Escaping Life (9 page)

As he heard the
clunk of the elevator and the rickety turning of the brass rollers at the top
of the shaft that sat just above his doors, he was certain it must be her.  She
wasn’t scared like Kate was.  He rose from the settee and walked to the door. 
He grabbed his wallet from the back pocket of the trousers that he had kicked
off on the settee earlier and took out two crisp twenty pound notes, the Queen’s
face looking back at him disapprovingly through a half smile.  He threw the
cash onto the table in the hallway.  She would know where to find it.  He heard
the knock of her knuckles against the cold steel door that stood between them. 
He peered through the peephole.  She looked cheap.  She looked ready.  She
looked good.  He let her in without saying anything and she shot him that sly
little smirk that she always did, as if to say what a naughty boy he was being
tonight.  Closing the door behind him, he moved in close behind her and as he
walked, he pushed her forward towards the bed with the weight of his body,
moving her with his hips and his swollen crotch.  He pushed her down and
climbed on top of her.  He had forgotten the dead woman stuck to his floor only
ten feet away, and Roxanne paid the photographs no attention.  He had forgotten
Kate too, at least for tonight, happy to accept his inevitable guilt the
morning after.  He pushed his face into the back of Roxanne’s warm neck as he
pulled her head back, his grip clasping at chunks of smoky hair.  He heard her
excitable groans, and he didn’t care if they were genuine.  He could smell her,
and as he put his lips onto her skin he could taste her, salty like the ocean
from the sweat of summer.  With his senses aligned and focussed on the woman
underneath him he could forget about Kate.  He could also forget about the
hollow-faced blonde woman taped to the floor.  He would lose himself for a while
and use this time to block out the memories of the past that he kept trying to
run from, but that somehow he
could
just never leave behind.

He was up early
the next morning.  He awoke hungry and after a quick shower he got himself up
and out of the house.  The area in which he lived was still pretty industrial
and at the end of his road, parked up alongside the dock every morning, there was
a breakfast van that served the local tradesmen.  In fact, if you opened up the
windows, even on his sixth floor apartment, you could smell the hot grease of
bacon and fried eggs wafting up through the window.  He stopped off at the
breakfast van and picked up a hot bacon roll with lashings of ketchup, and a
cup of sweet coffee in a small polystyrene cup.

The drive to
work was just long enough for him to enjoy his bacon roll.  He ate from the van
every morning:  it was easier than making breakfast for himself, something he
would never bother to do anymore.  He stopped at the local garage and picked
himself up some cigarettes, handing over another twenty pound note.  Marlboro
red, his brand of choice.  He remembered standing in front of the cigarette
stand as a teenage boy and wondering, now he had finally plucked up the courage
to attempt to buy his own cigarettes from somebody other than the older kid at
school, who charged him fifty pence for each cigarette, which brand he should
actually choose.  He glanced across the golden boxes, the white with blue stripes
and the white with red strips.  Then, in the corner of his eye, he caught the
red box with the white triangle on the front.  Immediately he remembered the
Marlboro man; his red shirt, white cowboy hat, and leather waistcoat and
chaps.  It was an outfit that screamed ‘Hero’ as he leant up against his
horse.  As a boy, this man had been the ultimate man; everything he and his
peers considered masculine and necessary, wrapped up into a rugged and handsome
package.  ‘
Ten Marlboro cigarettes - the red ones please,’
he had said,
pointing up towards the shelf.
 
He had practised saying ‘
ten
cigarettes please’
over and over on the way into the shop, but then faced
with the unexpected and extensive choice, he hoped that the uncertainty that had
crept in hadn’t resonated in his voice, betraying his tender age.

He pulled up
outside the Police station and found an empty parking space.  It was another
hot and humid day, and he could already feel the odd bead of sweat running down
his back.  The storm had passed by last night, but had never really become the
beast that the grey clouds had promised, as the wind direction changed, just brushing
the outskirts of the storm across the city. 

