The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  ‘Then go back to the beginning. A lot of Brits working for the loyalists were army deserters.’

  Cross flew out of Belfast on Saturday morning. The plane was full of what looked like English weekenders going home and the mood was light-hearted. Cross half expected to see Moffat among them, sloping off.

  Nothing had happened the day before. There had been no murder, at least not of the type they were looking for. After a tense day of waiting, Cross and Westerby had ended up feeling that they were staring defeat in the face.

  Evans, F.A., Pte, he thought, wondering if Evans was his man. His Christian names – Francis Albert – suggested he was. Cross restricted himself to a single gin and tonic on the flight and brooded. He had sought no one’s permission and had paid for the ticket with his own credit card. He felt he was keeping everything and everyone at bay, hence his flight.

  He rented a car at Heathrow and drove to East Anglia. The strangeness of being back in England did not hit him until he was skirting the urban sprawl of London. Its vastness, compared to the tininess of Belfast, felt quite unnegotiable and the volume of traffic, even on a Saturday morning, unnerved him.

  He made slow progress and it was not until late morning that he left behind the last of the city, after a stop-start, anti-clockwise crawl around an inner ring road that frequently became clogged by single-file traffic. Even outside the city its influence continued to be felt. He drove through an endless hinterland of suburbs and industrial estates, wondering if the countryside had disappeared altogether.

  The army barracks lay on the outskirts of town. It was a gloomy Victorian pile and looked almost indecently naked without the usual fortifications that surrounded barracks in the North.

  Colour Sergeant Major Crabtree was already waiting. He was an intense man, and, like a lot of soldiers, not tall. The sergeants’ mess was empty in the middle of the afternoon and they sat in red leatherette armchairs beside a trophy cabinet.

  Crabtree was not a man to waste words and after two minutes had told Cross all he could remember about Private Evans. Evans had been a tough and competent soldier but had set himself apart from the others in a way that made him hard to remember.

  ‘Many of your memories about soldiering are social ones, being there for your mates. I have no recollection of Evans joining in with anything.’

  Cross found it odd how, after talking to Becky and now Crabtree, he felt his quarry was becoming vaguer. Crabtree’s memory of Evans was as faded as the old photograph in the regimental museum that showed Evans, F.A., Pte, a tiny figure in the back row.

  Crabtree thought that Evans had transferred to the SAS at some point around 1970 and some time in the following year was reported AWOL. They found a better photograph in the regimental magazine for 1969, an informal picture taken during a break in manoeuvres. It showed Evans eating from a mess tin, and displaying a terse grin among other smiling faces. There were several thumbs-up, but not from Evans. Cross stared at the face. The hair was fair and flat, almost a crew cut, the face not exactly simian but with something of an animal’s self-possession. It gave nothing away.

  Crabtree accompanied Cross to his car. He had shown no curiosity about Cross’s enquiry. His indifference set the seal on Cross’s growing depression. He asked the best way back to London and was directed towards Cambridge and told to take the motorway.

  The road was flatter than the one he’d taken before and off to his right Cross sensed the levels of the Fens. He turned off the main road without knowing why, beyond realizing that he didn’t have to be anywhere. His return flight wasn’t until the following night.

  ‘As flat as where I come from,’ the man had said to Molly Connors about his accent. Cross looked at the pushed-back landscape. By some trick of the eye, trees always appeared on the horizon. The only breaks in the monotony were the occasional line of pylons and the raised banks of the dykes that crisscrossed the fields.

  A red phone box by the side of the road announced itself from faraway. It stood entirely alone, surrounded by sky. Cross stopped the car and got out. The scene reminded him of his son’s drawings with ruler-straight horizons and giant skies.

  He stood feeling the wind on his face. It was stronger than it looked. In the phone box he could see phone books hanging in a row of metal binders. One had been turned over and lay open, its pages greasy with dirt.

  The directory was for the letters E to L and Cross flicked through until he found Evans. There were fewer than he was expecting for such a common name, no more than a dozen. He phoned all of them and got answers from most. By the time he was finished he’d used up most of his change. Of those he’d spoken to none had a relative named Francis Albert. There were three left.

  He bought a map at the next garage and decided to head north to Downham Market, where a Mrs D. Evans was listed in a nearby village.

  Her address belonged to a run-down housing estate: small semi-detached boxes, again like something Matthew might draw. The size of the sky above contributed to the mean air of the estate, making it look huddled and apologetic.

  Cross rang the bell and waited. There was no answer. He was about to leave when he became aware of a woman standing in the next-door front garden watching him. Cross rang again and took a step backwards and looked up at the front of the house.

  ‘She won’t answer,’ said the woman. ‘She’s there because she never goes out, but she won’t answer.’

  The woman told him to go round the back and knock on the living room window. He might get an answer then, but she doubted it. Cross looked at the woman. She was overweight and slovenly. It was hard to imagine anyone being anything else on this desperate estate.

  Cross thanked her and went round the back.

