by Jason Ayres
“Don’t forget I won’t be home tonight,” she said, over breakfast. “We’re going straight into town for our Christmas do after work. Probably won’t be back until pretty late.”
“That’s OK,” I said, then added, “I’ll wait up for you.”
“I’ll probably be pretty hammered when I get back,” she added, “if last year is anything to go by.”
After she went, I kissed her goodbye and made my preparations for the day. The words “I won’t be home tonight” echoed in my mind, thinking about how she hadn’t come home ever again. But today that would all change. This time it was going to be different.
I knew exactly where and when the accident had taken place, and where to find Tompkins during the evening. This was further evidence that had come out at the trial, but to make sure, I had tracked him down already to ensure there would be no case of mistaken identity.
The information I had was that he had driven his car to a pub a couple of miles from Oxford city centre and had parked it in their car park at around teatime that afternoon.
I hadn’t seen the car before: for whatever reason it hadn’t been parked at his house when I went to check him out, but I knew what I was looking for.
I drove to the car park myself and sat in my car and waited. It was dark by the time he arrived, around 4.30pm, but I still spotted the car instantly under the street lights, a beaten-up old red Nova with a 1993 registration plate.
He parked in a space almost directly opposite me, got out and headed into the pub. I decided to follow. I wanted to find out for myself what my wife’s killer was like.
At his trial he’d painted a picture of a family man who’d made a single terrible mistake. I knew that he was married with two kids, so if he really was the family man he claimed, why would he be driving to the pub at this time on a Friday afternoon?
Surely most fathers would be looking forward to spending some time with their kids at the end of the working week, wouldn’t they?
It wasn’t as if he was even attending a work Christmas party: he just seemed to be on his own, at least at first. I walked into the pub, ordered myself a soft drink and watched to see what he did.
It was busy in the pub, full of people who had just finished work for the Christmas break, and the place was full of festive cheer.
After about ten minutes he was already three-quarters of the way down his first pint of lager, having been standing playing a fruit machine on his own. Cash exhausted, he thumped the buttons on the front of the machine, swore at it, and headed across to a pool table in the corner where a group of young men were playing.
He chalked his name up on a blackboard which read “Winner stays on” and started joining in the banter with the others.
By 8pm, he was on his fifth pint and it was still over three hours until the fateful moment of the accident. It was time for me to head out into the car park and put the next part of my plan into operation.
It was my intention to phone the police and report him for drinking and driving, but I couldn’t be sure that it would be enough to stop him. What if the police didn’t come? It was one of their busiest nights of the year after all, commonly known as “Mad Friday”. Town would be full of people who didn’t normally drink, overdoing it and getting out of control.
The increasingly cash-strapped police forces were going to find their resources highly stretched tonight. So for good measure, I went and let down one of his tyres, the nearside rear. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice and would still get in the car.
I would need him to do this if the police were to be able to arrest him. A flat tyre would also delay him from getting away, giving Sarah ample time to make it over the zebra crossing safely.
Had I done enough, though? What if the police didn’t come and he decided to change the wheel and drive off? He might end up killing someone else. I couldn’t imagine he’d be up to changing a wheel in his inebriated state, but anything was possible.
What if he decided not to drive home and left the car behind? That would solve the problem for tonight, but what about in the future? It was all very noble of me, saving Sarah’s life, but if he got away scot-free I’d only be saving up his lethal combination of booze and car for another night.
Worst of all, he might be so drunk he wouldn’t even notice the tyre was flat, turning the car into an even more lethal weapon than it already was. I had a plan C in mind if neither the police nor the flat tyre stopped him, but it was very much a last resort.
I needed him to get caught by the police one way or another, as the man had to be punished for the crime he was yet to commit.
The timing of my call was crucial. The accident had occurred at 11.22pm. If I rang the police too early they would get here, find that he was still in the pub and leave again, as no crime had been committed. Too late, and he would already have left.
It was reminiscent of the time that I’d deliberated about what time to call the fire brigade about the fire at the furniture store. Timing was crucial. I decided I would make the call at precisely 11pm.
The time seemed to crawl by as I sat in my car. At half past ten I decided to go back into the pub and find out what was happening. It was absolutely packed and very noisy. A fat, middle-aged man in an Animal T-shirt was running a disco in the corner and the music was deafening.
It took some time to fight my way through to the other end of the pub where the pool table was. Tompkins was still there, and engaged in a heated argument with another man over whose turn it was next. As I watched, he brandished the pool cue at the man who wisely backed down.
I had no idea how much he’d had to drink but he was swaying and slopping his pint all over the place. I’d seen enough. All those crocodile tears I’d seen him put on at his trial were an absolute farce. The man was a drunk and a bully.
“Family man, my arse,” I muttered to myself as I turned and headed back for the car park. Well, he was just about to get his come-uppance.
