Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson Read Free Book Online Page B

light never seems to go…
    “It’s just that you lack drive.”
    Billy watched as a car came into view further down the road.
    “You’d rather avoid things,” Newman said, “than really take them on.”
    When the car pulled up level with the house, Billy saw that it belonged to one of Sue’s friends from the school gates.
    “You’re frightened,” Newman said.
    Above the car’s roof was a row of trees, arranged along the horizon. Billy knew that they were poplars, and that they grew in the field beyond the railway line, but in the slowly fading light they looked like an ancient curse written in a language he could not decipher. They had the same qualities as Newman’s words: spiteful, insidious—black as the wrong kind of magic.
    The car door opened, and Sue got out with Emma in her arms. Emma’s legs hung straight down, which meant she was probably asleep. Sue glanced at her father’s car, then turned back and watched her friend drive off, freeing one hand so she could wave. She hadn’t noticed Billy in the window, and somehow he felt she ought to have done. That lack of awareness, that apparent self-sufficiency didn’t say much for their relationship—or rather, it said everything.
    “What do you think, Scruffy?” came Newman’s voice. “Do you think that’s unfair?”

11
    Billy stood up suddenly and walked down to the far end of the mortuary. He would have liked some air, a change of scene, but it was still hours until his break. Newman’s voice had been so gentle and considered, as if he were dispensing valuable advice, each sentence carefully shaped and weighted so as to lodge in Billy’s memory. Billy rubbed at his face with both hands. Had he avoided things? He didn’t think he had. Sue had wanted security, and he had done his utmost to provide it. He had worked unceasingly to try and build a life that seemed worth living, and now, after fourteen years together, they had more or less everything they were supposed to have—a house, a child, a car, a job, a pension—but nothing felt secure at all, and nothing felt quite real either.
    In the last few months he had stopped going straight home after work. The first time it happened, in February, it had been an accident. He knew the roundabout well—he used it most days—so there was no reason why he should have taken the first exit instead of the second, and even once he’d made the mistake he could easily have pulled into the side of the road and turned round. But he didn’t. He carried on. And there was a distinct lightness about the way he drove after that, a detached quality, as though the decision was not only one that had been made for him, but also one that he didn’t have the power either to challenge or to overturn. He wondered if that was how his father, Glenn Tyler, had felt when he walked out on his pregnant wife in 1956. That lightness, that detachment. Things shaken off—for ever, in his father’s case.
    From that day on, even after his transfer to Stowmarket had come through, Billy would go back to that same roundabout, and he would follow the road that curved under the Orwell bridge and out along the river. He would always park in the same lay-by. If it was raining, he would listen to the radio, or read the local paper. From time to time, he would switch the wipers on and peer through the windscreen, but there was nothing much to see, just the dark twist of the road ahead of him, and the grass verge to his left and, beyond that, the river’s dull grey surface. If the weather was fine, though, and the tide was out, he would walk across the mud-flats, eyes lowered, as if searching the ground for something he had lost. He only engaged with what lay directly in front of him—seaweed, nails, bones, feathers, shells. The rest of his life he was able, for a while, to keep at bay. He saw all sorts of people. Lonely types mostly. There was a man who carried a white bucket and a long stick with a spoon taped to the end of it.