The Backs (2013) (12 page)

Here they stood, in the middle of the street, and yet she felt cornered. Just like the first time she’d ever faced up to a bully and been smacked so hard she’d felt her little-girl spirit hit the ground first. Only, then, she’d been unprepared and there had been many years in between. ‘I don’t know anything.’

He reached out and grabbed her arm, his grip firm but not painful. Not yet. She saw his other hand flatten, palm upwards.

‘Why don’t you just slap me? That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

She didn’t fight the pressure on her biceps, his thumb now digging into the bone, the tendons jumping aside with a small popping sensation. She focused on his face, watched his slow self-questioning of whether she was bluffing, whether she wanted him to strike her – and why. Her arm was throbbing, the nerves sending light-headed signals to the brain, but she held still. Would he really risk forfeiting his probation over her?

The answer never arrived.

From somewhere to her right, Campbell’s reedy tones reached them. ‘I’m going to call the police, you know.’

Jackson’s grip loosened to merely painful and he turned his head towards the other man. ‘I don’t think you should.’ His voice took on a hoarse quality as he shouted. He continued to stare, and Jane noticed his lips twitching and recognized the shapes of numbers being counted. Was he counting down to something, or just cooling off?

She didn’t even need to look at Campbell. He had to be at his upstairs window to be so outspoken, leaning out by a daring six inches, yet careful not to disturb his row of model E-Types on the window ledge.

‘You’ve been warned,’ he bleated, and then pulled the window shut.

‘He won’t phone the police,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll call my dad.’

‘I don’t give a shit.’ But Jackson released her then. ‘Fuck you,’ he hissed, still hoarse.

‘Sorry.’ She stepped away, kept her head up and showed no sign of hurry. ‘You may have fucked my mother, and fucked my sister, but I’ll pass.’ Another couple of steps backwards, then she turned and followed the straightest line possible towards her door.

No footsteps followed. None walked away either.

She felt his eyes on her as she placed her shopping by her feet and unlocked the door. The key trembled, skating several times round the metal plate before slipping home. The tips of her fingers throbbed Burgundy red and white bloodless bars scored her palms from carrying the plastic bags for so long. Now her hand was starting to shake in earnest.

His hoarseness reached her. ‘I haven’t finished. Don’t forget that.’

She hauled the bags over the threshold, then straightened and paused in the open doorway, long enough for him to witness her hatred.

‘I’m not giving up, Jane. Someone. Has. To. Pay.’

Once inside, Jane sank to the floor, with her back to the door. There she waited – for Jackson, for Campbell, or even for her father. The dusty nothingness of the hallway soothed her; no one would lie on such a floor through choice. She was that
no one
for a minute, then: invisible, invincible even. The evils of her life could pass her by. Like a game of tag, shouting ‘home’, and being safe until the moment came to run again.

Run
or
home
, therefore, but not both.

Her mind drifted like this for a while, then circled and regrouped.

Later there came a knock at the door: a sharp treble rap. She kept very still until she sensed they’d moved away, then carefully slid the bottom bolt into place. Even her father, with his own key, couldn’t come in through that door now.

She moved from room to room, securing every possible entry point. Then finally she smiled.

Home.

She drew a long slow breath.

Her home.
She turned the words over in her mind. Accepting them. Letting the implications open up to her. She’d stopped running now. She felt it without understanding why it had happened; all she knew was that these two trains of thought had been shunting each other back and forth. Pulling her away. Pulling her back. But now, without complaint, the two of them had fallen still and silent.

The memory of Cambridge returned: the familiarity of this house, the mess of her life that she somehow knew could only be re-anchored here. Self-preservation had propelled her away; maybe it was the same instinct that wouldn’t let her do it again. It didn’t matter why. She’d finally stopped running, and in that moment came the certainty that she would never run again.

Jane unpacked the shopping and soon after took a bowl of soup and mug of coffee into the playroom. Tomorrow she’d check her bank account, see what was left. Buy food with it. And some other basics.

She ought to make a list. There was a pencil in the kitchen.

