The Murder Code (11 page)

His eyes flicker open briefly as he goes under.

The last things he sees before a dream is the nightstand. He sees the photograph of Emmy. And beside it he sees the old candle, its petals frail and dusty with age. It is purple and blue and red—but he knows there are tears and more besides mixed into its waxen randomness, for this is the candle he cast eight years ago, in the hollow hours after his daughter’s murder.

I
T WAS LATE. AFTER
midnight, I think.

And so the boy begins his story.

He is in the bedroom he shares with his older brother. It would be cramped with just one of them; with two, the room is rendered impossibly tiny. It is the length of the bunk bed and only twice as wide. All their clothes are piled under the lower bunk. The only other furniture is a battered wooden bookcase filled with cheap paperbacks and a row of tatty comics, stuffed in so tight that the paper has bunched and torn. There is no window.

The door opens directly on to the dim corridor running along the centre of the small house. It is shut, but—suddenly—outlined with light. Their mother has been in bed for hours. This is their father arriving home.

The boy holds his breath in the dark. Lying on the bed above him, he knows his older brother is doing the same.

Together but separate, they wait.

The boy is used to judging the world, on occasions like this, by noises. When his father is whistling, there is a chance everything will be all right. When he is talking to himself under his breath, it means someone has annoyed him at the pub: someone larger than him with whom he cannot pick a proper argument, so that he now needs to find someone with whom he can.

The little boy knows that his father is a bully, just like the children at school. When he told him he was being bullied, his father tried to teach him how to box. He took him out front and kept yelling at him to keep his hands up as he slapped him.

There is a clatter from the hallway, a stumble, and a thud against the wall. Tonight, his father isn’t making any other sound at all, and the boy’s heart is like a frightened bird trapped in his chest. That is always the worst. It means his father is very drunk indeed, that the bitterness he carries inside him will be tight against the surface. Every time he thuds drunkenly against the wall, it will feel instead like someone shoving him. When his father is this drunk, everything feels like a shove to him. Everything is against him.

The boy hates him.

A shadow drifts across the base of the door.

Pauses.

The boy, already not breathing, somehow holds his breath deeper still.

BANG BANG BANG.

His father’s fist, rapping on the door.

From the corridor, there is a laugh, and then the shadow passes. He listens as, further along the hall, his father shoulders the wall again—or, as he will experience it, the wall shoulders him.

The boy lies there in the darkness for a time, picturing him. Yes, he is
Father
, never
Daddy
. He cannot remember ever hugging him. He cannot picture his father smiling. His face is an ugly thing: red and weathered, like a troll in one of the storybooks on the shelf. His hair is brown and curly; he wears fluffy old paint-stained jumpers and brown cords. His body is small and slumped. The only big thing about him any more is his forearms and his knuckles, like an ape. All the failures and disappointments of his life are there to see.

At the far end of the house, the bedroom door slams.

The boy wants to lie there, but he can’t. He sits up in the dark and rests his bare feet on the carpet, clenching his toes against its wiry texture. And when the noises start—the other slamming, his father’s raised voice, his mother’s muted shouts and cries—the little boy pushes his fists into his eyes and rocks back and forth, concentrating on the sensations of his feet.

He begins crying silently, the way he’s learned to cry over the years, limiting the inward breaths to hide the sniffles from his thick nose.

After a while, he realises his older brother is sitting beside him. He had not even noticed him clamber down the red step-ladder. But John puts his arm round his shoulder, leans into him. They are both very small, hugging each other in the dark.

The policeman listens carefully to this story, and although the boy’s face betrays no obvious emotion—no sign of either sincerity or guile—he finds himself believing that this much is the truth. Having met both boys, and seen the house itself, he can picture them sitting there like that together. He can imagine the desolation and fear.

He says, ‘And then what happened?’

For a long moment, the boy does not reply. But then he gathers himself. And once again there is something there in his expression. Something that seems older than the child.

