Death of a Murderer

11

Billy stood up suddenly and walked down to the far end of the mortuary. He would have liked some air, a change of scene, but it was still hours until his break. Newman’s voice had been so gentle and considered, as if he were dispensing valuable advice, each sentence carefully shaped and weighted so as to lodge in Billy’s memory. Billy rubbed at his face with both hands. Had he avoided things? He didn’t think he had. Sue had wanted security, and he had done his utmost to provide it. He had worked unceasingly to try and build a life that seemed worth living, and now, after fourteen years together, they had more or less everything they were supposed to have — a house, a child, a car, a job, a pension — but nothing felt secure at all, and nothing felt quite real either.

In the last few months he had stopped going straight home after work. The first time it happened, in February, it had been an accident. He knew the roundabout well — he used it most days — so there was no reason why he should have taken the first exit instead of the second, and even once he’d made the mistake he could easily have pulled into the side of the road and turned round. But he didn’t. He carried on. And there was a distinct lightness about the way he drove after that, a detached quality, as though the decision was not only one that had been made for him, but also one that he didn’t have the power either to challenge or to overturn. He wondered if that was how his father, Glenn Tyler, had felt when he walked out on his pregnant wife in 1956. That lightness, that detachment. Things shaken off — for ever, in his father’s case.

From that day on, even after his transfer to Stowmarket had come through, Billy would go back to that same roundabout, and he would follow the road that curved under the Orwell bridge and out along the river. He would always park in the same lay-by. If it was raining, he would listen to the radio, or read the local paper. From time to time, he would switch the wipers on and peer through the windscreen, but there was nothing much to see, just the dark twist of the road ahead of him, and the grass verge to his left and, beyond that, the river’s dull grey surface. If the weather was fine, though, and the tide was out, he would walk across the mud-flats, eyes lowered, as if searching the ground for something he had lost. He only engaged with what lay directly in front of him — seaweed, nails, bones, feathers, shells. The rest of his life he was able, for a while, to keep at bay. He saw all sorts of people. Lonely types mostly. There was a man who carried a white bucket and a long stick with a spoon taped to the end of it. Employed by a nearby farm, he had taken it upon himself to poison the rats that were breeding on the riverbank. There was also a man who dug up ragworms and razorfish, which he would use as bait. Like most keen fishermen, he didn’t have too much to say. And there was a frizzy-haired woman who fed the swans — with biscuits, usually, or stale buns. Another woman, older, would stare out over the water, one hand pressed against her collarbone, as if waiting for a lover to arrive by boat. They would exchange a few words, or nod at each other, but that was about it. Nobody came down to the estuary to make new friends. Sometimes he would read the notice that had been erected on the grass verge. He learned about the various birds that visited the area — the godwit, the redshank, the dunlin. They would spend the summer in Norway or Greenland or Russia, and then, when the temperature began to drop, they would fly south. Those names, though: they sounded like characters from myth or legend. Redshank the warrior, soaked in blood. Godwit the jester, the holy fool…And beyond the notice, of course, there was always the view. There were two cargo ships moored against the far bank, their hulls rusted ginger and listing in the water. There were yachts too, tacking upriver, their sails paunchy with the wind. Behind them lay the Nacton foreshore, where people often went to have sex or smoke dope, and away to his left, the bridge itself, its giant concrete span so high that it looked precarious, almost unsafe. Only the westbound lane was visible from where he stood, the cars and lorries sliding endlessly and steadily from right to left like targets in a fairground rifle-range. Above all, though, there was a sudden immense resource of space and light. It had sufficient power to absorb him, he felt. It was something he could vanish into if he wanted, and that notion gave him solace, making it possible for him, after a while, to turn his car round and drive back home.

Billy sat down again, then leaned forwards, the points of his elbows on his knees. Placing the palms of his hands on his forehead, with his fingers reaching up into his hair, he stared down at the metal grating that covered the drain. He was aware of the pulse beating on the inside of his right wrist. Years ago, when he was sixteen or seventeen, he had imagined all kinds of scenarios, but never anything so obvious or so difficult. He had met people here and there, people who could make things happen. Somehow none of it had quite come off. Life could surge away from you at great speed, leaving you bobbing dumbly in its wake. His friend, Raymond Percival, for instance, who had tried to persuade him to move down south, to London. We could get a squat. Go on the dole. There’ll be parties, girls… Raymond who always said he wanted to be an arms dealer — where was Raymond now? And what about Venetia? He would have married her in two seconds flat, but marriage had been the last thing on her mind. Venetia with her hair flowing over her shoulders, like black treacle poured out of a tin…

He last saw Raymond in Cheshire. It was October 1993, and he had driven up to the north-west to visit his mother who’d just celebrated her sixty-eighth birthday. Sue was three months pregnant with Emma, and Billy’s father, Glenn Tyler, had died a few weeks earlier, in Germany. It was a strange time, full of events that were enormous but concealed, remote. He found it hard to work out what he was feeling. He just kept going, without thinking too much, and tried to do the ordinary things as efficiently as he could. On the Saturday night he took his mother out to dinner in a country pub where the food was supposed to be good, and as he went up to the bar for the second time, to fetch more drinks, somebody called his name. He glanced over his shoulder, and there, unbelievably, was Raymond Percival, sitting at a candlelit table with a girl.

