Escaping Life (8 page)

“Lyme beach,” she
said, “she means Lyme beach.”  Graham had already grabbed the computer and was
propping it up on his lap, typing in the words as they rolled off her tongue.  Elizabeth,
Helen, and David huddled around him.  There were stories of local fetes, of
fishermen, of housing problems; it could have been Haven.  Then he saw it: 
Search result 6:  ‘
Unidentified female found on Lyme Beach’.
They all
read the headline at the same time, and they felt its weight on top of them.

“It can’t be
her!  I told you already.  She would never have left me without saying goodbye.” 
Elizabeth refused to believe it.  Not again.

As Graham
clicked in the story, knowing they had solved the first clue, he handed
Elizabeth the paper.

“You were right
Elizabeth.  She never would have left you without saying goodbye.”  He could barely
bring himself to finish the sentence.  “This time she didn’t.”

As she took the
paper from him, she knew what he meant.  She collapsed into the oversized chair
next to the fireplace, Helen and David still standing in front of her.  She
read the last sentence to herself again as the first tears started to fall down
her cheeks. 

Remember.  Love
you always.  Goodbye, Becca x.

Jack Fraser
could hear the telephone ringing in the background as he shuffled his rain coat
up his arms and onto his shoulders.

“Nobody going
to answer that?” he bellowed back down the hall as he took a cigarette from the
packet with his teeth.  “Where the hell are they all?”  Detective Fraser wasn’t
in the mood to hang around.  He had had enough of working this late on a
Sunday.  Phone still ringing, he marched his way down the hallway to the
incident room, the walls covered in photos of his latest case.

“Detective Jack
Fraser,” he answered with the tone more a statement than an introduction.  He
didn’t have the time to mess about with pleasantries. 

“Hello.  My
name is Elizabeth Green.  I am calling from Haven about the case of the body
found on the beach.”  He didn’t know where the hell Haven was, but she had his
attention.  This case had been the focus of his incident room all week, and he
still hadn’t got a clue of the name of the face, with the dead eyes and hollow
cheeks that he had been staring at for days on end with no possible lead to get
him out of the office.  He scrambled around for his note pad, the cigarette
still jiggling about in his teeth as he pulled a small leather bound notebook
from his inside pocket.  Pulling out the pencil from its little holder, he was
ready for her information.

“OK, tell me
your name again.”  He nodded as he wrote out the words.  He circled her name
twice for confirmation.  “Tell me what information it is that you have.” 

“Well, I am
certain that the woman is my sister, Officer,” she replied, so sure of herself
now that she had solved the first clue.  This was the path to discovering the
truth. 

“Detective,” he
reminded her unnecessarily so, with a tinge of irritation in his otherwise
monotone voice.  “So what makes you believe it’s your sister?”

“Well, she has
been missing for four years and she left me a …” he interrupted her before she
could finish.

“Since when did
she go missing? Four years ago?”  He was throwing her off course.  She could
hear by the tone of his voice that he was already questioning her.  She felt
like a suspect in a case that until two minutes ago she didn’t even know
existed.  She wished he would just let her finish.

“Yes, four
years ago, but she …”  He interrupted her again.

“Hang on a
minute, Miss .......”  Now it was her turn to interrupt him.  She had formed an
instant dislike of this man.  She had to make him listen. 

“It’s Mrs.
Green.  Four years ago there was a car accident.  We never found her.”   He sat
himself down on Gibb’s swivel chair, wrapping his feet around the silver legs,
as he pushed the chair under the desk with his toes. 
There was a car
accident. 
The words took him straight back to a time he had long since
tried to forget.  He never really had though, and every now and then, a snippet
of information like this would pick him up and transport him straight back to
that day. 
That horrible day.
  He grabbed the cigarette lighter on the
desk and lit the cigarette still in his mouth.  He inhaled deeply, the smoke
filling his lungs.  Taking the cigarette from his mouth at the base of his
fingers, he let out a plume of white smoke, soft and velvety, interrupted only
by the thicker wavering spiral of smoke coming directly from his cigarette;
wasted smoke rising to the yellow tinged ceiling.  He rested his forehead onto
the pads of his finger tips, carefully trying not to singe his once-blonde, but
now greying wavy hair.  It was his hair that girls had always found so
attractive when he was a young cocky cop, and he used to love to have Rose run
her fingers through it, but he had aged since that time and his hair had
receded to form two neat little bays on his forehead.  His hair now was just
another element of his appearance that reminded him that he was getting older.

