Death of a Murderer

6

Once Billy had secured the double doors and made a note of Phil’s departure in the scene log, he sat down and stretched out his legs, one ankle crossed over the other, the heel of his left boot resting on the drain in the middle of the floor. He flipped the folder open and began to leaf through his paperwork. The third form he came to had the words missing child/youth printed in bold black type across the top. His throat tightened, and he let the folder fall shut. He had spent most of Sunday afternoon in a council house out near Cherry Tree Road, interviewing a couple whose daughter, Rebecca, had been missing since the day before. Thankfully, Rebecca had called home as Billy was driving back to the station that evening, but since he felt a follow-up enquiry might be in order he had held on to his report, and he now needed to complete the continuation sheets, which would prove invaluable if she were to go missing again. “Misper” forms took time — they were exceptionally detailed — and they always filled him with foreboding. Even though seven years had gone by, the memory of Shena Coates still haunted him. One summer morning, while her parents were out shopping, Shena had left her house by the back door. She was wearing a velvet dress and a pair of high heels, and carrying her brand-new vanity set. She locked herself in the garden shed, applied lipstick, rouge, eye-shadow and mascara, and then hanged herself. She was eleven years old. You could see her hand-prints on the window where she had tried to clean the glass. She had needed more light, in order to do her make-up properly…You’d think a seasoned police officer would have got used to occurrences like these, tragic though they were, but, if anything, the opposite was true: they seemed to affect him more as time went by, the way an allergy might, so much so that he began to wonder whether they might not actually kill him in the end. One of the reasons why he’d put in for a transfer to Stowmarket at the beginning of the year was because it was such a sleepy little town, and the crime would be gentler, more trivial. That was the theory, anyway. Rebecca’s story might be over — for the time being, at least — but the bad associations were still there. He would deal with the report later on, he told himself, when he had the stomach for it.

As he set the folder aside, he became aware of a smell — or not so much a smell, maybe, as a prickling in his nostrils, a slight sense of irritation — and he remembered what Phil Shaw had said. That’s death. Turning in his chair, Billy stared at the fridge Phil had pointed out for him. Like the others, it was white, but the wipe-clean board where the identity of the deceased would normally be recorded had been left blank. There was nothing to indicate that anyone was there at all.

A name came floating into his mind. Trevor Lydgate. It had been surfacing ever since he heard the news on Friday afternoon. Once again, he had to push it away. He didn’t want to think about Trevor, not now.

He stared at the blank space on the fridge until he too began to feel blank.

No names, no thoughts…

The inside of his head felt hollow, scooped out, smooth as an empty eggshell.