Escaping Life (34 page)

“It must be
hard for him to see how Rebecca was living, Elizabeth.  Give him time” was all
that he’d said.  Time seemed, in some way, like the only thing that they had. 
She had spoken to Jack a number of times, and he had reassured her that
although the case wasn’t closed, there were still just a few formalities that needed
to be carried out.  He told her that as soon as they were done, he would be
able to release the body for them to have a funeral.  As far as she could make
out, it seemed to be about a week that she would have to wait, and it was
almost impossible to make any proper arrangements before the body was released
to them, so she tried to restore an air of normality about the house.  She sent
Graham back to work.  The longer he stayed around, the more abnormal the house
would feel. 
She had got used to spending days on her own
, she’d told
him.  In all truth, it was strange for both of them to be out of their routine,
but even returning to work was no solution.  Whilst Edward continued with his
self-enforced silence, there was a constant air of apathy surrounding their
little cliff top cottage.

By the time
Elizabeth was awake and taking her shower, Edward was already outside.  He had
wandered down to the local shop early on the Tuesday morning, before most
villagers were out, but not so early that Mr.
Madden
wouldn’t have the corner shop open. 
She had seen him wandering down the cottage path when she’d first woken, and
was pleased that he was going for a walk. 
It will clear his head,
she’d
thought.  He used to do that when she was a child.  He always said that it was
his time to think and she, Rebecca, and their mother knew better than to try to
disturb him when he was thinking like this.  By the time she had taken her
shower and had turned off the water, she could smell the faint, but
unmistakable smell of tobacco smoke.  She knew that Graham smoked the
occasional cigarette, but never at seven in the morning, before work.  She went
down into the kitchen where Graham was drinking his coffee and she could see
her father sitting outside the French doors, his head only just visible in an
almost continuously renewing cloud of smoke.

“I never knew
that your father smoked, Elizabeth.  That’s his third since he got back.  He’ll
be ill,” Graham had said, as he motioned his head towards the figure of Edward
sat virtually motionless outside.  Elizabeth poured herself a coffee from the
pot that was being kept at a steady temperature by the built-in hot plate on
the filter, keeping one eye on her father outside.

“I had
forgotten that he ever smoked, it’s been that many years since I last saw him
doing it.  I just don’t know what to do about him.  I don’t know if I should
just leave him to come out of it at his own pace, or try and talk to him.  I
try to find things to do in the garden, so that I can be around him.  Every
time I talk to him he just says the same thing over and over.  That he was
responsible for Rebecca; that he should have made her stay.  I can’t just sit
there with him anymore.”  She took a sip of her drink and looked back to her
husband; his big, brown and usually comforting eyes looked strained and tired,
just like hers did.  “He’s destroying my faith in what we have learnt.”

Jack had spent
the days following the discovery of Rebecca’s apartment doing some serious
thinking.  He hoped that Elizabeth had begun to accept the message that Rebecca
had been trying to convey, that being alone was a mistake and that no matter
how much isolation you impose upon yourself, and no matter how far you run, you
cannot escape the things that haunt you.  He had thought about Elizabeth a lot
over those days, and looked for reasons to be in touch.  He wanted to speak to
her and to know that she was OK. 

They had bagged
up as much evidence as they could from the apartment, everything movable, even
down to the tatty old bed linen.  The forensic teams had bagged up the smallest
of samples of hair, old tissue scraps found on the floor, and after they had stripped
it of any detectable life, the photographers arrived.  It had taken them a long
time to take all of the photographs, methodically cataloguing the extent of the
wall covering that Rebecca had created over a four-year period.  The
fingerprinting teams had been in, and Jack stood in the empty space, surrounded
by a collection of lost names.  Before his colleagues sealed up the door with
police tape and a thick impenetrable metal padlock, he glanced around at the
bare room.  The only things left staring back at him were the random thoughts
of a crazed lonely woman, no longer able to be saved.