She wrote on the back of an old envelope:
Item 1 – buy a notepad and pen.
Joke.

She wasn’t really a list person but she then jotted down the basics.

Tins and dried food.

Toilet rolls and Tampax.

Tea and coffee.

Emulsion and brushes.

Speak to Dad or just refuse to move?

She contemplated this last point, doodling a pyramid of regular bricks. And, as for the paint . . . adding emulsion to the list had been nothing more than a wry observation of her present surroundings. But why shouldn’t she do something about it? She ran her hand along the wall where it met the skirting board. The paper was heavy, already layered with paint. Another coat would at least freshen it. She tapped it with her fingertips and heard the hollow tip-tap of paper that had separated from plaster.

She lifted the edge with her nail, worked her finger under for a better grip, then tore the paper from the wall. In places it came away in fat panels, crisp with age; in others she removed it, inch by inch, with the rounded tip of her only spoon. There was no plan until, with just a single panel remaining, she knew she had to stop.

Sleep came swiftly and, as it overtook her, she truly believed that nothing was going to wake her again before mid-morning.

The rain brought her back to the surface. It drove in at an angle that hit the patio doors with a sharp rattle that made it sound like hail. On other mornings the daylight slid up between the curtain rings and threw bright triangles on the ceiling. Right now there wasn’t even enough light outside for her to know where the top of the curtains met the wall. She guessed at 2 a.m., then checked her phone. It was 4.30. She felt tired but another five or six hours’ sleep still seemed viable.

She dozed . . . off and on.

The downpour continued unabated for another couple of hours then, within the space of five minutes, subsided to a drizzle. She imagined the weatherman pointing to the front of higher air pressure, and the isobar completing its invisible fly-past. The post-rain silence would have been complete if it hadn’t been broken by constant dripping. Amplified dripping at that. This dogged plunk-plunk-plunk was about as soothing as a cold finger tapping her in the forehead.

She burrowed further under the covers and finally succeeded in blocking it out. Except, like a catchy melody that wouldn’t let her go, she could hear it even when she couldn’t. She knew it was still there, and at 7.24 a.m. she gave up and pulled back the curtains. Only then did she find that the leaky guttering at the rear of the house was trickling silently. She opened the patio doors: everything outside was sodden but equally soundless.

She listened carefully, then slowly turned back to face the room; the dripping had been inside the house all along. Years before her family had owned this house, the cellar entrance had led from the scullery. Walls had been moved, purposes of rooms changed, but no one ever moves a cellar. No one had ever blocked it off either, and that narrow, half-height door in the corner had mostly gone unnoticed. Unless the cellar happened to flood.

She now stood ankle-deep in wallpaper debris, deciding she needed to add everything from dustbin sacks to cutlery to her original shopping list. It was tempting to add wellies and a bucket, and simply leave the leak until later. She resolved to take a peek; perhaps there would be some way to muffle the sound and ignore the problem.
Who are you kidding?
She pulled on her trainers and switched her mobile phone over to torch mode. She had no intention of doing anything less than fixing the noise. She then grabbed her trusty spoon and unhooked the gate-style latch that held the cellar door shut.

The cellar wasn’t a full storey deep, but the stone steps leading down were shallow, and there were as many as in a normal staircase. They were worn away in the centre, so Jane found it hard to keep her footing. Cellar steps always seemed like this: the least used but most worn. She stumbled on the last couple, and was thankful when she stepped on to solid flagstone rather than into water.

As far as she was aware, there had only been one very serious flood. That was back in the early nineties, when a burst water main had overwhelmed the natural advantage of living on a hill. Even so, this cellar had always been prone to dampness. It smelt damp now and she had no doubt that there would still be sections of brickwork around the walls that were silky green with it. She shone her torch and found them, the patches seeming too vivid to belong here in the dark.

She found the dripping too, moisture falling from the saturated moss and wet bricks in the furthest corner. It kept hitting the base of an upturned enamel bucket. She smiled to herself, because she knew that bucket. According to her long dead great-gran, it had boiled countless nappies – they’d been simmered on the oven top and prodded with a stick. Gran had never been much of a cook, but the bucket would be handy.