It was nearly 11pm when I got back to the car, so I dialled 999 and asked to be put through to the police. It took some time to get all the details through, at which point I got chastised for calling the emergency number rather than 101.
“But this is an emergency,” I exclaimed. “This bloke in the pub is extremely drunk and aggressive, and he told me himself he was going to drive home, boasting that he’d never been caught. His exact words were “Bollocks to the pigs”, if I recall correctly.”
OK, so I had made the last bit up for dramatic effect, but I still wasn’t getting the response I wanted. Eventually, the lady on the other end of the line agreed to send someone out, but I wasn’t convinced, and the conversation had taken so long, there wasn’t much time to spare. I should have phoned earlier.
I sat back in the car and waited. As expected, at a quarter past eleven he came staggering out through the back gate towards his car. He was clearly angry, shouting and swearing.
“Fucking wankers!” he shouted, looking back towards the pub, before tripping over an empty yellow beer crate that had been left just outside the gate.
Just managing to stay on his feet, he crossed over to his car, fumbled in his jacket pocket for his keys and promptly dropped them on the ground. Frustratingly there was no sign whatsoever of the police.
He got into his car, switched on the ignition and began to pull out of the space, seemingly unaware that he had a flat. There was nothing else for it. I was going to have to resort to plan C.
I turned on the ignition, engaged first gear and slammed down the accelerator. Holding my breath and praying the air bag would deploy, I closed my eyes and braced for the impact.
It was far more of a shock than I had expected. Our two cars had been parked barely ten yards apart, but the crash was significant. The sound of breaking glass was everywhere. My air bag did indeed go off in my face which wasn’t particularly pleasant but that, along with the seat belt, almost certainly saved me from any serious injury.
In fact, other than a slight pain in th
e back of my neck which I attributed to whiplash, I felt OK physically. Emotionally, I was a wreck, heart thumping away at such a rate of knots I feared for a moment I was going to have a heart attack.
The sound of the crash had brought drinkers running from the pub garden. “Call an ambulance,” I heard a girl’s voice shout. “And get the police,” called another. “It’s that twat who started the fight over the pool table. There’s no way he should have been driving, he’s had a right skinful.”
“Are you alright, mate?” said a young man, no older than his early twenties, as he opened my driver’s side door.
“I’m OK,” I said, “just a little bit of whiplash,” I said, as he helped me out of the car.
“He wasn’t so lucky,” replied the young man, gesturing at the other car. I looked to see that Tompkins had hit his head on the windscreen. Not only did his old car not have an air bag, he also hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. Serves the arsehole right, I thought.
“Is he dead?” I asked, half-hoping that he was. That would be poetic justice. And with him drunk, and me sober, there would be no doubt who would be blamed.
“I don’t think so,” said the man. “You weren’t going fast enough. He’s in a pretty bad way, though. That’s what happens when you drink and drive.”
A minute or two later, I heard the sirens of the approaching ambulance and police cars. It was a shame that an accident had to have taken place before they’d come out; had they heeded my earlier warnings, none of this needed to have happened.
Tompkins was indeed not dead, but unconscious and pretty badly smashed up. I didn’t feel any remorse. I hadn’t intended to injure him so badly, just prevent him from hurting anybody else.
I was confident that once the police had investigated fully, they would conclude that I was blameless. I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol that day as they soon discovered, breathalysing me at the scene as a matter of routine.
Once they’d heard from others in the pub about Tompkins’ drunken behaviour, they were sure to get his blood tested at the hospital. He’d wake up to discover himself with a smashed up face and severely in the shit with the police.
All in all, it was a job well done.
The police wanted to interview me at the scene, but first I needed to make sure that Sarah was OK. Although I’d had plenty of experience of altering the future before, there remained a nagging doubt in my mind.
I feared that somehow something else might happen to her to “protect the timeline”, as I’d recently seen happen in an old movie about some teenagers cheating death.
It was nearly a quarter to twelve by now, and I was incredibly relieved when she answered the phone to reveal that she was in a taxi on the way home.
I explained to her that I’d been in a car accident and that I was perfectly alright, but she insisted on getting the taxi to turn around and bring her directly to me. I wasn’t going to complain. Until I could physically see she was safe, I wouldn’t be happy.
I was talking to the police ten minutes later when she arrived in the taxi and flung her arms around me. I felt hugely reassured by this and knew that, for now at least, the world had been put to rights.
Stacey
August 2017
Sarah’s arrival in my life had changed it beyond all recognition. Whatever sparkle had initially brought us together was still there, and I swiftly found myself falling in love with her.
We were soulmates, best friends and constant companions. My past debauched behaviour was soon forgotten as I slipped quickly and easily into the relationship. There never seemed to be any shortage of things to talk about, we simply gelled and that was all there was to it.
Throughout 2018 I had noticed the weight falling off me, and once I was back with Sarah I began to notice further changes, not only in my appearance, but also in how I felt.
