“Most of the time I wasn’t even there,” she said.
Most of the time. She had no idea how chilling those words sounded.
“Once, I sat on a rock,” she said. “Another time I waited by the car. I wasn’t there.”
“That’s what happens in a war,” Billy said. “That’s what generals do. They watch from a distance while their soldiers do the—”
Her expression hardened into one of thinly suppressed contempt. “So that’s your theory, is it? You think I was in charge?”
Well, why not? he thought. A female general. In her knee-length boots and her helmet of blonde hair.
The people who spoke in her defence tended to claim that her lover was both evil and deranged, and that she had fallen under his influence. Had she never met him, they argued, she would have led a perfectly normal life. But supposing the opposite was true? Supposing he had fallen under her influence? What if her presence alone had been enough to unleash the wickedness in him, to spur him on to greater and greater acts of savagery? What if she not only allowed him, but encouraged him — no, required him — to explore that side of himself?
“Are you denying it?” he said.
Sighing, she stubbed out her cigarette in the lid of her cigarette packet. “I didn’t have anything to do with your friend.”
“I’m not sure I believe you.” He leaned over the table, feeling that he had her now, that he was finally getting somewhere. “Why should I believe you?”
She too leaned over the table. He was aware of her hands, pale and plump, carefully manicured, and he thought of her lover, and what she was supposed to have said about him: The first man I ever met who had clean fingernails. Billy shuddered. Then she took what he’d been thinking and she put it into words:
“If he was in that house,” she said, “you really think he would have got out again?”
27
During the weeks that followed Trevor’s death, and prompted at least in part by his unfinished conversation with Trevor’s brother, Billy had found himself researching the murders, casually at first, but then with increasing vigour and intensity. He was curious to see whether there were any references to children who had got away — and, oddly enough, he found one: a boy called Sammy whose photograph had turned up among the murderers’ possessions subsequent to their arrest. There was no mention of a Trevor Lydgate, however, nor was there any suggestion that other children had had narrow escapes. But if there had been one, then surely it was possible…As a result, Billy had to ask himself why he had doubted the story in the first place. Partly, he supposed, because it was so extraordinary. To fall into the clutches of two such dangerous people and yet live to tell the tale. To be lured into that house — actually into the house—and then to make a getaway. It sounded like a bizarre fantasy, or a much embroidered version of a far less terrifying event. Which brought him to the second reason for his scepticism. At some level he thought that what he had heard had all the trappings of a story that was being told to cover another story, one that had to remain secret. There might well be three stories, then: the story Trevor had told his parents—I got lost—the one he told his wife, his brother, and his childhood friend—I was abducted—and the one he kept to himself, or even, possibly, hid from himself. This third story had never been revealed, probably because it was too close to home. Perhaps it even involved members of his family. The advantage of the version he had told Billy was that it allowed him to unburden himself without actually giving anything away.
At the time, the details had seemed authentic enough, but Trevor could easily have invented them. Billy wouldn’t have known the difference, nor would most people. Equally, Trevor could have gleaned certain facts from newspapers, or documentaries, or one of the innumerable books written on the subject, and then, over the years, he could have internalised those facts, made them his own. The motorbike, the wig — the cigarette-machine…If Billy’s theory was correct, it showed how deeply that series of murders had embedded itself in the nation’s psyche. No one who had been alive at the time could ever be entirely free of it. It was one of those rare news items against which you defined yourself.
When Billy visited the moors just before the millennium, he had been attempting to put Trevor’s story into some sort of context — the very one that Trevor himself had claimed for it — but his journey had also been undertaken in a spirit of recognition. In a sense, he had been demonstrating solidarity, paying tribute. The pictures of the murdered children that appeared in the papers looked like the pictures his mother had taken of him and Charlie when they were little — the same dated black-and-white, all shadows and smudges, an eerily prophetic pattern of erasure and concealment. Those children belonged to the same generation as he did. They were his exact contemporaries. We were all damaged by what happened, he thought. We were all changed.
28
Imagining he heard a sound outside, Billy moved across the mortuary and listened at the doors, then he undid the locks, pulled the right-hand door open and put his head into the gap. It was late now, after three in the morning, and the corridor had a deep stillness, an almost supernatural hush: if he had seen a fish sliding soundlessly through that watery green air, somehow he wouldn’t have been surprised — or the boy in the black swimming-trunks, his skinny body doubled over, hair dripping…As Billy stood in the doorway, Raymond’s voice came to him, Raymond in that pub in Cheshire, talking to the beautiful girl. I almost drowned him once.
There were people things happened to. Billy knew that because he’d been one of them himself — for a while, anyway. The boy in the swimming-trunks had been another. So, for that matter, had Trevor Lydgate. What was the quality they shared? Were they unlucky, or naive, or were they simply weak? He couldn’t decide. Nowadays, of course, they would be called victims. Not a word you’d ever think of applying to Raymond.
Halfway through their European holiday, while they were exploring the chilly, urine-scented passageways of the Colosseum, Raymond started telling Billy about the next stop on their itinerary. There were some volcanic lakes to the north of the city, apparently, where Roman emperors used to bathe. He thought these lakes ought to be worth a visit.
They caught a train to Bracciano, then hitched a ride in a lorry that was loaded with gravel. The man behind the wheel had bloodshot eyes and stubble. As he drove he drank red wine from a huge, clear, pear-shaped bottle. A piece of rolled-up rag served as a cork. He offered Raymond and Billy the bottle, and because it seemed expected they had several large gulps each. The wine was inky and brackish; Billy was sure he could taste the man’s saliva. “Grazie tanto, signore,” Raymond said as he handed the bottle back. “Molto gentile.” The lorry-driver grunted, then spat out of the window.
They had to walk the last two miles down a white track, and before too long their shoes were pale with dust. “Una strada bianca,” Raymond said, half to himself. Billy wondered where Raymond had learned the language. They didn’t teach Italian at school.
The sky had clouded over, but it was hot, and the cicadas were so loud that Billy felt as if they were actually inside his head. He hurled a stone at the trees, and the chattering stopped abruptly. Just as he was about to congratulate himself, though, it all started up again, even louder and more grating than before. He glanced at Raymond, but Raymond seemed quite oblivious, his hands in his trouser pockets, his fedora tilted jauntily over one eye. He had picked a purple flower, Billy noticed, and threaded it through his lapel.