Escaping Life (26 page)

Almost as soon
as she had left, the team of expert finger printers had arrived.  The area had
already been cornered off as the first officers had arrived, sirens blazing and
ready for action.  Jack had been waiting for them, and they arrived with Gibb. 
They burst through the doors of the station like a riot squad, their manner
electrifying to the other travellers, who quickly began nosing in to see what
had been found.  Jack found this over enthusiasm somewhat amusing.  Young
officers straight from training were always like this;  every call-out in their
minds the next big case, a place to earn their stripes, to blood their cheeks
as if on a hunt, their prey the next available promotion for which they would
fight to chase down.  He stood back, knowing how all of this worked.  The
junior officers stood guard at the white and blue plastic tape, their job to
get the area secure.  There were the infantry, those that secured the defences
whilst the intelligence worked incognito behind the scenes.  They would warn
off the baying crowd, all making assumptions about what had been found.  A
gun?  Drugs?  Body parts?  They were all reasonable guesses, and all items that
had been found in Chesterwood before.  The fingerprinting team went about their
work, delicately flicking the grey powder across the surface of the locker and
those surrounding it.  There were officers taking photos, and others already up
on the first floor reviewing the CCTV footage from two weeks back.  Jack hung
at the sidelines.  He patted the inside of his pocket, thinking about his
cigarettes.  When he was confined somewhere like this, with nothing to fill his
time, he craved that chemical comfort that he was trying hard to quell.  Trying
to give up, he had decided, was a royal pain in the arse.  He had learned to cut
out some cigarettes by finding a distraction:  the odour of the bacon buttie that
wafted up to his apartment windows from the vendor’s van in the street below; the
coffee that he would always be carrying with him; the different women with whom
he spent his evenings when he felt lonely and scared of the life that he had
been left with.  But it was this one cigarette, the one as he watched, like an
emperor above his kingdom, the other officers scurrying around the crime scene
and coming to him one by one with their findings, this one was the one that he
could never cut out, and he had decided not to try.  Suddenly, he felt
incredibly claustrophobic and needed to get outside.

“Boss, can I
have a minute?”  Gibb was approaching him.  For the height of summer Gibb was
remarkably overdressed.  He was wearing heavy woollen trousers, like those that
Edward Jackson had been wearing, and a tight tie.  He was new to his position
and it showed.  Jack could remember him only months ago when he had been in
uniform; the constant air of alertness, like a Labrador eager to impress and
ready for action at the short notice of his master.  He hadn’t learned to be
relaxed yet, it would take time.

“Yeah.  What
you got for me?”

“They have
found virtually a full set of prints, the guys think they look good, and they
are gonna get them back to the lab and confirm that they are from the body.” 
Jack wanted to tell him it wasn’t just a body.  That her name was Rebecca
Jackson.  That she had a sister called Elizabeth who looked like an angel and
whose life had been falling apart like his had been.  He didn’t say anything. 
He just nodded his head once, briefly and sharply.  “CCTV clearly shows our
dead woman coming in and out of the station.  We checked all the Saturdays like
you said, at the times the guy - what’s his name?”  Gibb started to flick
through his little black note book.  There were so many notes in there, it was
impossible to find the information quickly.

“Barry,” Jack
offered flatly.  He could see that this had annoyed Gibb.  Gibb wanted to know
everything.  Once he had learned to relax, it was that very fact that would
make him an excellent cop.

“Yeah, Barry,”
he replied, not able to make eye contact yet, his face flushed from
embarrassment like fresh raspberry, swollen and ripe and ready for picking. 
“At those times every Saturday.  We went back two months, took ages.  We have
got her coming in to the station every week like he said.  His story checks
out.”

“Good.  Get the
guys back to the crime lab.  They need to run the tests on that key, prints, trace
it for DNA.  I want the trace evidence back ASAP.  Got it?”  Gibb nodded,
enthusiastically.  “We know who she is, and once we can prove that the key is
hers, maybe we can make some progress with an address.” 

