Death of a Murderer

24

There was a name he could no longer avoid. It had come to him on Friday, when he sat in his car and listened to the news, and then again on Saturday, when he went walking in the woods. It had come even more strongly when Phil Shaw showed him the fridge where the woman’s body was being kept. During the past few hours it had grown more and more powerful until it seemed that the name had a voice, and it was calling out to him, demanding his attention.

Four years ago, in the autumn of 1998, he had been summoned to Northampton to give evidence in a trial. He hadn’t been able to leave Ipswich until the late afternoon, and after driving for about two hours he had checked into a Travel Inn at the junction of the A14 and the A1, not far from Huntingdon. His room was tidy and overheated, with a big double bed and a notice you could hang outside your door that said SSSSHHH…FAST ASLEEP. Like most Travel Inns, it made you feel as if you’d ended up in the middle of nowhere. Their locations seemed determined largely by the presence of a main road or a motorway; apart from that, they didn’t appear to have any connection with real life at all. This would be a terrible place to die, he remembered thinking as he set his case down on the bed.

On the far side of the car-park was a large, partially timbered building that the brochure referred to as the “food barn.” It had a restaurant and a bar, and on that particular night it was full of lorry-drivers, travelling salesmen, and a party of high-spirited golfers from a club in Warwickshire. Billy was halfway through his Chicken Kiev when a man in a grey suit jerked to a standstill in front of his table.

“Billy Tyler?”

Billy stared up into the man’s face. “My God,” he said. “Trevor? Is that you?”

He rose quickly to his feet, and the two men shook hands.

“Billy Tyler,” Trevor said again, but in a tone of wonderment this time.

Billy was grinning now. “What a coincidence.”

Trevor Lydgate had been in the year above Billy at primary school, but their mothers were friends so they had played in each other’s houses from an early age. Their friendship hadn’t lasted long, though, because the Lydgates moved away, to Manchester, and the two boys gradually lost touch.

“Look, you finish your meal,” Trevor said, “then come and join me for a drink. I’m over there, in the corner.”

Billy watched the thin, balding man move away across the bar — he remembered a slender boy with light-brown hair — then he sat down again. Picking up his fork, he smiled to himself and shook his head. So there was a reason for these out-of-the-way places after all…

A few minutes later, he was sitting in a booth with Trevor, drinking pints of Stella and catching up on the events of the last twenty-five or thirty years. They both drank fast, excited by the chance reunion, and determined to make the most of it. Every now and then, their conversation would reach into the distant past, as if for a point of reference, a touchstone; they wanted to emphasise the unlikely nature of their meeting — or to make sure that it was all true, perhaps, to prove that the things they remembered had actually happened, that they really were who they said they were.

Trevor was married, with four children. Three boys and a girl. He worked for a firm that manufactured pottery. Plates, mugs, bowls — that sort of stuff. The firm was downsizing, though, and he would soon be looking for another job. At his age, he didn’t think it would be easy. “I’m in my forties now,” he said. “Can you believe it?” Trevor sounded amazed, almost jubilant, and yet, at the same time, Billy saw anxiety pass over his face, as sudden and fleeting as the shadow of a cloud. In any case, Trevor went on quickly, he would cross that bridge when he came to it. He was living in Staffordshire, in a town called Stone. It was very handy for the M6.

“But tell me about you, Billy,” Trevor said, leaning forwards over the table. “What have you been up to?”

Billy couldn’t help smiling at Trevor’s eagerness. He seemed so interested. As if any news of Billy’s would delight him, just so long as Billy could manage to put it into words. It was a childlike quality, one not generally found in people who were middle-aged: either they had lost it along the way, or else they’d had it ground out of them.

“I’m in the police,” Billy said.

“Really? I’ve never met a policeman. I mean, not socially.”

“We’re all right, you know. We’re human.”

Trevor beamed. “You know, I didn’t used to trust the police. Back in the late seventies, I mean, when Thatcher first came in. Now, though, I think it would be a fascinating job. Who knows, if I get fired, I might even become one myself — or is it too late for me?”

“It’s not exactly well paid,” Billy said, “and you do have a large family…”

“That’s true.” Trevor nodded, then drank.

