The Next to Die, page 22
If I’m murdered, Drew will appear on the TV news and tell the nation that, however unfortunate Billy’s actions might have been, mine also, frankly, had always left a lot to be desired.
According to my brother’s rules, nothing bad can be allowed to have happened to me, nor may I notice wrongs done. It’s a form of protection from harm that’s anything but reassuring.
“On the surface, Drew was keen to welcome me to the Hopwood family,” I tell Waterhouse. “He’d just lost his mum. As a bloke who doesn’t like to be short-changed, he knew he was down to the tune of one close relative, and he was happy to be able to fill that gap. Marion and Trevor went along with the ‘Of course you’re one of us’ routine—probably to please Drew—but there was a silent, nonnegotiable condition attached to all of this: nobody was allowed to mention the backstory.”
“You mean—”
“Everything I’ve just told you: my adoption, Drew’s planned adoption, Marion not being able to go through with it, Elaine hating her and Trevor as a result, my miserable childhood with the Tribbecks. We all had to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that Drew and I were equal members of the family who’d never been treated at all differently . . . I went along with it at first, but it soon started to rankle. I didn’t have the guts to walk away, so I rebelled covertly, hinting whenever I could at the traumatic experience I’d had that my brother hadn’t. That’s what really set them against me: I was a troublemaker, determined to rake up horrible things from the past. I didn’t want to be like that, but the enforced silence got to be too much for me. Marion never apologized, or acknowledged any aspect of what happened to me. Instead, she behaved as if I’d chosen to go on a very long holiday, then reappeared with the sole intention of putting a dampener on everyone else’s happiness.”
“I have to ask, because I know you could have; you had plenty of opportunity . . . Did you kill Marion?”
“No. Cancer and Billy Dead Mates did, between them.”
“Did you know, or know of, any of the four other victims: Linzi Birrell, Rhian Douglas, Angela—”
“I know the names. No. Never heard of any of them until they were in the paper after they were killed.”
Waterhouse pulls a small lined piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and hands it to me. “These are the dates they were killed. I’ll need to know what you were doing on the afternoons of those days.”
“For most of them I was probably being driven from one gig to another. Look up ‘Kim Tribbeck autumn tour 2014’—you can also talk to my driver, Dmitri Pescov. I’ll give you his number.”
I reach for one of the pens on the shelf above my head, write Dmitri’s number on the back of the lined paper and pass it back to Waterhouse.
“Thanks. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe you killed anyone.”
“I’m more worried about being killed, to be honest,” I say. Worried. Still not scared. It seems too unreal, all of it. And confusing. An hour before Waterhouse arrived, a uniformed police officer was sitting where he’s sitting now, scraping the inside of my mouth with a wooden stick to get a DNA sample.
Apparently no one can decide if I’m a danger or in danger.
“Your worry’s understandable,” says Waterhouse. “I’m hoping that once you’ve had your session with our sketch artist and we’ve spread the image of the man who gave you the book far and wide, we’ll be well on our way to catching Billy. In the meantime, I’m glad you’re going away with Charlie tomorrow. That’ll give you some protection while we make progress.”
My tour-in-reverse, in search of the mysterious gig venue that I can’t identify. I’m dreading it.
“Let me ask you something. Who might want to harm you?”
“Apart from members of the public who tweet me death threats because I’m not funny?”
“Are there many of them?”
“No, and please don’t waste your time tracking them down. They’re saddos letting off steam. I feel sorry for them. Who might want to harm me seriously? Gabe, Liam, Drew. I can’t think of anyone else.”
“Your husband, your ex-boyfriend and your brother.” Waterhouse makes a note. I imagine it says something like “Only knows three people in entire world. All probably want her dead.”
“To turn that question around and look at it another way: Who, if they’d planned to kill six people and you were one of the six, might not be able to bring themselves to harm you, even if, theoretically, they wanted to?”
This one I have to think about. I’m surprised by my conclusion. “Strange as it sounds . . . the same three people. Gabe. Liam. My brother, Drew,” I say. “No one else would care enough to spare me.”
* * *
I was surprised when I met Charlie and she was a woman. Waterhouse hadn’t mentioned it.
My first thought: if a Charlie can be a woman, maybe a Billy can too.
When she introduced herself to me—the police officer who was to be my chauffeur for however long it took—I knew it was too late to call off the gigless tour. I considered feigning an illness: sharp pain in my stomach. Maybe that ringpull I swallowed could be brought into play, I thought.
I didn’t want to let anyone down, but I feared I would, whatever I did. If I helped them find the man who gave me the little white book, I’d be leading them to the wrong person. I didn’t know why I was so certain that man wasn’t Billy, but suddenly I was.
So why had I felt so uncomfortable when he approached me? My instincts had told me there was danger . . .
Not danger of murder, though.
I shook my head to banish the incoherent swirl of thoughts. It would be easier, I knew, if I stopped thinking, got into the car and let Sergeant Charlie Zailer drive me around the country as planned. It wasn’t as if there was anything else I wanted or needed to do at that moment.
