Free Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

not for several weeks, and when school started again they both avoided each other. That year Raymond went around with an older boy called Derek Forbes. Billy took up judo.
    He dreamt about Raymond, though. All the time.

13
    On first arriving in the mortuary, Billy had had the impression of an orderly, efficient space, but the longer he spent in the room, the more damage and neglect he noticed. The shell-shaped doors were set in a plain wooden frame that was badly scarred, especially at a point about three feet off the floor. The doors themselves were marked as well: there were dozens of little dents, all in a cluster, and all roughly the same diameter. There were similar marks on the fridge doors, and at a similar height. He thought he knew why, and a brief inspection of the trolley at the far end of the room confirmed his suspicions. Its leading edge and sharp corners lined up perfectly with most of the marks and dents. Clearly the porters were none too careful when it came to wheeling bodies about. The work wouldn’t exactly be well paid, of course, but that was only part of the story. If you had a job in a hospital, you couldn’t allow yourself to be disturbed by all the illness and disease surrounding you. You had to go to the other extreme, affecting indifference at the very least, and, from the outside, that could look insensitive or even callous. Similar strategies came into play if you worked for the police. Walking back to the entrance, Billy touched the dents in one of the doors. Maybe, after all, he had something in common with that surly young porter. He still felt like thumping him, though.
    He moved to his left, passing shelves of neatly folded shrouds. In the gap between the main bank of fridges and a fridge marked police bodies he found a mop, a bucket, two rolls of pale-blue paper towels and a yellow-plastic pyramid that said wet floor. There were also a couple of empty card-board boxes, one of which had the words return to mortuary scrawled across it. Here too there was evidence of carelessness or haste. All the various items had been piled on top of each other, higgledy-piggledy, and Billy imagined, for a moment, that his neighbours, the Gibsons, had been involved somehow. Their back patio was always a jumble of toys, most of them broken. In the garden a swing lay on its side, grass growing over it; the sandpit was half-full of rain-water, and green with mould. The Gibson family: they weren’t actually criminal, but they didn’t seem to know how to clear up after themselves, and they never showed any respect for anything—and then they went and got their knickers in a twist about a wind-chime…
    Rounding a pillar, Billy found himself facing the fridge where the woman’s body was being kept. At some subconscious level, perhaps, this had been his intended destination all along. Now that he had arrived, though, he didn’t know why he was there, or what it was that he wanted to do. At last, he reached out and tested the handle, just as the sergeant had done a few hours earlier. It was still locked, of course. How could it not be? All the same, a flicker of disappointment went through him.
She looked old. Older than sixty.
Was he becoming morbid, voyeuristic, or was it his own sense of dislocation that he was grappling with? Ever since he had been left by himself in the mortuary, he had felt a little as if he were guarding a phantom, or the figment of someone’s imagination. He didn’t quite believe she was there. Perhaps he needed something that would anchor him in the experience, make it tangible. But wasn’t that exactly what all those journalists outside were saying? In the end, he didn’t think his urge to look in the fridge would bear too much examination.
Do your job,
he told himself.
Just do your job.
With the murderer’s head behind that sheet of metal, only inches from his knuckles…He remained motionless for several seconds, and then stepped back, the cold shape of the door-handle