Read Online Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson - Free Book Online

“That’s just guilt,” he’d say. He was unshakeable. Raymond always slept with his windows shut on account of the toxic gases that were released into the atmosphere at night. He didn’t trust anything that was produced locally. He only ever drank soda water, which he stole from the Co-op, and he refused to eat fruit and vegetables unless they came from somewhere far away like Israel or Costa Rica.
    One particular afternoon from that time stood out in Billy’s memory. He would have been about fourteen. It had been a hot, sticky couple of days in an otherwise dismal summer, and when Raymond turned up at Billy’s house, he didn’t have a shirt on, only a pair of mulberry-coloured loon pants, the backs frayed where they dragged along the ground. Raymond’s dogs swirled about on Billy’s small front lawn, growling and snapping at each other. One of them was called Cabal, which had been the name of King Arthur’s dog. The other one was John. John the dog. Raymond thought that was funny. When Billy answered the door, Raymond held up a plastic bag and swung it from side to side. The contents clinked. Billy knew then that they would be getting drunk together. Raymond would have conned somebody into buying alcohol for him, or maybe he’d been shoplifting again. If you stole something and got away with it, you were innocent. That was Raymond’s philosophy. You were only guilty if you got caught, and Raymond never got caught: people would look into his face and see nothing but honesty in it.
    “I’m going out for a bit,” Billy called back into the darkness of the house. He heard his mother’s voice, but Raymond was already turning away, so he shouted, “See you later,” and then slammed the front door shut. Once on the pavement, he glanced up and saw a bent head in the upstairs window. His brother Charlie, reading. Charlie’s A level results were due any day now, and they were all expecting great things.
    That afternoon Raymond and Billy did what they usually did. To get to the park, most people would have walked along the road, a distance of less than a mile, but Raymond and Billy would cut across the open fields, which took them past the brine reservoir. Billy was fascinated by the warning signs—drowning hazard, corrosive liquid—and he was drawn, too, by the mysterious square brick huts. As for Raymond, he had his own personal agenda. The reservoir belonged to the company he held responsible for his father’s death, and he would be muttering threats and curses as they approached the padlocked gates. He seemed to like this route to the park. It kept his hatred fresh.
    There was a place where the path narrowed, and they had to walk in single file. Raymond went first, the dogs running on ahead. A high hedge shielded them from the sun; the air cooled suddenly. As he followed Raymond, he noticed the paleness of Raymond’s back, more like the inside of something than the outside, as if the skin had already been peeled away and this was the fruit, the goodness, the part that you could eat. He felt himself blushing, and he lagged behind, feigning interest in a discarded cigarette packet.
    Later, they lay side by side on the warm grass. They started with barley wine. There was a kind of thickness to the liquid in those small brown bottles; you could taste how strong it was. Drink three and you’d see double. They drank two each, then switched to vodka.
    “You want to do something?” Raymond said.
    Billy was staring up into a sky that was so smoothly blue, so absolutely free of clouds, that it made him feel dizzy, and when he heard the words “do something,” his heart turned over.
    “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
    And then, when Raymond didn’t speak, he said, “Like what?”
    “Come on.” Raymond got to his feet. Two fingers in his mouth, he whistled to the dogs, then he began to walk.
    “Where are we going?” Billy asked.
    Raymond didn’t answer.
    They circled back past the brine reservoir and