Escaping Life

by Michelle Muckley

  “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.

  Seven

  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.

  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.

  Eight

  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.