Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

Author:Rupert Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307267054
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

24

There was a name he could no longer avoid. It had come to him on Friday, when he sat in his car and listened to the news, and then again on Saturday, when he went walking in the woods. It had come even more strongly when Phil Shaw showed him the fridge where the woman’s body was being kept. During the past few hours it had grown more and more powerful until it seemed that the name had a voice, and it was calling out to him, demanding his attention.

Four years ago, in the autumn of 1998, he had been summoned to Northampton to give evidence in a trial. He hadn’t been able to leave Ipswich until the late afternoon, and after driving for about two hours he had checked into a Travel Inn at the junction of the A14 and the A1, not far from Huntingdon. His room was tidy and overheated, with a big double bed and a notice you could hang outside your door that said SSSSHHH…FAST ASLEEP. Like most Travel Inns, it made you feel as if you’d ended up in the middle of nowhere. Their locations seemed determined largely by the presence of a main road or a motorway; apart from that, they didn’t appear to have any connection with real life at all. This would be a terrible place to die, he remembered thinking as he set his case down on the bed.

On the far side of the car-park was a large, partially timbered building that the brochure referred to as the “food barn.” It had a restaurant and a bar, and on that particular night it was full of lorry-drivers, travelling salesmen, and a party of high-spirited golfers from a club in Warwickshire. Billy was halfway through his Chicken Kiev when a man in a grey suit jerked to a standstill in front of his table.

“Billy Tyler?”

Billy stared up into the man’s face. “My God,” he said. “Trevor? Is that you?”

He rose quickly to his feet, and the two men shook hands.

“Billy Tyler,” Trevor said again, but in a tone of wonderment this time.

Billy was grinning now. “What a coincidence.”

Trevor Lydgate had been in the year above Billy at primary school, but their mothers were friends so they had played in each other’s houses from an early age. Their friendship hadn’t lasted long, though, because the Lydgates moved away, to Manchester, and the two boys gradually lost touch.

“Look, you finish your meal,” Trevor said, “then come and join me for a drink. I’m over there, in the corner.”

Billy watched the thin, balding man move away across the bar—he remembered a slender boy with light-brown hair—then he sat down again. Picking up his fork, he smiled to himself and shook his head. So there was a reason for these out-of-the-way places after all…

A few minutes later, he was sitting in a booth with Trevor, drinking pints of Stella and catching up on the events of the last twenty-five or thirty years. They both drank fast, excited by the chance reunion, and determined to make the most of it.

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