As he walked
into the station, the humidity rose and he got that same feeling as stepping
off an air-conditioned aeroplane and being hit by a tropical wall of heat, and
a layer of sweat formed immediately on his brow.  He made his way down the
corridors, as police officers of lower seniority nodded their heads towards
him, accompanied by a curt ‘morning Detective
.’   
He arrived at the
incident room to find his team of detectives hanging around drinking coffee and
with their feet on the desks.  Like a collection of jack in the boxes they sprang
into action, straightening themselves up like a bunch of sloppy students caught
slacking off by the teacher.

“Morning Boss.” 
DC Nathan Gibb was the only one paying any attention or doing any work.  He was
the newest of the bunch and this was his first proper investigation and only
his second week out of uniform.

“Which one of
you lazy bastards is gonna make me a coffee?”  He didn’t look up as he walked
through the room and up the small corridor to where his office was located.  He
could hear the fuss and commotion that his request had provoked, and knew all
fingers would be pointing at Gibb.  Jack was just out of the main hub of things,
but close enough to hear what was going on. 

“Here you go Boss.” 
DC Gibb placed a cup of coffee down on the desk, his voice casual enough to
sound, he thought, like he wasn’t trying too hard.  He spilled a drop and it
formed a wet ring underneath the mug, slowly seeping into the papers underneath
it.  Jack grabbed a tissue from his inside pocket and dabbed it at the ring,
his actions jumpy and laced with annoyance at Gibb’s over enthusiasm.  They
could hear the mobile phone in Jack Fraser’s pocket ringing.  As he picked up
the vibrating phone, he could see it was Kate’s name, and he felt as sure as
anything that pang of guilt that he promised himself he would deal with today. 
Jack Fraser looked up at Gibb, who was hopelessly hanging around looking for a
way to undo the last two minutes of his life and take back the coffee stained
papers. 

 “I need to
take this call,” he said, as he motioned to the phone, signalling that he
wanted some privacy.  “Do you think the dead woman’s gonna identify herself?” 
DC Gibb left the room, muttering an apology that Jack Fraser didn’t really
hear.  He was already answering the phone, and trying to think of the right
words.

“You called
late last night.  I was out.  What did you want?”  There was no pleasant ‘Good
morning’, no ‘How did you sleep?’  He wouldn’t have wanted to tell her, even if
she’d asked. 

“I was just
wondering if you were free?  If perhaps you would have come over?”  The pissed
off sigh that he could hear on the other end of the phone was enough to make
him realise that what he had just said didn’t sound that good.  No call all
week and then a late night Sunday telephone call only sounded like one thing. 
Roxanne didn’t have a problem with that, but when she left his house it was
with forty quid tucked inside her bra.  This kind of telephone call to your
girlfriend wasn’t permitted.  Not by Kate at least.

“Is that what I
am to you Jack?  A late night fuck buddy?”  When she spoke like this, in her
upper class southern accent, it always turned him on.  The words and the voice
were such a contrast.  “If you only want to see me at that time of night, don’t
bother calling me.”  She had a point, he realised.

“No, no.”  He
wanted to sound convincing.  “I wanted to see you.  I wanted to spend time with
you.  I’m sorry it was such a busy week.”  This at least was true; he had
missed her the last week.  He had had been so caught up with the unidentified
dead woman lying in his morgue, that he hadn’t had any time for her.  He was
thinking on his feet.  “I’ll meet you tonight, if you can?”

“I don’t know,
I’ll let you know,” and before he could answer, she had already hung up the
phone.  He placed the phone down on the desk and emptied the cigarettes from
his pocket and set them down next to it.  He took a big glug of his coffee, and
walked back into the incident room.  They were all still sat doing nothing.

“Right, you,” Jack
pointed, “get on the psyche report.  And you speak with the lab to see if we’ve
got any forensics back yet”.  Addressing Gibb, who was alert and ready for
instruction, “Give this guy down in Wellbeck a call.  There was a woman who was
in a car accident three or four years ago.  Rebecca something ......Jackson, I
think.  Find out if there is any way that our dead could be her.”  He handed
Gibb a note of paper with the name and number of the officer tha
t
Elizabeth had given him the night
before.  “Boys, we’ve got a dead body in our morgue, and I want to know who she
is and how she got there.  Get on it.”