  Mrs Evans was a decrepit woman sitting in a sordid living room. She ignored his knocking and continued to sit there, looking straight through him. Cross put her at about eighty. A grimy cardigan was drawn across her thin shoulders and under that she was wearing only a flannel nightdress. The joints of her knuckles were swollen from arthritis. Her white hair was wispy and pale scalp showed through where it had fallen out. As a scene of squalor it was unremittingly bleak, and made even more skewed by the bright-red lipstick smeared around her mouth.

  Cross knocked once more and got no response. In the next-door garden laundry flapped hard like it was trying to tell him something. To judge from the wind’s rawness it was blowing in from the east, straight off the steppes.

  The neighbour was still in her front garden when Cross returned, her curiosity barely containable.

  ‘Are you DHSS?’ she asked.

  Cross took in the cracked veins and missing tooth. He told her he was from the Royal Ulster Constabulary and registered her confusion.

  ‘You’ll not get anything out of old Doris. Her memory’s gone.’

  ‘What about her husband?’

  ‘Long gone. The cancer.’

  ‘Who looks after her?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘I tidy up once a week and check each day to see she’s still alive.’

  ‘It’s Francis Evans I really want to talk to.’

  The woman looked blank and Cross thought he had made another wasted journey, when her expression changed to one of unwelcome recognition.

  ‘You mean Albie. No one called him Francis, at least not round here.’ She remembered Albie well. He’d killed her cat.

  ‘Never could prove it, mind. Babyblue eyes like butter wouldn’t melt, and always that look that said he was dead amused by something.’

  Albie had run wild as a child, she told him, and often proved unmanageable. A combination of his unruliness and his parents’ negligence led to various spells in care. Cross silently thanked the woman for her years of nosiness. In ten minutes she gave him more than anyone else to date. The weak father who drank and beat his wife and his son and dragged them all off to church on Sundays. The wife – ‘You wouldn’t want Doris for a mother even when she was all there’ – who alternated between lavishing affection on
her son and thrashing him.

  ‘And I don’t know what they got up to some nights. I’m sure he made the boy watch while he punished her.’

  ‘What did that involve?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ said the woman, this time with a bustling indignation.

  Cross spent a lonely night in a Holiday Inn, with a minibar and third-rate television for company. He drank too much, failed to make it downstairs for dinner, and feeling sorry for himself called Deidre before remembering that his going away at such short notice had sent their relationship crashing into reverse. Cross decided to make amends with the call but Deidre was snappish and irritable.

  ‘You didn’t call just now and hang up?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not. Why on earth should I?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on. It’s happened twice now.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About an hour ago. You’re not seeing anyone I don’t know about?’ she asked sharply.

  It was depressing how quickly Deidre could turn personal. He could hardly rouse himself to sound indignant.

  ‘No, I’m not seeing anyone you don’t know about, and while we’re on the subject, what about you?’

  It crossed his mind that he was actually paying for this long-distance bickering. He should just hang up, he thought, but Deidre beat him to it after getting in the last word. ‘Well, if you are,’ she said, ‘tell her to stop calling you at home.’

  He swore at Deidre down the dead line, then dialled Westerby. There was no answer.

  Westerby was still in the office on the phone to one of her former colleagues in the sex abuse unit.

  ‘You’re not allowed any brains, you’re not allowed any imagination, you’re not even allowed any bloody voice,’ she was saying when she spotted Hargreaves gesturing from the main door and told her friend she had to go. Increasingly she found excuses not to go home – mainly to avoid Martin – and contrived to be still at work several hours into the next shift.

  Because they were short staffed, Westerby found herself driving Hargreaves to one of the city’s richer suburbs, a leafy area of wide roads and tranquil houses in spacious gardens. A shooting had occurred there. What made the crime immediately extraordinary was that such areas were usually immune.

  The body of a middle-aged woman in a floral print dress lay across the threshold of the front door. It was shielded by screens from the crowd of gawpers gathered on the pavement, children with their bikes mainly. Westerby looked round at the organized chaos of the emergency services at work on what should have been a tranquil evening. She took in the neat detached house with its manicured lawn and separate garage, and the last of the sun dipping behind the trees.

  ‘Get some sense out of the husband,’ Hargreaves said and told her that he was a local councillor with a high profile. Westerby thought the name sounded familiar.

  She found him sitting on his own in a large, well-appointed kitchen-diner. Absurdly, the television was still on, playing unwatched in the corner. He looked up as she entered.

  ‘Councillor Eddoes?’

  ‘I asked to be alone,’ he said.

  He was a big man with deep grooves down the side of his face and large hands. Even in his grief there was something calculating about him.

  ‘I know, sir, but we need a statement,’ she said in her best concerned voice.

  Eddoes was suddenly on his feet and shouting. ‘There’s no statement to be made. It’s quite clear who the fuckers are, but they didn’t have the guts to come in and get me, so they gunned down Betty instead.’

  He staggered as if punched at the mention of her name.

  ‘Can you tell us who they are, sir?’

  Eddoes felt his heart, like a bad actor trying to register shock.

  ‘It’s those INLA fuckers.’

  Westerby made them both a cup of tea, then coaxed the details out of him.

  ‘I heard the shots and ran out,’ Eddoes said. ‘The door was open and poor Betty was as you found her.’

  He held his head in his hands. A policeman walked in whistling and Westerby urgently motioned to him to get out.