‘And then what happened?’

The boy begins to tell him.

This is the point, looking back, when the policeman will be convinced the lies begin.

D
AVID BARRETT IS SWEEPING
his yard.

For many people, this would be a mundane, boring task—but not for him. Behind him, lit bright by the sun, is the farm he has built over the years. It began life as a detached house, two up, two down, with a scratchy field and dirt land attached. Even back then, it was expensive to buy, but it had always been his dream to own a small farm, and the property was ideal. In the decade since he and Kate moved in, he has extended the house itself to one side and carefully cultivated the land around. They have chickens and sheep. They have rows of crops. For most things in life, they are self-sufficient.

And it is lovely.

Swish. Swish.

The broom makes a comforting noise as he methodically pushes the dust from the front of the house. It billows across the quiet road outside the property, cast into gentle rolling swirls by the warm breeze. Swish. Swish. Other than that sound, the world is almost entirely silent.

And then—

‘Mama!’

He glances up to see that Robin is running across the field on the far side of the road, arms and legs working in what seems to David more of a controlled fall than a run. His son is a little bundle of energy, and it often threatens to overtake him. He is still discovering the bounds of his small body, and constantly testing them.

‘Robin,’ he calls. ‘Be careful.’

‘Mama!’

‘Mama’s at the shop.’

Robin keeps running, legs and arms pinwheeling.

‘Mama!’

For a moment, David is not even sure if Robin means Kate or not. The little boy has been slow to walk and talk, and whereas he’s made up for the former since, his language remains underdeveloped for a child of three. ‘Mama’ was the first word he ever managed, and one he’s stubbornly clung to since. For a while, everything was ‘mama’, from the bookshelf to the chickens, and even now it’s still the first word to come to mind when the boy is excited. David supposes that’s natural enough. Kate certainly never minds.

‘Just be careful.’

He doesn’t shout loud enough; the breeze takes the words. And anyway, Robin is already halfway across the field and showing no signs of slowing down or being remotely careful.

David puts the broom down on the yard, his hands in his pockets, and sets off after the boy. The field is about a hundred metres long, where it meets another curl of the road he crosses now. There are bushes there, another field beyond the road. There is no real danger—it is too quiet here; there is rarely even any traffic—and Robin often plays there, but he doesn’t want him out of sight.

‘Robin,’ he calls.

‘Mama!’

The word drifts back, as small as the little boy himself. David can see the bottoms of his tiny sneakers as he runs, like white balls being juggled in the patchy grass.

He isn’t too far from the bushes now.

David speeds up a little.

‘Robin,’ he shouts. ‘Come back!’

If the boy hears him, he doesn’t show it. But now David can hear something else. The whine of a scooter: a constant nasal burr, growing gradually louder.

Maybe the kid’s psychic,
he thinks—because Kate is back after all; he can see her scooter puttering along a loop of the road in the distance. Her skirt is fluttering slightly, revealing rigid calves, and her hair and scarf are rolling out behind her. She is a stiff but careful driver, and takes the turning slowly that will bring her to the line of bushes Robin is still careering towards.

As she drives along, she glances his way, and David waves a big arm over his head once, pointing down to the bottom of the field to indicate that she has a reception committee. She waves back slightly hesitantly, then seems to understand, notices her son on the field and slows down gradually to meet him.

She doesn’t get that far. Twenty metres away, someone stands up from behind the bushes just as she reaches them. David can’t quite see what happens, but the sound drifts across—horrifying on a subconscious level—and it’s like a gunshot followed by a screech of metal. He is walking, and he moves more quickly now, even as his mind is still registering the sight of the scooter on its side, careering down the road straight past his son, who has come to a halt at the bottom of the field.

‘Kate!’ he shouts.

David starts running.

He’s still trying to put it together in his head—the fragments of what just happened. She crashed. But she didn’t. There was the man. David can’t see him now. His vision of the field is juddering as he runs, but the man is out of sight anyway. Somewhere around where Kate had her accident.

