This was supposed to have been an unremarkable death

Preludes to Nothing

This was supposed to have been an unremarkable death. The funeral parlours see them every day, one after the other, like a procession. Good people for sure, most of them, and well-loved, some of them. But ordinary people all of them. People who never invented anything and who never wrote a book and who never got on TV or climbed a rock or flew a plane or made a fortune or robbed a bank or saved some kid from drowning or killed a man. People, in short, who didn’t get reporters like me turning up to their funerals.

But aha. You see, that’s the thing. This man—and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past seven days, I think you know who I’m talking about—had indeed killed someone. True, not a man, as it turns out; it was a woman. But he “had” killed someone. It’s just that he’d never told anybody. Until, that is, about a week ago. When finally, he did. The big brave deathbed confession thing.  And to a priest, no less. 

Well, as you probably know by now, the priest, God bless him, went straight to the media. And then all hell broke loose. And by all hell, I mean media hell.  Suddenly, this bloke “was” on TV. And he still is, too. Even though he’s now done, dead and dusted, nasty piece of work he’s proved to be.

(His funeral was today, I might as well mention. And it’s been the experience of having been there, standing off slightly as I always do at these things, which has prompted me to quickly get my real thoughts about all this down onto paper to clear my head before I pull my sleeves up and get cracking on the version of what I’m writing here that my editor wants to see. Which yep, true, I need to patch through to him five minutes ago.)

All right then. Let’s have the bare facts. Close enough to forty years ago, this murder this bloke done, if I can put it like that, stopped the nation. And it held us in its grip for years afterwards. Truth be told, it never did let us go. And now here we are again, with all the old wounds once again ripped open. Walk past any news stand or TV screen right now and there she is. The image, the girl, the one and the other by now one and the same thing for most of us, the girl-next-door who never got old, the girl who never even got out of the Eighties, sitting there as she is still on that same clinker brick fence in front of that same clinker brick house in the fashion of her day: the stone-washed overalls, the oversized WHAM! top and an improbable sweeping hairdo that’s probably more George Michael than Princess Di.

And he did do it, too. This murder. It took no more than a day before the detectives and the forensic people and God knows who else, and we the media too, of course, had confirmed that his confession was genuine. For twenty-four hours we were all breaking news in real time. It was the perfect media event: the cold case that just got hot. And it hasn’t let up one little bit since. I don’t mind saying: I’m shattered. I’ve had next to no sleep in a week and when I have got an hour here and there, it’s been on the floor under my desk, or in my car. That’s how it gets in my line of work. That’s how it gets in lots of lines of work.

But here’s the thing. Do you know what’s been bugging me most about this case? Well, no, of course you don’t. My apologies, I told you: no sleep. But it’s this. OK, so the bloke confessed. Good, I suppose, even if that’s not likely to bring the poor girl back to life any time soon. But the problem is that the bloke’s confession is not what the media storm this past week has been about. And it hasn’t even been about the girl, may she rest in peace and my thoughts to the family. All this really does break my heart and one day I’m gonna get out of this game, soon as I can. But no, it’s not been about any of that. It’s been about this: right up until he died a couple of days ago, he refused to tell anybody where her body is. He took that information with him to the grave.

Why?!

I did speak to that priest of course, on the day of the deathbed confession. I speak to everyone, in cases like this. I’m good at what I do. And with that complacent serenity these sorts of blokes cloak themselves in, the priest did assure me that the confession had been all to do with a man about to meet his maker and the whole getting rid of the burden of guilt thing. But if so, why not tell us where the body is?

And to that question, right now I have no answer. The best I can come up with in my half-drunk-through-lack-of-sleep state is that the man was evil. But then, if he was evil, why did he confess at all?

I’m sorry Diary, but that’s all I’ve got right now. My brain is fried. Perfect time I think to get cracking on the piece I’ve gotta get across to the editor, so he can feed the chooks.