Being with her meant I ate much more healthily than I had after her death when I’d really let myself go. My skin looked better, my hangovers were gone, and so were all the niggling aches and pains. My clothes had gone from XL to L to M and I felt good in them.
It wasn’t all down to healthier living. Many of the changes were down to the physical properties of my ever younger body. The grey continued to disappear from my hair. It had almost completely covered the bald patch by now, leaving me with a full head of thick, black hair.
My teeth were much improved, as was my eyesight. By the time of my 46th birthday in 2016, I was able to begin managing without my glasses. Which was just as well, really, as soon after that, they vanished.
My social life also took off after Sarah’s return. Suddenly we were attending weddings and parties, and meeting other friends at weekends. Sarah was a very active person and for every evening we sat contentedly at home watching TV together, there would be another when she was out at a class or at the gym.
I, too, discovered that I had a sporting side when I began playing squash with Nick on Thursday evenings, a sport at which I was pleasantly surprised to discover I excelled.
I was still crap at golf, though. In addition to the annual charity do, I was also part of a society that went out four times a year. Whatever course we attended, it was the same woeful display, and the club shops must have done pretty well out of me when they went to dredge the lakes for balls.
I quite enjoyed the days out with the golf society, and was glad I hadn’t kept to my resolution to avoid golf at all costs.
Another enjoyable addition to my married life was the taking of holidays. My trips abroad to date had consistently entirely of business travel. It seemed I hadn’t bothered with holidays in my widower years, so I was pleased to discover that I had plenty of holidays to look forward to.
The excitement tended to build backwards as the holiday approached, and I usually got a good idea of what to expect from the hundreds of pictures Sarah always insisted on loading up to Facebook.
The only downside of holidays was the travelling. Going home on the last day wasn’t so bad, as I’d still have the holiday to look forward to, but the first day of the holiday was always a real chore. It seemed pointless going through all the hassle of flying out to somewhere when I knew I’d only end up back home the next day.
But I’d resolved to try and live as normally as possible, which included not letting on to Sarah about my trek back through time, so I just went along with it. It was less hassle to go through with the journey than having to come up with explanations as to why I wasn’t going, not to mention disappointing Sarah and Stacey.
Most people checked the weather forecast to see what the weather was going to be like on holiday, whereas I just looked up past statistics. They were much more accurate than weather forecasts. I also got a good idea of how much sun I was going to get just by looking at my skin.
In the run-up to two weeks in Crete in August 2017 I turned a rich shade of golden brown, so the weather must have been good. When I awoke there on the first morning, I wasn’t disappointed. Flinging open the shutters on the windows of our villa, I was greeted with the gorgeous sight of the sun’s rays shining down upon a sparkling blue Aegean sea.
Such was the laid-back lifestyle of those two blissful weeks in that sleepy part of the Western Crete coast that I was able to forget about my backwards spiral through time and just enjoy the days as they came.
We mixed lazy days at the beach with sightseeing, and in the evening spent long hours in tavernas, eating and drinking. One day was much like another, and I relished being able to spend my days with Sarah, just the two of us in the most idyllic place I had ever been.
Apparently this was the first holiday that we’d had without Stacey since she had been born. She was eighteen now, and had decided to go on a girls’ holiday to Majorca with two of her school friends, Sophie and Amelia, to celebrate finishing their A Levels.
It was during that holiday in Crete that I became further aware of the dark clouds hanging over Stacey’s past. One night when we were in a taverna, Sarah expressed concern about her
being out in Majorca with her friends at such a tender age.
“I do wonder if we did the right thing, letting her go out there,” said Sarah.
“We have to cut the apron strings eventually,” I replied. “She’s eighteen now, she has to be allowed to spread her wings.” I was able to speak with some confidence, having seen the well-rounded, mature person that Stacey had become in her twenties.
“I know,” replied Sarah. “But I can’t bear the thought that something might happen to her again like before. After all we’ve been through over the last couple of years with her, something like that could completely destroy her.”
I knew that no harm had come to Stacey in Majorca, so I could try and reassure Sarah on that score, but what had happened before? How could I ask? Or should I bide my time and wait for it to come out.
“I’m sure she will be fine,” I said. “You said yourself that the girls had promised to stick together.”
“I think I’ll ring her, just to make sure,” replied Sarah, reaching into her bag for her mobile.
All was well with the phone call and I decided not to pursue the matter further. If this was the only holiday Sarah and I were to have alone, I didn’t want to spoil even one day by discussing less happy times. I would find out what I needed to in the fullness of time.
March 2016
It was not until we were on holiday in Florida the following year that I was to find out exactly what had happened to Stacey. I knew that it must have been something very bad, but even I wasn’t prepared for the truth of what had happened the previous summer.
It was the first time I had been to America. Despite my many travels around Europe with the company, I hadn’t been any further afield; we were strictly a European operation. So this was the first time I had moved significantly outside my time zone, which threw up an interesting anomaly.
