Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

Billy pocketed the card, then leaned across and shook the man’s hand. “I’m Billy Tyler.”

“PC Tyler,” Mr. Prabhu said, as if correcting him. “A pleasure to have met you.”

“I hope everything turns out well for your wife.”

The man inclined his head in thanks.

Billy gathered up the crisp bag and the can of Fanta, both empty now, and dropped them in the rubbish bin, then he started back towards the mortuary. The small hours. It was so quiet that he could hear his own footsteps. They had a measured, dependable sound, and contrasted strangely with his thoughts, which kept flitting from one subject to another. It could be fatigue, or it could be the eerie suggestibility of a hospital at night. It could even be the influence of Mr. Prabhu. The good eye, dark and gentle. The other with its lavish swirl of white. A little like being looked at by two people at once. That subdued, intriguing way of talking around a subject, then closing in on it and capturing it with elegant precision. At some fundamental level, Billy felt they had understood each other perfectly. Mr. Prabhu had implied that he was there for his wife, as any caring husband would be, and that was almost certainly true, but Billy knew that Mr. Prabhu was also there for himself. There was a tremendous fear in you at times like that. There was the need to stay close to whatever was going on. You had to try and hold things together, even though it seemed to be their natural tendency to fall apart.

He thought of how he had rushed to A and E the year before, having just been told about Sue’s crash. He found her behind a curtain, on a high, hard bed. She looked so young that he knew she must have been through something violent, but the only mark on her was a small scratch at the base of her thumb: she’d cut herself when she crawled out through the shattered window. On the right side of her head, behind her ear, her hair looked as though someone had furiously backcombed it, and the fine, spun-sugar tangles were studded with bits of broken glass. The fact that she’d escaped without injury staggered everybody. It also made them suspicious. There had to be damage somewhere, surely…The doctor who examined her described how organs could get twisted in certain types of accident. If the car rolled, for instance, as it had in her case, there was always a possibility of internal bleeding. Sue should stay in bed, he said. She had to keep quiet. Rest. During those long, tense days, Billy turned on the TV and saw a plane slide slowly into one of the Twin Towers. He wasn’t able to process the images at all. They had no effect on him except as an illustration of his own private catastrophe. The demolished skyscrapers stood in for the car that Sue had reduced to a pile of scrap. The three thousand casualties symbolised her brush with death. It was his own story, written large, yet it all felt curiously stilted and obscure. It was a time when things seemed hard to believe, and hard to sustain. He dressed Emma in the mornings, and drove her to school. He cooked her meals. “Mummy resting,” she said once, at breakfast — and then, looking him full in the face, “Mummy all right.” She wanted him to reassure her, but she might also have been prompting him, or even coaching him. The future could be talked into existence. He took one of her hands in both of his. “Yes,” he said. “Mummy’s fine.” At night, though, when Sue was sleeping, he would tiptoe into the room and hover uselessly next to the bed, her bitter breath clouding the air below him, or he would leave the house and stand on the grass track, shivering. What did he think as he stared out over the field? Did he pray?

If something should happen to my wife…

He turned the corner into the corridor that led to the mortuary. At first, he didn’t notice the woman, partly because he hadn’t expected anyone to be there, and partly because she was leaning against the wall in one of the shadowy areas between two lights. She was wearing the same lilac suit, and she was smoking, as before.

“How did you—?” He broke off, uncertain as to what question he should be asking.

She didn’t look at him. Instead, she simply lifted her cigarette up to her mouth. When she inhaled, a row of fine vertical lines showed on her upper lip. She took the smoke deep into her body and didn’t exhale at all. The smoke was just absorbed.

“Did you believe him?” she said.

She sounded the same as she had when he saw her in the hospital grounds, her vowels harsh and flat, her accent recognisably Mancunian.

“That Indian bloke,” she said. “Do you think he got it right?”

Billy couldn’t take his eyes off her. His forehead felt cold, his ears too. A steady industrial hum came from the ramp beyond her.

“Don’t worry. I won’t bite.” She tapped half an inch of ash into the cupped palm of her left hand. “I spent a lot of time in this place.” She looked past him, down the corridor. “I have to say, they were pretty good to me, actually.”

And now Billy saw that she wasn’t alone. Behind her, standing close to the wall, was a frail, dark-haired boy of about thirteen. He wore a pair of black swimming-trunks, and his body was the colour of cement.

As Billy watched, the boy stepped out of the shadows, into a pool of light. Bending suddenly, he vomited on the floor. It was just water, Billy realised. Water from the reservoir. The boy stayed doubled up, hugging himself as though he’d caught a chill.

“What can I do for him?” the woman said. “There’s nothing I can do.” She rounded on Billy, her voice losing its note of resignation, becoming harder. “You don’t say much, do you?” She looked straight at him, with her cigarette held just to one side of her mouth. “Most people want to ask me questions. Why did I do it? What was I thinking? How can I live with myself?”

She reeled off the various expressions of other people’s curiosity in a bored monotone that Billy found repellent. Yes, the questions were predictable, and she had probably heard them a hundred times, but she was talking about torture, murder…Then again, she’d never been known for her tact, had she?

“What are you doing here?” he said. “What do you want?”

“Surely you can do better than that.” She was still staring at him. The swollen eyelids, the narrow mouth. One hand full of ash. “Come on, Billy,” she said. “This is your big chance.”

Take a deep breath. Look away.

A few feet to his left he saw a notice that said pathology. There was a door with a small window in it, at head height. He peered through. There didn’t seem to be anybody in the room, but all the lights were on. In the fluorescent glare he could see a row of white coats hanging on a rail, each one clean but shapeless, limp, like recently discarded skin. He felt a creeping sensation at the back of his neck, beneath his hair, a dread that he was quite unable to explain.

He had a question for the woman now, but when he turned to face her she was gone. She must have run out of patience. Lost interest. Or perhaps she had sensed what he was about to ask, and it had driven her away. He crossed to the place where she had been standing and moved the flat of one hand over the wall. It felt uniformly dry and cool. There was no evidence that anyone had been there, not the slightest vestige of human warmth or body heat. Kneeling quickly, he inspected the floor. No suggestion of any water either. Not a trace of ash.

“Did you drop something?”

Still on his knees, he glanced over his shoulder. A nurse stood at the end of the corridor. Though her eyes were fixed on him, her face was turned slightly away, as if she found it difficult to look straight at him.

“Yes,” he said, getting to his feet. “Well, I thought I did.”