After kicking
the butts of his squad, he wanted to get out of the office.  Walking into that
office again today and seeing that face, framed by blonde hair and with dead
green eyes staring vacuously back at him was just a constant reminder that he
hadn’t got anywhere with the case.  He had already spent a week fending off television
and newspaper interviews with the press, and they had released a few details
about a body being found, but without the identity of the woman known, they
couldn’t get any further.  He had put all his eggs into the laboratory basket,
hoping that if he could find some DNA he could run it through the database and
find a match somewhere.  At least that would give him a start.  Right now, his
main efforts had to be on trying to find out what this woman had been doing
here in the first place, and the best place he knew to find answers to that was
the most populated place closest to Lyme beach.  Somebody had to have seen her.

As he drove his
Explorer into the busy Chesterwood high street, he scanned the road for
somewhere to park.  He knew coming out to interview random people was a long
shot, and way below his pay grade, but he couldn’t stand being cooped up in
that office.  Plus, he knew his detective skills were sharp.  He could find
details that might pass other people by.  He had seen it before, time after
time.  He could recall one case when all he had found was a grocer who
remembered seeing a dark haired guy, tall and tanned run past his shop,
desperately looking over his shoulder a week or so before.  He had let it go,
thinking that the guy looked more than able to handle himself, whatever it was
that he had got involved in.  Coming in to identify the dark haired stranger
had put the man who his girlfriend testified, was at home with her, in the
location of the mugging that had occurred in the stairwell of the car park on
the same day within the same hour.  His positive identification had saved the
case. 

He pulled his
car up into a space, parked so askew that it looked like he had mounted the
side of a mountain using all of the car’s off-road ability, but it had been a
long time since he had driven this thing like that.  Grabbing his jacket from
the passenger seat, he slammed the door shut.  It was too hot for his jacket,
but he wore it anyway, such was the ease at having his cigarettes, phone and
notepad immediately to hand.  He was trying to give up smoking, but he couldn’t
stand the thought of not having a pack in his pocket.  It was his ‘just in case
pack’.  He needed to know that his ‘crutch’ was there and if it wasn’t, he knew
the moment would come when he would reach for their addictive chemical support,
and when a frantic search of his pocket proved fruitless he would drop
everything to seek them out and smoke like he hadn’t smoked all year.  Knowing
that they were there was sometimes enough.  He had given up before, but a little
over twelve months ago he had started again.  Kate had been nagging him ever
since to give up.  That wasn’t the crutch that he needed, or so she said. 

The best places
to start were the convenience stores, where people bustled in and out every
couple of days; shops with heavy traffic.  The people who run these stores have
an eye for faces and would remember their customers:  it was part of the
service in shops like this, even in Chesterwood.  He passed through the four
that he could think of, always starting out with the same line of questioning. 
Most people in the town had heard about the body now; people knew somebody had
been found.  In fact, people had been slowly filtering past the beach, up to
the police line in order to get a glimpse of the location where a mysterious
dead body had been discovered.   The lonely beach comber had also become an
unwilling local celebrity, with news agencies and nosey parkers all trying to
get access to him in order to discover the details.  Nobody knew the details
yet, and ‘
that’s how it will stay, nosey little bastards’,
Jack Fraser
thought to himself
. 
He bustled into the final store, past the young
mothers laden with shopping bags, and shifty looking groups of teenagers who
huddled in groups in the quieter aisles waiting for an opportunity to fill
their pockets.  The shop keeper was understandably preoccupied with these young
troublemakers, knowing full well that his magazine shelves where about to be
ripped off again.  He paid no attention to the tall and still handsome police detective,
despite the dark circles underneath his eyes and wrinkles that cut deep into
his forehead as he walked into the shop.  Immediately, Jack Fraser knew what
was going down.  He glanced over at the teenagers in the large domed mirror
above the shop counter.  They couldn’t have been more than about fourteen years
old.  He knew how to diffuse this situation.