Death of a Murderer (2 page)

3

When he first met her, in the late eighties, her name was Susie—Susie Newman—and there was so much in that extra syllable, that hidden “z.” There was a kind of fearlessness. There was laughter. There was sex. Back then, she was always Susie, never Sue. At that point in his life, Billy had been a police officer for almost a decade. Thanks to Neil, a schoolfriend who had joined the force at the same time, he was called “Scruff”—Neil had caught him in the equipment room, polishing the badge on his helmet—but as nicknames went it wasn’t too bad, not when you considered that two of his contemporaries were known as “Vomit” and “the Perv.” For the first few years he had lived in “the Brothel,” the single men’s hostel located behind Widnes police station, but then, at the beginning of 1985, he had moved into a small flat of his own on Frederick Street. He had already failed the sergeant’s exam, but he’d taken it because you were supposed to, not because he wanted to, and he had long since decided that he was happy being a constable. In the early days he would go about on foot, calling in at various businesses and shops. Later, he would drive around in the area car. A lot of what he did was listen. It was the side of his job he liked best, this chance to mix with all sorts of people, to establish some connection with their lives. He liked knowing everyone, and being known.

One bright June morning he stopped at a local garage for his usual cup of tea. They had a new girl working in the office, and he decided to go in and introduce himself. Putting his head round the door, he saw that she was typing. He waited until she sensed his presence and looked at him, and then he stepped into the room.

“I’m Billy Tyler,” he said.

He asked her a few questions, nothing too personal. It turned out that her stepfather had found her the job. He ran a second-hand-car dealership in Stockport. Not just any old cars. Jaguars. Ferraris.

“It’s only for the summer,” she said. “After that, I’m thinking of travelling. India, maybe—or Thailand…”

Her eyes had gone misty, opaque, and he wanted to kiss her there and then. He wanted to kiss her eyes back into focus.

“Susie Newman.”

Standing in that poky office, with its threadbare carpet and its dog-eared girlie calendar, he had repeated her name out loud. She watched him carefully, and puzzled lines appeared on her forehead, though there was also the promise of a smile at the edges of her mouth. But he’d been in a kind of dream. As soon as she told him her name, he’d had the feeling that it was familiar. Not that he had ever heard it before. No, it was more as if he had been propelled into his own future, a future that included her, or even revolved around her. Her name seemed familiar because it was about to become familiar. It was a familiarity that hadn’t happened yet.

He didn’t mention any of this to Susie, though—not that morning, anyway. When he was twenty-eight, he had gone out with a girl called Venetia. He had been unable to conceal the extent of his infatuation, and it had spoiled everything. “I can’t breathe with you around,” Venetia had told him once. “You use up all the air.” Over the years he’d learned that sometimes it’s better to go slowly. When he finally told Susie about the feeling he’d had on hearing her name, it was two months later, and they were having a cup of tea in a place just round the corner from the garage, the Kingsway Hotel on Victoria Road. She let him finish talking, then she tucked her hair behind her ear and looked straight at him, her eyes so shiny that he could have been the first thing they had ever seen.

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she said.

He didn’t laugh, nor did he attempt to deny it; he remained perfectly serious, and his gaze dropped to the tablecloth. Though he had spent weeks trying to work it out, what he had just told her still perplexed him.

“I’ve
never
said it before,” he said. “I’ve never even
felt
it.”

There was a moment when nothing happened, nothing at all, but they both knew what was coming, so those few seconds were slow-motion and yet urgent, the slowness and the sense of urgency simultaneous but contradictory, delicious too, like ice-cream wrapped in hot meringue. At last, she put a hand on the back of his head and drew him towards her until their lips were touching. After the kiss, they remained an inch or two apart, looking into each other’s faces. He could feel the warm steam from his tea on the underside of his chin.

“Don’t go travelling,” he said. “Not yet.”

4

If you see the sugar factory, you’ve gone too far, Phil had said, but Billy left the Al4 at the Bury St. Edmunds East exit, and the hospital showed up on signposts shortly after. He went through several roundabouts, then up a quiet suburban road. Trees on either side, large houses. Bury wasn’t a town he knew particularly well. He had driven here one Saturday with Sue when Emma was a baby. They had spent an hour at a car-boot sale, and Sue had bought a bamboo wind-chime, which she had hung in their garden. On the first blustery day, though, their neighbours, the Gibsons, complained about the noise it made, and Sue had to take it down again.

