The Trunk Murderer

It was nearly three weeks after the funeral before I could bear to go through Chrissie’s things.

She didn’t have much: her clothes, a few books and CDs, some odds and ends of jewellery, the tattooing equipment that we used in our shop (that was something else I’d have to deal with: I’d not opened the business since she’d passed away) and a big metal trunk that she kept under the bed in her cottage. For someone who’d been alive for almost fifty years, my best friend hadn’t left much behind at all.

I picked up one of her chunky silver rings from the dresser and slipped it onto my thumb. It fitted perfectly, and wearing it made me feel as if a part of her was there with me. I smiled sadly and opened the trunk, stirring up a thick cloud of dust in the process.

It was an antique, with an illegible name written in worn yellow paint, and the words Not Wanted On Voyage stencilled across the top. I laughed out loud at that; perhaps the stress of the past few weeks had finally got to me, but you had to see the funny side; Chrissie hadn’t needed her trunk on her final journey.

Inside were a few old journals, some of her designs and sketchbooks, packets of old photographs – the ephemera of her life. There was her birth certificate (Christina Anne Maslen-Ward, born 22nd October 1962 in Wiltshire, England), and a marriage certificate…I hadn’t known until recently that Chrissie had ever had a husband, and I’d wondered at the time if what I’d heard at the funeral had even been true.

I rummaged a bit deeper in the trunk, and pulled out a padded envelope that had been tucked carefully down one side. ‘To Esmeralda Brennan’, it read on the front. Nobody, not even my own mother, calls me Esmeralda any more, but I opened it and inside was a sheaf of lilac notepaper covered in Chrissie’s spidery writing. I was puzzled by the letter so I sat on her bed and started to read.

‘Dearest Esme,’ it began. ‘You’ve been like a daughter to me since I came to Ireland, and we both know that I don’t have long left. There’s something that I must tell you before it’s too late and I can’t go to the Garda; I’m not up to it, not now. Esme, I killed somebody…’

My brain went into freefall: there was no way that Chrissie was a murderer. Chrissie, who’d taken me under her wing when she’d arrived in Dublin ten years previously, and taught me everything I knew about the tattooing trade? Chrissie who lived alone quietly with her two cats, her only bad habits drinking lethally strong espressos and a bit too much Jack Daniels? I skimmed the next few lines and got the gist that this had all happened in the early 1980s. Dear God in Heaven, I’d hardly been born back then.

‘There were four of us living in a squat in Battersea, by the railway line – me, Bill and another couple who were friends of his: Steve and Helen. I suppose now you’d call all four of us junkies, but although Steve and Helen were smack-heads who were always nodding out all over the place, Bill and I were strictly speed freaks. We took the moral high ground; despite climbing on the needle almost as often, we were better than them. We were drug snobs, see?

‘Sorry, I’m rambling. We were living in the squat – an old derelict two-up, two-down terraced house by the railway line and opposite the metalworks; in the summer it was as hot as hell and twice as noisy. The council had condemned the houses and shipped the inhabitants off to live on an estate somewhere; ours was the only house occupied in the little square. We nicknamed it Trumpton; don’t ask me why, the things you think of when you’re young, eh?

‘It wasn’t too bad, all things considered. The water was still turned on, and although there was no electricity we managed alright with candles and the occasional fire in the hearth. The council had put big metal shutters over the door and the windows, but Steve was a burglar because of his habit and he’d taken them off in no time. We’d kitted it out as best we could, and there was an old sofa and a mattress that we’d managed to liberate from a skip. We’d even pinned up a blanket in front of one of the windows as a makeshift curtain.

‘I’d married Bill when I was nineteen; it’s a long story and not one that I’ll bore you with now. He was from Newcastle – a proper Geordie. We never had any money, which is how we ended up that autumn of ’83 living in the squat in Trumpton; he never had a job, but no-one I knew back then did, it was the height of Thatcher’s Britain with three million of us out of work. We were all on the dole; sometimes we would beg, or go busking outside one of the railway stations to get a few quid for food and drugs. And beer: Bill was a big drinker, and the booze was partly to blame for what I did to him.

‘It was a week before my twenty-first birthday when it happened. We’d all been up half the night as usual. The junkies had been shooting up and then nodding out on the mouldy old sofa, and Bill and I drinking cheap wine and speeding into the small hours. He’d run out of fags, which always put him in a bad mood, and he asked me to go and get him some more from the all-night garage on the main road.

