Death of a Murderer

16

When Billy pressed the mortuary bell, Fowler opened the door and then looked past him, into the corridor, as if he expected Billy to have brought his wife with him.

“Everything all right?” he said.

Billy nodded. “Everything’s fine.”

“You took your time.”

“Sorry. Nothing I could do.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Fowler said. “She wasn’t any trouble.”

Billy suspected that this line had been rehearsed, but he gave Fowler the obligatory smile. To most people, a bobby’s sense of humour would seem tasteless, if not actually sick, but then most people didn’t have to cope with what bobbies had to cope with. Billy thought of the time Neil gave the kiss of life to a man who had been thrown through a windscreen. Thanks to Neil, the man survived, though his entire face had to be reconstructed. Neil won a commendation from the Chief Superintendent, and his name appeared in the local paper. He didn’t make a big song and dance about it. In fact, he only mentioned it once, and that was later that night, in the equipment room. “I don’t know much about that bloke,” Neil said, “but I can tell you one thing: he’d had an Indian.” Neil paused to allow the laughter to die down. “Chicken Madras, I think it was.” A sense of humour. You wouldn’t be able to carry on without one. It’s how you protect yourself.

Taking over as loggist, Billy saw that he’d been gone for more than half an hour. Fowler had been right to draw his attention to it. He would have to tell Sue not to turn up like that again. It made him look unprofessional. It was humiliating too.

“Well,” Fowler said, “back to those corridors.”

“Thanks very much for filling in,” Billy said. “I appreciate it.”

Fowler looked at his feet and nodded, then he lifted his head again and gave Billy a lopsided grin.

When the constable had left, Billy sat down at the table. It was still almost two hours until his first real break, but he didn’t feel like doing any paperwork. He poured himself another coffee. Half a cup. The lights on the ceiling gave off a faint mechanical sound, somewhere between a whine and a buzz, and a regular but spaced-out beep-beep-beep was coming from the coroner’s office, which meant that Fowler had failed to answer the phone, and somebody had left a message. The noise didn’t irritate Billy, as his young blonde colleague had assumed it would; if anything, he found it comforting, like a heartbeat, a vital sign. Sue would be on the A14 by now, he thought. The road would be quiet. Just the occasional lorry heading east to catch the night ferry.

He took out his mobile. If he sent Sue a text, it would seal the rare good note on which they had parted. Hope u got home safely, he wrote. Lets have b/fast 2gether. Billyx. He hoped she had finally resigned herself to the fact that he had gone to work, as ludicrous as that sounded. After all, he was a policeman; he couldn’t pick and choose between assignments. And certainly, when they sat side by side at the picnic table, she had seemed contrite, realising, perhaps, that she had overstepped the mark. But these recent, wild mood-swings troubled him. Following the birth of Emma, she had shown such courage, such application, and he had drawn strength from her example. He’d come to rely on her to keep things stable. Now, though, he wasn’t sure if she was so reliable…

Last spring, he had returned to the house at midnight to find her sitting in the kitchen. He could see from her eyes that she’d been crying. A bottle of wine stood on the table, half of it already gone. She had smoked a cigarette too, which was unlike her. He should have been home much earlier — his shift had ended at ten — but he had driven down to the estuary. He had sat in the dark with the heater on and listened to jazz. He’d been thinking about his father. The usual unfinished thoughts. Looking at Sue’s tear-stained face, he felt a certain guilt — or a sense of regret, at least — but he knew he would do the same again. He hung in the kitchen doorway, his arms held slightly away from his sides, as if he had fallen in the river and his uniform was wet.

“I’m terrible,” Sue said.

“What do you mean?”

She glanced at him, and then away again. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

Though tired, he pulled up a chair. “Tell me about it.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. Really.”

He poured some wine into her glass and drank it. “Tell me, Sue,” he said. “It can’t be as bad as some of the things I’ve done.”

She looked at him wide-eyed, but dubious as well, then lowered her head again.

“Just tell me what’s troubling you,” he said. Then we can go to bed was the rest of the sentence, but he left it unspoken.

She put both hands up to her face, using the middle finger of each hand to smooth the tears from beneath her eyes. “You remember when I went to Whitby last year?”

“Yes. You took Emma with you.”

“I almost killed her.” Sue kept quite still, her hands in her lap now, not daring to look at him. “I don’t mean accidentally.”

He stared at her lowered head, the white line of her parting.

“I didn’t plan it,” she went on. “At least, I don’t think I did. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.” She glanced at him quickly, through her hair, then let out a short, oddly resonant laugh.

He wasn’t sure what to say to her, but he also realised that he couldn’t leave too long a silence, and he knew he couldn’t judge.

“Tell me what happened,” he said quietly.

The journey north took longer than she’d expected, Sue told him, but it was only when they arrived at their hotel that Emma started playing up.

“She would have been tired by then,” Billy said.

Sue nodded. “You know how she gets.”

