Death of a Murderer (19 page)

36

Billy went over to the stainless-steel sink in the corner and brought handfuls of cold water up to his face. He had been honest with her, brutally so, and she had put up very little resistance, though she had hit back towards the end, when he was least expecting it, but now that she had gone, he was left with an uneasy feeling. He’d talked too much. He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t paid attention and, as a result, he felt there was something he had failed to understand. He turned off the tap, then tore off a couple of paper towels and dried his face and hands. Failure, he thought. Firstly, she had failed to realise what she was getting into. Then she had failed to object, to disassociate herself. Something was lacking in her, and it had made her lethal.
But what about me?
he thought as he dropped the sodden paper towels in the bin.
Am I so innocent?

Almost twenty years had passed, but he could still see Venetia sitting across from him in that prim, drab hotel dining-room in the North Pennines.

“If I tell you—” Venetia said, then stopped.

“What?” he said.

“It might change everything…”

“You decide.”

She took a breath and then began. When she was a little girl, she said, she hardly saw her father. He was always off somewhere—at work, or out with clients, or travelling. She would long to spend time with him, fantasising endlessly about all the things they might do together. Grimacing, she tipped more wine into her glass. George McGarry was his name, she went on, and he was the chief executive of a shipping company—a man of great energy and charm, by all accounts. In his forties he married a lively but delicate woman from Bombay. They had two daughters. Margaret was four years older than Venetia, taller, and more reserved.

“I always felt she should have said something,” and now Venetia looked away, into the room. “But I suppose it was asking too much. Besides, I probably wouldn’t have believed her. I wouldn’t have wanted to believe her.”

Billy felt as if the contents of his stomach were beginning to go sour, and he reached for some water.

“I didn’t really see my father until I was eight or nine,” Venetia went on, “and then suddenly, from one day to the next, he seemed to realise that I existed. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. This was my dream, and I’d almost given up on it. He started calling me V. V, darling. V, my sweet. He would pick me up after school and we would go to the cinema, or if it was summer we would drive out into the country. He had a beautiful car. A Daimler, I think it was—all soft leather and polished wood. It was like his work, the secret, glamorous side of him—the part of him I’d never been allowed to see.”

She looked across the table at Billy, and the expression on her face was one he didn’t recognise. She seemed to be pleading with him, but he wasn’t sure what she wanted. To change the past, perhaps. Impossible, then. The look had a nearness about it too, a confidentiality, and for the first time, possibly the only time, he felt properly included in her life, and it hurt him in a way that was almost physical, both because of the unexpected beauty of the moment, and because he was certain that it wouldn’t last.

“It keeps coming out wrong,” she said. “Do you want me to go on?”

Staring down at the tablecloth, he nodded.

“Promise me something,” she said.

“What?”

“Promise you won’t feel sorry for me.”

“If I feel anything,” he said, “it won’t be that.”

Her face was drawn to the dark window. “The first time it happened, we were in his car. We had been to a museum, I think, but he took a different route home, and we ended up on a quiet road that ran through woods…”

One of her hands lay on its side on the table, the fingers curled. Her head, angled away from him, was absolutely still, as if the story she was telling was an animal that could be frightened off by even the slightest of movements.

“He parked the car, then turned and looked at me,” she said, “and I thought he was going to talk about school, how I hadn’t been doing very well, and I had all my excuses ready, but then I noticed that there was something in his eyes that I couldn’t remember seeing before, something strange and glittery, and his breathing was noisier than usual. I could hear each breath, and when he spoke, his voice was husky.”

She gazed down into her drink. Billy wanted to reach out, put his hand against her cheek or stroke her hair, but he knew it would be wrong to touch her.

“It was husky, almost as if he had a cold, or he was going to cry. ‘You know I love you, don’t you, V?’ he said, and suddenly I didn’t want him to call me V any more. ‘Venetia,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You’re too grown-up for nicknames, aren’t you?’ He looked through the windscreen for a while, then he turned to me again. ‘I love you so much,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Of course I do,’ I said. I wanted to come out with a joke and make him laugh, but his eyes still had that weird glitter, and the air in the car had gone all thick. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he said. ‘Of course,’ I said. And that was when he reached down and undid his flies…”

Her face was still lowered.

