Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

The smell of cigarettes first, then the smoke rising, grey-blue, in the corner of his eye. Then, finally, the voice: “I had nothing to do with it.”

She sat across from him, a cigarette in her right hand, her left arm resting on the table. Britain’s most hated woman. She was wearing a suit again, only this time it was darker. Maroon, he thought, or burgundy. In front of her was a packet of Embassy filter, with a box of matches on top. There were chocolates too. He remembered reading somewhere that she had a sweet tooth.

“That friend of yours,” she said. “I never saw him before in my life.”

As she shifted on her chair, the lights on the ceiling picked out coppery tints in her hair. According to one of the newspapers, she was so pampered while in Highpoint that she’d had her own crimpers. He watched as she carefully selected another cigarette. She acted as if each cigarette was slightly different and uniquely delicious. It wasn’t the behaviour of someone who’d been pampered. She struck a match and lit the cigarette, then put the used match back in the box and placed the box on top of the cigarette packet. The years she had spent in prison were evident in every movement, no matter how small. When she touched ordinary objects, they seemed to acquire new value, greater substance.

“He was making the whole thing up,” she said.

“Why, though?” Billy wasn’t surprised by her denials; on the contrary, they were entirely consistent with the thought he’d had on the day of Trevor’s funeral, a thought that had lingered in the back of his mind ever since, ghostly, unconfirmed. “Why would he do that?”

“How would I know?” Eyebrows raised, mouth a little pinched, she held the cigarette away from the table and tapped it twice with her index finger. Ash fell silently into the drain.

“Maybe he was having some kind of breakdown,” Billy murmured.

In the excitement of that chance encounter, he had over-looked the most important factors: Trevor had a large family — four children — and was about to lose his job. He would have been under enormous strain.

The woman took another long drag and looked off into the distance, beyond the white doors of the fridges, beyond the hospital walls. “You want to know about breakdowns?” she said. “I’ll tell you about breakdowns.” She began to describe her life in Holloway, and then in Cookham — the insults, the beatings, the constant degradation. She talked about being kicked unconscious by a fellow inmate, and how her appearance had altered. Bones had been broken in her face. She wasn’t asking for pity. She was just saying. Billy realised that he was only half listening.

“There’s no way you’d ever admit to it,” he said, bringing her back to the original subject. “You can’t afford to.”

“Oh?” she said. “And why’s that?”

“If you own up to abducting Trevor, then it’s like saying there were others — and that’s my question, actually, since you wanted me to ask you a question: not ‘Why did you do it?’ but ‘How many more?’”

“How many more?” she said.

“How many more,” he said, “that we don’t know about?”

She looked at him steadily, smoke rising in a thin spiral past her eyes. “You’re quite a clever-clogs, aren’t you?”

Even if she was in possession of certain knowledge, she wasn’t about to share it with him. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. She’d rather torture him by leaving all his accusations hanging in the air. But he had noticed a twitch in the skin under her right eye.

“You killed people,” he said. “Children.”

She held his gaze. The twitch became irregular, then vanished.

“Most of the time I wasn’t even there,” she said.

Most of the time. She had no idea how chilling those words sounded.

“Once, I sat on a rock,” she said. “Another time I waited by the car. I wasn’t there.”

“That’s what happens in a war,” Billy said. “That’s what generals do. They watch from a distance while their soldiers do the—”

Her expression hardened into one of thinly suppressed contempt. “So that’s your theory, is it? You think I was in charge?”

Well, why not? he thought. A female general. In her knee-length boots and her helmet of blonde hair.

The people who spoke in her defence tended to claim that her lover was both evil and deranged, and that she had fallen under his influence. Had she never met him, they argued, she would have led a perfectly normal life. But supposing the opposite was true? Supposing he had fallen under her influence? What if her presence alone had been enough to unleash the wickedness in him, to spur him on to greater and greater acts of savagery? What if she not only allowed him, but encouraged him — no, required him — to explore that side of himself?

“Are you denying it?” he said.

Sighing, she stubbed out her cigarette in the lid of her cigarette packet. “I didn’t have anything to do with your friend.”

“I’m not sure I believe you.” He leaned over the table, feeling that he had her now, that he was finally getting somewhere. “Why should I believe you?”

She too leaned over the table. He was aware of her hands, pale and plump, carefully manicured, and he thought of her lover, and what she was supposed to have said about him: The first man I ever met who had clean fingernails. Billy shuddered. Then she took what he’d been thinking and she put it into words:

“If he was in that house,” she said, “you really think he would have got out again?”

During the weeks that followed Trevor’s death, and prompted at least in part by his unfinished conversation with Trevor’s brother, Billy had found himself researching the murders, casually at first, but then with increasing vigour and intensity. He was curious to see whether there were any references to children who had got away — and, oddly enough, he found one: a boy called Sammy whose photograph had turned up among the murderers’ possessions subsequent to their arrest. There was no mention of a Trevor Lydgate, however, nor was there any suggestion that other children had had narrow escapes. But if there had been one, then surely it was possible…As a result, Billy had to ask himself why he had doubted the story in the first place. Partly, he supposed, because it was so extraordinary. To fall into the clutches of two such dangerous people and yet live to tell the tale. To be lured into that house — actually into the house —and then to make a getaway. It sounded like a bizarre fantasy, or a much embroidered version of a far less terrifying event. Which brought him to the second reason for his scepticism. At some level he thought that what he had heard had all the trappings of a story that was being told to cover another story, one that had to remain secret. There might well be three stories, then: the story Trevor had told his parents— I got lost —the one he told his wife, his brother, and his childhood friend— I was abducted —and the one he kept to himself, or even, possibly, hid from himself. This third story had never been revealed, probably because it was too close to home. Perhaps it even involved members of his family. The advantage of the version he had told Billy was that it allowed him to unburden himself without actually giving anything away.

At the time, the details had seemed authentic enough, but Trevor could easily have invented them. Billy wouldn’t have known the difference, nor would most people. Equally, Trevor could have gleaned certain facts from newspapers, or documentaries, or one of the innumerable books written on the subject, and then, over the years, he could have internalised those facts, made them his own. The motorbike, the wig — the cigarette-machine…If Billy’s theory was correct, it showed how deeply that series of murders had embedded itself in the nation’s psyche. No one who had been alive at the time could ever be entirely free of it. It was one of those rare news items against which you defined yourself.