The Evil Within

DEATH OF A MURDERER

By Rupert Thomson

Knopf. 226 pp. $23

Though less well-known in the United States, the title character of Rupert Thomson's eighth novel will be familiar to anybody in Great Britain, particularly those alive in the 1960s. The murderer, Myra Hindley, has achieved iconic significance in the psyche of all Britons. Her story has inspired films, books and a smattering of punk songs. The details of her crimes are so infamous in Britain that Thomson doesn't even name her directly, in part because he doesn't need to and in part to achieve a far more haunting and universal effect: Her name has become somehow unspeakable.

She is "the woman" or "that woman." Her crimes come to us as matter-of-fact summary: "Children had been savagely abused in front of her by her own boyfriend, and she had gone along with it; she had even, possibly, tortured one of them herself." She and her lover, "the psychopath from Glasgow," buried their victims in the moors west of Manchester.

The novel's setup is simple enough: After 36 years of incarceration, the murderer dies of natural causes in prison. Her body lies in the mortuary of a local hospital, locked away inside a steel drawer, awaiting cremation. For a 12-hour night shift, Billy Tyler, career beat cop, is given the job of guarding the body. It's standard procedure, but in this case the task is complicated by fears of trophy seekers, hovering reporters and the hatred and fascination of a public that can neither forgive nor forget.

Billy's own wife pleads with him not to go, stating in plain language the novel's central thematic conflict: "What she did . . . it's not healthy to be close to something like that." That "something" is little short of pure evil. For Billy's wife, the killer is a monster and a presence -- dead or alive -- that can "rub off on you." But Billy is not superstitious, not the kind to shirk duty or deny a superior, even if he must deny his own wife. Their marriage is already pushed almost to the breaking point by Billy's lack of ambition, his wife's lost dreams, infidelity and the strain of raising an 8-year-old child with Down syndrome. When his wife text-messages him, Billy turns off the phone and keeps his head in the job. When she appears at the hospital to deliver charms to protect him from "the soaking up of some dark influence," he is merely annoyed.

Yet Billy harbors his own dark fascination, born of connections to the killer both actual and psychological. A childhood friend once claimed to have been abducted by the pair, narrowly escaping with his life. Billy has visited the moors where the killers buried their victims. He has read all that he can find about the case.

When the murderer appears before Billy, he is somehow unsurprised. She seems to be a ghost, but over time Billy's vision shows all the earmarks of a full-blown hallucination. She is young, as she was when arrested so many years before, with the dyed-blond hair her lover demanded of her, the remorseless eyes that condemned her as much as the evidence, which included pornographic photographs and tape-recorded torture. Bored, she chain-smokes and goads Billy with comments and questions that cut to the bone: "Who did you love most?" and "Are you so innocent?" She knows Billy better than he knows himself.

Her prodding hastens Billy's journey into the moors and buried bodies of his own precarious past. He recalls a flurry of friendships complicated by sexual ambiguity and victimization. There's the manipulative, obsessive relationship with a classmate named Raymond, a secret, emotionally bankrupt affair with the abused Venetia, and his own shadowy capacity for violence. The recounting is direct, understated and pitch-perfect, and from it we gain the natural and grinding revelation of human character. An unfailing authority pervades, wound into the narrowed experience of Billy, an authority that is neither sentimental nor sneering. The defining moments of his life show us that the real death in the novel's title takes place inside Billy's soul.

In this way, "Death of a Murderer" has less to do with Myra Hindley and the "Moors Murders" than with how we live with what we call evil. Thomson poses the questions that seem to pervade our relativistic times: If evil exists, then what defines it? How do we recognize it in others and in ourselves? How do we find love in spite of it? Billy puts it to the murderer succinctly: "You did something people couldn't bring themselves to think about. You forced them to imagine it. You rubbed their noses in it." She rubs Billy's nose in it, too, but he comes out better for it.

With this very dark night, Thomson powerfully evokes the psychic and emotional scars caused by horrible crimes. It is all the more remarkable that he manages this with a narrative that only rarely leaves the green confines of a hospital morgue. In some ways, this is a novel in which nothing much happens; at the same time, it shows us everything that matters.