“It went on for six years,” she said.

“Venetia,” Billy said.

He couldn’t say anything else. He felt, oddly, as if he was implicated in her father’s behaviour, as if he was also guilty. Because he was a man, perhaps.

Fathers, though, he would think a few years later: they were like the poppies that appeared in the summer, so vivid against the new ripe yellow of the corn, so handsome, but if you pressed their petals between finger and thumb the red went black and wet.

Back upstairs, he lay next to Venetia on the bed and watched TV. He fell asleep without meaning to. When he woke, it was two thirty in the morning and Venetia had gone, but there was a strip of light under the bathroom door, and he could hear a tap running.

“Are you all right?” he called out.

She didn’t answer.

Leave her,
he thought.
Let her be.
Throwing off his clothes, he climbed beneath the covers and was asleep again before she reappeared.

On Sunday, as they drove back to Liverpool, he asked her whether she ever saw her father. Sometimes, she said. On special occasions. Though he was quite ill now, with angina. He’d been put on a strict diet and wasn’t allowed any excitement. Two months ago, on his seventy-first birthday, she had bought him the richest cake she could find. She thought that if he ate enough of it he might die. She cut him slice after slice, and because he loved her so much he kept on eating.

“It didn’t work, though,” she said. “He’s still around.”

Billy took his eyes off the road and looked at her. She wasn’t joking.

After that weekend, things were different between them. He no longer felt sidelined or short-changed. He didn’t see her for ten days, but he wasn’t jealous of the time she spent away from him. He now had a sense of what he might be worth to her.

On the Wednesday evening, she rang his bell at half past six. She was wearing a white blouse and a dark-grey pencil skirt, which told him she’d come straight from work; she was temping at a firm of stockbrokers that month, and they insisted that she dress conservatively.

“Whisky,” she said, handing him a bottle of Famous Grouse. Then she held up a bag of ice. “Rocks.”

As the drink took hold, they returned to the subject of her father. He had called recently, she said. Accused her of neglecting him. How could she be so inconsiderate, so heartless? Did she have no feelings for him whatsoever? In the end, she had to unplug the phone. If she’d let him go on any longer, he would have lost his temper—or else he would have started crying.

Towards midnight, they began to try and think of ways of killing him. Obviously they couldn’t afford to be caught, nor did they want to incriminate themselves; it had to look natural, or like an accident—or, at the very least, like a crime that had no motive. What they were saying was so terrible that they got completely carried away, each attempting to outdo the other, their ideas becoming ever more lurid and unrealistic. At some point, though, Venetia’s face went still, and she covered her mouth with one hand. She was looking at Billy’s uniform, which hung on the back of the door.

“What is it?” he said.

“My father,” she said. “He’s always been afraid of the police.” She paused. “You could do something.”

“Like what?”

“You could frighten him, somehow,” she said, her eyes on him now. “Frighten him to death.”

To frighten someone to death.
That was just a figure of speech, wasn’t it? He wanted to laugh, but he could tell that she was serious.

Two days later, on a foot-beat in the centre of Widnes, he saw Raymond Percival. At first, he thought he must be imagining it. The man standing outside the Landmark had bleached hair, and he was wearing a long black coat, but when his head moved and the club’s security light slanted across his face, there was no mistaking that superior, contemptuous expression. How long had it been? Eleven years? Twelve? And here he was, in Widnes of all places. He had some people with him, older, the women in high heels. As Billy approached, still not certain what to do, Raymond flicked his cigarette into the gutter. He didn’t notice Billy—or if he did, he chose not to register the fact—and Billy kept on walking, his right hand almost brushing the back of Raymond’s coat. He only stopped when he had turned the corner, and then, in the quiet of a dead-end street, he leaned against a wall. He thought of the slogan Raymond had quoted once, and said the words out loud: “Sexton’s have solved the mystery of elegant living.” Then, laughing, he looked up into the murky, grey-orange sky. He hadn’t spoken to Raymond. They hadn’t even exchanged a glance. Simply to have set eyes on him, though, after all these years! For Raymond to appear out of the blue like that at such a crucial time…

The following week, Billy called Venetia at work and asked where her father lived. She gave him the address.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Maybe nothing.”