“Tell me where
this accident happened.”  As she re-lived the details;  the glossy wet roads,
the mist clinging to the trees, the smoke as it rose from the ravine below, she
could feel that night as if she was still stood at the side of the road,
sheltered by the large police umbrella looking down to the flaming pit beneath
her feet.  She described the bend in the road, covered with the height of the
pine trees.  She described how, even in the light of day, it was a dark and
dangerous corner.  She described how the barrier had been broken, and how the
car had rocketed off the road.  How, when she had got there, it had still been
burning so strongly, unhindered by the fire trucks or stream in which the
remains lay.  She described how they had never found a body.  That there was
nothing there. 
Or nothing left,
thought Jack Fraser.

He was polite
as he listened to the details and was sincere when he promised to check it out
the next day with the local police.  As he put down the receiver, his gaze
returned to the blonde woman in the photographs before him, dressed in unusual
clothing and with too many unexplained peculiarities at the scene for his
liking in a simple suicide case.  As he had pulled up at the scene, early on
that Sunday morning just one week ago, he had thought how peaceful it was; the
gentle sound of the waves as they became one with the rolling pebbles; the
early morning sky still hanging low, the colours of which merged into the ocean
before it had been woken by the sun.  He had seen the body, lying there supine
and quiet, the waves breaking against the two bare feet like two big rocks sat
amongst thousands of tiny pebbles.  It was like no other crime scene he had attended;
it was serene, and peaceful.  He thought that it could have been the perfect
place to die.

He pulled the
heavy door of the old Explorer truck closed, shutting himself in the cabin.  He
quickly wound down the windows, letting the late evening summer breeze drift
in
through the windows, releasing the
heat of the stuffy oven-like interior.  It felt claustrophobic and humid, as if
the sky might suddenly give way to the pressure and let out an almighty crash
as the belly of the clouds buckled open.  He had a headache, and he wished the
storm would just come to clear the air.  It had been a long week staring at the
once pretty blonde woman lying peacefully on the shore of a local isolated
beach.  As he sat there in the car park, the thoughts of the clothes, the
carefully placed shoes, cigarettes that were no longer in circulation, photographs
and a key to an unknown lock, he knew that he had passed an entire week and was
no further forward in finding out who this woman was.  He didn’t think that the
woman on the phone late this Sunday evening could help him.  She
had given
him the name of the
officer down in Wellbeck, and he decided that he would call him in the morning
just to clear up the lead. 

As he drove
home through the dark streets, the city was quiet, the residents sleeping in
preparation for the week ahead.  He smoked his last cigarette, before pulling
up outside the rundown apartment block.  It was an old warehouse, and he liked
the unfinished look of it all.  Kate refused to live here, in this run down
part of the city, so he would be spending the night alone.  She wasn’t
interested in moving from her up market tiny apartment into the old rambling
factory that only loosely housed six apartments.  She didn’t want to sacrifice
her telephone entry security system for a door that you had to slide open, and which
always had new graffiti on it.  She didn’t want to give up her mirrored
elevator for the old open-walled freight elevator with its pull-shut red metal
fretwork gate.  His unfinished home, with no separating walls - except for the
toilet - was no place to raise a family.  She had also informed him that it was
no place to leave your girlfriend at all hours when he was still out working,
protecting the city. 