He thought
about Rebecca’s life and how it must have been to live alone like this.  He
tried to imagine what it must have been like to have found your own mother lying
strangled on the floor of her own kitchen.  He tried to put himself first in
that position, and then tried to imagine living alone in the tall dark tower
block - a living hell if ever he had seen one.  Even the extent of his own loneliness
and the difficulty of his own life couldn’t compare.

It was quiet at
work as Jack waited for the laboratory to finish up.  He couldn’t close the
case until then, so he chose to enjoy the free time rather than seek out a
swift solution.  On the Monday, he drove to the hospital and met Kate for
lunch.  She had been staying at his apartment ever since that afternoon when he
had first picked her up from work.  He called into the offices of an estate
agent, a small corner building in an old Edwardian street in the centre of the
town, and asked for a rough price for which he could sell his industrial
minimalist apartment.  The agent had been positive, and Jack had left with the
details of two prospective properties in the suburbs that he could consider:  open-plan
kitchen/diner, lounge overlooking the garden, no pond, at least two bedrooms. 
There was a long way to go, but he felt positive about life for the first
time.  He had made his choice; it was to not be alone.  He had shut people out
of his life for far too long.

On the Tuesday
morning, and before he took Kate to work, he had packed up the photographs of
Rebecca that he had stuck to the apartment’s floor.  He cleared away all of the
remnants of the case, and took the presence of death with him to the office
where it could be filed away.  There was no place for it in his home anymore. 
When he arrived at the office, Sam and the other officers were out making the
most of the free time that could be gleaned for personal enjoyment, or errands,
when a case was solved, but not yet officially closed.  He knew that they would
be out somewhere, probably all together and planning to have a pub lunch and a
pint, enjoying the last days of sunshine before the end of August would bring
in the dawn of autumn.  The summer was rapidly drawing to a close.  The air was
cooler in the city, and the humidity had dropped.  Jack was grateful for the
respite, and his shoulder had felt looser and more comfortable over the last
few days.  Gibb was still in the office.  He was pottering around with files
and pondering over reports.  He was filing things away too, but every now and
again he would stop and read more thoroughly. 
It is going to be good
working with Gibb
, Jack thought to himself. 
Another two cases and he’ll
have got the hang of it.

Graham was
reading the newspaper and sipping his coffee when Gibb approached him, a pile
of notes and loose sheets tucked under his arm.

“Boss, you got
a minute?   Can I show you something?”  He put the notes down on Jack’s desk
and started to leaf through them, looking for the relevant ones.

“What is it? 
Found something we missed?”  He was laughing slightly, offering a sarcastic
token of approval at Gibb’s thorough commitment to the case.

“I don’t know
Boss, but for me, something doesn’t fit.  The first thing is this.”  He held up
a fuzzy black and white picture of a woman that could potentially have been
Elizabeth, or Rebecca.  “When Barry’s story checked out and Rebecca was at the
bus station every week, just like he said she was, I checked with the guys down
in Wellbeck.”

“With the police? 
Yeah, me too.” 

“No, with the
bus station.  I wanted to know if she got there.”  He extracted a fuzzy-
looking black and white photograph from the pile of loose paper.  “This is from
their CCTV.  It came through late last night.  It was taken on a Saturday that
we have got her on CCTV at Chesterwood bus station.”  Jack rubbed his chin with
his hands, the pads of his fingers making a perfect resting point for his head
as he slouched backwards in his chair, folding his arms and giving Gibb room at
the desk.  Gibb held out the photograph to Jack.  He shook it, prompting him to
take it.  Jack stared at the photograph, looking for any clue that it might be
the face that he had come to know so well, before taking it from Gibb.

“We can’t be
certain that this is Rebecca and anyway ......” he said as he tossed the
picture back down on the desk, “Barry already told us that she said that she
went there.  Maybe it was a trip down memory lane.”

