Michael Hartford

You’d think a sensible police officer would have got used to occurrences like these, trying though they were, but, if anything, the opposite was true: they seemed to affect him more as time went by, the way an allergy might, so much so that he began to wonder whether they might not actually kill him in the end.

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

In the middle of his life, Billy Taylor, an unambitious Manchester police officer, finds himself in a dark wood. And there to lead him on a spiraling journey into his private hell is the corpse of a notorious child killer.

Billy has pulled an overnight assignment to guard the body of the most hated woman in Britain in a provincial hospital. Thirty years ago, when Billy was himself a child, this woman–never named, but clearly based on Myra Hindley–had, with her lover, tortured and murdered five children in Manchester. Having died in prison of natural causes, she waits in a morgue vault for an unmarked grave. Billy’s job is to sit in the morgue, log anyone who comes in, do a little paperwork, and make sure the corpse in handed off to its next protector.

The work he really does, though, is disinterment. Over the course of his twelve-hour shift, he digs through his strained relationship with his wife and daughter with Down’s Syndrome; his abandonment by his own father and his father-in-law; a dark episode with a girlfriend’s abusive father; and a strange, disturbing friendship from his youth. He also meets the murderer’s ghost in mutual interrogations, and is haunted by the memory of a childhood friend who may have been the woman’s first and last victim. Billy emerges from this journey into hell wiser if not quite healed, and at last finds a sort of heaven with a most unlikely Beatrice.

“Death of a Murderer” is a meditation on violence and fatherhood. Billy examines his own ambivalence toward and love for Emma, his disabled daughter, against a backdrop of abandonment and abuse. Good fathers are scarce indeed in this novel; in spite of his admissions of imperfection, Billy is by far the most admirable father to be found. And though he unearths episodes of violence in his past. They are nothing compared to the cruelty of his father-in-law, the abuse and manipulation of his lover Venetia’s father, and the thoughtless bullying of his friend Raymond. Being good, Billy imagines, is a treacherous balancing act along a precipice; it is the easiest thing in the world to tumble into violence, even the kind of extreme violence of the murderer at the novel’s heart.

Rupert Thomson’s writing in “Death of a Murderer” is tight and unobtrusive, deftly handling the frequent shifts of time and place. The changes are handled subtly, folding into each other as in a dream. The scenes with the woman’s ghost–she seems conjured up from Billy’s own mind, though she knows more about him than he claims to know himself–are presented with just the right mix of the concrete and the fantastic, so that they don’t clash with the otherwise naturalistic world of the novel.