden immense resource of space and light. It had sufficient power to absorb him, he felt. It was something he could vanish into if he wanted, and that notion gave him solace, making it possible for him, after a while, to turn his car round and drive back home.

Billy sat down again, then leaned forwards, the points of his elbows on his knees. Placing the palms of his hands on his forehead, with his fingers reaching up into his hair, he stared down at the metal grating that covered the drain. He was aware of the pulse beating on the inside of his right wrist. Years ago, when he was sixteen or seventeen, he had imagined all kinds of scenarios, but never anything so obvious or so difficult. He had met people here and there, people who could make things happen. Somehow none of it had quite come off. Life could surge away from you at great speed, leaving you bobbing dumbly in its wake. His friend, Raymond Percival, for instance, who had tried to persuade him to move down south, to London.
We could get a squat. Go on the dole. There’ll be parties, girls…
Raymond who always said he wanted to be an arms dealer—where was Raymond now? And what about Venetia? He would have married her in two seconds flat, but marriage had been the last thing on her mind. Venetia with her hair flowing over her shoulders, like black treacle poured out of a tin…

He last saw Raymond in Cheshire. It was October 1993, and he had driven up to the north-west to visit his mother who’d just celebrated her sixty-eighth birthday. Sue was three months pregnant with Emma, and Billy’s father, Glenn Tyler, had died a few weeks earlier, in Germany. It was a strange time, full of events that were enormous but concealed, remote. He found it hard to work out what he was feeling. He just kept going, without thinking too much, and tried to do the ordinary things as efficiently as he could. On the Saturday night he took his mother out to dinner in a country pub where the food was supposed to be good, and as he went up to the bar for the second time, to fetch more drinks, somebody called his name. He glanced over his shoulder, and there, unbelievably, was Raymond Percival, sitting at a candlelit table with a girl.

“Billy Tyler,” Raymond said, not getting up. He was wearing a fawn leather jacket that looked expensive, and his skin was lightly tanned.

“Raymond! What are you doing here? I thought you’d be in London.”

“Oh, you know,” Raymond said. “I get around.”

He had the same mocking smile that he’d had as a teenager. It had been amusing then, even necessary, as much a part of his image as his haircut or his flared trousers, but in a man approaching forty it looked much more like provocation. It didn’t seem as if Raymond knew that, though—or perhaps he just didn’t care.

“So,” Billy said, “how are you?”

“Could be worse. What about you?”

“Not bad.”

“I almost drowned him once,” Raymond told the girl, his eyes still moving over Billy’s face. The girl’s mouth opened a fraction, then she laughed quickly and reached for her champagne.

For a moment Billy saw the water, almost black, and seeming to slope uphill, away from him.

“I suppose you’re running Scotland Yard by now,” Raymond said.

Billy smiled faintly. “Something like that.”

So Raymond knew what he did. He was sure Raymond found it not only ludicrous but incomprehensible. After everything they had been through together, he would be bound to see it as a betrayal too. But that was years ago, all that…

Raymond introduced him to the girl. Her name was Henry, Raymond said. When Billy stared at her, she smiled and told him it was short for Henrietta. They shook hands, hers cocked slightly at the wrist, and bright with rings. She had a pair of sunglasses in her hair. Billy thought she was probably a model.

He turned back to Raymond, his eyes dropping briefly to Raymond’s jacket. “You look as if you’re doing all right for yourself,” he said. “Nothing illegal, I hope.”

Raymond laughed. “You want to join us, Billy? You want to pull up a chair?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I’m with someone.”

Raymond looked past him. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

“My mother,” Billy said.

They both smiled, but their smiles didn’t reach their eyes.

“Well, anyway,” Raymond said, brisker now, “good to see you.” You’d think they ran into each other all the time. It had been twenty years, though. Maybe more.

“Take it easy, Raymond,” Billy said, then he turned to Henrietta. “Nice to have met you.”

He walked over to the bar. As he ordered the drinks, he heard Raymond and the girl start laughing. On his way back, he passed their table again and nodded, but he didn’t stop, focusing instead on the two glasses he was carrying, as if worried they might spill.

Sometime later, he looked through the window and saw Raymond standing near a low-slung sports car. The girl was with him. Though it was already dark, she had her sunglasses on. Out of habit, he made a mental note of Raymond’s number plate. BOY 1DA. If Raymond wanted to, he could drive to London tonight with that beautiful girl beside him. Or Paris. He could do anything.

“Are they friends of yours?” Billy’s mother asked.

“That’s Raymond,” Billy said. “Raymond Percival.”

“You were at school with him, weren’t you?”

Billy nodded. “I went on holiday with him as well. We travelled all round Europe.”

“I remember.” His mother’s eyes lingered on Raymond as he climbed into the car. “Good-looking boy.”

Billy smiled to himself.

“Your father had something of that about him,” she said.

“Really?”

“He was glamorous.” She took a sip of wine, then put the glass back on the table. She kept her hand on it, though, and twisted it from time to time. “Imagine falling for a musician…”

They both watched through the window as the sports car moved noisily out on to the road.

“Was he ever violent?” Billy asked.

“He got drunk sometimes. I was frightened of him then.” She looked across at Billy. “He never hit me, if that’s what you mean.”

Billy stared at the table. His father had been drinking the night he died, apparently. A tram had knocked him down. In Hamburg. When Billy thought about the death, all he could see was a saxophone lying on a cobbled street, the bell tinted red by strip-club neon, the octave key bent out of shape. His father, the musician…Had he been playing live that night? Where had he been living, and who with? What had happened to the saxophone? The questions came to him in a leisurely, almost sluggish way, as though aware that answers were unlikely to materialise. They had more to do with a kind of nostalgia than with any real curiosity. He had seen his father just twice in his entire life.

“Why do you ask?” his mother said, and he could sense her eyes on him.

“No reason,” he said, still staring at the table.

“You’re not in trouble, Billy, are you?”

“No.” And he wasn’t. But he felt as if he was.