Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

“It keeps coming out wrong,” she said. “Do you want me to go on?”

Staring down at the tablecloth, he nodded.

“Promise me something,” she said.

“What?”

“Promise you won’t feel sorry for me.”

“If I feel anything,” he said, “it won’t be that.”

Her face was drawn to the dark window. “The first time it happened, we were in his car. We had been to a museum, I think, but he took a different route home, and we ended up on a quiet road that ran through woods…”

One of her hands lay on its side on the table, the fingers curled. Her head, angled away from him, was absolutely still, as if the story she was telling was an animal that could be frightened off by even the slightest of movements.

“He parked the car, then turned and looked at me,” she said, “and I thought he was going to talk about school, how I hadn’t been doing very well, and I had all my excuses ready, but then I noticed that there was something in his eyes that I couldn’t remember seeing before, something strange and glittery, and his breathing was noisier than usual. I could hear each breath, and when he spoke, his voice was husky.”

She gazed down into her drink. Billy wanted to reach out, put his hand against her cheek or stroke her hair, but he knew it would be wrong to touch her.

“It was husky, almost as if he had a cold, or he was going to cry. ‘You know I love you, don’t you, V?’ he said, and suddenly I didn’t want him to call me V any more. ‘Venetia,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You’re too grown-up for nicknames, aren’t you?’ He looked through the windscreen for a while, then he turned to me again. ‘I love you so much,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Of course I do,’ I said. I wanted to come out with a joke and make him laugh, but his eyes still had that weird glitter, and the air in the car had gone all thick. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he said. ‘Of course,’ I said. And that was when he reached down and undid his flies…”

Her face was still lowered.

“It went on for six years,” she said.

“Venetia,” Billy said.

He couldn’t say anything else. He felt, oddly, as if he was implicated in her father’s behaviour, as if he was also guilty. Because he was a man, perhaps.

Fathers, though, he would think a few years later: they were like the poppies that appeared in the summer, so vivid against the new ripe yellow of the corn, so handsome, but if you pressed their petals between finger and thumb the red went black and wet.

Back upstairs, he lay next to Venetia on the bed and watched TV. He fell asleep without meaning to. When he woke, it was two thirty in the morning and Venetia had gone, but there was a strip of light under the bathroom door, and he could hear a tap running.

“Are you all right?” he called out.

She didn’t answer.

Leave her, he thought. Let her be. Throwing off his clothes, he climbed beneath the covers and was asleep again before she reappeared.

On Sunday, as they drove back to Liverpool, he asked her whether she ever saw her father. Sometimes, she said. On special occasions. Though he was quite ill now, with angina. He’d been put on a strict diet and wasn’t allowed any excitement. Two months ago, on his seventy-first birthday, she had bought him the richest cake she could find. She thought that if he ate enough of it he might die. She cut him slice after slice, and because he loved her so much he kept on eating.

“It didn’t work, though,” she said. “He’s still around.”

Billy took his eyes off the road and looked at her. She wasn’t joking.

After that weekend, things were different between them. He no longer felt sidelined or short-changed. He didn’t see her for ten days, but he wasn’t jealous of the time she spent away from him. He now had a sense of what he might be worth to her.

On the Wednesday evening, she rang his bell at half past six. She was wearing a white blouse and a dark-grey pencil skirt, which told him she’d come straight from work; she was temping at a firm of stockbrokers that month, and they insisted that she dress conservatively.

“Whisky,” she said, handing him a bottle of Famous Grouse. Then she held up a bag of ice. “Rocks.”

As the drink took hold, they returned to the subject of her father. He had called recently, she said. Accused her of neglecting him. How could she be so inconsiderate, so heartless? Did she have no feelings for him whatsoever? In the end, she had to unplug the phone. If she’d let him go on any longer, he would have lost his temper — or else he would have started crying.

Towards midnight, they began to try and think of ways of killing him. Obviously they couldn’t afford to be caught, nor did they want to incriminate themselves; it had to look natural, or like an accident — or, at the very least, like a crime that had no motive. What they were saying was so terrible that they got completely carried away, each attempting to outdo the other, their ideas becoming ever more lurid and unrealistic. At some point, though, Venetia’s face went still, and she covered her mouth with one hand. She was looking at Billy’s uniform, which hung on the back of the door.

“What is it?” he said.

“My father,” she said. “He’s always been afraid of the police.” She paused. “You could do something.”

“Like what?”

“You could frighten him, somehow,” she said, her eyes on him now. “Frighten him to death.”

To frighten someone to death. That was just a figure of speech, wasn’t it? He wanted to laugh, but he could tell that she was serious.

Two days later, on a foot-beat in the centre of Widnes, he saw Raymond Percival. At first, he thought he must be imagining it. The man standing outside the Landmark had bleached hair, and he was wearing a long black coat, but when his head moved and the club’s security light slanted across his face, there was no mistaking that superior, contemptuous expression. How long had it been? Eleven years? Twelve? And here he was, in Widnes of all places. He had some people with him, older, the women in high heels. As Billy approached, still not certain what to do, Raymond flicked his cigarette into the gutter. He didn’t notice Billy — or if he did, he chose not to register the fact — and Billy kept on walking, his right hand almost brushing the back of Raymond’s coat. He only stopped when he had turned the corner, and then, in the quiet of a dead-end street, he leaned against a wall. He thought of the slogan Raymond had quoted once, and said the words out loud: “Sexton’s have solved the mystery of elegant living.” Then, laughing, he looked up into the murky, grey-orange sky. He hadn’t spoken to Raymond. They hadn’t even exchanged a glance. Simply to have set eyes on him, though, after all these years! For Raymond to appear out of the blue like that at such a crucial time…

The following week, Billy called Venetia at work and asked where her father lived. She gave him the address.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Maybe nothing.”

He had to set her free, but wasn’t sure how far he could go. There were so many factors to take into account. Sometimes he wondered what Raymond would have done in his position — Raymond who was always so confident, even when he was in the wrong…One thought, above all others, was ever present in the back of Billy’s mind: no matter what he did, he would be unlikely to profit from it. In the long run, favours win you nothing but resentment. Gratitude’s a double-edged sword.

One Saturday night, at about eleven, he let himself out of his flat. He was wearing a bomber jacket and a pair of jeans; the roll-bag in his right hand contained his uniform. It had rained earlier, but the sky was clearing. Clouds moving fast. He walked over to the next street, the bluish-white glow of TVs filling almost every front room. Match of the Day was on. In the gutter near his car was an umbrella blown inside-out, which made him think of the girl he and Neil had found in a club a few weeks back. She’d drunk too much and ended up on the toilet floor with her dress over her face. As he unlocked his car, he could hear people shouting in the distance. Some pub kicking out.