  ‘I ran outside,’ continued Eddoes, ‘as the car was pulling away. I didn’t get the number. It was a family saloon, light blue. A Cortina, perhaps.’

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  Eddoes gestured helplessly. ‘I was more concerned about the state of my wife.’

  The killing had all the hallmarks of sectarian murder. Eddoes himself was in no doubt that it was the INLA.

  ‘Filth, unchristian filth, that’s what they are. Unloading their muck on to the Protestant streets of Belfast because they can’t win their fight any other way. You do know about the theft of drugs from the hospital?’

  This was the theft that Cross had told her about.

  ‘Mark my words, that stuff will be on the streets and where will it be sold? Not in the Falls Road and not in Andersonstown, you can bet your bottom dollar. Probably not even in the Shankill. They’re after the respectable children of hard-working, God-fearing Protestants. Areas like this! They’re taking the fight to the middle classes, not with guns but through the corruption of children.’

  Eddoes’ hectoring sermon was more appropriate to an assembly hall than his kitchen. Westerby wondered whether he was rehearsing the speech for the television cameras that would inevitably come. She was surprised they were not there already.

  By the time she left, everything had been tidied away and restored to its former neatness. Apart from a few spots where the lawn had been trampled on, a fine spray of dried blood on the wall by the front door and a stain on the carpet, there was nothing to show that anything had ever happened.

  Cross flew back to Belfast late the next day and arrived home to find Deidre tense and argumentative. His own mood had not been improved by wasting twenty minutes trying to get through to her after landing and finding the number permanently engaged.

  She had left the phone off the hook, she told him, because the ringing and hanging up had been carrying on. Cross said he would get the number changed and they had a row about that. Changing the number was not convenient for Deidre.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of someone calling up like that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s probably some pervert who’ll get bored after a day or so.’

  ‘Well, I’ll answer the phone when I’m here. That might put him off.’

  ‘I’m quite capable of answering the phone,’ snapped Deidre.

  ‘What, in case he calls?’ He knew he sounded pathetic.

  When the phone rang they both looked at it like it was a charged object about to explode.

  ‘After you,’ said Deidre with heavy sarcasm.

  ‘Why are we being like this?’ Cross asked wearily.

  ‘Are you going to answer the phone or not?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’

  ‘JUST ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE!’

  Cross lifted the receiver and heard only silence.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  There was a soft laugh. ‘We’re coming to fix you, cunt!’ a voice with a West Belfast accent whispered.

  He didn’t tell Deidre what the man had said.

  Because of work it was impossible to disconnect the telephone in case the barracks needed him, so he took the bedside phone into the spare room without further explanation to Deidre and slept there for the first time since his return from hospital. He also put his father-in-law’s old revolver beside the bed.

  The phone rang once more, some time in the night.

  ‘We’re on our way, cunt.’

  After that he lay awake in tense anticipation. Finally, after it was light, he drifted off uneasily only to be woken by the phone ringing again. He was still half-lost in some dream – the waking part of him was making a mental note to remember to change the number – as he reached groggily for the phone. As he picked up the receiver he realized that it was the front door that was ringing.

  ‘Dear Go
d, no,’ he said aloud, suddenly fully alert and grabbing the heavy revolver.

  He heard Deidre in the hall, calling out, ‘Coming!’

  ‘No!’ Cross shouted. He was about to shout again when he trod painfully on something. Christ, he thought, was the difference between life and death going to be a piece of Matthew’s Lego left lying on the landing? There was still the turn in the stairs before the hall came into view. Time seemed to stretch like melting plastic.

  ‘Don’t answer the fucking door!’

  He threw himself round the corner to see Deidre opening the door, looking for all the world as though she had not heard.

  Cross yelled again and she turned and looked at him. He was aware of the children in the hall too, staring at him goggle-eyed.

  ‘What’s the matter with Daddy?’ asked Fiona.

  ‘Why’s he got a gun?’ Matthew’s voice was excited.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Deidre, taking a packet from a puzzled-looking postman.

  ‘Are you all right in there, now?’ asked the postman uncertainly.

  ‘It’s just my husband having a nervous breakdown,’ answered Deidre with a breezy smile.

  Truer than you know, thought Cross as he collapsed on the stairs, a naked man caught between weeping and laughter.

  ‘I thought the door was—’ The sentence was never finished. Weak laughter replaced it.

  ‘Why’s Daddy not wearing pyjamas?’ Fiona asked.

  Cross cackled like an idiot, his helplessness increasing in proportion to Deidre’s lack of amusement. It was funny. They were still alive, when thirty seconds earlier he would have bet the last remaining moments of his life on the fact that they were all about to die.

  ‘Matthew, Fiona, back and finish your breakfast now.’ Deidre clapped her hands to hurry them along.

  ‘Hoopla!’ said Cross, clapping his hands too, and giggling. ‘They’re not fucking circus animals,’ he muttered.

  ‘Stop making a spectacle of yourself in front of the children,’ snapped Deidre.

  The tears started without warning.

  ‘Jesus, I thought—’ Again the sentence was left unfinished as racking sobs took over his body.