Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

“You need a break, Billy?” Phil said. “You want to go outside and stretch your legs?”

With those words, Billy understood that, as far as Phil was concerned, the matter was closed.

“I’ll wait till midnight, sarge,” he said. “It’s not long now.” He watched Phil yawn, then rub his eyes. “You’re probably the one who needs a break.”

“When this is over, I’m going to sleep for a week.”

“A week? They’ll never give you a week.”

“Right.” Jaw clenched tight, Phil smiled another of his grim smiles.

When Phil had gone, Billy returned to his chair. Yes, the pressures were immense. It wasn’t just the long hours, the bad food and the lack of sleep. It was all the temptations that came your way as well. Women often threw themselves at police officers. Was it because police officers were confident, decisive characters who knew how to handle themselves? Or was it because they were supposed to represent the straight and narrow, and there was a kind of thrill in leading them astray? Or was it just the uniform? He didn’t know. It definitely happened, though. On Saturday nights, when he parked outside a club like Pals at closing time, women would dance in front of the police van, taking off half their clothes. The previous summer, a dark-haired girl in a short skirt had leaned over the bonnet and given the windscreen a long, slow kiss. Tongue and everything. Sooner or later, most policemen weakened. They had one-night stands, quick flings — full-blown affairs. They would bring their lovers to parties in the police station and leave their girlfriends or their wives at home. They would claim to be on a training course and all the while they’d be on holiday with another woman. If you met a bobby who told you he’d never been over the side you didn’t entirely trust him. Nobody could be that bloody perfect.

Once, in the mid-nineties, Billy had been called to Sir Alf Ramsay Way on a grade-one response. A prostitute had thrown a brick through the plate-glass window of a car showroom. Jade was known to the Ipswich police; she was a good-looking girl when she wasn’t on the smack. Poor old Sir Alf, Billy thought as he drove across town; he’d turn in his grave if he knew that the street named after him was now a red-light area. By the time he arrived at the scene, Jade had a friend with her. The friend’s name was Carly, and she caught Billy’s eye the moment he stepped on to the pavement. He wasn’t making excuses, but Shena Coates had killed herself a week or two before, and then, a few days later, in a hostel, a dead baby had been found at the bottom of a bed. As a policeman, there were times when your life was so sickening and brutal that you felt you’d earned whatever came along, and Carly had such a cheeky, dirty look about her…For the six weeks it lasted, she always wanted him to do it the same way — from behind. By the end, he knew the back of her head like the back of his own hand. The soft groove that ran vertically from the top of her spine into her dyed blonde hair, the smooth curve of bone behind each ear. The smell of her neck: Anais Anais and the sweat of guilty fucking…“You’re rubbish, you are. You should be at home, with your wife.” Though she had been wearing very little when she said that. She’d been sitting on the bed and she’d given him a steady look that came up at him through her eyelashes, and then she’d moved her knees apart ever so slightly, not so he could see anything, but so he thought about it, what was there. Carly. Seven years on, he could still remember the taste of her earlobes, faintly metallic where they’d been pierced…

But infidelity could be subtler than that, and more contaminating. Though he was in the mortuary, he could no longer smell formaldehyde or disinfectant; now it was jasmine suddenly, a heady, cloying cloud of jasmine shot through with the much keener scent of lemons, and he found himself remembering the holiday he’d had with Sue and Emma in Newman’s villa in the hills above Cannes, and in particular the night when he met Newman’s girlfriend — if that was the word…

Billy had only agreed to go because Newman wasn’t there, but Newman called halfway through their holiday to say that he would be returning earlier than expected, and though Billy tried to reassure himself — in the five years since Newman’s surprise visit to the house, perhaps he would have mellowed — the thought of spending forty-eight hours in Newman’s company filled him with unease, if not with dread. “We should have left the moment we heard,” he told Sue later. “We should have booked into a hotel.” Sue thought he was overreacting. It hadn’t been that bad, she said. She didn’t know, though, did she?

Billy was in their bedroom high up in the house when Newman arrived. Through the open window he heard the murmur of a car on the drive, and then voices, Newman’s to start with, silky but authoritative, followed by a woman’s. Hers had a blur to it, and he sensed right away that English wasn’t her first language.

He didn’t meet her until shortly before dinner. He was sitting on the terrace with Emma, drinking a beer, when a young woman appeared in the doorway. She had long black hair, and wore a sheer black dress that clung to her body. She was from somewhere like Japan, he thought. As she was about to venture out on to the terrace, Emma sprang forwards, blocking the doorway with one arm.

“Password,” she said sternly.

“Emma, it’s all right,” Billy said. “I think you can let her through.”

Emma grudgingly lowered her arm.

When the woman came over, Billy explained that Emma was just playing a game. If you didn’t know the secret password, it meant you were the enemy. You would have to be locked up. Put in the tower. The woman had been watching Emma, but now she turned her depthless black eyes on Billy, giving him a look that was somehow both startled and intrigued, and seemed to bear little or no relation to what she’d just been told. Her name was Lulu, he learned when they sat down, and she was Korean. She worked in a casino.

Emma had never met anyone like Lulu before — Ipswich had a fair number of Bengalis and Iranians, Iraqis too, but very few people from South-East Asia — and she was utterly besotted. Perhaps that was why the evening went so smoothly. Newman seemed relaxed, almost benign, chuckling over Emma’s sudden infatuation.

After dinner, Lulu let Emma brush her hair.

“Beautiful.” Standing behind Lulu, brush in hand, Emma’s whole face appeared to be radiating light.

“No, you’re beautiful,” Lulu said over her shoulder.

“No, you !” Emma boomed. She’d never been able to stand being contradicted.

Later, when it was time for bed, Emma took Lulu by the hand and led her away. After a while, Billy went upstairs to help Lulu out, only to meet her on the landing. She had started telling Emma a story, she said, but Emma had fallen asleep almost immediately.

“She gets very tired,” Billy said.

“How do you call it,” Lulu said, “what she has?”

“Down’s syndrome.”

“She’s very different…”

“There isn’t a cell in her body that’s the same as yours or mine.” The moment the words had left his mouth, Billy felt as if he’d said something oddly intimate.

Lulu only nodded. “Like a dolphin,” she said, then glanced at him quickly.

“It’s all right.” Billy grinned. “I think I know what you mean.”

When they returned to the dining-room, there was a CD playing, some French singer Billy had never heard of, but Sue and her father were nowhere to be seen. Lulu poured Billy a glass of champagne, and they sat out on the terrace. The warm air shifted; the leaves of a palm tree scraped against each other. He asked Lulu about her job. It paid well, she told him, but the hours were long. The dresses they wore didn’t have pockets, which was supposed to stop them stealing chips, but one girl had a special technique; though Lulu didn’t go into any detail, Billy was left in little doubt as to what this might involve. She said she wasn’t allowed to give out her phone number, or even accept tips. Men were always hitting on her — that was the phrase she used — sometimes women too, but fraternisation with the patrons was strictly forbidden.