From wall to wall, she doubted it was more than fifteen feet across, but Jane crossed the cellar slowly, making sure her trainer found a good grip before stepping forward. It seemed unusual to leave a bucket upside down . . . unless it was there to sit on or use like a footrest or a table. With her next step she wobbled again, but took another two quick strides and made it safely to the other side. She looked back towards the stairs, and at the weak light coming down from the ground floor. Who was she kidding? No one would decide to spend time down here.

Then another thought occurred to her. She tapped the bucket with her toe, but it didn’t move. She pushed firmly and it moved sideways without much difficulty, but she could tell that something was definitely hidden underneath. She squatted, balancing on the balls of her feet. One hand trained the mobile phone’s light on the point where the rim of the bucket met the floor, the other gradually tipped it. She silently prayed that nothing would scuttle towards her or, worse still, over her fingers. She saw some earth first, then a few fragments of stone. She lifted the bucket fully and the pile underneath it collapsed. The light found just mud and rock, and Gran’s old bucket. She grabbed it by the handle, and had hurried halfway back up the steps before she froze.

Above her, someone was banging at the front door. Her gaze drifted in the direction of the front door, then back down the cellar steps. It took her several seconds of listening to the incessant rapping before she could collect her thoughts and decide exactly what she must do.

She locked the cellar door, left the bucket in the kitchen, then slipped out to the tool shed and returned with an axe.

As the rain fell on Cambridge, Goodhew had heard nothing. He’d been swimming his regular one hundred lengths of front crawl, oblivious to the world outside. This activity had been a deliberate choice, aimed at shutting down his thoughts. This pattern of snatching two or three hours’ rest per night was a familiar and recurrent one, and the previous night had proved another sleepless one. This was one of those days when swimming would help refresh his mind.

His clear head lasted just until he reached his desk. Kincaide was already seated at his, and DI Marks was heading for the door.

‘Ah, Goodhew, perfect. Apologies for the early start.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘You have time to grab a coffee, if you bring it in with you. I’m going straight down.’

As soon as he left, Goodhew turned to Kincaide. ‘I thought the briefing was scheduled for eleven?’

‘He changed it. I sent you a text.’ Kincaide’s expression remained accommodating.

Goodhew shrugged. ‘Same room?’

Kincaide nodded.

‘Good, I’ll see you there.’

Goodhew waited until he was on the stairs to check his phone. There was no text.

He poked his head round a doorway on the first floor and found Gully writing up a report, leaning in towards her monitor and frowning.

‘Morning, Gary.’

‘Hi, Sue. Listen, I need to be quick.’

‘So do I. And the faster I try to write these things up, the slower I seem to be. Now I’m becoming word blind.’

‘Sue? Do you speak French?’

‘Oh, oui, mais comme une écolière.
Which won’t help with my paperwork.’

‘I heard the word “oui”. It seems Jane Osborne’s mother moved to France, possibly to Limoges. I’ve already emailed the police, so could you just phone for me, find out who will be dealing with it, and try to persuade them to hurry it up?’

‘Why the rush?’

‘There isn’t.’

‘Liar.’

‘OK. Greg Jackson’s been seen hanging around Pound Hill. Mary Osborne had a relationship with him, so I wanted to speak with her.’

‘
And
reunite her with Jane?’

‘Of course.’ He pressed a slip of paper into her hand. ‘All the details are there. Will you phone?’ He backed towards the door.

She shrugged then nodded. ‘
Oui.’

Goodhew managed to slip into the briefing without being last through the door. Kincaide, DCs Young and Charles, and a handful of other officers were all present. Just nine of them, including Goodhew. A few moments later, Marks followed him into the room, beginning to address the officers even before he’d extracted his notes from the black document wallet he carried.

‘Paul Marshall’s full autopsy results reveal several new factors. We already know, of course, that he was the subject of a violent assault. Once the car was alight the assailant would have been aware of the increased risk of discovery, and
if
his intention was to kill, then it is reasonable to assume that would have occurred very soon after the car began burning.’