The carpet is worn and the floorboards beneath it groan. There are three bedrooms, one messy, one tidy and one completely empty — not a single piece of furniture or poster on the wall. Of the two in use, the tidy one is tidy only in comparison to the messy one, and the way things are all slightly out of whack in there suggests the police have been rummaging around looking for something and one of the Aldermans has rummaged around putting things back. I figure whatever evidence Bruce had hidden under his bed is now sitting on a desk somewhere in the police station.
The kitchen is swamped with dirty dishes and empty beer cans. In the lounge there are bottles and cans on every available horizontal plane. Sidney Alderman had a hard night. The arms of the lounge suite have been ripped up at the front, suggesting the presence of a cat, but there is no food bowl around, so maybe it got sick of the living arrangements and moved out. I’m surprised, though, to see photo albums scattered across a coffee table — Alderman didn’t seem the type to get hung up on family moments.
I pull on a pair of latex gloves before opening the cover on the top one. Colour photographs of happier times are arranged neatly in the pages. A man, a woman, a child. The Alderman nuclear family. They all look happy. Smiles, relaxed candid moments, posed photos for birthdays and Christmas. Sidney Alderman is a different man here, the type of man who back then was mostly likeable.
I keep going. I already have a feeling about what is coming up. The man and woman and child start to get older. They grow.
They still look happy. I recognise the house in the background of some of these shots. Summer photos. Winter photos. Snapshots from school plays and school sports. I move from one album to another. The house is neat and tidy and looks welcoming. It looks well maintained. Fresh paint, clean windows, no broken
roof tiles.
Fashions change. The eighties become the nineties. Some of the furniture is updated. The carpet in one photo is that awful orange and brown Axminster stuff from the late sixties, and becomes that awful flecked pale green stuff from the early eighties. The TV is updated. A cat appears in some of the pictures, a black thing with a swath of white fur around its neck.
The parents get older, and the kid gets taller and starts taking on the features of the man I met and saw die yesterday. Sidney Alderman looks like a happy man. Looks happy in the holiday photographs. Beaches and boats and fishing lines. Ugly shirts and bad haircuts and boxy-looking cars with poor petrol consumption.
The house stays the same. The smiles stay the same. On to the next photo album. More holiday snaps.
Then Alderman’s wife is no longer around. The smiles are forced and thin, and the gaps in time between photos start to extend. No more holidays. No more happy moments. Just forced moments. Like birthdays and Christmases that nobody wants to be at. The wife doesn’t come back, and the decaying state of the house in the photographs suggests she isn’t going to. The years pass with only a few moments caught on film but nothing heartwarming — the participants are going through the motions, they’re drawing on the memories of how these events ought to be, drawing on them so they can remember how to smile. At the back of the photo album is a collection of newspaper clippings.
My cellphone rings and breaks my focus. It’s another number I don’t recognise. I answer it, but nobody speaks back. I don’t say anything either. There’s a slight hissing sound that every cellphone in the country must get, the kind of hissing that can never fool you into thinking you’re talking on a landline.
Then, after ten or twenty seconds, a voice comes on the line.
‘You took away my son.’ The words are slow and solid, as if each is its own sentence, as if he’s struggling to say them and has to concentrate really hard. ‘You took away my son,’ he repeats when I don’t answer him.
I look down at the albums and the empty booze bottles.
Alderman found out last night that his son was dead. There’s no way in the world the police decided not to inform him immediately.
No way they figured it was the sort of thing they could put off until they swung by this morning to take him to the morgue. It’s got to be why these photo albums are out. I remember doing the same thing, and even now I sometimes still do it. I wonder if over the last few hours he’s come to the conclusion that I’m to blame for everything — for his wife leaving him, for his house wearing down, for his son killing himself, and for his son burying others.
“I wanted to help him. I didn’t want him dead. But I didn’t kill him. He killed himself. That was his choice and I had nothing to do with it.’
‘You killed him.’
“I didn’t kill him.’
‘You killed him because you’re a killer. It’s in your nature. You said last night you were going to find him. You said if I helped you, you’d go easier on him, but I didn’t help you so you went hard. You went as hard on him as you could.’
‘He killed himself out of guilt. You knew what he was doing.’
“He wasn’t doing anything.’
‘How many are out there?’ I ask.
‘You killed him.’
“How many others? Is it just the four?’
‘The police are lying to protect you, just like they protected you two years ago, just like the reporter said.’
‘You don’t even know what you’re talking about.’