The Narrow Bed, page 19
‘We believe something, perhaps a poison, was injected,’ says Gibbs. ‘We’ll know more soon.’
Thank God Drew’s not here. Thank God.
‘Why? Why would a shooter of best friends kill a dying old woman with no friends? Why? There’s no reason. It wouldn’t happen. I don’t believe you.’
Fiona believes it. That’s why she was crying.
Waterhouse pulls a notebook and pen out of his jacket pocket. ‘I need to ask you some questions.’
‘I suppose, on the upside, it’s one in the eye for cancer,’ I say. ‘Right? Poisonous substance one, cancer nil on this occasion. Ha!’
‘Before you arrived, we spoke to Marion’s oncologist,’ Gibbs says. ‘He explained how Marion would have died, if her disease had taken its natural course. She’d have slept more and more, with her breathing becoming increasingly shallow until she stopped waking up, stopped breathing altogether. But the nurses report her having a substantial wakeful interval shortly before she died.’
‘That’s true.’
‘They were all surprised she went so fast, but they didn’t question it because … well, she was dying. They expected her to die, and she did. Until we asked if there was any chance she could have been killed by something or someone other than her illness, no one thought of it.’
‘They weren’t suspicious when they found a creepy book in her deathbed, with the words “Death devours all lovely things” inside it?’
‘No.’ The way Waterhouse says it makes me suspect he asked somebody the same question in the same incredulous tone. ‘People behave strangely when their loved ones are dying. The nurse who found it assumed that either you or your brother left the book there, or else it was a sort of … present, tribute, whatever, from someone else. A token. Normally she’d have passed it on to the relatives but she was afraid you’d find it upsetting so she pinned it on the noticeboard instead. Kim, I want you to think hard: while you and your brother were here, in the last few days before Marion died, did you see anyone go into her room who wasn’t a member of hospital staff, or who might not have been?’
‘No. That doesn’t mean they didn’t. They could have, easily.’
‘The nurses told us that either you or Drew was with Marion the whole time.’
‘Drew was with her, sitting next to her bed, nearly the whole time – apart from when he nipped to the loo or down to the food court to get food and coffee. And once or twice he fell asleep in the chair next to Marion’s bed, he told me. I’ve no idea how long for. And obviously at night he slept on the camp bed the nurses put in the room for him. I suppose someone could have gone in while he was asleep.’
‘What about you?’ Waterhouse asks. ‘While Drew was taking a bathroom break or eating, weren’t you here?’
‘I was here in the ward, but not in the room with Marion. The day she died and the day before – Monday and Tuesday – I didn’t go into her room at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t want to. I spent Saturday and Sunday in there, after which I decided I didn’t enjoy being in a room with a dying person. It’s a more unpleasant experience than you’d think, believe me.’
‘So where were you Monday and Tuesday?’
‘Sitting in the corridor.’
‘Where exactly, in relation to Marion’s room?’ asks Waterhouse.
‘About three feet to the right of the door.’
‘That’s easily close enough to see who goes in and out.’
‘It is if I’m looking. Mainly, I wasn’t. I was fiddling with my phone a lot of the time – Googling what happens if you swallow a ringpull.’
‘A ringpull?’ Waterhouse glances at Gibbs. ‘From a can?’
‘Yeah. I’d accidentally washed one down with Fruit Rush and I was trying to find out if I could risk doing nothing about it. I was also answering emails, reading Twitter – anything I could to distract me from Marion dying. I was aware of nurses going in and out of her room all the time; after a while I stopped paying attention. It annoyed me too much. They’d refused to catheterise her in case it gave her a bladder infection – obviously those are hugely annoying to dead people – and they refused to put an end to her misery, so I tuned out and focused on my little screen.’
‘Could someone who wasn’t wearing hospital clothing have gone in without you noticing?’
‘Seventeen people wearing “I’m a serial murderer” leotards could have gone in and I’d have been none the wiser. This is what I’m trying to tell you.’
Waterhouse sighs.
‘What about the ward itself?’ asks Gibbs. ‘Surely those seventeen people wouldn’t have been buzzed in.’
‘Don’t count on it,’ I tell him. ‘When I went back to the ward to get Billy’s white book, they buzzed me in without seeing my face or hearing my voice.’