“OK, but tell
me this.  We are saying that this woman imposed this isolation on herself. 
Why?”  It was a rhetorical ‘why’ that promised an answer.  “Because she was
terrified.  Terrified that her mother had been murdered.  If that’s so, why
would she go back?”  Jack was silent as he processed Gibb’s words.  He took a
sip of his coffee and reached for his cigarettes.

“Go on.”

“Somebody who
is terrified hides.  They fake their death.  Yes.  They stick crazy shit all
over the walls in their flat.  Yes.  But they don’t go back to the place that
terrified them in the first place.  The place that they are trying to escape.” 
Gibb had a point.  Without any evidence the whole idea that she had returned to
Wellbeck, or Haven, was just a theory.  He picked up the photograph and studied
it carefully.  It was blurred and pixellated and he couldn’t categorically say that
it was Rebecca, but it sure as hell looked like her.

“OK, let’s go
with it being her.  How does this change anything?”

“On its own,
not a great deal.  It’s just another theory of some other cop.  But you said to
me that her family never saw her, right?  They had no idea that she was
alive.” 

“They thought
she was dead.  They had a funeral.  Of course they didn’t see her.”

“But yet I’ve
also got Edward Jackson on the same CCTV footage.”  Gibb handed Jack another
photo.  Jack’s chair creaked as he burst forward to take the photo from him,
and he snatched it from his hand.  The person staring back at him was
undeniably Edward Jackson; the same tall stature, the same wispy hair, the
structured face and long pointy nose.  There was no mistaking him.  “Same day,
five minutes apart.  The photographs are taken in the same waiting room.”

“They could
have passed each other.  Five minutes is a long time to walk across what ...?”
he tried to imagine the bus station, although he had never been there, “.......
two hundred metres, tops?”  Even as he raised the question, he doubted
himself.  He knew how many times he had imagined seeing his wife and son in
crowds since they had died.  He knew how many shoulders he had almost touched,
convinced that it had to be them.  There was no chance he wouldn’t have seen
them.  Gibb held up another two photographs, one in each hand.  The times on
both were identical.  In one photograph he saw Rebecca and in the other, Edward
Jackson. 

“They both left
fifteen minutes later.  Her towards the bus, him towards the main exit.  I saw
these this morning, before you came in.”  He could see that Jack didn’t know
what to say.  “Afterwards, I just kept thinking that we had missed something. 
Something just didn’t seem right.  I got looking at the evidence again.  The
photograph she was holding.  It’s him that’s missing.  He might be taking the
photo but he’s not in it.  Look at this.”  He laid out a few photographs in
front of Jack, who was now sat upright in his chair and smoking an illicit
cigarette, waiting for Gibb to speak.  He laid out four photographs that would,
when matched up together, form a continuous image of Rebecca’s living room
wall.  He grabbed the papers from the desk that he had placed there only
minutes before and started flicking through.  Jack craned his neck to see what
was written there.  They were old case files.  Murder files.  “Here, look. 
James Davies.”  He pointed to the name on the photograph with its red circled
edges.  He flicked the pages in front of him until he found the corresponding
name.  “James Davies was murdered three years ago, January the sixth.  Case was
solved.  Guy called William Flatley.  Bashed his skull in.  He was only
nineteen, Davies was thirty-two.”  He pointed again to the photograph, tapping
the
news
report that
Rebecca
had glued to the wall next
to James Davies’ obituary.  There was another red circled name; William Flatley’s. 
“You see?  This is not just the victims that she has been cataloguing.  It’s
the murderers too.  Next one.”  As Gibb spoke, rattling out more names of
victims and their murderers, each duo clearly documented in the sickening
collage of old newspaper clippings, Jack barely listened to what he was
saying.  He knew these cases off by heart; he had lived and breathed these
cases.  He had looked at their bloodied faces last thing at night before he
slept;  he had relived their injuries as he ate his breakfast;  he had seen the
victims’ families fall apart, and watched as the perpetrator sat, often remorselessly,
in court as the verdict was read out and they were sentenced.  How had he not
seen the names of the murderers?