He signalled left and turned into the drive, passing beneath the dark, flat branches of a cedar. The car-park was full. He waited, indicator flashing, while a woman backed out of a narrow space. Leaning close to the steering-wheel, he stared up at the hospital. It had been painted a curious mint-green colour, and modern bay windows jutted squarely from the façade. The place looked new, but cheap. It looked prefabricated.

Even from where he was, he could see the crowd gathered outside the main entrance. In his phone-call, Phil had mentioned the press, and how they had been camped in the hospital grounds ever since the news broke. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t expected, he had said; in fact, they’d thought it would be far worse. During the past four days, the police had talked to reporters on a regular basis, keeping them informed, but no one had been allowed into the hospital itself. Not that some of them hadn’t tried, apparently. One tabloid journalist had offered a nurse several thousand pounds in cash if she would smuggle him into the mortuary. They were after trophies, of course—a photograph of the corpse, a ring, a lock of hair. They wanted some kind of physical contact with the famous child-killer. They wanted to sense the power, the horror. They wanted a direct line to the unknown.

As Billy stepped out of his car, his foot caught in something and he looked down. The remains of a home-made placard lay on the ground, and though the soggy cardboard had dirt and tyre-tracks on it, the message was still legible. burn in hell.

Locking his car, he straightened his uniform and then began to walk towards the hospital entrance. Faces swung in his direction as he approached. Microphones appeared. A TV camera was pointed at him, its tiny red light glowing. At that moment his mobile bleeped, telling him that he’d just received a text. It was from Sue.
Please come home billy.
The fact that she’d used his name meant her anger had died down, but there was still nothing he could do. He switched the mobile off and slid it into his pocket. Ignoring the questions he was being asked, he pushed through the crowd. He didn’t open his mouth at all except to say “Excuse me.” One scrawny man in a parka took hold of his arm, but quickly let go of it again when Billy turned and stared at him.

On entering reception, Billy saw Phil Shaw talking to a woman in a pale-grey suit. Phil was wearing a suit as well, navy-blue, with a white shirt and a purple tie. There were dark smears under his eyes, and his skin looked blotchy, porous.

“You have any trouble out there, Billy?” Phil said.

“No, not really.”

“People seem to be behaving themselves—so far…”

Phil introduced him to the woman. Her name was Eileen Evans, and she worked for the hospital as an operations manager. If for some reason Phil was called away, she would be available to deal with any problems or enquiries. Billy felt Eileen’s cool grey eyes move evenly across his face.

A pass had been organised for Billy’s car, and he went outside and placed it in his windscreen. When he returned, Phil nodded at the constable on duty by the main entrance, then put a hand against the small of Billy’s back and steered him down a long, bright corridor. They passed a snack bar, then a lift. The walls were white, with just a tinge of pink to them. Sometimes there was a row of plastic chairs. The air seemed taut, almost rigid, as if the entire hospital had taken a breath in the early hours of Friday morning and was still holding it.

A garden appeared on Billy’s left. Built in an internal courtyard, Oriental in style, it had a pond with a miniature stone temple and a red wooden bridge. He wondered what Harry Parsons would make of it. Harry was a retired plumber who worked on the allotments behind Billy’s house. If Billy ever found himself at a loose end, he would go and see whether Harry was around. They’d talk about rainfall or the absence of skylarks or what a disaster the railways were—anything, really. Emma called him “Parsons.” “Morning, Parsons,” she would say, and he would tip the brim of his flat cap.

“You been keeping well?” Phil said.

“Fine thanks, sarge.”

“Sue all right?”

“She’s fine.” Billy paused. “The winter always gets her down a bit.”

Phil nodded, as if he, too, found winter difficult. “And your little girl? How’s your little girl?”

“She’s eight now.”

“Is she really?”

“It’s still hard work, though. We have to watch her all the time.”

Phil nodded, his eyes on the ground. “Sorry about the seven-to-seven, Billy,” he said. “There wasn’t anyone else I could call on, not just at the moment.”

“That’s OK.”

Or it would have been, Billy thought, if only Sue had let him have his nap. After their argument at lunchtime, he had gone back upstairs, hoping to get another couple of hours’ sleep, but he had been in bed for less than ten minutes when Sue walked in on him, and even with his eyes closed, he’d had a clear picture of the inside of her head, all sparks and broken china.

“You don’t care about us,” he heard her say. “That’s what it comes down to. You just don’t care.”