‘Great.’ Waterhouse sounds despondent. ‘Well, you’re now one of a clear third pair. Not a pair of best friends, but a pair. Relatives this time.’
‘I didn’t even like Marion,’ I tell him. ‘And she went one better: she formally expelled me from her family – bullied my mother into giving me up for adoption. It’s almost as if we knew a serial killer would one day decide to kill pairs of people who had a close bond, and set about trying to get ourselves off the hook!’ I giggle. ‘Sorry. Making jokes is what I do – whatever the occasion.’
‘A pair of relatives, not best friends, with no close bond,’ Waterhouse murmurs, looking down at his feet. ‘And the M.O.’s not Billy’s usual, either: poison instead of a gun. But the white books and the poem quotes in Marion’s and yours being from the same poem make it undeniable. This is Billy’s handiwork.’
‘Well, unless there are two of them,’ I suggest.
Waterhouse’s head jerks up as if someone’s yanked it with a rope. ‘Why d’you say that?’
‘I don’t know.’ I shrug. ‘Kind of neat, I suppose: a pair killing pairs. Maybe one’s targeting best friends and the other’s going for grandmothers and granddaughters.’ I mustn’t laugh at this. Really, really mustn’t. I’ll treat myself to a new car if I can hold out.
Thankfully, my hysteria subsides.
‘What put that into your head?’ Waterhouse demands. He’s almost shouting.
I sigh. There is no levity in this man. ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Ignore me. I was being silly. I’ve watched too many TV shows.’
He turns to Gibbs and says, ‘The interval between the planting of the book and the kill is shorter than it’s ever been: less than a week. That makes Kim, among the six recipients of white books, a real anomaly. Why’s she still alive?’
Charming.
‘We need to talk to her brother,’ says Gibbs.
I’m sure he doesn’t mean to imply that my ongoing existence is Drew’s fault. It only sounds that way.
I hated you then, Billy. The power of my loathing for you shocked me. I felt as if you were deliberately trying to take the story of me and my family – a story that mattered to me, perhaps too much – and turn it into a small, insignificant part of your bigger, more newsworthy drama. Marion and I had nothing to do with Linzi Birrell, Rhian Douglas, Angela McCabe and Josh Norbury. Yet suddenly we were all thrown together and defined solely by our relationship to you – your victims and prospective victims. Our fate seemed to have nothing to do with who we were or what we’d done.
How could someone plan to kill Marion and me? How could you, Billy, fail to see that I’d defined myself all my life as ‘Not Marion; against everything she stands for’ – so that if you wanted to murder her, I ought to have been the very last person on your list? How dare anyone kill Marion for any reason apart from as revenge for what she’d done to me?
Illogical and incoherent, I know; I’m simply trying to describe the chaos that was raging in my mind as I sat and listened to DCs Waterhouse and Gibbs talk about how they needed to speak to Drew, because I was such a disappointing, unreliable witness.
No, I’m not, I protested silently. I know so much more than my brother does about death. I’m the one who can be objective about it. Drew was thinking of his own loss while Marion was dying. I didn’t feel I stood to lose in the same way, so I thought about her deprivation, and how everything she had – her breath, her thoughts, her memories – was about to be wiped out forever.
If I could have saved her life, I’d have done it in a heartbeat. I viewed her death as the most horrifying tragedy: not because it was Marion, but because it was death. Drew was too busy crying over his grandmother to notice the encroaching epidemic that was – is – coming for all of us. That’s why he could stay in the room and I had to get the hell out.
What I didn’t realise was that Death had a human representative on Ward 10 that day: you, Billy.
I don’t hate you any more, not now that I understand why you did what you did. The five murders you committed were horrifying and unjustifiable, but once I knew your reason – the bizarre, meticulous logic of it – the personal antipathy I felt fell away. Yours was a mindset that only intense suffering could have produced. That’s why I can’t condemn you as evil through and through. I think you honestly believed you could redeem your own suffering by creating its equal and opposite. And while you planned and carried out your crimes, you were temporarily anaesthetised: focusing on creating pain for others prevented you from experiencing your own agony.
I understand all that because I, too, go to great lengths to avoid feeling the pain that’s lying in wait for me.
Would I ever commit murder? I doubt it. But I understand why you did. In order to make sense of your thought process and how you must have felt, I’ve had to build a model of your mind inside my own. I’ve forced myself to inhabit that model and, when I do, everything you’ve done makes perfect sense.
