The Backs (2013) (3 page)

22 August

Jane Osborne waited until Ady had left for work, then retrieved a packet of Nice ’n’ Easy from behind the detergent box in the cupboard next to the washing machine. The shade was
palest blonde;
it was a lot to expect from just one application when she’d been
darkest brown
for the last six months. It didn’t matter even if it came out orange, because the important thing was change.
Radical
change.

Her rucksack was ready, stashed out of sight of course, but she didn’t even need to open it to make a mental list of the things she required, and tick them off against its contents.

While she waited for the new hair colour to take, she changed her clothes, dragging a pair of black Converse trainers, some combat trousers and a vest top out from under her heaviest winter coat. She let her dress slip from her shoulders and stepped out of it, then, illogically, folded it gently and laid it on top of the coat.

She slammed the drawer shut; there was no way now she was going to stop and think this through again. She’d thought it through plenty. And hers wasn’t a life that had any space for sentimentality.

By 10 a.m. she was towelling her hair dry; it was definitely blonder, but not blonde enough. She’d do it again later, with more peroxide. She tied it into a ponytail then held it over a carrier bag and hacked it off just a couple of inches below the rubber band. She then knotted the carrier bag and stuffed it into her hip pocket, swung her rucksack over her shoulder, and closed the front door behind her as she left Ady’s flat for the final time.

She hurried to the end of the road, then moved on through the next estate, until she’d gone far enough to be confident that none of her neighbours would recognize her while she waited for a bus. She jumped off in the city centre, dumping the carrier bag of hair in the first litter bin she came across. Another two streets and she found a barber’s offering haircuts for £9.50. Her budget had been ten quid.

His name was Frankie and, once she’d told him what she wanted, he spent the next twenty minutes both asking and answering his own questions: ‘Me? I’m the third generation of the Rona family in Bradford. All barbers, except my brother.’

Snip, snip.

‘My brother? Thought he’d become a chef, but ended up as a optician. Brothers, eh?’

And so on, until Jane’s hair was shorn to a number two on the sides and a couple of inches of blonde on top. The colour was patchy but she’d sort that out later. She swung the rucksack over her shoulder and shouted ‘Cheers’ to Frankie and left the barber’s shop conscious that she’d used
Cheers
instead of
Thank you, goodbye.
It was a small point but confirmed to her that it wasn’t just her physical appearance that had changed overnight.

She hurried back to the bus stop and handed over the fare for the one-and-a-half-mile journey to Thornbury. She sat upstairs at the back, pretending to doze but quietly checking each bus stop for the unlikely bad luck of seeing someone she knew.

Armley Branch Road was the second to last stop on this route. She roused herself, then rang the bell and hurried down the stairs.

She was the only person alighting there, and the driver didn’t open the doors immediately. He looked at her accusingly through his rear-view mirror, bushy dark eyebrows and bags under his eyes. ‘You paid for Thornbury.’

‘Yeah, and I fell asleep. If you knew which stop I wanted, why didn’t you wake me? Now I’m screwed.’

‘Not my job. You’ll have to pay the extra.’

‘I don’t have any fuckin’ money, do I? You’ve had it all.’

His disembodied eyes blinked. He hadn’t told her not to swear, so she guessed he was remembering the way she’d delved in her pockets, scraping together the last few coppers to make up the fare. She sensed the discomfort of the passengers seated behind her. ‘You’re going to walk back?’ His voice remained impassive.

‘What choice do I have?’

He sighed and finally turned towards her, leaning out of his seat to look at her face to face. ‘The next stop’s the end, then I come back, so if you stay on, then I can drop you at Thornbury.’

She shook her head. ‘If the inspector’s waiting to get on, then I’ll have to get off there. And we’ll both be in the shit.’

She liked watching him think; he was so easy to read. ‘Get off, then, and I’ll pick you up on the way back. Twenty minutes.’

‘You’re a star. A complete star.’ The doors opened and she stepped out on to the pavement. She beamed up at him, ‘You’ve saved my life.’

She crossed to the bus stop on the opposite side then waited until the double-decker disappeared around the next bend, a couple of faces still watching her from the rear window until the last moment. Maybe she could’ve risked staying on until the final stop, but this was better – especially if Ady managed to trace her progress this far. Overall, she doubted that he’d even bother.