“That’s not true,” he murmured into his pillow.

“You don’t care about me and Emma. The way you walked out when she was born—”

“Don’t bring that up again. And anyway, I didn’t ‘walk out’…”

“What?” She was leaning over him now, her face only inches from his, and she was pushing at his shoulder. “
What
was that?”

Sometimes he had the distinct feeling that she was trying to goad him into violence. Then she would be able to stand back with a look of triumph on her face and say,
You see? I knew it. I knew it all along.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

He hurled the bedclothes away from him, brushing her aside. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her stagger—a little theatrically, he thought—then press herself against the wall. Once on his feet, he didn’t know what to do. In his T-shirt and underpants, he went and stared out of the window. The garden lay below him, with the allotments just beyond, the various plots forming a kind of patchwork that sloped gently uphill to the woods. Away to his right, a cornfield shifted and swirled as if governed by mysterious tides, hidden currents. When he first viewed the house it had been summer, and the corn was high, its yellow randomly sown with poppies. He’d rarely seen anything so beautiful. Today, though, its beauty seemed inappropriate, if not actually malicious. To think that their marriage had started there. To think that he had taken Sue by the hand and led her out into the middle of that field—Susie as she was then…And now, a decade later, here they were, bound together by little more than arguments and tears, by vicious words, by things they didn’t even mean.
I might as well go to work right now,
he thought,
for all the peace I’m going to get.

Phil began to talk again, this time about the woman whose body they were guarding. Since she had already been hospitalised on a number of occasions during the past two or three years—first for osteoporosis, then for a cerebral aneurysm and, most recently, for respiratory problems—the police had been able to develop procedures for dealing with her when she left the confines of prison. Now that she was dead it was no different. The police were duty bound to protect her from anyone who might want to take revenge on her or do her harm—and there were plenty of those, as a glance at the Internet would tell you—but, equally, they had to see that the other patients and their families were not upset or disturbed. He had worked intensively with hospital staff to make the place secure while simultaneously attempting to keep disruption to a minimum. There were police stationed at the rear of the building, and in many of the corridors. There were police patrolling the grounds as well. Every entrance and exit had been covered.

A door clicked open somewhere behind them, and Billy heard rapid footsteps. Phil turned sharply, but it was only a nurse hurrying off in the opposite direction. Soon she was fifty yards away, her reflection a smudgy, swaying blur in the bright mirror of the floor.

“We have to make sure nothing happens,” Phil said, his eyes still on the nurse. “If we manage that, we will have been successful.”

Billy nodded. It didn’t surprise him that Phil was jumpy. Should anyone slip up, he would be held responsible—and, what’s more, it would be splashed all over the front pages of tomorrow’s papers.
Make sure nothing happens:
it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

Ahead of them, a pair of double doors swung outwards, their leading edges padded with black rubber, and two men in dark-blue Adidas emerged, both with a cocksure, slightly bow-legged gait that Billy recognised from estates like Gainsborough and Chantry. A soft thump as the doors swung back. “She don’t want it done, though,” one of the men was saying. “Don’t she?” said the other. “No,” the first man said. “She’s frightened, isn’t she.”

Hospitals, Billy thought. It was a world you tended to forget about,
wanted
to forget about, but it was always there, and most people passed through it in the end. Lives turned down so low that you wondered if it was worth it. No actual flames any more, just pilot lights. Then all the agony and mess of dying…

The colour of the corridors had altered. All trace of white was gone. Gone, too, were the gardens and the copies of
Good Housekeeping
and the bright framed prints. Only those who truly belonged would venture this far in, and there was less need now for tact and reassurance. Everything was green. Sombre. Medical. The green was in the walls and in the air. In the pouches under Phil Shaw’s eyes. This was the business end of things. The autopsy, the coroner’s report. Bodies opened up like bags, then fastened shut again, their contents not as tidy as before. A gruesome customs house. One last border to be crossed, one final journey.

To Billy, it suddenly felt colder. The length of the corridors, the endless labelled rooms, the hush: he was approaching something huge, oppressive, even dangerous…But this line of thinking would only unsettle him, and he had too much experience to let that happen. He kept his thoughts ordinary, prosaic.
Seven-to-seven. A twelve-hour shift. Still, at least there’ll be some overtime in it.
And then,
I hope I didn’t forget my sandwiches.
And then,
It’s just a job.
Those words again. Though this time he was trying to convince himself.