Rupert Thomson: Death of a Murderer

Billy followed Phil through the doorway. Putting his bag down on a chair, he noted the bank of fridges that reached from floor to ceiling.

“Is there anything I should know about?” he asked the constable.

She thought for a moment, her small mouth twisting to one side. “If the phone rings in the office,” she said, “it’s best to answer it. Otherwise it starts making a weird beeping sound that’ll end up getting on your nerves.”

“Anything else?”

“It smells a bit.”

“That’s death,” Phil said. “Nothing you can do about that.”

Billy watched the constable bend over the scene log and sign herself out. If he had been asked to guess her age, he would have put it somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-one. When the murders happened, in other words, she wouldn’t have been born, or even thought of.

She straightened up and ran one hand through her short blonde hair. “Well, that’s me done.”

“Have you got far to go?” Billy asked her.

“I live near Cambridge.”

“That shouldn’t take you too long.”

“Seen me drive, have you?” She grinned at him, then reached for her belongings.

When she had gone, Phil called Billy over. Billy recorded the fact that he was now the loggist, and that Detective Sergeant Shaw was present, then he wrote the date and time in the left-hand column, signed the entry and leaned back against the radiator, which was only faintly warm.

“Where is she?” he said. “Just so I know.”

“That one.” Phil pointed to the fridges marked police bodies, just to the right of the door that led to the postmortem room. “It’s locked.”

“Who’s got the key?”

“The woman you met by the main entrance. Eileen Evans.”

“Are there any others?”

“No.”

Prompted by Billy’s questioning, no doubt, Phil went over and tested the door of the fridge he had just identified. It didn’t budge.

“You’ve seen her, haven’t you?” Billy said. “Dead, I mean.”

Phil spoke with his back still turned. “Yes, I’ve seen her.”

“What did she look like?”

Now Phil’s head swung round — he suspected Billy of being ghoulish, perhaps — but obviously he saw nothing in Billy’s face to warrant such suspicions because he went ahead and answered. “She looked like she smoked too much,” he said. “She looked old. Older than sixty.”

“You ever think about what she did?”

“No. To me she’s just another sudden death.”

Billy nodded. “All the same,” he said. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was driving at, and yet he couldn’t seem to let the subject drop.

Phil walked over to another fridge, one that had a brown envelope taped to it, and inspected the names of the deceased. Once again, he spoke without looking at Billy. “Put it like this. When people die, I reckon they deserve a bit of respect — no matter what they’ve done.”

Billy thought Phil might have a point, though there would be many who would disagree. In this particular case, at least.

“And anyway,” Phil went on, still studying the names, “I think something goes out of people when they die, even someone like her. They stop being who they were.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Billy said, “but yes, I suppose that makes sense.”

“In the end, she’s just another code two-nine, you know?” Phil turned to face him.

Billy nodded, then opened his hold-all and took out a plastic folder. Behind with his reports, he had seen the twelve-hour shift as an opportunity to do some catching up.

“No chance of you getting bored,” Phil said.

Billy gave him a steady look, then the two men smiled at each other. Most police officers hated all the paperwork that came with the job — and there was so much more of it than there used to be. A lot had changed since 1984, when the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was introduced, and none of it for the better.

“Brought any refs with you?” Phil asked.

Billy reached into his bag again, producing a large package wrapped in silver foil. “Wiltshire ham,” he said, “with plenty of Colman’s.”

“If you need anything else,” Phil said, “there’s a cafeteria near the front entrance. You’ll get your first break at midnight and another one at about four.”

“OK, sarge. Thanks.”

Phil took one last look round the room, then left.

Once Billy had secured the double doors and made a note of Phil’s departure in the scene log, he sat down and stretched out his legs, one ankle crossed over the other, the heel of his left boot resting on the drain in the middle of the floor. He flipped the folder open and began to leaf through his paperwork. The third form he came to had the words missing child/youth printed in bold black type across the top. His throat tightened, and he let the folder fall shut. He had spent most of Sunday afternoon in a council house out near Cherry Tree Road, interviewing a couple whose daughter, Rebecca, had been missing since the day before. Thankfully, Rebecca had called home as Billy was driving back to the station that evening, but since he felt a follow-up enquiry might be in order he had held on to his report, and he now needed to complete the continuation sheets, which would prove invaluable if she were to go missing again. “Misper” forms took time — they were exceptionally detailed — and they always filled him with foreboding. Even though seven years had gone by, the memory of Shena Coates still haunted him. One summer morning, while her parents were out shopping, Shena had left her house by the back door. She was wearing a velvet dress and a pair of high heels, and carrying her brand-new vanity set. She locked herself in the garden shed, applied lipstick, rouge, eye-shadow and mascara, and then hanged herself. She was eleven years old. You could see her hand-prints on the window where she had tried to clean the glass. She had needed more light, in order to do her make-up properly…You’d think a seasoned police officer would have got used to occurrences like these, tragic though they were, but, if anything, the opposite was true: they seemed to affect him more as time went by, the way an allergy might, so much so that he began to wonder whether they might not actually kill him in the end. One of the reasons why he’d put in for a transfer to Stowmarket at the beginning of the year was because it was such a sleepy little town, and the crime would be gentler, more trivial. That was the theory, anyway. Rebecca’s story might be over — for the time being, at least — but the bad associations were still there. He would deal with the report later on, he told himself, when he had the stomach for it.

As he set the folder aside, he became aware of a smell — or not so much a smell, maybe, as a prickling in his nostrils, a slight sense of irritation — and he remembered what Phil Shaw had said. That’s death. Turning in his chair, Billy stared at the fridge Phil had pointed out for him. Like the others, it was white, but the wipe-clean board where the identity of the deceased would normally be recorded had been left blank. There was nothing to indicate that anyone was there at all.

A name came floating into his mind. Trevor Lydgate. It had been surfacing ever since he heard the news on Friday afternoon. Once again, he had to push it away. He didn’t want to think about Trevor, not now.

He stared at the blank space on the fridge until he too began to feel blank.

No names, no thoughts…

The inside of his head felt hollow, scooped out, smooth as an empty eggshell.

A couple of years ago, in that sluggish, soporific time between Christmas and New Year, Billy had driven to the place where the murderers had buried their victims. He had left Sue and Emma with his mother, saying that he was going to visit his friend, Neil, in Widnes. Snow had fallen overnight in Yorkshire and Humberside, but Cheshire was bright and sunny when he started out, and his spirits lifted, as if he were embarking on an adventure. As the M60 curved through Manchester, though, he caught his first glimpse of the moors, a looming shoulder of high ground to the east, treeless and primitive, and he felt something sink inside him, and a slow burning around his heart. It was all he could do not to drive straight back to his mother’s house.