Though he appeared to be agreeing with Billy, he had by no means been put off the idea. Trevor seemed to be a man who was given to continual small enthusiasms. He would probably be exhausting to live with.

“Four children,” Billy mused. “How do you do it?”

“Ask my wife.” Trevor chuckled, shook his head. “What about you, Billy? Have you got kids?”

“I’ve got a daughter,” Billy said. “Emma. She’s got Down’s.”

This piece of information would have thrown most people. Not Trevor, though.

“How bad is it?” he said.

“We’re lucky, really. On a scale of one to ten, she’s probably seven or eight. I mean, she’s fantastic, I love her to bits, but it’s still difficult.”

“You must worry…”

“She’s four and a half, and she can’t talk properly. She just makes sounds. Their tongues are bigger, you see.” Billy swallowed some more lager. “Her eyes are bad too. She had to have an operation to tighten the muscles. And she has to wear special shoes to help her stand up…” Billy thought about mentioning her heart, but he just couldn’t bear it.

“I expect you have to watch her all the time,” Trevor said.

Billy nodded. “Yes. Non-stop.”

It was his round. He went up to the bar and ordered two more pints. Before he could even sit down with the new drinks, Trevor was talking again.

“If you think about it, though, we all have to watch our children now, don’t we? So many things can happen to them. When we were young, it was different.” He reached for his new pint and took a gulp. “Back then, it was all woods and fields, and we’d be gone for the whole day, and no one even thought twice…”

Trevor’s voice had started trembling halfway through the sentence, but then it gave out completely, and he put his face in his hands. Billy stared at Trevor’s bald spot, unable for a moment to believe what was happening.

“Trevor?” he said. “What is it?”

But Trevor wouldn’t answer. He sat in the booth with his hands covering his face, his whole body shaking.

“What’s wrong, Trevor?”

People were beginning to look at them, wondering what was going on. There’s a bloke crying over there.

Billy clambered to his feet and put an arm round Trevor’s shoulders. “Come on, Trevor. Let’s get you back to your room.”

He picked Trevor’s key up off the table, and they left the food barn together, with Billy taking most of Trevor’s weight. Once outside, the cold air hit them. The wind was swooping in from the east, over the landscaped banks and mounds, and Billy thought he could smell snow. That keen, metallic edge. When he lifted his head, the cars bounced beneath the yellow lights. Their shiny surfaces swirled glassily about. How many pints had they had? Six? Seven?

Trevor’s room was on the ground floor, behind reception. On opening the door, Billy saw that the room had been designed for people who were disabled, with pinkish-brown grab-rails everywhere, and a red string dangling between the toilet and the bath. IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY THE DUTY MANAGER CAN BE CALLED BY PULLING THE RED CORD. Billy hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“Asked for a non-smoking room,” Trevor said, slurring his words, “and this’s all they had.” His head lurched on his neck as he looked around. “It’s no different, really. Everything’s a bit lower, that’s all. The bed, door-handles…”

“It’s fine,” Billy said.

Trevor stumbled into the bathroom. Through the closed door, Billy heard the splash of urine, then a controlled roar as the toilet flushed.

When Trevor emerged again, he avoided Billy’s gaze. “Sorry about all that,” he said, wiping his face. “Sorry, Billy. God. Do you want a drink?”

He seemed to have pulled himself together. His speech was clearer. All the same, Billy didn’t feel he could leave Trevor on his own.

“Go on, then,” he said. “Just the one.”

Trevor fetched two water-glasses from the bathroom, then opened his briefcase and took out some red wine and a corkscrew. “I always have a bottle on me,” he said, “just in case I run into an old friend.” He was trying to be funny, but his voice was too thin to carry it off. Too wobbly.

He poured the wine. Even as he held out a glass for Billy, he was gulping from his own. “So I never told you what happened to me?” he said.

Billy crossed the room and sat down in the armchair by the window. He had checked into the Travel Inn because he was tired, and here he was, staying up and getting drunk. “When are you talking about?” he said.

“When I was ten.”

“I didn’t know you then. You’d moved away.”

