He slid the phone into his pocket and put the Lucozade on the roof of the car, then flicked through the paper. There, on Chapter 7, was a photo of the crematorium where the woman’s body would be burnt that evening. The caption said furnace heading for hell. Tucking the paper under his arm, he reached for the Lucozade and drank it standing beside the car. After two or three long gulps, he tipped his head back and stared at the sky. Another cloudy day. Thick cloud too. He thought of people in planes, and how they would be above it all, and he wished he could be catapulted straight upwards, into miraculous sunlight. He finished his drink, then dropped the bottle in a rubbish bin and climbed back into his car.
Ten minutes later, he passed the turning that led to his village, the trademark brick façade of a Travel Inn visible off to the right, but he only left the dual carriageway a few miles further on, at the last exit before the Orwell bridge. Ahead of him as he drove down the hill was Ipswich harbour with its marina full of yachts and its static, dark-blue cranes. He rounded the roundabout. A fire had been lit behind a wooden fence next to the boatyard, and smoke was drifting across the road. The acridity of the fumes told him that what was being burnt was probably illegal. Rubber, it smelt like — or plastic. Two Christmases ago, his brother had flown back from San Francisco, where he was now a successful paediatrician, and Billy had driven to Runcorn with Sue and Emma to see him. On Boxing Day night, sitting up late over a whisky, Billy had asked him what he remembered about their father.
“Not much,” Charlie said. “He gave me a toy saxophone once. It was gold.” He swirled the whisky in his glass. “I burned it.”
“Really?”
“In the garden,” Charlie said. “I threw it on the bonfire. For a few moments nothing happened, then it sort of went all floppy. It made a real stink.” He sipped his whisky. “I used to think that was the real him, that stink. I still do, actually.”
“Remember when I broke my toes?” Billy said, then told him the story of how he had gone to the Iron Door in Liverpool.
“What?” Charlie said. “You saw him play?”
Billy nodded.
“Was he any good?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “I couldn’t tell.”
Now they were both laughing, two brothers who rarely saw each other, and it was the kind of quiet laughter that never quite dies away. Just when you think it’s stopped it starts again.
Billy followed the narrow road that led out along the river. He should go and stay with Charlie one of these days. In fact, maybe that was the trip they should be planning. Not Amsterdam, but San Francisco. He would have to save, of course — or borrow — but imagine it! San Francisco, with its madly plummeting streets. Alcatraz, the Golden Gate — the fog…Pleased with himself for having such a good idea, he felt less guilty about visiting the estuary, and he put his foot down, speeding between the soaring concrete stanchions of the Orwell bridge. Looking to his left, he saw flat, slick expanses of mud. Low tide.
Somebody had parked a beaten-up silver Volvo in his lay-by, but there was just enough room beyond it, and he was able to reverse into the gap. He turned the engine off, but left the keys in the ignition. He seemed to remember that the woman who fed the swans drove a Volvo. She usually showed up later in the day, though: he would see her at around three in the afternoon, when he came off an early shift. Yawning, he leaned his head against the head-rest for a moment.
40
Trevor was high above him in a half-built house, busily hammering a nail into a rafter. Trevor? he called out. What are you doing? Trevor looked down, his body foreshortened, as if he were bearing the full weight of the bright-blue sky and it was crushing him. Billy wanted Trevor to join him on the ground, but he couldn’t seem to make Trevor understand. Trevor didn’t even glance at him again, let alone speak. The hammering went on and on — endless nails being driven into endless wooden beams.
Billy’s eyes opened. In a panic, he looked around. He’d forgotten something — or he was late for something. No, wait. He was in his car. Though all the windows had steamed up, he could see somebody peering at him through the glass. His body stiff with cold, he reached across and wound down the window on the passenger’s side. A wide face, corkscrew curls. It was the woman who fed the swans.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I must have nodded off, that’s all.”
“Your lights are on.”
“So they are.” He switched them off. “Thank you.” He yawned, then sat up straighter in his seat. “What time is it?”
“About nine.”
“Is it? God.” He rubbed his face with both hands. It felt rubbery and slack, and he needed a shave. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he said. “I thought you only came down in the afternoons.”
“Normally I do. Today my son’s in a concert, though. At school.” She looked past him, into the back of the car. “Is she dead?”
He glanced over his shoulder. On top of the pile of papers from the weekend was Saturday’s Telegraph, the famous picture of the murderer occupying half the front page.
“She died on Friday,” he said.
“I had no idea.” She shook her head. “So terrible, what she did.”
He nodded absently.
“People like that,” she said, “I think they do deals.”
He stared at her with her frizzy hair and her face all spread out like a house with its windows flung wide open. “What do you mean?”
“They go further than anyone else, and they have to pay a price for that.” Her eyes moved to the picture behind him. “That’s why she’s got that look.” Turning to Billy again, she smiled almost sadly. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Maybe I’m still half asleep.”
She gave him a steady, slightly patronising look that told him tiredness had nothing to do with it.
When she had driven away, he reached over into the back seat and got hold of the paper. Propping it up against the steering-wheel, he scanned the article on the front page. There was nothing in it that he didn’t already know. The facts of her death, a description of the tape. A brief account of how the murderers behaved in court. Sullen, defiant. Passive. In his memory, it was this apparent passivity that had upset people most of all, since it had been seen as a form of arrogance, a clear indication that the couple in the dock were not only unrepentant but contemptuous, both of those who sat in judgement over them and — far more shocking, this, if true — of those who had suffered at their hands. Do what you like, their silence seemed to say. It makes no difference to us.
His eyes lifted to the woman’s face. That gaze, always described as empty. The black mouth curling a fraction, as if suspecting the photographer of weakness or inferiority. And now, suddenly, he had an inkling of what the swan lady might have been getting at. The woman and her lover had gone where no one else could follow. They probably thought of themselves as mavericks, dare-devils — pioneers. They were special, in other words. Unique. But then to be arrested, charged, held under lock and key…It would all have seemed so humdrum. Pathetic, really. No wonder they had joked about it when they wrote to each other from their separate cells. What did it mean to be put on trial? What did that have to do with anything?
He ought to be heading home, he knew that, but there was something he had to do first. Folding the Telegraph, he stepped out of the car. A still grey morning, sky the colour of an unlit light-bulb. The mud-flats glistening. Down by the river’s edge gulls glided through the air, their wing-tips seeming to clear the land by no more than a few inches. He opened the back door and gathered up the rest of the newspapers, then he locked the car and set off along the grass verge. This wouldn’t take long, he thought. Apart from anything else, it would warm him up. Get his circulation going.