Death of a Murderer (11 page)

23

For the last few minutes he’d had the sense that he was being watched. A light sweat broke out on his forehead as he remembered the figure in the hospital grounds, and how her gaze had seemed to linger on him even after he had moved away, into the trees; there had been a kind of weight to it, as if her eyes were thumbs and they were being pressed into his back. Warily, he glanced over his shoulder. Sitting behind him, two tables away, was an Asian man in a dark-grey suit and an open-necked blue-and-white-striped shirt. Although the man appeared to be staring downwards at his hands, which were resting on the table, Billy still felt as if he was being scrutinised. Facing the corridor again, he started on another sandwich. He now knew what he should have said to Raymond in that pub in Cheshire.
I still owe you forty francs.
That might have put paid to his irritating smile.

A staff nurse walked past, jingling a bunch of keys. Billy was about to open his newspaper when the Asian man finally spoke.

“You’re guarding that woman, I suppose…”

The man’s voice was genial, and a little careworn, but it had no false notes in it. Clearly, he was no threat to security. Billy turned in his chair. The man was still looking at his hands.

Billy adopted the same innocuous tone. “That’s right. I’m on duty all night. A twelve-hour shift.”

Only now did the man look up. There was a pale cast across one of his eyes, as if candlewax had been smeared over the iris. “You work hard,” he said.

“Pretty hard. What line of business are you in?”

“Hi-fi. I own a couple of shops.”

“I’ve had the same system for twenty years. Ever since I joined the force.”

“Come to me,” the man said. “I’ll upgrade you.”

“I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it.”

“I’ll give you a special price.”

The two men smiled at each other.

Billy raised his can of Fanta to his lips and drained it. “So what brings you here?”

“My wife’s having an operation tonight.”

“Nothing too serious, I hope.”

The man looked away for the first time, his eyes moving across the cafeteria. “I don’t know. Something to do with her bowel.”

“I hope she comes through it all right,” Billy said.

“Thank you,” the man said. “Me too.”

There was a silence during which he appeared to be trying to decide whether or not to go further, and Billy glanced down at his paper. In interviews he often used this technique. If you stepped back, it had the effect of allowing the other person to come forwards, almost involuntarily, and occupy the space you’d just vacated. It was one of the more subtle methods of eliciting a confession.

“I have been listening to Mozart,” the man said.

Billy sat sideways on his chair, one forearm resting on the back. This wasn’t what he had expected.

“Do you listen to classical music?” the man asked.

“Not much.”

“I listen to Mozart,” the man went on, “and I have trouble understanding how someone could have thought of something so beautiful. I try to imagine the world before that music came into being, and then I try to imagine someone creating it from nothing—all those sounds…Impossible.” He shook his head and then allowed himself a brief sad smile. “And yet it’s just as impossible to imagine the world without that music in it.”

Billy watched the man carefully, but said nothing. One of the vending-machines behind him shuddered and then fell silent.

“If something should happen to my wife…” Forearms still lying flat on the table, the man’s hands lifted off the surface and then dropped back again. He had come as close as he dared to saying what he wanted to say.

Billy looked up as an elderly woman in a pink dressing-gown hobbled past. Noticing him, she raised one fragile fist and shook it in the air beside her ear.
I’m giving it everything I’ve got,
she was telling him.
I’m not bloody going quietly.

“There are things we don’t understand,” the man said, staring at his hands again. “This woman that you’re guarding, for instance. The things she did…”

Billy made sure that the wariness he now felt didn’t reach his face.

“What do you think about that?” the man asked.

“I try not to think. I just do my job.”

“But thoughts still occur to you,” the man said seductively, “despite yourself.”

Rather than express an opinion of his own, Billy fell back on the conversation he’d had with Phil a few hours earlier. “I never met the woman,” he said. “A colleague of mine met her, though, on several occasions, and he told me that it was difficult to connect the things she did then with the woman he saw in front of him.”

The man nodded slowly. “Perhaps it was difficult for her too.” He paused. “Even at the time it was difficult, perhaps…”

“Yes, perhaps,” Billy said. “But you or I would never go so far.”