“That’s right.” Trevor settled on the end of the bed. He drank some more wine, then reached out and placed his glass on the desk where the TV was. Only alcoholics put glasses down that carefully.

“So what happened?” Billy said.

Trevor began to talk about the old days again, what he called “back then”—children off playing by themselves, and no one giving them a thought. Had it ever really been like that? Maybe it had. What Billy remembered most, though, was the housing boom, and all that building going on. Stacks of bricks, cement-mixers. Scaffolding. He and Trevor would climb up inside the new houses and drop messages down between the walls: swearwords, or spells, or sometimes just their two names and the date. They were still there, probably…Only dimly aware of Trevor’s voice, Billy was on the point of drifting off to sleep when a single sentence drew him right in close.

“But that day, for some reason, I was all alone…”

Billy roused himself. “Sorry. Where was this?”

“In Manchester. A place called Fallowfield.”

A white car pulled alongside him, Trevor said, as he was walking. The driver was a woman, and she was on her own. She wound her window down, called out to him. He couldn’t remember what she said, but he remembered that she had a hard voice, flinty and impatient; she sounded like someone who was bad-tempered, or in a hurry. She had black hair, with a headscarf tied over it. Though it was November, she dangled her right arm out of the window, and her painted nails showed up vividly against the door. Between the first and second fingers was a cigarette. There was a moment when she withdrew her arm and dragged on the cigarette, and the whole time she was inhaling she never took her eyes off him, then her arm returned to where it had been before, and the smoke soon followed in a thin blue stream.

His parents had told him that there were people called “strangers,” and that they might offer him a bag of sweets, or a ride in their car, and that he should always say “No, thank you,” but somehow, that afternoon, he forgot everything he’d been taught. Oddly enough, it was the woman’s harshness that drew him across the pavement. She didn’t make the slightest attempt to be friendly, let alone seductive. On the contrary. If he couldn’t be of any use to her, she would have to find somebody else, and he could see that thought annoyed her.

“I wondered later,” Trevor said, his eyes wide now, “whether she might have been nervous, you know?” He paused. “I mean, what if I was one of the first?”

At this point, Billy still wasn’t quite sure what Trevor was talking about, but he decided not to interrupt.

Trevor went on. When he stopped at the kerb, the woman told him that she was lost. Did he know the area? He nodded. Good, she said. If he would just get into the car, maybe he could show her the way. Once again, there was no subtlety in her approach, nothing remotely clever or ingratiating. He asked her where she was going. He called her “Miss.” Instead of answering, she cocked her head, appraising him, and then said something about him looking bright as a button: if he couldn’t help her, she said, nobody could. Only then did he feel a flicker of misgiving. It was because she had flattered him. The hardness, the impatience — they were believable; they seemed real, and he trusted them. But the flattery felt different, like something shiny that wasn’t actually worth anything. So why did he get into the car? He didn’t have an explanation. It still puzzled him, even today. Round the front he went, her made-up eyes tracking him across the windscreen. When he reached the passenger’s side, the door was already open. All he had to do was climb in and pull it shut.

“Give it a good slam,” the woman told him. “We don’t want you falling out now, do we?”

Trevor looked away into the room. “Fuck,” he murmured, then reached for his drink and finished it. He poured himself another glass, right up to the brim, and held the bottle out to Billy, but Billy shook his head. He’d had enough.

“It was so quiet,” Trevor said. “I don’t remember any noise at all.” He paused again. “No, wait, that’s wrong. Once, on a bend, I heard a motorbike. That was him, of course. He was following.”

Only now did Billy understand what Trevor had been telling him, and he leaned forwards in his chair, clear-headed suddenly, as though all the alcohol had drained out of his body. “So you saw him too?” he said.

Trevor closed his eyes. “We haven’t got to that bit yet.”

They drove on for a while, and the woman kept her eyes fixed on the road. She braked, she indicated; everything was so normal that he forgot what he was doing there. Then he came to. She hadn’t asked him for directions; she hadn’t spoken to him at all, in fact. He glanced at her, and it wasn’t her nails or her hair that he saw, but her blunt nose and her jutting chin. Any glamour there might have been had gone, and he was beginning to suspect that something might be wrong.