He had to set her free, but wasn’t sure how far he could go. There were so many factors to take into account. Sometimes he wondered what Raymond would have done in his position—Raymond who was always so confident, even when he was in the wrong…One thought, above all others, was ever present in the back of Billy’s mind: no matter what he did, he would be unlikely to profit from it. In the long run, favours win you nothing but resentment. Gratitude’s a double-edged sword.

One Saturday night, at about eleven, he let himself out of his flat. He was wearing a bomber jacket and a pair of jeans; the roll-bag in his right hand contained his uniform. It had rained earlier, but the sky was clearing. Clouds moving fast. He walked over to the next street, the bluish-white glow of TVs filling almost every front room.
Match of the Day
was on. In the gutter near his car was an umbrella blown inside-out, which made him think of the girl he and Neil had found in a club a few weeks back. She’d drunk too much and ended up on the toilet floor with her dress over her face. As he unlocked his car, he could hear people shouting in the distance. Some pub kicking out.

He drove over the Runcorn–Widnes bridge, its struts criss-crossing above his head. Once on the south side, there was almost no traffic. Sometimes a taxi would cruise past in the fast lane, men full of beer being ferried back to their four-bedroom houses after a day at the football or the races. He slowed for a roundabout, then followed the signs to North Wales. The road was even emptier now. To the west, over the marshy fields, he could see flames burning in the tops of chimneys at the oil refinery. Twenty-five to twelve, and most of the clouds had blown away, though the weather-man was forecasting rain before morning.

He took a right turn, on to the A540. The smell of silage stole into the car. He was entering the Wirral, where Venetia’s father lived, and a knot formed in his stomach. He switched the radio off; the voices were too warm, too reassuring. What he was about to do lay to one side of all that.

Beyond Heswall, Billy parked on an unlit lane and walked off into a copse with his bag. When he was hidden from the road, he quickly changed into his uniform. At home, he had removed his silver epaulette numbers and replaced them in a jumbled order, on the off-chance that McGarry made a note of his number and reported him. He doubted that anyone would think of checking officers as far afield as Widnes. Still, it was best to take precautions.

As he continued towards West Kirby, the houses fell away. At first, the land opened out into a kind of heath or common—a golf course wouldn’t have looked out of place—but then high walls of gorse-studded rock closed in around the car. He turned left at a junction marked by an obelisk, the road doubling back on itself and looping down towards the river. The cul-de-sac where McGarry lived appeared on his right—he had memorised the address—but he drove beyond it, parking in a pub car-park at the bottom of the hill. Since he was in uniform, every action had to be carried out with absolute conviction and authority. He was on duty now. He was the law.

From the car-park a footpath led back up the hill. Trees dripping and creaking, uneven walls of ivy-covered brick. There were some steps, then the path narrowed. Billy emerged halfway along the cul-de-sac, with McGarry’s house directly in front of him. His footsteps echoed as he crossed the street. To his left, a thin moon tilted above a steep slate roof.

McGarry’s front door was on the right side of the house and set well back from the pavement. Billy didn’t hesitate. As he started up the path, a high leylandii hedge screened him from the next-door neighbours, but he could still be spotted by the people living opposite. Not that they would be able to describe him. It was dark, and he was more than fifty yards away. Once people noticed a uniform, it tended to blind them to all sorts of other details.
A policeman,
they would say, and they might have some vague notion of his size or height, but that would be all. In any case, Billy’s aim was not so much to come and go unseen as to conceal his actual identity. If a neighbour saw a policeman arrive, so much the better. It would put McGarry under still more pressure. After all, the police don’t appear in the middle of the night unless it’s serious. Were a neighbour to bring up the subject, casually, in conversation, McGarry would be unlikely to tell the truth. Given what Billy was about to say, he also doubted that McGarry would go to the authorities. If he did, he would only draw attention to the secret he had hidden successfully for so many years. In the end, then, having thought the whole thing through, Billy wasn’t convinced that he would need an alibi at all.