Death of a Murderer Read online

  He didn’t laugh, nor did he attempt to deny it; he remained perfectly serious, and his gaze dropped to the tablecloth. Though he had spent weeks trying to work it out, what he had just told her still perplexed him.

  “I’ve never said it before,” he said. “I’ve never even felt it.”

  There was a moment when nothing happened, nothing at all, but they both knew what was coming, so those few seconds were slow-motion and yet urgent, the slowness and the sense of urgency simultaneous but contradictory, delicious too, like ice-cream wrapped in hot meringue. At last, she put a hand on the back of his head and drew him towards her until their lips were touching. After the kiss, they remained an inch or two apart, looking into each other’s faces. He could feel the warm steam from his tea on the underside of his chin.

  “Don’t go travelling,” he said. “Not yet.”

  4

  If you see the sugar factory, you’ve gone too far, Phil had said, but Billy left the Al4 at the Bury St. Edmunds East exit, and the hospital showed up on signposts shortly after. He went through several roundabouts, then up a quiet suburban road. Trees on either side, large houses. Bury wasn’t a town he knew particularly well. He had driven here one Saturday with Sue when Emma was a baby. They had spent an hour at a car-boot sale, and Sue had bought a bamboo wind-chime, which she had hung in their garden. On the first blustery day, though, their neighbours, the Gibsons, complained about the noise it made, and Sue had to take it down again.

  He signalled left and turned into the drive, passing beneath the dark, flat branches of a cedar. The car-park was full. He waited, indicator flashing, while a woman backed out of a narrow space. Leaning close to the steering-wheel, he stared up at the hospital. It had been painted a curious mint-green colour, and modern bay windows jutted squarely from the façade. The place looked new, but cheap. It looked prefabricated.

  Even from where he was, he could see the crowd gathered outside the main entrance. In his phone-call, Phil had mentioned the press, and how they had been camped in the hospital grounds ever since the news broke. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t expected, he had said; in fact, they’d thought it would be far worse. During the past four days, the police had talked to reporters on a regular basis, keeping them informed, but no one had been allowed into the hospital itself. Not that some of them hadn’t tried, apparently. One tabloid journalist had offered a nurse several thousand pounds in cash if she would smuggle him into the mortuary. They were after trophies, of course—a photograph of the corpse, a ring, a lock of hair. They wanted some kind of physical contact with the famous child-killer. They wanted to sense the power, the horror. They wanted a direct line to the unknown.

  As Billy stepped out of his car, his foot caught in something and he looked down. The remains of a home-made placard lay on the ground, and though the soggy cardboard had dirt and tyre-tracks on it, the message was still legible. burn in hell.

  Locking his car, he straightened his uniform and then began to walk towards the hospital entrance. Faces swung in his direction as he approached. Microphones appeared. A TV camera was pointed at him, its tiny red light glowing. At that moment his mobile bleeped, telling him that he’d just received a text. It was from Sue. Please come home billy. The fact that she’d used his name meant her anger had died down, but there was still nothing he could do. He switched the mobile off and slid it into his pocket. Ignoring the questions he was being asked, he pushed through the crowd. He didn’t open his mouth at all except to say “Excuse me.” One scrawny man in a parka took hold of his arm, but quickly let go of it again when Billy turned and stared at him.

  On entering reception, Billy saw Phil Shaw talking to a woman in a pale-grey suit. Phil was wearing a suit as well, navy-blue, with a white shirt and a purple tie. There were dark smears under his eyes, and his skin looked blotchy, porous.

  “You have any trouble out there, Billy?” Phil said.

  “No, not really.”

  “People seem to be behaving themselves—so far…”

  Phil introduced him to the woman. Her name was Eileen Evans, and she worked for the hospital as an operations manager. If for some reason Phil was called away, she would be available to deal with any problems or enquiries. Billy felt Eileen’s cool grey eyes move evenly across his face.

  A pass had been organised for Billy’s car, and he went outside and placed it in his windscreen. When he returned, Phil nodded at the constable on duty by the main entrance, then put a hand against the small of Billy’s back and steered him down a long, bright corridor. They passed a snack bar, then a lift. The walls were white, with just a tinge of pink to them. Sometimes there was a row of plastic chairs. The air seemed taut, almost rigid, as if the entire hospital had taken a breath in the early hours of Friday morning and was still holding it.

  A garden appeared on Billy’s left. Built in an internal courtyard, Oriental in style, it had a pond with a miniature stone temple and a red wooden bridge. He wondered what Harry Parsons would make of it. Harry was a retired plumber who worked on the allotments behind Billy’s house. If Billy ever found himself at a loose end, he would go and see whether Harry was around. They’d talk about rainfall or the absence of skylarks or what a disaster the railways were—anything, really. Emma called him “Parsons.” “Morning, Parsons,” she would say, and he would tip the brim of his flat cap.

  “You been keeping well?” Phil said.

  “Fine thanks, sarge.”

  “Sue all right?”

  “She’s fine.” Billy paused. “The winter always gets her down a bit.”

