Death of a Murderer Read Free Page B

another couple of hours’ sleep, but he had been in bed for less than ten minutes when Sue walked in on him, and even with his eyes closed, he’d had a clear picture of the inside of her head, all sparks and broken china.
    “You don’t care about us,” he heard her say. “That’s what it comes down to. You just don’t care.”
    “That’s not true,” he murmured into his pillow.
    “You don’t care about me and Emma. The way you walked out when she was born—”
    “Don’t bring that up again. And anyway, I didn’t ‘walk out’…”
    “What?” She was leaning over him now, her face only inches from his, and she was pushing at his shoulder. “
What
was that?”
    Sometimes he had the distinct feeling that she was trying to goad him into violence. Then she would be able to stand back with a look of triumph on her face and say,
You see? I knew it. I knew it all along.
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
    He hurled the bedclothes away from him, brushing her aside. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her stagger—a little theatrically, he thought—then press herself against the wall. Once on his feet, he didn’t know what to do. In his T-shirt and underpants, he went and stared out of the window. The garden lay below him, with the allotments just beyond, the various plots forming a kind of patchwork that sloped gently uphill to the woods. Away to his right, a cornfield shifted and swirled as if governed by mysterious tides, hidden currents. When he first viewed the house it had been summer, and the corn was high, its yellow randomly sown with poppies. He’d rarely seen anything so beautiful. Today, though, its beauty seemed inappropriate, if not actually malicious. To think that their marriage had started there. To think that he had taken Sue by the hand and led her out into the middle of that field—Susie as she was then…And now, a decade later, here they were, bound together by little more than arguments and tears, by vicious words, by things they didn’t even mean.
I might as well go to work right now,
he thought,
for all the peace I’m going to get.
    Phil began to talk again, this time about the woman whose body they were guarding. Since she had already been hospitalised on a number of occasions during the past two or three years—first for osteoporosis, then for a cerebral aneurysm and, most recently, for respiratory problems—the police had been able to develop procedures for dealing with her when she left the confines of prison. Now that she was dead it was no different. The police were duty bound to protect her from anyone who might want to take revenge on her or do her harm—and there were plenty of those, as a glance at the Internet would tell you—but, equally, they had to see that the other patients and their families were not upset or disturbed. He had worked intensively with hospital staff to make the place secure while simultaneously attempting to keep disruption to a minimum. There were police stationed at the rear of the building, and in many of the corridors. There were police patrolling the grounds as well. Every entrance and exit had been covered.
    A door clicked open somewhere behind them, and Billy heard rapid footsteps. Phil turned sharply, but it was only a nurse hurrying off in the opposite direction. Soon she was fifty yards away, her reflection a smudgy, swaying blur in the bright mirror of the floor.
    “We have to make sure nothing happens,” Phil said, his eyes still on the nurse. “If we manage that, we will have been successful.”
    Billy nodded. It didn’t surprise him that Phil was jumpy. Should anyone slip up, he would be held responsible—and, what’s more, it would be splashed all over the front pages of tomorrow’s papers.
Make sure nothing happens:
it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
    Ahead of them, a pair of double doors swung outwards, their leading edges padded with black rubber, and two men in dark-blue Adidas emerged, both with a cocksure, slightly