“I thought you were lost,” he murmured.

The woman didn’t seem to hear him.

Some time later, he said, “You haven’t asked me which way to go.”

“We’re going to my gran’s house first,” she told him. “I forgot my gloves.”

She parked in an area he didn’t recognise. It looked poorer than where he lived. Rubbish was blowing about: bubble-gum wrappers, pages from the paper, plastic bags. On the roof of a nearby house a TV aerial quivered. It was windy out that day. He brought his eyes back down. A brown bottle rolled across the pavement, then stopped and rolled the other way. He remembered the sound of that bottle with such clarity that it might have happened half an hour ago. But it was thirty years now, thirty years…

“Come inside for a second,” the woman said. “Come and help me find those gloves.”

He knew what she was up to. She was trying to make something that was actually a chore sound like a game — grown-ups were always doing that — but she wasn’t very good at it. There was no warmth in her voice, no sense of adventure or intrigue. He thought he’d better play along, though. If he didn’t she would only get cross.

She came round to his side of the car and opened the door, then she took him by the hand and pulled him out. She hadn’t used his name, he realised. She hadn’t even asked him what he was called.

“My name’s Trevor Lydgate,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Imagine,” Trevor said, putting a hand up to his forehead. “Imagine if she’d told me. Not that it would have meant anything to me. It wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone, not then.” He laughed a precarious laugh, high and thin, and then continued.

Her hand still gripping his, they walked along a path next to a white fence. Her gran’s house was on the corner, at the end of the row. The woman opened the front door and pushed him into a narrow hallway. A cigarette-machine was fixed to the wall. He caught sight of his face in a chrome panel. He looked like someone pretending to be Trevor Lydgate, and had to turn away quickly because it made him feel strange. There was no sign of the woman’s gran. Maybe she’d gone out. He heard the motorbike again, much louder this time, and glanced over his shoulder to see where it was, but the woman was blocking his view. She seemed bigger now she was standing up. She seemed to fill the hall. As he tried to look past her, she gave him another push.

“They’re probably upstairs,” she said.

The gloves, she meant.

Up they went. Him first, her following behind.

She took him to a small room at the back of the house. There was hardly any furniture, just a two-bar electric fire and a single bed with a bare mattress. There was no carpet. Only boards. On the mattress was a Kodak camera. The curtains were drawn, but light from outside filtered through the flowery material, enough to see by. On the floor were some magazines, with men and women doing things to each other.

The woman nodded when she saw that he had noticed them. “Have a look, if you like.”

He shook his head.

She seemed to have forgotten all about the gloves. She was just staring at him, and there was greed on her face, and also a kind of pride, an expression that he didn’t understand until much later.

The air in the room was motionless and stale, and smelled of something vaguely familiar, but private, secret. It was a smell he knew, but not too well, and he couldn’t quite identify it. Mostly, he was trying not to look at the magazines.

“It’s cold in here,” the woman muttered, and she bent to plug in the electric fire.

A door opened and closed downstairs. He heard footsteps in the hall. The woman’s back stiffened, as if she were anxious or fearful, and that was when he panicked.

The next few seconds were hard to piece together. What he saw wasn’t continuous. It came to him in vivid fragments. Flashes and splinters. As though the film of his life had been slashed to ribbons and then taped back together. He didn’t really know how he managed to get away. There were times when he found it impossible to believe. There were times when he thought he must have been in that room for longer, but part of him had shut down, blotting those bits out. There were times when he searched his body for traces of the things they must have done to him. There were times too when he felt that he might still be in there, and that all this — he waved a hand to indicate the room, the hotel, and everything outside and beyond — all this was just fantasy or wishful thinking.

The woman was bent over, by the fire. He moved suddenly and fast, slipping past her, even though she was between him and the door. She let out a cry, as if, in attempting to escape, he had hurt her. Her hand clawed at him, but he eluded it. Then he was on the landing. A yellow wall, music coming from below. Through the banisters, he saw somebody walking up the stairs. A man. Head lowered, the man hadn’t noticed him. Trevor rounded the corner and hurled himself down the stairs so hard that he knocked the man off balance.