Those facts gradually come together, like two lenses clicking into place, revealing a clear view of the truth. The man knocked her off the scooter.

‘Robin!’ he shouts. ‘Get back! Get back up here now!’

He sees his son’s small face turn to him, sees the look of confusion and shock. The boy is pale. He saw.

‘Robin! Back to the house!’

The man reappears: standing back up, like a shadow appearing over the bush. He is dressed entirely in black and wearing a balaclava. He sees David running as fast as he can towards him, watches for a second, then turns and makes striking motions at the ground out of sight. He is holding something, David can’t see what.

‘No!’

The noise of the impacts carries. David runs hard, feet pounding across the field, not noticing or caring where Robin is now. Because something has just snapped inside him: some twang of pain that leaves an empty kind of knowledge in its place. The man is hitting Kate, over and over. He doesn’t know why. He just knows he has to get there, and that he won’t get there in time, that he is chasing something he cannot catch, something that he has already missed.

And now the man is running up the road, towards the fallen scooter. Carrying something. David adjusts his course slightly, aiming to meet him—to come charging through the bush and rugby-tackle him. But he misjudges: the man outpaces him. As David reaches the line of bushes, he has already righted the scooter and is kicking down at the pedals, revving the throttle. David barely notices the tearing thorns as he crashes through the foliage, stumbling slightly on the sudden hardness of the tarmac, turning to see the cough of smoke as the scooter accelerates away.

He knows immediately that he has no chance of catching it. Within a moment, the man is already looping around, heading up to go straight past the front of David’s white-faced, sunlit farmhouse dream.

Kate.

He turns slowly. She is just lying there, twenty metres away. There seems to be a spill of petrol all around her head, and even though he knows it isn’t petrol, for a moment he still holds out hope as he runs.

For the moment it takes him to reach her.

T
HERE WERE A COUPLE
of things that surprised me about Vicki Gibson’s funeral. The first was that it was held at a non-denominational chapel: for some reason, I’d had Carla Gibson pegged as a religious woman. I was right about that, as it happens, but Vicki herself had not been, and her mother had chosen to respect her daughter’s wishes rather than her own.

The second was the number of people that turned up.

It was a quiet, warm morning. Gravel crunched softly beneath my shoes as I walked up the drive, which was lined on either side by luscious, perfectly trimmed green hedges. Funeral homes, even non-denominational ones, often seem to try to recreate a vision of heaven, of peace and rest. Outside the chapel itself, a crowd had already gathered in advance of the service.

I looked around at everyone slightly wonderingly. Other people’s lives can be mysterious from the outside, and it’s wrong to rush to snap judgements. Vicki Gibson had never been the isolated outsider that her poverty and living circumstances had led me to believe.

I circulated a little—carefully avoiding the officers who were attending more discreetly. It wasn’t unusual for serial murderers to turn up at the funerals of their victims, or observe them from a distance. In the immediate absence of other lines of enquiry, the funeral was a high priority for us.

Nobody stood out.

There were a few of the regular customers at the launderette: two women and an elderly man. Vicki’s co-workers from both jobs turned up, clustered together in two large bunches. Members of her extended family had travelled to be here. And there were countless friends from the community, dressed as sombrely and neatly as they could afford. Everybody present seemed to know somebody. Nobody appeared to be here alone.

After a while, the hearse arrived and a silence settled on the assembled crowd, like a blanket falling.

Six professional pall-bearers carried the coffin into the chapel, stepping forward in solemn, practised unison. Gradually the people followed in after. A few officers mingled with them, although most would remain stationed quietly in the grounds.

I went in last of all.

The chapel was a large hall with a peaked roof. It reminded me, bizarrely, of a holiday chalet: varnished wooden floorboards, clean white walls and small high windows framed with thick dark wood. Wedges of sunlight hung in the air above.