It was late
afternoon by the time the forensic teams had finished and the blue ticker tape
was being torn down by the junior officers.  The station manager had been going
crazy all day, every half an hour needling at Jack to get the search finished. 
It looked bad to have a crime scene in the bus station.  It would put people
off using the bus, he said.  There were buses queued up in the bays, the whole
schedule thrown out by the commotion and the crowds.  The journalists had
turned up by early afternoon, as soon as word had spread.  Jack had given an
interview.  They had been pressing to know if the search was related to the
body that had been found on Lyme beach.  ‘
Have you identified the mystery
woman yet?  When are you releasing pictures?  What did you find in the
lockers?  Should the public be scared?’ 
He had given a simple statement. 
An item interesting to an ongoing police case had been found and was under
investigation, but it had done little to quell their insatiable appetite for
sensationalist theories and he dreaded what the newspaper might print the next
day.  There was a bustle about the station like never before and yet it was the
kind of crowd that nobody at the station wanted - except for Barry.  He had
been right in the thick of things, helping where possible, and making coffee
for everybody when he couldn’t.  Jack had decided that he would get the other
officers to pick him up tomorrow, take him down to the station.  Barry had
really hung around today, and had been helpful.  But Jack had met this type
before - the people who get unnecessarily involved, hanging around the case,
looking in their eyes at least helpful and innocent.  He could remember one young
guy, a bit of a loner, like Barry.  He too had hung around helping the police,
giving statements and appearing on the television.  He had made it into the
national papers and the country had hailed him as a hero for the evidence that
he had given concerning the disappearance of the local nine year old girl. 
When she had eventually been found, barely alive, in a sealed-off room in the
locked basement of his home, it hadn’t surprised the police.  Jack didn’t think
that Barry was involved, but best give him a good going over, just to make
sure.

When Jack
dropped Barry outside his house that night, he had driven away normally, but fifteen
minutes later he had turned his car around and had gone back.  Jack pulled up
in the next street and walked under the shadow of the broken street lamps,
stopping on the opposite side of the road to Barry’s house.  He had watched him
through the window, the lamps which came on by timer illuminating his small bay
window, topped by boarded up windows and broken roofing.  He wasn’t doing
anything strange; Barry sat on his settee, the television playing in the
background, different shades of light and shadow cast upon the room and onto
Barry.  He moved into the kitchen, and it gave Jack a better view as he hid in
the shadows of the broken down buildings behind him.  There was a stench in the
air, a rotten smell of wood, and urine.  He could hear rustling behind him in
the dilapidated houses as the squatters and druggies trudged their way around
the cluttered floorboards.  He could hear that one of them was getting close,
footsteps becoming louder and yet softer, and the caution of the figure behind
him laced with uncertainty.

“Mate, you got
any smack on ya’?” the voice dared behind him.  “I can pay ya’.”  Jack knew
this area well, and had spent many a nightshift here, watching the comings and
goings of the underworld of Chesterwood.  Woodside was filled with the
undesirables, the inhabitants of the city that Chesterwood would rather not
exist.   It was financially, socially, and geographically divorced from the
rest of the city, but there was always a steady trickle of two-way traffic, in
and out.  Some nights, as he sat there in the chilly winter months, the rain
beating down onto the roof of his car, he would watch as the well kept cars
from the city would roll suspiciously and cautiously into the depths of
Woodside.  They would crawl their way along the curb, hoping to leave with one
of the girls who offered an easy route to a good time, or would pull up in dark
corners trading money for little packets of powder or pills.  It didn’t
interest Jack.  This was Woodside, and it wasn’t his fight. 

“No,” Jack
replied, his words stone cold.  “But I’ve got a night in the cells for you if
you want it.”  He could see the dead whites of the eyes of the sad figure
behind him glaring back at him emptily as he realised his mistake.  “Now fuck
off.”  He crawled his way back into the house, shock and cursed mutterings of ‘sorry’
escaping with each laboured breath and step.  Jack turned his attentions back
to the soft glow of the kitchen light.  Barry looked as if he was cooking, his
face blurred in the rising steam.  He came back into the living room and set
out a small table in front of the settee, a knife and fork placed delicately at
the side.  He placed down a glass of something transparent, and after another
trip to the kitchen returned with a steaming plate of food.  Jack was aware of
his empty stomach, and he felt the cramping pang of hunger hit him. 