He reached the front door without seeming to have crossed the hall. The door flew inwards, hit the wall. Something shattered. He didn’t look back, and yet he had a memory of the man in the doorway, mouth crooked, one hand bleeding.

He ran off down the street. The houses all looked the same. He had no idea where he was. An old lady came up the road towards him, but he was worried she might be the gran. He tore past her, as fast as he could go. He thought he heard the motorbike start up. Quick. Hide. He found a dustbin round the back of someone’s house and climbed inside. Luckily, it was almost empty. It still stank, though. When he opened the lid again, it was dark, and the streetlights had come on. Standing on the pavement, he hesitated. Tried to guess which way was home. His stomach twisted, and he did some diarrhoea. All down one leg. All runny. He stood there in his shorts, not knowing what to do.

Some time went by. A woman turned the corner with a shopping bag. She wanted to take him home and clean him up, but he said he wasn’t allowed to go into strangers’ houses. He asked if she could telephone his parents and tell them where he was. He recited his number for her, the number he had learned by heart, then he stood out on the street and waited.

When he saw them drive up in the car, he thought how innocent they looked. It was as if he was the parent and they were the children. He felt they needed to be protected. The fact that he had diarrhoea was useful because it gave them all something to talk about. He never told his parents the real story about that day. Not then, not ever. When they asked him what he was doing in Hattersley, he said he’d got on the wrong bus.

“Then you were scared,” his mother said, “because you didn’t know where you were.”

He looked at her gratefully. “Yes,” he said, and he was relieved that she had taken on the burden of thinking up a lie. He wasn’t sure he could have done it on his own.

“Yes, I was scared,” he said.

“You were lost,” his mother said.

He nodded. He bit his bottom lip. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

Trevor wiped his face with one hand, then reached for his wine. “I was in that house.” Unable to believe it, he shook his head, then glanced across at Billy. “The black hair. It was a wig, you see?” The skin on his face seemed to have tightened. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand,” Billy said, though he wasn’t quite sure how to react.

Trevor finished his drink, but held on to the empty glass. “I’ve only told three people in my life,” he said. “My brother, my wife — and now you.”

Billy was staring at the carpet, but he could feel Trevor’s eyes on him. Did Trevor expect something from him? If so, what? And why had Trevor told him, anyway? Because they’d got drunk together? Because he was a policeman? Because, once upon a time, they had been friends?

The silence lasted. Billy felt hot. Leaning sideways, he looked at the radiator on the wall. The dial was set to 5. He turned it down to 2.

“When did all this happen?” he asked eventually.

“Nineteen sixty-four,” Trevor said. “November.”

A child had been murdered at around that time, Billy thought, though he couldn’t remember which one.

“I still think about that little boy,” Trevor said, “you know, the boy who wasn’t found.”

Billy nodded.

“I think of him lying in that lonely place,” Trevor said. “I just hope someone finds him one day. I’d hate to think he just stayed up there for ever, on the moors.”

He fell silent again.

“Most of all, though, I feel guilty,” he went on after a while, looking down into his empty glass. “Nothing happened to me. I got away.”

“You were lucky—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Trevor said, cutting in with a kind of savagery. “I’m linked to them for ever, those children. The ones with the names we all know. Sometimes it’s like I can sense their presence — somewhere near by…”

Billy watched as Trevor slowly lowered his face into his hands and began to cry again. There was another level to Trevor’s guilt, he realised. Not only had Trevor survived, but he had also kept the fact of his survival to himself. If he had told his parents what had happened — the woman in the white car, the man on the motorbike — if he had identified the house, it was possible that lives could have been saved. Billy rather hoped this thought hadn’t occurred to Trevor. It would be hard for him to bear.

Now Trevor had started crying, he couldn’t stop. He was hunched over, only his hands separating his forehead from his knees. Billy sat beside him on the bed and put an arm round his shoulders. Trevor’s body felt rigid, as though every muscle had been stretched to breaking-point.

Then, little by little, his breathing deepened. He had cried himself to sleep, just as a child might. Billy still had his arm round Trevor, though Trevor was leaning against him now. Trevor smelled of deodorant and alcohol. Once or twice, he jerked so violently that Billy was afraid they might both be thrown to the floor.

