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FIFTY-NINE
Des Banister’s life ended at six-thirty in the evening, exactly three hours after Channel 1 interrupted Yogi Bear to announce that Matty had been found guilty of the Shadow murders. It would take us another twenty-four hours to discover our neighbour had shuffled off this mortal coil. We never found out why.
Shortly after Matty’s arrest, he’d returned home from wherever he’d been holed-up. I came downstairs as he was unloading his van; black bin bags that gave off a yellow smell of cauliflower cheese. His clothes were filthy, his army boots and trousers caked in mud.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked.
I hadn’t laid eyes on him since the ‘fries in the puddle’ incident.
He just mumbled, ‘Away,’ and kept on walking.
It was the last time I ever spoke to him. I’d hear him clunking about downstairs late at night and his godawful rock music drifting up through the floorboards. But I didn’t hear his van pulling up in the early hours any more, or the pipes chugging as he drew a bath.
I got up one night, needing the toilet. As I sat there, a movement in the window caught my eye. A black shape shifting in the dark garden.
A burglar? Someone trying to break in?
My whole body tensed. I was both hot and cold at once. I wanted to call my mother, but I was turned to stone, couldn’t speak.
The shape moved, a figure looking up. Before I could duck, I saw its face, Des Banister’s white skin seeming to glow in the moonlight. He hadn’t seen me though. The light was off, the slats were down.
He turned back to what he was doing; something with a shovel. Digging, patting the earth flat.
I watched him wipe his hands down the side of his trousers, pick up a can of beer from the ground and raise it to the sky as if he were toasting it. The following day, I went out there, curious as to what he’d been up to.
I figured he must have been burying something, but there was no sign of disturbed earth and I couldn’t be sure where exactly I’d seen him. Oh well . . . I turned to go back inside.
As I reached the back door, I sensed him watching me. A face in the window that quickly disappeared. The next time I saw him, he was dead.
Bailey had been whimpering non-stop. Des’ van was parked outside, but there were none of the usual noises to suggest he was home. Matty had just been found guilty, I had other things on my mind, but as the animal’s whining got louder and more persistent, I started to worry. Not about Des, about his dog.
Reluctant to speak to him if I could avoid it, I lifted the letter-box flap and peered in rather than ringing the bell.
I’m not sure what I expected to see, only that what I saw wasn’t what I was expecting.
‘People see what they want to see, not what’s really there,’ Matty told me once. ‘It’s called Motivated Perception.’ Something I expect he relied on a lot.
I don’t know what motivated me that day, only that I saw Des’ feet poking out from behind a wall, Bailey standing over him. And as my eyes adjusted to the light, blood on Des’ white socks. A red rose blossoming in the snow.
I saw, but I didn’t want to see. My brain refused to catch on.
‘Des,’ I called through the flap. ‘It’s Sophie.’
Bailey raised his head, and then lowered it again.
‘Did you hurt yourself, Des? Des?’
My chest was tight, I couldn’t take in enough air. The edges were closing in. I knew what had happened in the way a lion knows it’s time to leave the pride, and yet I couldn’t acknowledge it to myself. Wasn’t ready to make it real.
‘Let me in, Des. I know I was rude to you before. I didn’t mean it.’
Des obviously felt remorseful about something too. When the ambulance men came, they found a note next to his body written in the same block capitals he’d used on the newspaper clipping. Two words: I’M SORRY.
To this day, I don’t know why he took his life or what he was apologising for. He suffered from depression apparently, blamed himself for his mother’s death and for a road accident involving a child when he was in his teens.
His cryptic note could have been about either of those things. Or it could have been about something else altogether. Framing Matty, as conspiracy theorists have suggested. The Shadow murders. Having urges he couldn’t control.
We’ll never know for sure, not least because he hadn’t addressed the message to anyone.
That night, I finally cried. For myself, for Matty, and for all the sorrys I couldn’t say.