As he yanked
open the metal door, he threw his jacket onto the leather chair.  He grabbed
himself a beer from the fridge, and threw a frozen pasta meal for one into the
microwave.  He picked up the file that he had brought home the night before and
leafed through the contents before carefully arranging the photographs on the
floor in front of him.  He placed the close-up picture of the dead woman in the
centre, her empty eyes staring past him into the apartment behind him.  Her
pale blue skin was like silk, soft and delicate when he touched it, and it blended
in with the sky.  Around her, he placed the other photographs:  the neatly
placed shoes; the packet of cigarettes; the photographs and the key, clutched
into a tight hand. 
Who is this woman?

He pulled a
large sheet of paper out from his shelving unit and stuck it onto the wooden
floor, the kind so large in scale it would be used by architects or artists. 
It didn’t stick at first, the location he chose too dusty to make a good
contact.  Brushing the fine particles away, they rose into the air and through
coughs and sneezes he attached another piece of brown parcel tape to the sheet
of paper.  He marked it clearly at the top in big letters:  ‘PENDING’. 

He listed the
outstanding jobs:  
Psych analysis;
FORENSICS; BLOOD results; INTERVIEWS
.  It was such an isolated beach;
there weren’t many people who would have seen anything.  The only witness was a
lone man and his dog and he was so visibly shaken on finding the woman, it had
been pretty easy to rule him out of anything sinister.  A quick check through
his life, his bank details, and weekly bridge club meeting and daily walks by
the beach in the exact same place made him an unlikely suspect.  The only other
nearby shop owner hadn’t seen anything.  BUS TICKET.  He had no idea if they
would still have tapes from around that time.  He thought that it was from
Chesterwood, the nearest city to the beach, his city, but even that was a
guess.  DNA.  SUICIDE?  He circled the question mark.  He had no suspects; he
had no clues, just a bunch of random stuff that so far he couldn’t make any
sense of. 

“Now, what was
the woman’s name?”  He flicked through the small black book, flipping through
the pages with the thumb of the same hand.  There it is.  ‘REBECCA JACKSON’, he
wrote, certain that by the morning he would already have drawn a thick black
line through it.  He stuck another sheet of paper down on the floor on the
opposite side.  At the top of the page he wrote ‘LEADS’.  He left that page
blank.

The pinging of
the microwave alerted him to the fact that it was time to rest.  He grabbed his
meal, wrapping the small cardboard box in a tea-towel and he dropped into the
crinkled leather settee.  It was cool in his apartment.  The open space
swallowed up the heat of summer, snatching it away into the empty cavern of the
roof.  He flicked his way through a series of inane television programmes,
before finally letting go of the week’s work.  He left the television on low,
the gentle mumble of strange voices a comfort to the loneliness of the empty
apartment.  He wished Kate was here tonight.  He wanted some company.  He was tired
of his own.  He dialled her number.  Nothing. 
Sunday night?  Not at home?  
He
knew she was tired of him lately too;  his inflexibility to commit to anything
more solid, choosing to live - as she described it - with his dead victims,
rather than live their own lives together. 

“Probably just
pissed at me.”  He lay there for a while contemplating where she might be. 
She
could be at home.  Club?  On a Sunday?  Not very likely,
he thought. 
Hospital?
  
He traced his brain back and tried to think of her last shifts.  Tonight
was definitely a night off.  As he picked up the phone again and dialled the
number, he heard the ever-excited voice on the other end of it.

“Come over? 
Sure.  Give me half an hour.”  The willing voice on the other end of the phone
never refused.  Her name was Roxanne.  He had given her that name.  He thought
that she probably had hundreds of different names, depending on the day and
where she found herself.  He liked her company; it was easy.  He didn’t have to
try.  Roxanne didn’t expect him to move out of his empty faceless apartment to
raise a family in the suburbs.  She didn’t complain about his preference to smoke
in bed.  She didn’t complain about any of his preferences.