She was tall and thin, with wavy dark brown hair cut to just above shoulder-length, pale skin and no makeup apart from bright red lipstick. “You’re not wearing a uniform,” I said.
She looked down at herself. “Actually, I am. This is it.”
“No, I mean . . . when we go on our blast-from-my-past tour, I’d rather you wore regular clothes. Otherwise I might feel like I’m an escaped loony who needs a uniformed attendant.”
“I’m glad you raised this.” Charlie perched on the edge of the table in the corner. “I’d rather not play driver to a spoiled star with an overinflated ego.”
Star? Was she deluded? “Is that your way of saying it’s important to you to wear the uniform?”
“I’ve seen your list of requirements: a gold-plated dressing room, a Filipino butler with a six-pack to polish your toenails between interviews, et cetera.”
“Wow. Seems there really are a million different ways you can interpret the words ‘pickled onion Monster Munch.’”
We were going to be getting into a car together soon whether we wanted to or not. Since Charlie Zailer was unlikely to stop being an arsehole—people rarely did—I decided I’d have to be the one to make the effort. “I only made that list because I’d been treated badly by an event organizer one time too many,” I said. “Feel free to ignore my list, and wear whatever you want. You’re right, it’s none of my business.”
“I probably don’t need to wear the uniform,” she said. “Leave it with me. First things first: we need to draw up a schedule. Where we go and in what order. Also hotels—I want to get on and book them.”
“Hotels?”
Every bed is narrow.
When I’d first read those words in a little white book, I’d thought they meant that any bed you share with another person feels too small. Even in the early days of our relationship when I couldn’t get enough of his body or his conversation, I’d wished Gabe would sleep somewhere else at night and not next to me. I’d have suggested it, but you’re not supposed to. People who are in love are meant to want to sleep side by side, so I tried to want to. It took me more than a year to work out that Gabe’s intermittent snoring was the perfect excuse to make a case for separate rooms.
“B-and-Bs more than hotels, probably,” said Charlie. “I have to try to keep costs down. If we’re traveling all over the country, we’re going to need to sleep somewhere—unless you want to start from the Culver Valley every morning.”
“No. Sorry. Hadn’t thought it through.”
She peered at me. “Are you okay?”
Totally, and not at all would have been an honest answer. For as long as I could remember, I’d been absolutely fine and a complete mess.
“If it’s okay, I don’t want to stay in any of the hotels I stayed in before, when I gigged in those towns. I don’t like going back to old haunts if I can avoid it.”
“Fine. I’ve got the list from your agent of where you stayed while on tour. I’ll avoid places you’ve been before. Chances are they’re beyond our budget anyway.”
“And we’ll have our own rooms? I mean, separate? No twin rooms to save money?”
“Of course not.”
Thank God for that.
“Once we’ve identified the event venue we’re looking for, we’re also going to need to go to whichever hotel you stayed in—the narrow-bed hotel—to check it’s the right one.”
That was the main one I didn’t want to revisit. Damn.
“Simon wants to know for sure. He said you should positively identify both: venue and hotel.”
This was an opportunity, I told myself, to learn a hard lesson: namely, that you couldn’t have everything you wanted all the time. All you could do was force strangers to buy you your favorite kind of crisps and pretend that was all your dreams come true at once.
“You’re not keen to revisit the hotel?” Charlie asked me. “How come?”
“It was hardly the Savoy.”
“We can just walk in, you say, ‘Yes, this is where I stayed,’ then we walk out.”
We could walk in? Was she going to insist on coming into the room with me? God, that would be embarrassing. Unless . . .
“Let me tell you now and get it over with,” I said. “Any hotel room I go into, whether I’m spending the night there or just popping in, I have to take a book into the room with me and put it in a drawer. If there’s a Bible in the room, I have to put my book in the same drawer as the Bible. If there’s no Bible, any drawer will do.” My face radiated heat as I spoke. I’d have found it less embarrassing if I’d had to admit that I traveled with a bag of sex toys.
“Really?” Charlie wasn’t smiling. She didn’t look as if she was preparing to mock me. “Which book? The same one every time?”
“Yes. It’s called Delirium of the Brave. By Terence Nithercott. I guarantee you won’t have heard of it. Please don’t ask me why I have to take it to every hotel with me. There’s literally no reason. The book has . . . had . . . sentimental value. Soon after I got it, as a present, I took it with me to a hotel because I wanted to try to read it—turns out it’s unreadable—and then it kind of became a thing. A mascot, or . . . I don’t know.”
Why was Charlie Zailer suddenly paying such close attention to my every word?
“What would happen if I said, ‘I want you to go into hotel rooms without that book from now on’?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I’d probably take the opportunity to persuade myself it’s turned into an irrational obsession and now’s a great moment to break the habit.”
She nodded. “And if I say, ‘Do what you like with regard to the book’? Then are you going to bring it or leave it at home?”
“Bring it. Don’t you have any irrational superstitions?”
“Have you read Beloved by Toni Morrison?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’ve read one of her books—The Bluest Eye. Why?”
“Billy Dead Mates sent a copy of Beloved to Sondra Halliday, a journalist who’s been—”
“I know who Halliday is. I’ve been reading her commentary on the murders. With mounting incredulity. I wish someone’d get her the help she needs.”
