Baildon Moor - Chapter 13

Chapter 13

West Bowling, October 1993 (Wednesday)

On Wednesday morning, Sullivan is still snoring like a bandsaw when I wake up. Billy on the other hand is bolt upright and wide awake in the living room. The TV is turned on with the sound muted; he’s staring at the screen but isn’t watching it; instead he has a glazed and faraway expression.

‘Hey – are you alright?’ I ask and he jumps as if he’s been shot.

‘Y-y-yeah,’ he says, but it’s clear that he isn’t. He is pale and pinched and still has that haunted look from yesterday.

I make some tea and offer him a cup; he ignores it and keeps on staring into the middle distance.

‘Breakfast?’ I ask. He doesn’t reply.

I sit on the sofa next to him. ‘What’s the matter?’

Billy replies but continues to stare at an indefinite point in the distance. ‘Rudy’s come back; he’s going to kill me because of what you did to him. It’s all my fault and he’ll tell the police what really happened, and we’ll all end up in prison.’

‘Rudy won’t go to the police, think about what we found in his room.’ My voice sounds a lot calmer than I really feel: Billy has a point. If Rudy really is alive we are all in major trouble. I reassure myself that he can’t be – Sullivan and I buried him; my back and arms still ache from the effort.

‘He’ll say the case is mine,’ Billy continues. ‘After all, we’ve got all the money, haven’t we? I shouldn’t have taken it.’ He begins to cry – huge, pitiful racking great sobs. ‘I thought…I thought that I was helping you and Sullivan by taking it, I know you’re skint and I wanted to give some to mum as well, wanted to make everything better after what Rudy did…but I’ve really screwed up, haven’t I?’

‘Rudy is dead, Billy.’ I repeat it like a mantra. ‘And nobody is going to prison, alright?’

‘I got nightmares,’ he says. ‘Every time I shut my eyes I could see Rudy and he blames me. I’m going to see him in town again or he’ll come back to the house or something and he’ll come after me. Julianne, what am I going to do?’

Sullivan gets up and grunts his way to the bathroom. He barely speaks to either of us as he walks though the living room. Experience tells me he’s badly hung over.

‘I’m going to work,’ he says once he’s taken a shower. ‘See you later.’

The front door slams as he leaves.

The next few days drag by: on Thursday I go back to work and leave Billy on the sofa; once more he hardly moves from his place in front of the television all day. Sullivan is late home again that night without offering an explanation of why or where he’d been. I’m worried - his recent behaviour is so out of character – gigs and band rehearsals aside, we normally live in each other’s pockets.

I barely function at the studio and feel as though my limbs and brain are filled with treacle. I jump every time a customer comes through the door – I fully expect them to be the police, come to arrest me and by lunchtime I’m pale, brittle and shattered from exhaustion.

‘Are yer sure yer alright, love?’ asks Gary, the studio manager. ‘You’ll scare the customers away, looking like that.’

‘Yeah,’ I say and go and tidy up some designs in the back room and somehow I make it through the rest of the day until half past six when I can escape to the relative safety of the flat.

Billy is still there, curled up foetally on the sofa when I return. It’s dark and the lights in the flat are off. There’s no point in me asking whether Sullivan has come home.

‘Have you been to college today?’ I ask

He shrugs.

‘Billy love, you’ve got to get on, go back to classes, and move on. How about Marie? Have you spoken to her?’

He shrugs again.

‘S’pose I’d better, hadn’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, I’ll go home tomorrow, and give her call.’

‘Good idea. What do you want for dinner?’ I figure that I might as well cook for Billy as his brother.

We run through the now-familiar routine again: Sullivan comes home late and drunk after Billy and I have gone to bed. Billy is up early the next morning and I give him a lift back to Baildon. It’s now five days since we buried Rudy and I allow myself to think for the first time – and just for a moment - that we might just have got away with what happened.

‘Are you going to report him missing?’ I ask Billy on the drive home.

‘Yeah.’ He rubs his eyes. ‘You really think that I made a mistake when I saw Rudy?’

‘Yes you did, I know you did.’

‘Maybe he just went visiting,’ Billy says dreamily. ‘Maybe he went to see friends and didn’t let me know.’

I don’t know what he means but decide if that’s what he wants to believe I‘d might as well go along with it.

‘Who knows? You said he was a law unto himself, going off for days at a time.’

‘Hmmmm.’

I drop Billy back at the farmhouse and this time I put on my bravest face and force myself to go in. The farmhouse is just as we left it: overflowing ashtrays, dirty mugs and glasses, the empty whisky bottle on the kitchen table. It doesn’t look like a murder scene.