Death of a Murderer

9

Alone again, Billy noticed something on the floor under the table. Bending down, he picked up a metal nail file with a handle of pearly white plastic. He doubted that Marjorie would have brought a nail file to the mortuary — and besides, the iridescent handle didn’t seem in character — so he could only assume that it belonged to the young blonde constable who had preceded him. He turned the nail file slowly in his hand. If he had asked the constable what she thought of the woman in the fridge, what would she have said? What would she have made of it all, born as she undoubtedly had been in the early seventies? Would she have wanted to try and understand how it was possible for a woman who had once been a trusted babysitter to become involved in the torture and murder of children? Or would she simply have repeated what the tabloids were telling her, and what most people in the country appeared to believe, namely that the woman was inhuman, evil, a monster?

In the autumn of 1999, Billy had spent some time in a newspaper library, reading up about the murders, and one story in particular had stayed with him. When the woman was a girl of fifteen, she’d been friends with a boy two years her junior. He was delicate, apparently, and she’d taken it upon herself to protect him. One day he asked her if she would come swimming. She told him she couldn’t. That afternoon he went up to the local reservoir on his own and drowned. For weeks afterwards, she was inconsolable. She wore nothing but black. The boy had always been a weak swimmer, and yet she had refused to go with him. She was to blame for his death. She couldn’t forgive herself. Some people said it was then that she first turned to the Catholic Church. There are moments in your life when something’s taken from you, and once you’ve lost it you don’t get it back. What you were before is neither here nor there. You’re different now.

Billy didn’t pretend to be an expert — what did he know, really, except for what he had picked up on the streets? — but he couldn’t help wondering whether that boy’s death by drowning wasn’t a defining moment, a kind of turning-point. Supposing somewhere deep down in her there was the feeling that she had killed, and not a stranger either, but somebody who was dear to her, somebody who had — and this detail always sent a shiver through him—the same initials as she did? If that was the case, if that was how she had felt, did the psychopath from Glasgow see that abyss in her, that bottomless pit, the belief that she had nothing left to lose? Could that be what had attracted him? She’d done it once. She could do it again. What difference would it make? She was already guilty. And having more experience than he did, she could even, maybe, guide him, show him the way…It wasn’t an apology or an excuse. It might just be a fact, though. And that eerie coincidence with the initials…When the boy died in the reservoir, did part of her die with him?