“What do you mean?”
“From the few autobiographical columns of hers I’ve read in the past, I know she should be crying on a shrink’s couch and drinking hot milk with honey in it till she feels better, not trauma-laundering to create unrest.”
“I’ve seen her mention PTSD but never anything specific.” The hardness of Charlie’s voice suggested she wasn’t convinced. I was. You don’t end up like Sondra Halliday if nothing terrible’s happened to you; you don’t harm others unless you’ve been harmed yourself first.
You think I’m wrong? You have counterexamples? That’s so sweet and naïve—which is tactful-speak for “fucking stupid.” Whenever people say about someone who’s committed an evil act, “But he had a happy, loving childhood,” feel free to say to them confidently, “No, he didn’t.” Not all wounds or causes of hurt are visible to those on the outside.
“Halliday had an abusive stepfather from a really young age—seven or eight, I think—and a mother who colluded,” I said.
“Simon calls her the Hate Preacher,” said Charlie.
“I feel sorry for her. She so desperately wants to believe women aren’t as venal and vicious as men. Maybe she never went to school with other girls between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Why did Billy Dead Mates send her a Toni Morrison novel?”
“We don’t know. He also sent her Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Books are everywhere in this investigation. Billy’s little white ones with lines from poems in them . . .” Charlie gave me a pointed look.
“And now my copy of Delirium of the Brave.”
“Yes.”
“Books don’t commit murders,” I said. “Even the very worst of them. That’s why books are so much better than people.”
Lifeworld online, January 14, 2015
BILLY DEAD WOMEN STRIKES AGAIN
by Sondra Halliday
Yesterday, Culver Valley Police revealed that the killer they’re failing to catch, while affectionately dubbing him Billy Dead Mates, has struck for a fifth time. Guess what? Once again, the victim was a woman: eighty-two-year-old Marion Hopwood from Silsford. Unlike Billy’s other victims, Marion wasn’t shot. That would have attracted too much attention, given she was in the hospital at the time of her death. Instead, she was injected with something very similar to battery acid.
How do the police know Marion was killed by Billy and not by one of the many other lethal male death machines freely roaming our streets? Well, a little white book containing one line of poetry was found in her hospital bed shortly before she died, and, as we all know by now, Billy serves a little white book to each of his targets before killing her, like a sinister murder-subpoena.
By murdering Marion Hopwood, Billy Dead Women proved the validity of my adapted nickname for him. For those of you who aren’t following each new permutation of the story, Billy has now murdered four women. In chronological order: Linzi Birrell from Combingham, Rhian Douglas from Poole, Angela McCabe from Chiswick, and now Mrs. Hopwood. And just as Billy’s latest foray into brutality shows us, as if we were in any doubt, that ending the lives of women is his top priority, it shows us something else about him, too. It’s not enough for him that women’s lives should be snuffed out; he personally wants to be the one to make it happen. He’s even willing to put himself out to achieve that goal, being no slouch when it comes to practical misogyny.
How do I know this about him? Because Marion Hopwood was in the process of dying of cancer when he killed her. She had somewhere between twenty-four and seventy-two hours left to live when he injected her with poison. All Billy had to do, if he wanted Marion dead, was wait. Like so many violent misogynists, however, he craved more than that. He needed to feel his own power surge through him as he played God with a helpless, terminally ill grandmother’s life. After all, belonging to the superior sex class is more fun if you get to exterminate the subordinates once in a while—right, guys?
This latest murder enables us to draw a further conclusion: if you want to be a killer who gets away with it apparently forever, kill women. It’s that simple.
For the ambitious career murderer, targeting women is a sensible move. Does anyone honestly imagine the police wouldn’t have caught Billy by now if it were men he was shooting dead? Of course they would; like the rest of us, all the investigating officers were born and socialized into a world that believes men’s lives matter and women’s don’t. I’m the first to admit that it’s hard to train yourself out of thinking that way. Evidently the police have failed to do so.
Marion Hopwood’s life mattered. She was a devoted wife until her husband died in 2008, a loving mother, a beloved grandmother. She never worked outside the home, but she spent her whole life doing the unpaid work expected of women: caring for her family, bringing up her grandson, Drew, when his teenage mother couldn’t cope with the responsibility.
Drew Hopwood was kind enough to speak to me yesterday, and it was from him that I learned a fascinating fact about Marion, something about which the news coverage of her murder has so far been silent: she had no best friend. She was on nodding terms with her immediate neighbors, but her grandson described her as “always so immersed in family that she never had time for friends.” The only people she saw regularly were Drew and his half sister, comedian Kim Tribbeck, who was adopted by another family at birth.
No. Best. Friend. Are you going to break into the police briefing to tell them the bad news, or shall I? Their theory that Billy is killing pairs of best friends has just died on its arse. Now all those brilliant detectives are going to have to look for another pattern, and I’m willing to bet my vital organs that they’ll still fail to notice the glaringly obvious: that Billy is a dedicated practitioner of the misogynistic murder of women.
