Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

“I’m sorry about your father,” he said. It seemed to be what she expected to hear.

She nodded, but said nothing.

Later, when they were sitting on the sofa, he leaned over and put his head on her lap. He tried to work out how many times he had made love to her. It wasn’t much more than ten. Less than twenty, certainly. It startled him when he realised quite how little he’d been happy with. He was facing out into the room, his cheek resting against her thigh. The taut yet supple curve of muscle. The flutter of a heart somewhere above.

He felt her hand on his head, pushing it away.

“You’re too heavy,” she said.

“I miss you,” he said.

None of their sentences fitted together.

They met up one last time. A beautiful evening in Liverpool. Above St. George’s Hall the clouds were edged in gold like invitation cards or pages from the Bible. Outside the station he thought he smelled tar and ropes, as though a tall ship had sailed past just minutes earlier; the air still had ripples in it, all that remained of the wake. He had travelled into the city with a desolate lightness in his heart. The fact that she was prepared to meet him in a public place could mean only one thing.

“It’s over,” she said.

She had to repeat the words because it was so noisy in the pub. Half-five, and people had just left work. Everyone excited. Summer here at last.

“I don’t love you,” she said.

“You never did,” he said.

She sighed and looked away.

“Well, did you?” He leaned forwards, moving his face into her eye-line.

“If you’re going to make a scene,” she said.

He leaned back again.

He picked up his drink, but found he couldn’t swallow it and pushed it to one side. He had never been able to look at her without wanting her. He had never had enough of her, nowhere near. Was it any wonder that he was upset? In giving him so little, she had bound him to her all the more closely. Didn’t she realise that?

“What were you doing with me, anyway?” he said.

Once again, she had no answer.

He consoled himself with this one thought, which was unworthy, if not downright cruel: she would never know the truth about her father’s death. She may have talked to Billy about revenge and furnished him with the name and address, but she had no way of proving that he had actually done anything. She didn’t know that he had driven out to the Wirral. She knew nothing of the eleven minutes he had spent in George McGarry’s house. Had his unexpected visit brought about her father’s death, or would it have happened anyway? No one could possibly say, not even Billy, and he found a certain comfort in that element of doubt.

As he reviewed their brief history, a smile spread across his face. Ironically, the very aspect of their relationship that he had most resented was now providing him with a measure of protection. No one was aware that they had slept with each other. No one had ever seen them together. No one even suspected that they might be friends. In the eyes of the world there was no connection between them whatsoever, and never had been.

“What’s so funny?” Venetia asked.

On that warm night, in that loud pub just down the road from Lime Street station, he looked across at her and saw her father. That mouth, those eyes. You can fuck right off. He shook his head.

How he had loved her, though.

With the end of his shift less than an hour away, Eileen Evans looked in on him, and he was grateful to her for making the effort. She didn’t know what it meant to him to have some company. For the past twenty minutes, he had been fighting an overwhelming desire to go to sleep. He had no coffee left, not even a drop. All he could do was stay on his feet. Pace up and down. If he rested his head on his arm for so much as a second he’d be gone. Out cold.

Taking a seat, he bent over the scene log and noted Eileen’s arrival in the mortuary. While he was writing, he asked whether she’d seen Phil.

“He went home a couple of hours ago,” she said. “He’ll be back at eleven.”

Billy put his pen down, then sat back in the chair. Eileen was leaning against the radiator with her arms folded across her chest.

“What about you?” he said. “Have you had any sleep?”

“Not really.” She gave him a look that he remembered from when he met her, in reception; it was searching and yet resigned, as if she believed that the quality she hoped to find in him was unlikely to be there, as if she’d grown used to such disappointments. “It’s been a long night.” She lifted a hand to smother a yawn. “Another long night, I should say.” She yawned again. “Still — excuse me — it’s nearly over now.”

“I’ll be glad, actually,” he said. “I meant to have a nap yesterday afternoon, but somehow I never got round to it. It’s been pretty hard to stay awake.”

“Have you got far to go?” she said. “When you leave, I mean?”

He told her where he lived. “It’s a village. Near Ipswich.”

“I don’t think I know it.”

He began to describe the place for her. It was only small, he said, and most of it was arranged along a single road. He told her about the allotments at the back of the house, and about Harry Parsons and his secret hoard of beer, and he told her about the field where, only a few months ago, his daughter had gone wandering at night. He wouldn’t have seen her if she hadn’t had her glasses on. He laughed softly when he realised how that sounded, and Eileen laughed with him.

“Was she sleepwalking?” Eileen said.

“She’s got Down’s,” he said. “She just hasn’t got it up here.” He tapped one side of his head with his index finger. “She hasn’t got a clue, really.”

He found himself talking about the time Emma went missing in a shopping centre. When Sue rang him, he thought at first that she was calling from the swimming-pool. The background acoustics were the same: voices, laughter, shouting, everything echoing and merging in the huge, hollow space behind her voice.

“I’ve lost Emma,” she said.

She sounded so calm that he thought he must have heard it wrong.

“I came out shopping with her,” Sue said, “and now she’s disappeared.”

He asked Sue where she was. In Tower Ramparts, she said. By the lift. He told her to stay put. It was only half a mile from the police station to the shopping centre, and he ran the whole way. When he pushed through the gilt-and-glass doors, his shirt was sticking to his back. He saw Sue immediately. She was the only person in the place who wasn’t moving. In the context of a shopping centre, her stillness looked unnatural, suspicious.

He took her by the arm. “You didn’t do something, did you?”

“Do something?” she said. “What?”

After all their years together, you’d think they would be on the same wavelength, but they often had difficulty understanding one another; there were none of the short cuts that a long relationship ought to have brought with it.

“Sue,” he said quietly, “did you do something?”

She shook her arm free. “Would I look like this if I’d done something?”

Well, yes, he wanted to say. Maybe. Because her face was drained of colour except for beneath her eyes, where the skin had darkened, and her irises were lighter than usual, as they often were if she was frightened.

“When did you last see her?”

“I don’t know. About twenty minutes ago.”

“She was here? Beside you?”

“Oh God.” Sue turned in a slow circle, as if she were in a trance; she didn’t seem to be able to make any sense of her surroundings.

He told her to start looking on the first floor, and in the various restaurants, while he searched the ground floor and the exits. They agreed to meet by the lift again in ten minutes.