  Phil nodded, as if he, too, found winter difficult. “And your little girl? How’s your little girl?”

  “She’s eight now.”

  “Is she really?”

  “It’s still hard work, though. We have to watch her all the time.”

  Phil nodded, his eyes on the ground. “Sorry about the seven-to-seven, Billy,” he said. “There wasn’t anyone else I could call on, not just at the moment.”

  “That’s OK.”

  Or it would have been, Billy thought, if only Sue had let him have his nap. After their argument at lunchtime, he had gone back upstairs, hoping to get another couple of hours’ sleep, but he had been in bed for less than ten minutes when Sue walked in on him, and even with his eyes closed, he’d had a clear picture of the inside of her head, all sparks and broken china.

  “You don’t care about us,” he heard her say. “That’s what it comes down to. You just don’t care.”

  “That’s not true,” he murmured into his pillow.

  “You don’t care about me and Emma. The way you walked out when she was born—”

  “Don’t bring that up again. And anyway, I didn’t ‘walk out’…”

  “What?” She was leaning over him now, her face only inches from his, and she was pushing at his shoulder. “What was that?”

  Sometimes he had the distinct feeling that she was trying to goad him into violence. Then she would be able to stand back with a look of triumph on her face and say, You see? I knew it. I knew it all along.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  He hurled the bedclothes away from him, brushing her aside. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her stagger—a little theatrically, he thought—then press herself against the wall. Once on his feet, he didn’t know what to do. In his T-shirt and underpants, he went and stared out of the window. The garden lay below him, with the allotments just beyond, the various plots forming a kind of patchwork that sloped gently uphill to the woods. Away to his right, a cornfield shifted and swirled as if governed by mysterious tides, hidden currents. When he first viewed the house it had been summer, and the corn was high, its yellow randomly sown with poppies. He’d rarely seen anything so beautiful. Today, though, its beauty seemed inappropriate, if not actually malicious. To think that their marriage had started there. To think that he had taken Sue by the hand and led her out into the middle of that field—Susie as she was then…And now, a decade later, here the
y were, bound together by little more than arguments and tears, by vicious words, by things they didn’t even mean. I might as well go to work right now, he thought, for all the peace I’m going to get.

  Phil began to talk again, this time about the woman whose body they were guarding. Since she had already been hospitalised on a number of occasions during the past two or three years—first for osteoporosis, then for a cerebral aneurysm and, most recently, for respiratory problems—the police had been able to develop procedures for dealing with her when she left the confines of prison. Now that she was dead it was no different. The police were duty bound to protect her from anyone who might want to take revenge on her or do her harm—and there were plenty of those, as a glance at the Internet would tell you—but, equally, they had to see that the other patients and their families were not upset or disturbed. He had worked intensively with hospital staff to make the place secure while simultaneously attempting to keep disruption to a minimum. There were police stationed at the rear of the building, and in many of the corridors. There were police patrolling the grounds as well. Every entrance and exit had been covered.

  A door clicked open somewhere behind them, and Billy heard rapid footsteps. Phil turned sharply, but it was only a nurse hurrying off in the opposite direction. Soon she was fifty yards away, her reflection a smudgy, swaying blur in the bright mirror of the floor.

  “We have to make sure nothing happens,” Phil said, his eyes still on the nurse. “If we manage that, we will have been successful.”

  Billy nodded. It didn’t surprise him that Phil was jumpy. Should anyone slip up, he would be held responsible—and, what’s more, it would be splashed all over the front pages of tomorrow’s papers. Make sure nothing happens: it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

  Ahead of them, a pair of double doors swung outwards, their leading edges padded with black rubber, and two men in dark-blue Adidas emerged, both with a cocksure, slightly bow-legged gait that Billy recognised from estates like Gainsborough and Chantry. A soft thump as the doors swung back. “She don’t want it done, though,” one of the men was saying. “Don’t she?” said the other. “No,” the first man said. “She’s frightened, isn’t she.”

  Hospitals, Billy thought. It was a world you tended to forget about, wanted to forget about, but it was always there, and most people passed through it in the end. Lives turned down so low that you wondered if it was worth it. No actual flames any more, just pilot lights. Then all the agony and mess of dying…

  The colour of the corridors had altered. All trace of white was gone. Gone, too, were the gardens and the copies of Good Housekeeping and the bright framed prints. Only those who truly belonged would venture this far in, and there was less need now for tact and reassurance. Everything was green. Sombre. Medical. The green was in the walls and in the air. In the pouches under Phil Shaw’s eyes. This was the business end of things. The autopsy, the coroner’s report. Bodies opened up like bags, then fastened shut again, their contents not as tidy as before. A gruesome customs house. One last border to be crossed, one final journey.

  To Billy, it suddenly felt colder. The length of the corridors, the endless labelled rooms, the hush: he was approaching something huge, oppressive, even dangerous…But this line of thinking would only unsettle him, and he had too much experience to let that happen. He kept his thoughts ordinary, prosaic. Seven-to-seven. A twelve-hour shift. Still, at least there’ll be some overtime in it. And then, I hope I didn’t forget my sandwiches. And then, It’s just a job. Those words again. Though this time he was trying to convince himself.