I’m writing this book because I want it to make sense to other people, too; not only to you, me and Simon Waterhouse. Also because it seemed the obvious thing to do. There has to be a book about you, Billy. How can there not be?
11
13/1/2015
Sam Kombothekra was finding it hard to concentrate on the questions he wanted to ask Kim Tribbeck’s husband. Gabriel Kearns’s rented one-bedroom flat in the Kornbluth Tower in Rawndesley was unlike any living space Sam had seen before. Every object his eye landed on looked either rare and beautiful or intimidatingly expensive – a glossy orange curve-edged coffee machine; a leather jacket with a phoenix emblem on the back; original oil paintings, mostly fruit-in-bowl still lifes – but everything was in the wrong place. The leather jacket was slung across the kitchen sink; the twelve or so paintings were laid out like floor tiles on one side of the living room; the coffee machine was in the corner of the bathroom, balanced on a blue-painted wooden crate that was playing the role of a table. Also on the crate was a yellow pottery mug with a pair of Calvin Klein boxer shorts stuffed into it.
On a black-and-white-striped rug in the living room was something Sam at first mistook for an ornate oriental teapot: a brown glass thing with two waists, three curved bobbly bits, and a silver spout-type thing protruding from its side. It looked like the kind of contraption from which a genie might emerge to grant you three wishes. Seconds later, Sam recognised it for what it was: a more elaborate than usual drug-taking device. A bong, he supposed you’d have to call it, though no other bong he’d seen looked so much like a work of irreplaceable art. The glass was subtly patterned; you had to look closely to see the tiny leaves, birds and flowers. It was a beautiful object. Shame about its function. As the father of two boys, Sam sometimes felt as if he spent all his spare time telling his sons how important it was that they never touch drugs. Would they listen? Probably not.
Gabriel Kearns’s flat, unlike the homes of most bong owners, did not reek of cannabis. It smelled faintly of spices – nutmeg and cinnamon. The scent had to be artificial, but Sam could see no oil burner or air freshener.
Kearns reappeared in a new outfit: red jogging bottoms and a white zip-up sports top with a logo on it that Sam didn’t recognise. Eye-wateringly expensive, no doubt. Sam tried not to disapprove of the bare feet. When he’d let Sam into his flat, Kearns had been wearing brown jeans, a striped shirt and brown suede shoes. He’d vanished into his bedroom almost immediately, calling out, ‘Won’t be long!’ Evidently he thought sportswear was more suitable for a police interview.
‘Right, then.’ Kearns arranged himself in a cross-legged position on his lounge floor. ‘I hope you got yourself a drink while I was in the shower. You and I have serious business to do today.’
‘What do you mean?’ Could he be talking about providing details of his whereabouts on the dates of Billy’s murders? That, as Sam had explained on the phone, was the purpose of this meeting.
‘What do you think I mean?’ Kearns laughed. ‘I’m not letting this fucker Billy Dead Mates make a dog’s breakfast of my love life. The intel I’ve had so far suggests he might want to kill my wife. If she’s dead she can’t take me back, whereas if she lives I’m going to make sure she does, you see. So how are we going to stop him from killing her and instead usher him into a claustrophobic jail cell? Note: I say “we”, not “you”. I’m at your disposal, Sergeant.’
‘Um …’
Sam was still formulating his reply to the surprising onslaught when Kearns launched a new verbal assault. ‘Of course, Kim’s in danger twice over, as I see it. Not only from Billy, but also from you guys.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Sam said truthfully.
‘One of the murder victims was Malevolent Marion. I know it’s not public knowledge yet. Kim told me. See, I’m still the one she turns to in times of trouble. She won’t be willing to pretend she didn’t have a low opinion of the old bag, so you’re bound to suspect her.’
‘Suspect Kim? Of killing Marion?’ Sam wanted to be sure.
‘Yes.’
‘Why would she want to kill the others, though – Billy’s first four victims?’
‘She wouldn’t. Kim would never kill anyone. I would, without hesitation. Don’t worry, I’m not Billy. I have alibis for every one of the five: full house.’ Kearns beamed at Sam. ‘I was at work while Billy was doing his stuff – my colleagues at De Bonis will vouch.’
Sam believed him, and half wished he didn’t. There was something of the pantomime villain about Gabriel Kearns; he was a man one might enjoy hating.