On foot, she followed the bus route into Leeds city centre, pausing only as she caught sight of her reflection in the dark window of an empty shop. Her make-up was wrong, still signifying old Jane. She needed paler foundation and black eyeliner and mascara, darker lipstick also. Hairspray too, or maybe one of those rock-hard styling mousses that would keep her hair in aggressively rigid tufts.

She remembered that there was a branch of Boots the Chemist inside Leeds railway station. Perfect.
Buy one, get four free.

Her visit to the make-up shelves was swift. She stood with her back to the security camera, picking up one item with her right hand whilst her left pocketed the one she really wanted. One, two, three, four –
done.
She spent marginally longer in the hair-care section, wanting to be sure of not being shadowed before she approached the till to pay. She chose a travel-size tube of Boots’ own maximum-hold hair gel for £1.99, then paid, by breaking into the first of her £20 notes.

She made it less than ten paces outside before a dull-haired woman in a plum overcoat stepped in front of her. ‘You have items . . .’ she began.

Jane glanced down at the woman’s shoes: square-toed courts and she didn’t look like a runner. Jane stepped back, then spun through one-eighty, straight into the arms of a depressingly fit-looking security guard. He grabbed her wrist in one hand and her rucksack with the other, pulling it from her shoulder with a decisive tug. It was as if he knew that she wasn’t going to think about bolting without it. It held the start of her new life. She knew what would come next, and, suddenly staying home with Ade didn’t seem so unappealing.

The phone call from DS Tierney of Leeds CID was answered by DI Marks at a little after 2 p.m. Tierney sounded harassed: ‘Got a woman in custody, mid-twenties, picked up for shoplifting. No previous, but we got a match on her prints. Flags up that we need to contact you lot.’

‘What’s her name and why do we want her?’

‘Calls herself Jane Franklin.’

Marks felt the back of his neck prickle. The first name was correct.

Tierney tutted then rattled on, ‘It doesn’t even say why you want her, and it’s old – like seven years old.’

Marks nodded to himself. ‘Can you email her photograph to me?’

‘Look, I don’t want her in here. We’re talking twenty quid’s worth of cosmetics, so I want her charged and released.’

‘No.’

‘We’ve got her home address, and she won’t do a runner for only that much.’

Marks leant his elbows on the desk, the handset close to his mouth. ‘DS Tierney, I said “no”. Forget the photograph. You have a fingerprint match. I need to speak to her in relation to a murder investigation and if you let her go anywhere whatsoever, you will soon appreciate the real meaning of stress. Is that clear?’

Tierney muttered an apology.

Marks continued, ‘Has she called anyone yet?’

‘Doesn’t want to. Just tells us to piss off.’

‘But you have her home address?’

‘A flat in Allerton, Bradford . . . was living there with an Adrian Cole. She said they’ve split up and he wouldn’t miss her.’

‘We’ll have someone there by midnight.’ So Jane wasn’t cooperating, and she had no incentive to stay in the area. How was that not a flight risk? ‘Don’t lose her,’ he warned, ending the call. He then leant back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. The paint was uneven and grey with age. ‘Oh, hell,’ he sighed. He closed his eyes and felt pretty much like the ceiling looked.

Seven years was a while ago in some ways, but not so many in others. Finding Jane was good news. Seeing her in person would be harder.

Marks blew out a long slow breath, and went to find Sergeant Sheen.

Finding
was the wrong word, Sheen would be at or within touching distance of his desk, surrounded by notes and files, and shelves heavy with even more of the same. Sheen’s ‘office’ occupied an open-ended cul-de-sac on the second floor. It had a good view of Parker’s Piece and was overlooked by no one else.

Sheen sat with the
Cambridge News
open in front of him. He glanced up at Marks, and pushed the paper to one side. ‘It is work-related, you know,’ he said slowly in his Suffolk drawl. Several blocks of text had been outlined or highlighted.

Sheen had been at Parkside for his entire career and now, with retirement on the middle horizon, it seemed to Marks that the Sheen technique of colour-coding and cross-referencing had been honed to an art. No one else knew three decades’ worth of Cambridge people and crimes like Sheen did.

‘D’you have a minute, Tom?’

Sheen nodded, nudging the spare chair towards him. ‘Unusual to see you up here.’

