Rupert Thomson: Death of a Murderer

When the waitress came over, Newman and his colleagues ordered glasses of wine. So did Susie. Billy said he would have wine too.

“Really?” Newman said. “You wouldn’t rather have a pint?”

“No, I’ll have some wine,” Billy said. When, actually, a beer was what he wanted. But he felt clumsy in the company of these business people; he felt the way he’d felt when he failed his sergeant’s exam.

To begin with, Newman talked about a project he was investing in — a luxury resort on a Greek island — but gradually he steered the conversation round to Susie, and the fact that she was going out with a policeman.

“‘Scruffy Tyler,’ they call him,” Newman told his colleagues.

The two men laughed softly and nodded. This piece of information didn’t seem to surprise them in the least.

“It’s ‘Scruff,’” Billy said, “not ‘Scruffy.’”

“I still don’t get it,” Newman said. “How on earth did you two meet?”

Billy did his best to ignore the slight. “Susie was working in a garage in Widnes,” he said. “It’s a place I often call in at when I’m—”

Newman talked right over him. “Of course, I’ve seen her with all sorts,” he said, addressing his business associates again. “I mean, she’s not exactly particular.”

Newman’s cronies leered at Susie, as if they too might be in with a chance of having her. Susie was staring down into her glass.

For a few moments, Billy couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard. Then he took hold of his wine-glass, which was still half-full, and pushed it away from him into the middle of the table.

“You ought to watch your mouth,” he said.

“Oh dear”—Newman was talking to the two men, but his eyes were on Billy—“I think we could be looking at another case of police brutality.”

A smirk on his face. On the faces of his colleagues too. One of them took a long, slow mouthful of wine, watching Billy over the rim of his glass.

Billy reached for Susie’s hand. “Come on. It’s getting late.”

Outside, he stood on the pavement, trembling. A cold wind, streets all red and grey. Manchester.

“Sorry about that, Billy,” Susie said.

He turned to her with a kind of desperation. “How could you just sit there?”

She smiled at the ground. “That was nothing. You should hear some of the—”

“No, don’t. Please. I don’t want to know.”

Later, on the train, he said, “It’s not true, is it?”

Susie was staring out of the window. “No,” she said. But she had put no effort into her answer, as if she wasn’t sure, or didn’t care.

“Susie?” He leaned closer.

When she turned to him, she looked desolate, her skin stretched thin and drained of all its colour. “No, Billy,” she said. “It’s not true.” She held his gaze for a moment longer, and then, finally, some humour crept back. “I’m not exactly a virgin, though, either…”

The mortuary radiator clanked once, then gurgled. Billy reached out and put a hand on it, but it was no warmer than the last time. He shifted in his chair. After that awkward evening in Manchester, he had refused to have anything to do with Susie’s father. The man was only interested in making what they had seem grubby. If Newman ever rang up to suggest a drink or dinner — though based in the South of France, he was always travelling to England, it seemed, on business — Billy would claim to be working. “But you go,” he would say to Susie. “You go.” When she was offered a job in Suffolk and asked Billy whether he’d consider leaving the north-west, he surprised her by saying yes. He surprised himself too — he had never seen himself living anywhere else — but perhaps, in the back of his mind, he thought a move to the other side of the country would put them out of Newman’s reach. He worried about his mother being on her own — his older brother, Charlie, had moved to America the year before — but she made light of it, telling him that, after all, there were such things as cars and he could always drive up and see her now and then. Once Susie had accepted the offer, Billy requested a transfer to the Suffolk Constabulary — luckily, they had a vacancy for an officer with his experience — and by the spring of 1990 he and Susie were renting a neat modern flat in the centre of Ipswich.

At first he missed the buzz of Widnes, the muck and stink of it. The huddled red-brick terraces and the towering, tangled heaps of scrap metal. The bloody fights that broke out every five minutes for no good reason. Sometimes you’d find teeth in the gutter, or a clump of hair. When Widnes played arch-rivals Warrington at Naughton Park, the coaches bringing in the visitors would have to run a gauntlet of stones and bottles, and the police took dogs along to keep the two sets of fans apart. Then the game itself, with half the players on amphetamines, the tackling so brutal that Billy’s bones would shudder — and he was only watching…Afterwards, he and a few other bobbies would call in at the pie shop, pork-and-apple fillings or hamburger-and-baked-beans. You’d get stomach-ache just looking at those pies, but you’d still have two, and you’d wash them down with tea that had brewed so long you could have used it to stain furniture. Later, there would be trouble at one of the nightclubs, the Landmark or Big Jim’s, and they’d go down there mob-handed to sort it out. The women were even more ferocious than the men, especially if they’d had a drink. “Don’t let them get you on the floor,” a sergeant told him early on. “You won’t get up again.” There was the night three pubs spilled out at the same time, and an almighty punch-up started in front of the chip shop on Victoria Road. Billy tried to nick somebody in a black shirt who was only about half his height. The bloke turned out to be some sort of martial-arts expert, and Billy came away with one side of his face swollen up like a melon and his left arm fractured in two places. But the way the bobbies pulled together, Neil and Terry and Vomit Molloy and the Perv and Dad, even Light Duties Livermore, everybody looking out for everybody else, that was really something…Ipswich felt tame by comparison, less vivid. If asked, though, Susie could explain exactly what was better about their lives. She seemed happier, and that was Billy’s one great wish, to make her happy.

But before the year was out, Susie began to feel that something was missing. She wasn’t homesick for the north; it was more like a kind of restlessness or hollowness, the sense that she hadn’t fully occupied the space around her. The space inside her too: in early 1991, she’d had a miscarriage, and she was frightened she might not be able to have children. Words like “security” and “the future” crept into her conversation; she worried about what she called “missing the boat.” These were things that mattered to her, and he considered it his duty to provide them. After months of searching, they found a property a few miles out of town. It was a small place, semidetached, the end house in a row of eight, and there was noise from the railway line on the far side of the road, but it would be their first real home. Billy waited until they had settled in — the house had needed painting inside and out, and it took weeks to clear the garden — and then, on a cloudy, drowsy afternoon in late July, he reached for Susie’s hand and led her out into the field. “Where are you taking me?” He wouldn’t say. Only when they got to the middle did he stop. The corn waist-high, and seeming to whisper, even though there wasn’t any wind. Then, holding Susie’s hand in both of his, he knelt in front of her and asked her to marry him. She looked away into the sky, and a dreamy smile rose on to her face, as if he’d reminded her of something that had happened a long time ago, in her childhood. When she said, “Yes, I’d love to,” he was still on his knees, invisible to everybody in the world but her. Anyone watching would have thought she was talking to herself.