‘I blew up and told him to go and buy his own sodding fags; it wasn’t my problem that he’d spent all his dole on drink. Suddenly he went for me, grabbed me around the neck and he was yelling at me and so angry there was spit flying out his mouth. I really thought I was going to die when he started shaking and punching me. Steve dragged himself out of his semi-comatose state and managed to pull Bill off me, but skinny little Steve was no match for Bill, and he kicked him into the corner of the room like a dog. I was more scared than I’d ever been before or since: of course we’d had fights before, and I’d started my fair share of them, but nothing like this.

‘I snatched up an empty bottle from the table and hit Bill on the side of the head with it before he could attack me again. It made a noise, a dreadful wet thud like someone dropping a watermelon. Bill half-turned and looked at me with such a ghastly look of utter shock on his face that straight away I felt terrible for what I’d done, and dropped the bottle on the floor.

‘Then he crumpled at the knees ever so slightly – and I swear to you, Esme, that this happened in slow motion – he fell down to the floor in a heap just where he stood. Steve was still winded and bent over in the corner and Bill was there at my feet, not moving. I saw that there was blood coming out of his ear.

‘Helen hadn’t moved from the sofa all this time. She’d put one grubby fat hand over her mouth and had whispered, ‘Oh, no, no,’ over and over again, but she was so wasted I didn’t know how much she’d taken in. Steve and I looked at each other; his eyes were like black holes in his pasty face, like cigarette burns in a white sheet.

‘I forced myself to look at Bill; he could almost have been asleep if it wasn’t for the trickle of blood that had run down his face and soaked into his hair. I knelt down and searched for a pulse; I tried a few different places and couldn’t feel anything apart from my own heartbeat hammering away. My mouth had gone dry; I tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come out.

‘Steve broke the silence in the end. “You’ve only gone and fucking killed him!” he screamed at me. “You mad bitch, you’ve fucking well killed him!”

‘I flinched, but I knew he was right and I started to panic: should I phone an ambulance? No, I couldn’t do that, they’d call the police and even if they believed it was self-defence there were all the drugs lying about the place; it wouldn’t have looked good.

‘So they came up with some sort of plan and cleared out, taking all their gear with them, and left me to deal with the situation. Never trust a junkie, Esme…I was a wreck, a zombie; I couldn’t cope with being on my own and Bill lying dead on the floor. I quickly packed a few things in a carrier bag – a change of clothes, my purse, the last of the speed. Then I left too; I walked through south London on a rainy autumn night with no idea where I was going.

‘I sat on Clapham Common for a couple of hours, sobbing, shaking, terrified and agonising over what I should do: I desperately wanted to phone for help, but that would have meant the authorities asking all sorts of questions. Finally at about six in the morning the guilt got too much and I made a decision and to hell with the consequences: I found a phone box, dialled 999 and gave the details of the house. I hung up when they asked for my name.

‘I felt a bit better once I knew that the ambulance would find Bill, and that he wouldn’t be lying there dead for days before someone else discovered him. Then I walked a bit more and at dawn I finally hitched a ride in a fishmeal lorry to Bristol.

‘You know most of the rest. I cleaned up, and got a place at art college. After that I went travelling, and met Johan in the ‘Dam who got me into the tattooing business. We split up and then I came to Dublin and opened the shop and met you, and now I’m forty-eight and dying of breast cancer. I’m sorry Esme, I hope you understand that I just wanted to put the record straight and tell the truth before it’s too late?’

Chrissie had written several pages more but I can’t read them because I’m crying too much. I get up from the bed and look out of the window at Dalymount Park in the spring sunshine, and I wipe my eyes with my sleeve. I can only wonder what she went through; living her life every day knowing that she’d killed a man. I wish she’d said something before: someone might have been able to help.

Because the thing is, I’d met Bill at the funeral.

A stooped, hollow-cheeked and greying man with a Geordie accent, he looked nearly seventy but was in fact only fifty-two. He told me this and plenty more besides over endless cups of tea and little plates of sandwiches at her wake.

He told me how she’d been the love of his life when they married thirty years before. How they’d had a stupid, vicious, drunken fight one night and she’d run away. How he’d finally got his act together last year and quit drinking. How he’d tried to track her down to make amends like his AA sponsor said he should. How he’d found our shop from searching for her name on the Internet.

He’d written his email address on a scrap of paper and begged me to keep in touch.

I stare out the window some more and wonder what I should do.