“I’m very sorry,” Billy said.
Steve looked at him again. “Did you come far?”
“I drove up from Ipswich.”
Steve nodded, as if the strength of one’s support could be measured by the distance travelled. “Listen, thanks for making the effort.”
It was Billy’s turn to avert his eyes. The room had filled up, with most people under fifty preferring alcohol to tea. You always get drunk fast at funerals. There’s that inappropriate hilarity, that giddy feeling of relief. It wasn’t me this time. It wasn’t me.
“I take it you know about Trevor…”
Billy studied Steve across the rim of his glass. “Know what?”
“He killed himself.” Steve took a gulp from his pint in exactly the same way that Trevor would have done, with a kind of ferocity, so much so that a speck of foam leapt up on to his cheek.
“Oh. I see.” Billy nodded slowly, sadly.
Steve was staring at him. “You don’t seem very surprised.”
Lowering his voice, Billy started telling Steve about his encounter in Huntingdon the year before.
“Trevor got upset that night,” Billy said. “He was haunted by what had happened to him, and he felt guilty too, but I didn’t think it would drive him to—”
“Guilty?” Steve said. “What do you mean, guilty?”
“He survived — not like the others. He was lucky.”
“Not that fucking lucky.”
Biting his lip, Billy stared at the floor. “That was tactless of me. Sorry.”
“If they ever let her out,” Steve said, “I’m going to kill her, I swear to God. I’m going to hunt her down and kill her. I’ll serve time for it. I don’t care.”
Only after his outburst did he seem to remember what Billy did for a living, and he mustered a defiant, self-righteous look, as if challenging Billy to arrest him there and then.
But Billy hardly noticed. An idea had just occurred to him for the first time. “Do you think Trevor was telling the truth?”
“What are you saying?” Steve said.
Had the woman—that woman — really taken Trevor home with her, Billy thought, or was there another interpretation?
“What are you on about?” Steve’s face was suddenly closer than Billy would have liked, and his eyes had hardened. “Why would he lie?”
Billy thought it wise not to go any further. In fact, it was possible that he had already gone too far. Trevor’s suicide only made sense to Steve if he believed the story his brother had told him, and believed it one hundred per cent. That was all he had to hold on to. For Billy to suggest that it might have been a fabrication, or even that Trevor might have been exaggerating, was disrespectful, if not downright insulting, especially on a day like today, and clearly Steve wouldn’t hesitate to defend his brother’s honour. Billy had already noticed Steve’s knuckles. They were red and glossy, blurred-looking, and Billy knew what that meant: Steve was someone who liked to hit people. Even as Billy stood in front of him, he could feel the violence. It came off Steve in waves.
“There’s Trevor’s wife,” Billy said.
Before Steve could speak or otherwise detain him, Billy moved away. Crossing the room, he introduced himself to Mrs. Lydgate as Trevor’s childhood friend and told her how sorry he was. He didn’t live in the area, he said, but if there was anything he could do…He talked about his friendship with Trevor, and the adventures they used to have.
“Happier days,” she said with a weak smile.
He nodded. “Yes.” And then added, “For all of us,” though he wasn’t sure why he’d said that, or what he meant by it.
Soon afterwards he left.
Only when he was on the road did he realise that he had never got to meet Mary Betts.
Sitting up straighter in his chair, Billy rubbed his face quickly, then forced himself up on to his feet. The mint-green mortuary doors, the tube-lights fizzing softly overhead…Memories kept coming, and none of them gave him any respite. If only he could just switch off. Christ. What time was it?
26
The smell of cigarettes first, then the smoke rising, grey-blue, in the corner of his eye. Then, finally, the voice: “I had nothing to do with it.”
She sat across from him, a cigarette in her right hand, her left arm resting on the table. Britain’s most hated woman. She was wearing a suit again, only this time it was darker. Maroon, he thought, or burgundy. In front of her was a packet of Embassy filter, with a box of matches on top. There were chocolates too. He remembered reading somewhere that she had a sweet tooth.
“That friend of yours,” she said. “I never saw him before in my life.”
As she shifted on her chair, the lights on the ceiling picked out coppery tints in her hair. According to one of the newspapers, she was so pampered while in Highpoint that she’d had her own crimpers. He watched as she carefully selected another cigarette. She acted as if each cigarette was slightly different and uniquely delicious. It wasn’t the behaviour of someone who’d been pampered. She struck a match and lit the cigarette, then put the used match back in the box and placed the box on top of the cigarette packet. The years she had spent in prison were evident in every movement, no matter how small. When she touched ordinary objects, they seemed to acquire new value, greater substance.
“He was making the whole thing up,” she said.
“Why, though?” Billy wasn’t surprised by her denials; on the contrary, they were entirely consistent with the thought he’d had on the day of Trevor’s funeral, a thought that had lingered in the back of his mind ever since, ghostly, unconfirmed. “Why would he do that?”
“How would I know?” Eyebrows raised, mouth a little pinched, she held the cigarette away from the table and tapped it twice with her index finger. Ash fell silently into the drain.
“Maybe he was having some kind of breakdown,” Billy murmured.
In the excitement of that chance encounter, he had over-looked the most important factors: Trevor had a large family — four children — and was about to lose his job. He would have been under enormous strain.
The woman took another long drag and looked off into the distance, beyond the white doors of the fridges, beyond the hospital walls. “You want to know about breakdowns?” she said. “I’ll tell you about breakdowns.” She began to describe her life in Holloway, and then in Cookham — the insults, the beatings, the constant degradation. She talked about being kicked unconscious by a fellow inmate, and how her appearance had altered. Bones had been broken in her face. She wasn’t asking for pity. She was just saying. Billy realised that he was only half listening.
“There’s no way you’d ever admit to it,” he said, bringing her back to the original subject. “You can’t afford to.”
“Oh?” she said. “And why’s that?”
“If you own up to abducting Trevor, then it’s like saying there were others — and that’s my question, actually, since you wanted me to ask you a question: not ‘Why did you do it?’ but ‘How many more?’”
“How many more?” she said.
“How many more,” he said, “that we don’t know about?”
She looked at him steadily, smoke rising in a thin spiral past her eyes. “You’re quite a clever-clogs, aren’t you?”
Even if she was in possession of certain knowledge, she wasn’t about to share it with him. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. She’d rather torture him by leaving all his accusations hanging in the air. But he had noticed a twitch in the skin under her right eye.
“You killed people,” he said. “Children.”
She held his gaze. The twitch became irregular, then vanished.