  5

  The double doors that led to the mortuary were pale-green and set deep into the wall. To their left was a notice that said for entry please push bell once. Another notice close by said staff only. Fixed high up on the wall was a circular convex mirror in which both Billy and the sergeant featured as thinner, more alien versions of themselves. Bulbous heads, bodies tapering away to nothing. Like tadpoles. Behind him, Billy could see a wide passage or ramp that sloped up to a large, cavernous area. Parked at the top, and motionless amid the constant, low-level grinding of generators, were several small-scale fork-lift trucks that were known as tugs. Phil told him they were used for ferrying the patients’ dirty linen to the back of the hospital. The woman’s bedding had been brought here too, though it had been treated not as laundry but as non-chemical waste. The moment her body was wheeled out of the private ward where she had spent her last days, her sheets and pillowcases had been disposed of, as had anything else that she had come into contact with. All such items would inevitably be viewed as souvenirs, he said, and that sort of temptation had to be removed.

  Billy watched as Phil pressed the mortuary bell. The door opened from the inside, and a young blonde constable let them in. Billy didn’t know her. They were using officers from a number of different stations. Whoever they could get hold of, really.

  “You next, is it?” she said, looking at Billy.

  He nodded.

  “It’s all right.” Her face angled back into the room. “Just boring, that’s all.”

  Billy followed Phil through the doorway. Putting his bag down on a chair, he noted the bank of fridges that reached from floor to ceiling.

  “Is there anything I should know about?” he asked the constable.

  She thought for a moment, her small mouth twisting to one side. “If the phone rings in the office,” she said, “it’s best to answer it. Otherwise it starts making a weird beeping sound that’ll end up getting on your nerves.”

  “Anything else?”

  “It smells a bit.”

  “That’s death,” Phil said. “Nothing you can do about that.”

  Billy watched the constable bend over the scene log and sign herself out. If he had been asked to guess her age, he would have put it somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-one. When the murders happened, in other words, she wouldn’t have been born, or even thought of.

  She straightened up and ran one hand through her short blonde hair. “Well, that’s me done.”

  “Have you got far to go?” Billy asked her.

  “I live near Cambridge.”

  “That shouldn’t take you too long.”

  “Seen me drive, have you?” She grinned at him, then reached for her belongings.

  When she had gone, Phil called Billy over. Billy recorded the fact that he was now the loggist, and that Detective Sergeant Shaw was present, then he wrote the date and time in the left-hand column, signed the entry and leaned back against the radiator, which was only faintly warm.

  “Where is she?” he said. “Just so I know.”

  “That one.” Phil pointed to the fridges marked police bodies, just to the right of the door that led to the postmortem room. “It’s locked.”

  “Who’s got the key?”

  “The woman you met by the main entrance. Eileen Evans.”

  “Are there any others?”

  “No.”

  Prompted by Billy’s questioning, no doubt, Phil went over and tested the door of the fridge he had just identified. It didn’t budge.

  “You’ve seen her, haven’t you?” Billy said. “Dead, I mean.”

  Phil spoke with his back still turned. “Yes, I’ve seen her.”

  “What did she look like?”

  Now Phil’s head swung round—he suspected Billy of being ghoulish, perhaps—but obviously he saw nothing in Billy’s face to warrant such suspicions because he went ahead and answered. “She looked like she smoked too much,” he said. “She looked old. Older than sixty.”

  “You ever think about what she did?”

  “No. To me she’s just another sudden death.”

  Billy nodded. “All the same,” he said. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was driving at, and yet he couldn’t seem to let the subject drop.

  Phil walked over to another fridge, one that had a brown envelope taped to it, and inspected the names of the deceased. Once again, he spoke without looking at Billy. “P
ut it like this. When people die, I reckon they deserve a bit of respect—no matter what they’ve done.”

  Billy thought Phil might have a point, though there would be many who would disagree. In this particular case, at least.

  “And anyway,” Phil went on, still studying the names, “I think something goes out of people when they die, even someone like her. They stop being who they were.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Billy said, “but yes, I suppose that makes sense.”

  “In the end, she’s just another code two-nine, you know?” Phil turned to face him.

  Billy nodded, then opened his hold-all and took out a plastic folder. Behind with his reports, he had seen the twelve-hour shift as an opportunity to do some catching up.

  “No chance of you getting bored,” Phil said.

  Billy gave him a steady look, then the two men smiled at each other. Most police officers hated all the paperwork that came with the job—and there was so much more of it than there used to be. A lot had changed since 1984, when the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was introduced, and none of it for the better.

  “Brought any refs with you?” Phil asked.

  Billy reached into his bag again, producing a large package wrapped in silver foil. “Wiltshire ham,” he said, “with plenty of Colman’s.”

  “If you need anything else,” Phil said, “there’s a cafeteria near the front entrance. You’ll get your first break at midnight and another one at about four.”

  “OK, sarge. Thanks.”

  Phil took one last look round the room, then left.

  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.