“Wouldn’t we?” The man’s good eye seemed gentle, as though it were contemplating another, far more selfless world, while his damaged eye, by contrast, had a critical, even accusatory gleam to it. “Who really knows how far we would go,” he said, “if the circumstances were right?”

They both fell quiet again. In a nearby ward a man laughed—or it could have been a cough.

“If you were in love, for example,” the man said. “Not ordinary love. A love that takes you over, turns you upside-down. An absolute dependency. A kind of trance.”

Billy thought of Venetia and her father, their two faces overlapping, merging into one. He felt unsteady, giddy. He felt as if the world was accelerating away from him in all directions. At the same time, everything had remained exactly where it was.

“The things she did,” the Asian man went on, “they weren’t natural to her—not at the beginning, anyway. They
became
natural, though.”

“You don’t know that,” Billy said. “You’re just guessing.”

He had assumed that the man would argue the point, but the man just looked at him and said, “Of course.”

At that moment, Phil appeared with two other men, one of whom was a detective inspector. They were so deep in conversation that they didn’t notice Billy, but the mere fact of their presence prompted him to glance at his watch. Eight minutes to one.

Rising to his feet, he wrapped his last remaining sandwich in silver foil and tucked it into his bag. “I have to get back to work, I’m afraid.”

The man reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a card and handed it to Billy. “My name is Vijay Prabhu. If you’re ever looking for some new equipment…” His smile told Billy that he needn’t take the offer too seriously: he had simply wanted something tangible to pass between them.

Billy pocketed the card, then leaned across and shook the man’s hand. “I’m Billy Tyler.”

“PC Tyler,” Mr. Prabhu said, as if correcting him. “A pleasure to have met you.”

“I hope everything turns out well for your wife.”

The man inclined his head in thanks.

Billy gathered up the crisp bag and the can of Fanta, both empty now, and dropped them in the rubbish bin, then he started back towards the mortuary. The small hours. It was so quiet that he could hear his own footsteps. They had a measured, dependable sound, and contrasted strangely with his thoughts, which kept flitting from one subject to another. It could be fatigue, or it could be the eerie suggestibility of a hospital at night. It could even be the influence of Mr. Prabhu. The good eye, dark and gentle. The other with its lavish swirl of white. A little like being looked at by two people at once. That subdued, intriguing way of talking around a subject, then closing in on it and capturing it with elegant precision. At some fundamental level, Billy felt they had understood each other perfectly. Mr. Prabhu had implied that he was there for his wife, as any caring husband would be, and that was almost certainly true, but Billy knew that Mr. Prabhu was also there for himself. There was a tremendous fear in you at times like that. There was the need to stay close to whatever was going on. You had to try and hold things together, even though it seemed to be their natural tendency to fall apart.

He thought of how he had rushed to A and E the year before, having just been told about Sue’s crash. He found her behind a curtain, on a high, hard bed. She looked so young that he knew she must have been through something violent, but the only mark on her was a small scratch at the base of her thumb: she’d cut herself when she crawled out through the shattered window. On the right side of her head, behind her ear, her hair looked as though someone had furiously backcombed it, and the fine, spun-sugar tangles were studded with bits of broken glass. The fact that she’d escaped without injury staggered everybody. It also made them suspicious. There had to be damage
somewhere,
surely…The doctor who examined her described how organs could get twisted in certain types of accident. If the car rolled, for instance, as it had in her case, there was always a possibility of internal bleeding. Sue should stay in bed, he said. She had to keep quiet. Rest. During those long, tense days, Billy turned on the TV and saw a plane slide slowly into one of the Twin Towers. He wasn’t able to process the images at all. They had no effect on him except as an illustration of his own private catastrophe. The demolished skyscrapers stood in for the car that Sue had reduced to a pile of scrap. The three thousand casualties symbolised her brush with death. It was his own story, written large, yet it all felt curiously stilted and obscure. It was a time when things seemed hard to believe, and hard to sustain. He dressed Emma in the mornings, and drove her to school. He cooked her meals. “Mummy resting,” she said once, at breakfast—and then, looking him full in the face, “Mummy all right.” She wanted him to reassure her, but she might also have been prompting him, or even coaching him. The future could be talked into existence. He took one of her hands in both of his. “Yes,” he said. “Mummy’s fine.” At night, though, when Sue was sleeping, he would tiptoe into the room and hover uselessly next to the bed, her bitter breath clouding the air below him, or he would leave the house and stand on the grass track, shivering. What did he think as he stared out over the field? Did he pray?

