If something should happen to my wife…
He turned the corner into the corridor that led to the mortuary. At first, he didn’t notice the woman, partly because he hadn’t expected anyone to be there, and partly because she was leaning against the wall in one of the shadowy areas between two lights. She was wearing the same lilac suit, and she was smoking, as before.
“How did you—?” He broke off, uncertain as to what question he should be asking.
She didn’t look at him. Instead, she simply lifted her cigarette up to her mouth. When she inhaled, a row of fine vertical lines showed on her upper lip. She took the smoke deep into her body and didn’t exhale at all. The smoke was just absorbed.
“Did you believe him?” she said.
She sounded the same as she had when he saw her in the hospital grounds, her vowels harsh and flat, her accent recognisably Mancunian.
“That Indian bloke,” she said. “Do you think he got it right?”
Billy couldn’t take his eyes off her. His forehead felt cold, his ears too. A steady industrial hum came from the ramp beyond her.
“Don’t worry. I won’t bite.” She tapped half an inch of ash into the cupped palm of her left hand. “I spent a lot of time in this place.” She looked past him, down the corridor. “I have to say, they were pretty good to me, actually.”
And now Billy saw that she wasn’t alone. Behind her, standing close to the wall, was a frail, dark-haired boy of about thirteen. He wore a pair of black swimming-trunks, and his body was the colour of cement.
As Billy watched, the boy stepped out of the shadows, into a pool of light. Bending suddenly, he vomited on the floor. It was just water, Billy realised. Water from the reservoir. The boy stayed doubled up, hugging himself as though he’d caught a chill.
“What can I do for him?” the woman said. “There’s nothing I can do.” She rounded on Billy, her voice losing its note of resignation, becoming harder. “You don’t say much, do you?” She looked straight at him, with her cigarette held just to one side of her mouth. “Most people want to ask me questions. Why did I do it? What was I thinking? How can I live with myself?”
She reeled off the various expressions of other people’s curiosity in a bored monotone that Billy found repellent. Yes, the questions were predictable, and she had probably heard them a hundred times, but she was talking about torture, murder…Then again, she’d never been known for her tact, had she?
“What are you doing here?” he said. “What do you want?”
“Surely you can do better than that.” She was still staring at him. The swollen eyelids, the narrow mouth. One hand full of ash. “Come on, Billy,” she said. “This is your big chance.”
Take a deep breath. Look away.
A few feet to his left he saw a notice that said pathology. There was a door with a small window in it, at head height. He peered through. There didn’t seem to be anybody in the room, but all the lights were on. In the fluorescent glare he could see a row of white coats hanging on a rail, each one clean but shapeless, limp, like recently discarded skin. He felt a creeping sensation at the back of his neck, beneath his hair, a dread that he was quite unable to explain.
He had a question for the woman now, but when he turned to face her she was gone. She must have run out of patience. Lost interest. Or perhaps she had sensed what he was about to ask, and it had driven her away. He crossed to the place where she had been standing and moved the flat of one hand over the wall. It felt uniformly dry and cool. There was no evidence that anyone had been there, not the slightest vestige of human warmth or body heat. Kneeling quickly, he inspected the floor. No suggestion of any water either. Not a trace of ash.
“Did you drop something?”
Still on his knees, he glanced over his shoulder. A nurse stood at the end of the corridor. Though her eyes were fixed on him, her face was turned slightly away, as if she found it difficult to look straight at him.
“Yes,” he said, getting to his feet. “Well, I thought I did.”
“What was it?”
“It’s all right. It was nothing.” He gave her a smile that was supposed to be efficient and reassuring. “Thanks, anyway.”
As he hurried off towards the mortuary, he was aware that the nurse was probably still watching him. Had she seen him running his hand over the wall? And if so, what sense could she possibly have made of it?
24
There was a name he could no longer avoid. It had come to him on Friday, when he sat in his car and listened to the news, and then again on Saturday, when he went walking in the woods. It had come even more strongly when Phil Shaw showed him the fridge where the woman’s body was being kept. During the past few hours it had grown more and more powerful until it seemed that the name had a voice, and it was calling out to him, demanding his attention.
Four years ago, in the autumn of 1998, he had been summoned to Northampton to give evidence in a trial. He hadn’t been able to leave Ipswich until the late afternoon, and after driving for about two hours he had checked into a Travel Inn at the junction of the A14 and the A1, not far from Huntingdon. His room was tidy and overheated, with a big double bed and a notice you could hang outside your door that said SSSSHHH…FAST ASLEEP. Like most Travel Inns, it made you feel as if you’d ended up in the middle of nowhere. Their locations seemed determined largely by the presence of a main road or a motorway; apart from that, they didn’t appear to have any connection with real life at all. This would be a terrible place to die, he remembered thinking as he set his case down on the bed.
On the far side of the car-park was a large, partially timbered building that the brochure referred to as the “food barn.” It had a restaurant and a bar, and on that particular night it was full of lorry-drivers, travelling salesmen, and a party of high-spirited golfers from a club in Warwickshire. Billy was halfway through his Chicken Kiev when a man in a grey suit jerked to a standstill in front of his table.
“Billy Tyler?”
Billy stared up into the man’s face. “My God,” he said. “Trevor? Is that you?”
He rose quickly to his feet, and the two men shook hands.
“Billy Tyler,” Trevor said again, but in a tone of wonderment this time.
Billy was grinning now. “What a coincidence.”
Trevor Lydgate had been in the year above Billy at primary school, but their mothers were friends so they had played in each other’s houses from an early age. Their friendship hadn’t lasted long, though, because the Lydgates moved away, to Manchester, and the two boys gradually lost touch.
“Look, you finish your meal,” Trevor said, “then come and join me for a drink. I’m over there, in the corner.”
Billy watched the thin, balding man move away across the bar — he remembered a slender boy with light-brown hair — then he sat down again. Picking up his fork, he smiled to himself and shook his head. So there was a reason for these out-of-the-way places after all…
A few minutes later, he was sitting in a booth with Trevor, drinking pints of Stella and catching up on the events of the last twenty-five or thirty years. They both drank fast, excited by the chance reunion, and determined to make the most of it. Every now and then, their conversation would reach into the distant past, as if for a point of reference, a touchstone; they wanted to emphasise the unlikely nature of their meeting — or to make sure that it was all true, perhaps, to prove that the things they remembered had actually happened, that they really were who they said they were.
Trevor was married, with four children. Three boys and a girl. He worked for a firm that manufactured pottery. Plates, mugs, bowls — that sort of stuff. The firm was downsizing, though, and he would soon be looking for another job. At his age, he didn’t think it would be easy. “I’m in my forties now,” he said. “Can you believe it?” Trevor sounded amazed, almost jubilant, and yet, at the same time, Billy saw anxiety pass over his face, as sudden and fleeting as the shadow of a cloud. In any case, Trevor went on quickly, he would cross that bridge when he came to it. He was living in Staffordshire, in a town called Stone. It was very handy for the M6.