Barry sat back
down on the settee, placing his plate of sausages and potatoes, drizzled in
gravy down onto his foldaway table.  His favourite soap opera was playing out
on the television.  It was something from up north, a street where all the
inhabitants lived and worked and played together.  They all had problems, and
yet life seemed to go on independently in spite of the latest difficulty.  He
blew across the plate of food and took the first mouthful, the spice-enriched
meat a disguise for the poor cut, the gravy hot, thick and lumpy, like he
preferred.  Barry watched these characters every night; sometimes he would
record the programme and play the reruns too.  On a Sunday, when he didn’t have
much to do and the days were long, he would let the omnibus play in the
background, the characters the absent friends in his life.  He would lie on the
settee, the net curtains pulled to cover the windows to stop the glare of the
sun.  He never opened the windows, the smell was there every day but he never
got used to it.  If you opened the windows at the height of a summer’s day the
smell would hit you hard, assaulting your senses with its pungent stench. 
Instead, he tolerated the beads of sweat which would roll down his face, tickling
him as they pooled at the base of his neck.  He would snooze as the words in
the background made him feel that somewhere in this world he might be able to
find a life where he isn’t alone.

Jack tapped out
a message into his telephone and hit the ‘send’ button.  He tucked the phone
into his back pocket as he watched Barry clear his plate and make himself a cup
of tea.  Jack worried about how Barry might cope with the interrogation that he
was about to undergo the following day.  He seemed a genuine person; his face
open, his heart big.  He had befriended a virtual stranger, so desperate in his
attempt not to be alone.  It seemed to Jack that perhaps Rebecca had been his
only friend.  Based on what he knew so far, Barry may well have been her only
friend too.  It was, after all, he who she had asked to drive her on the final
journey of her life, to the spot where she would end her life.  He had been the
person with who she had chosen to spend her last moments of shared time
together.  Now, here he was, alone again, knowing that the only person that he
once had, had disappeared from his life.  As Jack looked upon the window he saw
Barry stand to draw the curtains, to protect himself from the undesirable world
just outside, and wondered how different their own lives really were.  Only a
year ago, Jack had had all that he wanted.  His life had been filled with
laughter, sticky fingers, and another body wrapped up tightly in his arms as he
drifted off to sleep.  He might not live in Woodside now, but how different was
his own life from the one he observed before him?  How different was going home
and eating a microwave meal alone night after night, his only free company a
casual girlfriend who he had treated badly?  His thoughts were interrupted by
the ‘BEEP’, ‘BEEP’ of the message that had arrived.  It was Kate answering his
previous message:

‘
Finishing
in half an hour.  Great, I’ll be waiting outside.
’

Jack knew that the
life he now observed before him wasn’t for him.  He didn’t want his days to be
filled by the lives of others and his nights spent dreaming of company that he
couldn’t have.  Rebecca Jackson had been right.  Her final words rolled around
in his head.  ‘
You should never choose to be alone’
.

It had felt
good to step off that bus and see her cottage standing proudly, strong against
the cliff top winds in front of her.  The bus didn’t run as far as her road,
but it was always good to be in the heart of the village.  Elizabeth liked the
sound of the gulls as they swooped in low and fast attempting to snatch the
early morning fish; the sound of the waves as they lapped against the sides of
the boats, sloshing about whilst lashed to the harbour wall.  It was later, now
though, and the late afternoon light that always has such a transparency about
it as the sun starts to lose some height in the sky, the rays of light
following a shorter, softer path, always made the village look especially
pretty.  The water was gentle at this time of day, as long as there was no
impending storm, and the sunlight danced around on top of it, diamonds of
sunlight skirting across the surface.  She started the walk up the long, but
steady climb to her front gate.  The smell of honeysuckle and the orderly yet
clustered rows of summer blooms that made up the lovingly planted garden was
always the best welcome home before she walked through the door.  On the
warmest days, as she walked back from the village, the heat would carry the
sweet scent on the breeze, and the local cats would sit with their noses high
in the air, hoping to catch a waft.