“Billy Tyler,” Raymond said, not getting up. He was wearing a fawn leather jacket that looked expensive, and his skin was lightly tanned.

“Raymond! What are you doing here? I thought you’d be in London.”

“Oh, you know,” Raymond said. “I get around.”

He had the same mocking smile that he’d had as a teenager. It had been amusing then, even necessary, as much a part of his image as his haircut or his flared trousers, but in a man approaching forty it looked much more like provocation. It didn’t seem as if Raymond knew that, though — or perhaps he just didn’t care.

“So,” Billy said, “how are you?”

“Could be worse. What about you?”

“Not bad.”

“I almost drowned him once,” Raymond told the girl, his eyes still moving over Billy’s face. The girl’s mouth opened a fraction, then she laughed quickly and reached for her champagne.

For a moment Billy saw the water, almost black, and seeming to slope uphill, away from him.

“I suppose you’re running Scotland Yard by now,” Raymond said.

Billy smiled faintly. “Something like that.”

So Raymond knew what he did. He was sure Raymond found it not only ludicrous but incomprehensible. After everything they had been through together, he would be bound to see it as a betrayal too. But that was years ago, all that…

Raymond introduced him to the girl. Her name was Henry, Raymond said. When Billy stared at her, she smiled and told him it was short for Henrietta. They shook hands, hers cocked slightly at the wrist, and bright with rings. She had a pair of sunglasses in her hair. Billy thought she was probably a model.

He turned back to Raymond, his eyes dropping briefly to Raymond’s jacket. “You look as if you’re doing all right for yourself,” he said. “Nothing illegal, I hope.”

Raymond laughed. “You want to join us, Billy? You want to pull up a chair?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I’m with someone.”

Raymond looked past him. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

“My mother,” Billy said.

They both smiled, but their smiles didn’t reach their eyes.

“Well, anyway,” Raymond said, brisker now, “good to see you.” You’d think they ran into each other all the time. It had been twenty years, though. Maybe more.

“Take it easy, Raymond,” Billy said, then he turned to Henrietta. “Nice to have met you.”

He walked over to the bar. As he ordered the drinks, he heard Raymond and the girl start laughing. On his way back, he passed their table again and nodded, but he didn’t stop, focusing instead on the two glasses he was carrying, as if worried they might spill.

Sometime later, he looked through the window and saw Raymond standing near a low-slung sports car. The girl was with him. Though it was already dark, she had her sunglasses on. Out of habit, he made a mental note of Raymond’s number plate. BOY 1DA. If Raymond wanted to, he could drive to London tonight with that beautiful girl beside him. Or Paris. He could do anything.

“Are they friends of yours?” Billy’s mother asked.

“That’s Raymond,” Billy said. “Raymond Percival.”

“You were at school with him, weren’t you?”

Billy nodded. “I went on holiday with him as well. We travelled all round Europe.”

“I remember.” His mother’s eyes lingered on Raymond as he climbed into the car. “Good-looking boy.”

Billy smiled to himself.

“Your father had something of that about him,” she said.

“Really?”

“He was glamorous.” She took a sip of wine, then put the glass back on the table. She kept her hand on it, though, and twisted it from time to time. “Imagine falling for a musician…”

They both watched through the window as the sports car moved noisily out on to the road.

“Was he ever violent?” Billy asked.

“He got drunk sometimes. I was frightened of him then.” She looked across at Billy. “He never hit me, if that’s what you mean.”

Billy stared at the table. His father had been drinking the night he died, apparently. A tram had knocked him down. In Hamburg. When Billy thought about the death, all he could see was a saxophone lying on a cobbled street, the bell tinted red by strip-club neon, the octave key bent out of shape. His father, the musician…Had he been playing live that night? Where had he been living, and who with? What had happened to the saxophone? The questions came to him in a leisurely, almost sluggish way, as though aware that answers were unlikely to materialise. They had more to do with a kind of nostalgia than with any real curiosity. He had seen his father just twice in his entire life.

“Why do you ask?” his mother said, and he could sense her eyes on him.

“No reason,” he said, still staring at the table.

“You’re not in trouble, Billy, are you?”

“No.” And he wasn’t. But he felt as if he was.