‘I’ve never bought into any of that self-serving sanctity-of-human-life claptrap that people like to put about,’ Kearns said. ‘Have you?’
‘I have, yes.’
‘Oh. Well, I suppose you’d have to, to do your job. Back to Kim … I hope you heard my point: killing’s not in her repertoire and never could be. She’s too contrary.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s a warrior and a contrarian. Her need to quibble and find fault is so strong, she’ll do it with herself if there’s no one else around. If she were seriously considering killing Marion, she’d immediately start arguing with herself: “Who are you to decide if someone lives or dies?”, “What if you’re the troublemaker and Marion’s lovely and harmless?” Kim’s said that to me more than once. It’s what her repulsive brother thinks, what Marion herself thought, and her husband Trevor before he carked it. That’s the Hopwood family folklore: Kim’s the stain on their otherwise perfect family. She’s never done them any harm apart from try to talk about the whole them-abandoning-her thing in an honest way, but they didn’t appreciate her being around to remind them of their own shoddy behaviour.
‘Anyway …’ Kearns uncrossed his legs and recrossed them with the left one on top this time. ‘Kim knows the score, but it’s hard to shake off the fear that the official family lie might be true. Ultimately, she wouldn’t feel confident enough in her membership of the Hopwood family to kill a Hopwood.’
Sam wasn’t sure he followed the logic of this. Kearns had presented it as if it were a self-evident truth and beyond question.
‘I like you, Sergeant. I trust you. You want Billy behind bars, I want my wife back. Let’s work together on it. I’ve already been to the police station to provide a DNA sample as requested, and I know you’re working hard at your end too. Give me a call when you’re ready to set up another meet. In the meantime, I’m counting on you to keep Kim alive and out of prison.’
A meet, without the ‘ing’ on the end? Was this what the cool young people were saying these days? The cool slightly older people too, by the sound of it. Gabriel Kearns looked around Sam’s age.
‘It’s good to hear you have confidence in the … um … investigation, Mr Kearns. I’ll be in touch if there’s anything else I need.’
Asserting himself was Sam’s least favourite activity, but being addressed as if he were Kearns’s right-hand man, receiving his patronising if favourable appraisal, made Sam wonder if there were any circumstances in which he might lose his temper. He was forty-seven years old and so far in his life he never had, not fully. When he saw it happen to people around him, he felt sorry for them and thought a version of ‘How awful to suffer from a condition like that’, as if he’d witnessed an epileptic fit.
On the threshold of his flat, Kearns’s parting words were, ‘You keep Kim in one piece, man. I need her.’ Unbelievable. As if anyone he didn’t require for wife duty could be killed all over the place and it wouldn’t matter at all.
Kearns slapped Sam hard on the back before slamming the door in his face.
What an absolute, premier league, gold-plated …
What a selfish man. That, Sam decided, was a reasonable conclusion.
The ticket machine at Silsford Marketplace car park was broken. Sellers went back to his car and fumbled in the glove compartment for the crumpled half-sheet of A4 on which, years ago, he’d written ‘Ticket machine broken – couldn’t pay and display, sorry!’ for occasions such as this one. Each time it proved necessary to communicate this message, he congratulated himself on taking good – well, good-ish – care of his home-made notice.
He’d identified within himself two prejudices against Liam and Isobel Sturridge, whom he’d not yet met but was on his way to interview. One, funnily enough, was parking-related. Their house was on Castle Terrace, the narrow and so-steep-it-was-almost-vertical approach to Silsford’s ancient castle that loomed over the town. Sellers was more favourably disposed towards those who lived in houses that enabled him to park in their driveways or immediately outside their front doors. Failing that, he was willing to undertake a short, level stroll from his car to his destination, but the Sturridges’ house was a worst-case scenario: an upward slog that would have him sweating rivers within seconds. He’d said as much to Gibbs before setting off from the nick, only to be told that it was his own fault for being a fat bastard. Sellers had wanted to point out that he’d lost nearly a stone already, but, frustratingly, that line of defence was no longer open to him at work; Charlie Zailer had told everyone that Sellers had joined Weight Watchers for the deep cleavages and nothing else, and now he couldn’t mention his new eating regime or his weight loss at the nick without everyone shouting ‘Cleavage!’ and laughing.