The next time Billy glanced at the clock on the TV, it said two twenty-five. He must have dozed off for a while. Trevor was facing away from him now, lying across the bottom of the bed, the soles of his shoes pressed against Billy’s thigh. One of his hands was curled into a fist and held close to his mouth. Billy did a quick calculation in his head. Northampton was still a good two hours’ drive away, and he was due in court at ten. He would have to be up by seven — at the latest.

He took off Trevor’s shoes and socks, then his trousers, and shifted him until he was lengthways on the bed. Trevor still hadn’t stirred. Billy couldn’t help noticing that Trevor’s legs were smooth and white, and utterly without hair. Somehow this seemed in keeping with the story he had told, the horror he had so narrowly escaped. Gently, Billy drew the covers over him.

Ssshh…fast asleep.

Although he very much doubted that Trevor would wake, he still didn’t feel he could leave. Not after what he’d heard. Switching off the lights, he loosened his tie and dropped into the chair by the window. It was a small modern armchair, with a low back, but he had slept in more uncomfortable places. Through the curtains behind him came a dim glow, citrus yellow, and Trevor’s story came with it — the bare mattress, the camera, the dirty magazines. Billy emptied his mind, then folded his hands over his stomach and shut his eyes. In the sealed hush of the hotel room, he could hear Trevor’s breathing, deep and ragged.

He woke what felt like moments later to see Trevor standing in front of the tall, thin mirror near the door. Though it was still dark, the spill of light from the bathroom allowed him to watch Trevor as he tied his tie. Trevor was wearing a suit and humming quietly to himself. He behaved as if he was on his own in the room.

Billy yawned and stretched, making more noise than was strictly necessary.

“I can’t sleep sitting up,” Trevor said. “I can never sleep on planes, for instance.”

“In my job you get used to it.” Billy yawned again. “What’s the time?”

“Nearly seven.”

Billy stood up and parted the curtains. The sky was a dull grey-blue. He could just make out a smooth grass bank and the section of main road that lay beyond. “I’m going back to my room,” he said. “I need a shower.”

“Yeah,” Trevor said, then sighed.

He seemed the less embarrassed of the two. He had humiliated himself, and that gave him a kind of edge. As for Billy, he was keenly aware of the need to be delicate. He knew too much — more, he suspected, than Trevor had intended to tell him — and he had to imagine, for the time being, that what he’d heard was just a story. Certainly he had to forget how he had held Trevor in his arms while Trevor cried himself to sleep. They were two old friends who had run into each other by chance, and they’d had too much to drink, as old friends often do. That was all there was to it. Should they ever run into each other again, there would be nothing to say. They would probably act as if they hadn’t seen each other. What had happened the night before could never be repeated, or referred to, or even remembered — not out loud, anyway.

Billy moved towards the door. One hand on the handle, he turned and looked back into the room. Trevor was opening his briefcase. Billy watched as Trevor took out a sheet of paper and frowned at it. He had the distinct impression that Trevor was only pretending to be busy, and that, as soon as he was alone, he would sit down on the bed and simply stare into space.

“Maybe see you at breakfast,” Billy said.

Trevor looked round quickly, as if he had forgotten Billy was there. “What?” he said. “Oh, sure. OK.”

But Trevor would have finished his breakfast before Billy appeared in the food barn. Trevor would make certain of that. He might even skip the meal altogether. Just get in the car and drive.

“Take care,” Billy said.

They both knew they would never see each other again.

Everything was silent in the mortuary. Billy realised that the answer-machine was no longer beeping; someone must have listened to the message while he was on his break. In the distance, on the very threshold of hearing, he thought he could detect the soothing hum of a floor-polisher — in hospitals, as in airports, cleaners nearly always worked at night — and he pictured a man with a blank look on his face guiding the machine from side to side, its brushes revolving briskly, smoothly, an endless series of tiny circles, each new circle covering a slightly different area from the last, but all the circles overlapping, and the floor becoming shinier and shinier until it existed only as a perfect reflection of what surrounded it.