Death of a Murderer

27

During the weeks that followed Trevor’s death, and prompted at least in part by his unfinished conversation with Trevor’s brother, Billy had found himself researching the murders, casually at first, but then with increasing vigour and intensity. He was curious to see whether there were any references to children who had got away — and, oddly enough, he found one: a boy called Sammy whose photograph had turned up among the murderers’ possessions subsequent to their arrest. There was no mention of a Trevor Lydgate, however, nor was there any suggestion that other children had had narrow escapes. But if there had been one, then surely it was possible…As a result, Billy had to ask himself why he had doubted the story in the first place. Partly, he supposed, because it was so extraordinary. To fall into the clutches of two such dangerous people and yet live to tell the tale. To be lured into that house — actually into the house—and then to make a getaway. It sounded like a bizarre fantasy, or a much embroidered version of a far less terrifying event. Which brought him to the second reason for his scepticism. At some level he thought that what he had heard had all the trappings of a story that was being told to cover another story, one that had to remain secret. There might well be three stories, then: the story Trevor had told his parents—I got lost—the one he told his wife, his brother, and his childhood friend—I was abducted—and the one he kept to himself, or even, possibly, hid from himself. This third story had never been revealed, probably because it was too close to home. Perhaps it even involved members of his family. The advantage of the version he had told Billy was that it allowed him to unburden himself without actually giving anything away.

At the time, the details had seemed authentic enough, but Trevor could easily have invented them. Billy wouldn’t have known the difference, nor would most people. Equally, Trevor could have gleaned certain facts from newspapers, or documentaries, or one of the innumerable books written on the subject, and then, over the years, he could have internalised those facts, made them his own. The motorbike, the wig — the cigarette-machine…If Billy’s theory was correct, it showed how deeply that series of murders had embedded itself in the nation’s psyche. No one who had been alive at the time could ever be entirely free of it. It was one of those rare news items against which you defined yourself.

When Billy visited the moors just before the millennium, he had been attempting to put Trevor’s story into some sort of context — the very one that Trevor himself had claimed for it — but his journey had also been undertaken in a spirit of recognition. In a sense, he had been demonstrating solidarity, paying tribute. The pictures of the murdered children that appeared in the papers looked like the pictures his mother had taken of him and Charlie when they were little — the same dated black-and-white, all shadows and smudges, an eerily prophetic pattern of erasure and concealment. Those children belonged to the same generation as he did. They were his exact contemporaries. We were all damaged by what happened, he thought. We were all changed.