Death of a Murderer Read Online Free PDF

channels beneath the ice. While up there, he saw a tree, its twisted trunk growing along the ground as if seeking shelter, then veering up into the air, the thin grey branches trembling. Once again, he had the feeling there was something to be discovered, but it was like having a word on the tip of your tongue and knowing you would never remember it. There were things here that couldn’t be grasped or squared away—not by him, in any case. He stared off into a gully, imagining a man leading a small boy by the hand. After a minute, only the man’s head and shoulders showed above the bank, and the boy wasn’t visible at all…
    The snow had blown in from the east the night before, and now it was coming again, the air closing in, surrounding him, a whirl of tiny flakes.
    He turned and started back towards the car.

8
    Glancing at his mobile on the table, Billy was reminded of the text Sue had sent. Sometimes, when she bombarded him with messages, each one more desperate and abbreviated than the last, or when she asked the impossible of him, as she had that afternoon, he would wonder why he put up with it. Where had Susie Newman disappeared to? And when?
Don’t go travelling,
he had said, and she hadn’t. She had got a job with a firm of marketing consultants, and later, in October of that year, she had moved in with him. They’d lived in his little two-room flat on Frederick Street, just round the corner from the police station. Christ, the sex they’d had back then. The love they’d had. He used to run home from work to see her. Actually run. But he had never taken her to India or Thailand; he hadn’t paid enough attention to her dreams. Fourteen years had passed, and certain possibilities had slipped through their fingers, and now she was turning into somebody he didn’t recognise. He would get flashes of how she used to be, but it was as if he were trying to tune into a foreign radio station with a weak signal; mostly all he received was interference, static, nothing he could make any sense of. What about the feeling of familiarity he’d had, though, when he stood in Murphy’s garage on that sunny morning in 1988? Had that been an illusion, some sort of trick? Or had he failed to look after what he’d been given? And if it was gone, was it gone for ever, or could it be recovered?
    He was going round in circles.
    He saw her again, standing by the front door in the cold, her face lowered, her arms folded tightly across her chest. There were days when he couldn’t seem to please her, no matter what he did or didn’t do, and it would occur to him that she might simply have grown tired of him, that he might be less than she had imagined him to be, less than she’d wanted. Certainly there were those who took that view. Her father, for one. Peter Newman never missed an opportunity to let Billy know that she deserved better. Not that Newman was such a great advertisement for marriage: he had left Susie’s mother when Susie was just thirteen.
    Billy first met Peter Newman in a wine bar in Manchester in the summer of 1989. Though wine bars were no longer a novelty—they had started appearing in the north-west at least five years earlier—Billy had never set foot in one before, a fact that Newman seemed to intuit almost immediately. Newman had a couple of business associates with him. The three men wore double-breasted suits with padded shoulders, which made them look American, and Billy was painfully aware of his cheap black shoes and the soiled bandage on his right hand, an injury sustained while arresting a drunk at a rugby-league game the previous Saturday.
    When the waitress came over, Newman and his colleagues ordered glasses of wine. So did Susie. Billy said he would have wine too.
    “Really?” Newman said. “You wouldn’t rather have a pint?”
    “No, I’ll have some wine,” Billy said. When, actually, a beer was what he wanted. But he felt clumsy in the company of these business people; he felt the way