If something should happen to my wife…

He turned the corner into the corridor that led to the mortuary. At first, he didn’t notice the woman, partly because he hadn’t expected anyone to be there, and partly because she was leaning against the wall in one of the shadowy areas between two lights. She was wearing the same lilac suit, and she was smoking, as before.

“How did you—?” He broke off, uncertain as to what question he should be asking.

She didn’t look at him. Instead, she simply lifted her cigarette up to her mouth. When she inhaled, a row of fine vertical lines showed on her upper lip. She took the smoke deep into her body and didn’t exhale at all. The smoke was just absorbed.

“Did you believe him?” she said.

She sounded the same as she had when he saw her in the hospital grounds, her vowels harsh and flat, her accent recognisably Mancunian.

“That Indian bloke,” she said. “Do you think he got it right?”

Billy couldn’t take his eyes off her. His forehead felt cold, his ears too. A steady industrial hum came from the ramp beyond her.

“Don’t worry. I won’t bite.” She tapped half an inch of ash into the cupped palm of her left hand. “I spent a lot of time in this place.” She looked past him, down the corridor. “I have to say, they were pretty good to me, actually.”

And now Billy saw that she wasn’t alone. Behind her, standing close to the wall, was a frail, dark-haired boy of about thirteen. He wore a pair of black swimming-trunks, and his body was the colour of cement.

As Billy watched, the boy stepped out of the shadows, into a pool of light. Bending suddenly, he vomited on the floor. It was just water, Billy realised. Water from the reservoir. The boy stayed doubled up, hugging himself as though he’d caught a chill.

“What can I do for him?” the woman said. “There’s nothing I can do.” She rounded on Billy, her voice losing its note of resignation, becoming harder. “You don’t say much, do you?” She looked straight at him, with her cigarette held just to one side of her mouth. “Most people want to ask me questions. Why did I do it? What was I thinking? How can I live with myself?”

She reeled off the various expressions of other people’s curiosity in a bored monotone that Billy found repellent. Yes, the questions were predictable, and she had probably heard them a hundred times, but she was talking about torture, murder…Then again, she’d never been known for her tact, had she?

“What are you doing here?” he said. “What do you want?”

“Surely you can do better than that.” She was still staring at him. The swollen eyelids, the narrow mouth. One hand full of ash. “Come on, Billy,” she said. “This is your big chance.”

Take a deep breath. Look away.

A few feet to his left he saw a notice that said pathology. There was a door with a small window in it, at head height. He peered through. There didn’t seem to be anybody in the room, but all the lights were on. In the fluorescent glare he could see a row of white coats hanging on a rail, each one clean but shapeless, limp, like recently discarded skin. He felt a creeping sensation at the back of his neck, beneath his hair, a dread that he was quite unable to explain.

He had a question for the woman now, but when he turned to face her she was gone. She must have run out of patience. Lost interest. Or perhaps she had sensed what he was about to ask, and it had driven her away. He crossed to the place where she had been standing and moved the flat of one hand over the wall. It felt uniformly dry and cool. There was no evidence that anyone had been there, not the slightest vestige of human warmth or body heat. Kneeling quickly, he inspected the floor. No suggestion of any water either. Not a trace of ash.

“Did you drop something?”

Still on his knees, he glanced over his shoulder. A nurse stood at the end of the corridor. Though her eyes were fixed on him, her face was turned slightly away, as if she found it difficult to look straight at him.

“Yes,” he said, getting to his feet. “Well, I thought I did.”