Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

They didn’t invite Susie’s father to the wedding. Billy wouldn’t allow it. “He’d ruin everything,” Billy said, and then added, somewhat hysterically, “It’s him or me,” which made Susie laugh. “My father won’t be coming either,” Billy told her. He didn’t know where his father was living, or even if he was still alive. “Let’s invite Harry Parsons instead,” he said. The wedding took place in Stockport, and Susie’s stepfather, the car-dealer, paid for everything. They’d been married for less than a year when Susie became pregnant again, and this time she didn’t lose the baby.

In the coroner’s office the phone started ringing, and the sound brought Billy swiftly out of his chair. Stepping into the cramped room, he picked up the receiver.

“PC Tyler,” he said.

The woman on the other end told him that her name was Marjorie Church, and that she was the charge-hand porter. “We’ve got a body to bring down,” she said.

Five minutes later, Billy heard a knock, and when he opened the mortuary doors a short, solid woman in a blue shirt and dark trousers was standing in front of him.

“Marjorie?” he said.

“That’s me.”

Behind her were two men with a trolley. One of the porters was middle-aged and bald, with clownish tufts of hair protruding from both sides of his head; the other one was younger, in his twenties.

Billy stood aside to let them in, making sure the doors were properly bolted after them. He would have to write their names down in the scene log, he said.

The younger porter blew some air out of his mouth. “Is that really necessary? We’re only going to be a moment.”

“It’s standard procedure,” Billy said. “It applies to everyone, me included.”

“You like your job, do you?”

The number of times Billy had heard that.

He looked at the porter. “You can take it up with the sergeant if you want.”

“There’s other people dying round here,” the porter said, “not just her.”

“His name’s Peter Baines,” said the porter with the clown’s hair. “I’m Colin Wilson.”

The young porter scowled at him.

“Thanks, Colin.” Glancing at Billy, Marjorie raised both her eyebrows, then she moved over to the bank of fridges and opened one of the doors.

Using his right foot, Wilson pumped up the trolley until it was on a level with an empty compartment, then Baines helped him slide the body on to a steel shelf. The body was wrapped in a whitish shroud, but the head was uncovered, and Billy glimpsed the crown of an old man’s head, the scalp mottled and waxy.

Marjorie closed the fridge door. “No need to lock this one in,” she said.

Billy smiled faintly. He watched as she took a black marker pen out of her pocket and wrote the dead man’s name on the fridge door, then he returned to the log and recorded what had just occurred.

Moments later, Wilson wheeled the trolley off down the corridor, with Baines walking behind, still grumbling. Marjorie went to follow them. On reaching the doorway, though, she paused and then turned round.

“It’s that woman,” she said. “She upsets people.”

“I understand that,” Billy said.

“It’ll be good when she’s gone. When things are back to normal.”

Billy nodded.

Her face brightened suddenly, as if whatever had been awkward or difficult was now over. “Anything I can get you?” she said. “A cup of tea?”

“No thanks, Marjorie,” he said. “I’m fine.”

Alone again, Billy noticed something on the floor under the table. Bending down, he picked up a metal nail file with a handle of pearly white plastic. He doubted that Marjorie would have brought a nail file to the mortuary — and besides, the iridescent handle didn’t seem in character — so he could only assume that it belonged to the young blonde constable who had preceded him. He turned the nail file slowly in his hand. If he had asked the constable what she thought of the woman in the fridge, what would she have said? What would she have made of it all, born as she undoubtedly had been in the early seventies? Would she have wanted to try and understand how it was possible for a woman who had once been a trusted babysitter to become involved in the torture and murder of children? Or would she simply have repeated what the tabloids were telling her, and what most people in the country appeared to believe, namely that the woman was inhuman, evil, a monster?

In the autumn of 1999, Billy had spent some time in a newspaper library, reading up about the murders, and one story in particular had stayed with him. When the woman was a girl of fifteen, she’d been friends with a boy two years her junior. He was delicate, apparently, and she’d taken it upon herself to protect him. One day he asked her if she would come swimming. She told him she couldn’t. That afternoon he went up to the local reservoir on his own and drowned. For weeks afterwards, she was inconsolable. She wore nothing but black. The boy had always been a weak swimmer, and yet she had refused to go with him. She was to blame for his death. She couldn’t forgive herself. Some people said it was then that she first turned to the Catholic Church. There are moments in your life when something’s taken from you, and once you’ve lost it you don’t get it back. What you were before is neither here nor there. You’re different now.

Billy didn’t pretend to be an expert — what did he know, really, except for what he had picked up on the streets? — but he couldn’t help wondering whether that boy’s death by drowning wasn’t a defining moment, a kind of turning-point. Supposing somewhere deep down in her there was the feeling that she had killed, and not a stranger either, but somebody who was dear to her, somebody who had — and this detail always sent a shiver through him— the same initials as she did? If that was the case, if that was how she had felt, did the psychopath from Glasgow see that abyss in her, that bottomless pit, the belief that she had nothing left to lose? Could that be what had attracted him? She’d done it once. She could do it again. What difference would it make? She was already guilty. And having more experience than he did, she could even, maybe, guide him, show him the way…It wasn’t an apology or an excuse. It might just be a fact, though. And that eerie coincidence with the initials…When the boy died in the reservoir, did part of her die with him?

The image of Baines, the young porter, lingered — his gelled hair, his slouch, his barely concealed sneer. Like your job, do you? There were certain people who couldn’t resist having a go at you, and though Billy was used to it — after twenty-three years, how could he not be? — he was closer to losing control these days than at any other stage in his career. But he was acutely conscious of what had happened to his friend, Neil Batty. A couple of years ago, Neil had beaten a suspect so badly that the man had ended up in hospital, and in spite of an exemplary record, Neil had been thrown out of the force. Billy couldn’t help but sympathise. There had been moments when he, too, had been tempted: a Friday night in the mid-nineties, for instance.

He had come home from work to find an unfamiliar car parked outside his house. It was exactly the sort of car that Sue’s stepfather, Tony, would put on his showroom forecourt — long, sleek, unnecessarily fast. But as Billy pulled up behind it he saw a chauffeur behind the wheel — he could make out the shape of a peaked cap above the head-rest — and, knowing only one man who’d be likely to have a chauffeur, he almost drove away again. At that moment, Newman came round the side of the house and moved languidly across the pavement. He was wearing a dark-blue suit and light-brown shoes, and his hands were in his pockets. His face was tanned. In the seven years that had passed since their first and only encounter, Newman didn’t appear to have aged at all.