She was in the car-park, trying to unload the car, and Emma kept wandering out into the road. She spoke to Emma calmly, warning her, then she tried to bribe her, then she shouted. None of it worked. In the end, she had to half carry, half drag Emma up to their room, with Emma bellowing the whole way, that awful, almost inhuman bellowing she did, and all in front of the other guests, who were watching from the lounge.

“Sometimes you want to punch her on the jaw,” Sue said. “Just knock her out. Like they do in films.”

“It’s not that easy,” Billy said.

“Well,” Sue said, “you’d know, I suppose.”

They stayed in their room that evening and ate the sandwiches and chocolate that were left over from the journey; she couldn’t face the dining-room, not with all those people staring. Next morning, the weather was bright and clear. She stood at the window in her pyjamas, trying to shut the jabber of cartoons out of her head. Sun slanted across the hotel car-park. They would climb up to East Cliff, she decided. Visit the ruined abbey.

As they crossed the swing-bridge, Emma walked with her head tilted back and her mouth open, watching the seagulls as they wheeled, shrieking, above the harbour. The path to East Cliff was steep, and paved with slippery flagstones, but the two of them took it slowly, holding hands. By the time they reached the top, a cold wind was blowing in off the sea. It was a weekday, out of season; they were the only people there.

When Emma saw the abbey, she turned to Sue, her eyes glinting behind her spectacles. “Like Hunchback,” she said.

Billy grinned. “She loves that video.”

Later, as they explored the graveyard, Sue told Emma the story of Count Dracula. This was where he’d landed, she said, here in Whitby, during a ferocious storm. She led Emma towards the cliff-edge, thinking they might be able to work out where the vampire’s ship had run aground. Leaning forwards from the waist, hands clenched and pressed against her hips, Emma peered down — she was imagining how Dracula had changed into a great black dog and leapt ashore, perhaps, or else she was simply hypnotised by the rhythmic creasing and folding of the waves — and in that moment, as they stood next to each other, no more than twelve inches from the edge, Sue thought, She could fall, and then, without a beat, I could push her. It was a drop of at least two hundred feet. She wouldn’t have survived. Couldn’t have. I could push her now, Sue thought, and that would be the end of it. She hesitated for several seconds, then she took a step backwards. She was behind Emma now, but near enough to be partly covered by her shadow. All our troubles would be over. She stood in her daughter’s shadow, and she came so close to reaching out that her hands seemed to throb.

A terrible accident. A tragedy.

And since they were alone on that bleak cliff-top, who would have been able to prove otherwise?

She stepped back so abruptly that she bruised her leg on a gravestone. “Emma,” she said, “I think we should leave now.”

“Leave,” Emma said. “Go down.”

“That’s right, my darling. It’s lunchtime.” Sue reached for Emma’s hand and gripped it tightly.

“Fish and chips.”

Sue smiled. “If you like.”

In half an hour they were sitting in a restaurant on the waterfront, their cheeks glowing from the wind.

Sue’s eyes fixed on Billy’s face. “I came that close.” She measured a gap with her thumb and forefinger. A very narrow gap.

“It’s not just you,” Billy said. “I’ve thought the same thing.”

She pulled away from him. “You have?”

He poured another glass of wine. “Not exactly the same,” he said. “I just used to wish that she hadn’t been born.”

Except no, he thought, as soon as he had spoken, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Emma never came into it, not as a person. It was much more abstract than that. What he wished was that they’d been dealt a different hand. But Sue’s eyes had already drifted to the kitchen wall. She looked infinitely sad, and he knew that she was thinking about her only child — her brightness, and her burden. If Sue was ever out for very long, he would find Emma sitting by the window in the lounge, watching the road. Waiting for Mummy, she would say, and her voice would have something of the goose’s honk about it, as always. But Mummy’s going to be late, he’d say. She would glare malevolently at him through her thick spectacles. Put you in the tower.

“It hasn’t exactly been easy,” he said. “If we didn’t have thoughts like that sometimes, we wouldn’t be human.”

He wasn’t sure he was right, actually. It was just something to say. But at least they were equally at fault.

“The main thing is, you didn’t do it,” he said.

“I could have,” she said. “I almost did.”

She didn’t want him to dismiss the urge she had felt as a one-off, an aberration — the exception to the rule. It was serious, and real, and it was there all the time. That was what she was trying to tell him. It’s there all the time.

“You didn’t, though,” he said again, more gently. “You haven’t.” He left a silence, and then he took a risk. “You won’t.”

Getting up off his chair, Billy shivered suddenly and rubbed his arms. He thought he understood why Sue had begged him not to go to work that evening. She was aware of the fragility of things. Their life together. Their foothold in the world. She might feel neglected, undermined as well. She might even suspect him. Not that he was driving down to the Orwell estuary and sitting in a parked car on his own — though that was bad enough, maybe — but simply that there was often an hour in his schedule that wasn’t accounted for. Perhaps she imagined he was seeing someone…And now this job with so much grief and terror surrounding it, and so much rage — the way that could eat into your thoughts without your knowing. Something might give, something might crumple or blow, and then all the horrors would descend. She was afraid for him, for herself — for the whole family. The wall protecting them was so very thin. In fact, it was a miracle that it had held for as long as it had.