Marks ignored the chair. ‘Jane Osborne’s turned up.’

‘Has she now? Where?’

‘Caught shoplifting in Leeds. We’ll get her back down here before we talk to her.’

‘Poor kid.’ Sheen paused respectfully for a moment. ‘And how can I help? I doubt many people know that case like you do.’

Marks gave a grunt, not minding which way Sheen interpreted it. ‘I am curious about anything else you’ve picked up since the case was closed.’

Sheen’s instant reaction was to swivel his chair so he could look directly up at the top shelf on the wall behind his desk. He then reached for a fat green lever arch about two-thirds of the way along. ‘Big file that one. Maybe you should sit down.’

This time the DI took Sheen up on his suggestion. ‘You know Greg Jackson’s still in the area?’

‘Of course I know . . . probably me that told you.’ Sheen underlined this by smacking the green file on to the desktop, where several loose sheets of papers quivered and backed up by a couple of inches. ‘He’s a local boy, wasn’t going anywhere else once he was released.’ He slid his hand inside the file and parted its contents at the first page of the third and largest section. ‘The Osborne murder takes up a big chunk of this one.’ He flicked through a few pages at a time. ‘Not much since, to be honest. The mother left town, the dad’s still here – and so is the son. But there’s one clipping you need to see.’

Sheen found the relevant page and spun the file round to face Marks, who nodded as he recognized the headline,
Exhibit Destroyed.
‘Yes, I remember. The press jumped on it.’

‘They thought it might be a publicity stunt.’ Sheen pursed his lips. ‘I’m ignoring your own feelings on the case when I say this, but I later discovered he’d smashed that item on the day he heard about Jackson’s parole.’

‘No, I hadn’t heard that.’ Marks sat very straight as he attempted to remain detached. He pictured Gerry Osborne, hatchet in hand, destroying his own centrepiece sculpture. Did it help to know the catalyst for that? Probably not. ‘Why does it matter now?’

‘On its own, it don’t—’

Sheen allowed another long pause, Marks silently corrected Sheen’s grammar, took a breath and waited for the rest of the sentence.

‘But at least two times I’ve heard that Jackson’s been seen talking to Gerry Osborne. That breaks Jackson’s parole conditions, so Osborne only needs to make a complaint and Jackson’s gone. If Osborne was really so upset about Jackson coming out, why doesn’t he try to get him sent straight back in?’

Marks didn’t comment, but instead spun the file back towards Sheen. ‘And that’s it?’

‘Pretty much. Ask me about the case and I have it in spades, but more recently everyone connected with Jane Osborne has stayed well out of sight. Except Jackson, of course.’ Sheen placed his hand flat on top of the open pages. ‘You know I would’ve told you if there’d been anything? I do know how you feel about this one.’

Marks just nodded.

‘So what really brought you?’ Sheen kept talking. ‘Seems to me you’re bogging yourself down with what you’re going to tell her once she gets here. I don’t envy you that conversation, you know.’

‘Thanks a lot.’ Marks almost managed a smile. In truth he wasn’t totally sure why he’d come to see Sheen, but maybe he just needed to share the news of Jane’s arrest with the only other person at Parkside who knew the case almost as well as he did. Marks stood up. ‘Anyhow, I thought you’d like to know.’ He shook Sheen’s hand, then turned to leave.

‘It wasn’t your fault, you know.’ Sheen said it quietly, almost to himself.

Marks turned slowly. ‘The chain of evidence was compromised.’

‘And you were only one link of that chain. There was no official blame.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Go up and collect her yourself. You’ll feel better once you’ve spoken to her.’

‘Wouldn’t be appropriate.’

Sheen snorted. ‘You know who you
should
send?’

‘Is the name DC Goodhew about to emerge from your mouth, Tom?’ One look at Sheen told him he didn’t need to wait for an answer. ‘Why Goodhew?’

Sheen patted the file again with his flattened hand. ‘Since he discovered that Jackson’s case was on your mind, he’s been up here reading that file on several occasions. He’s smart, sneaks up here when I’m off duty, and doesn’t leave a single trace.’ Sheen tapped the side of his nose. ‘But I had a feeling someone had been at my desk, so I stayed late one night and watched for him. Besides, who else would it be?’

Who else indeed?