Escaping Life

by Michelle Muckley

  “OK, what else have you got there?” She was back at the table now and eyeing up the brown file. She was composed, dragging her subconscious will to run kicking and screaming back into the kitchen. “What is this key for?”

  “Again, we just don’t know. This woman,” he paused, “Rebecca, disappeared four years ago. I haven’t got anything on her. You are my best lead so far. And this.” He pointed at the letters in the paper. “Calling the paper is my next step.”

  “I already called them.” Graham stared at her.

  “You didn’t tell me?” He didn’t realise they had any secrets.

  “You would have thought I was crazy. It was the Monday after the first letter. They wouldn’t tell me anything anyway. Said it was confidential.”

  “But they’ll tell me,” Jack said, “they don’t have a choice.” He was certain that they could follow this up. There had to be a forwarding address, a name, a contact, at least something. So far, it was his next best chance. But there was something else on his mind. Something that he couldn’t shake, and just as always, that same uncomfortable feeling was creeping up his back, starting to sit on his shoulders and push him further into a place of darkness that he had been running from for so long now. “Elizabeth,” he began, wishing he could scratch out the images racing through his mind; images that he had prayed so many times to leave him, but yet remained as indelible horrific memories.

  “I have to ask you to identify the body.”

  Sixteen

  After spending another half an hour at the cottage, they were in Jack’s car and driving up and out along the winding Haven road. They left behind the gentle coastal breeze, the sweet smelling scent of summer and the protection of the colossal sea cliffs, and began the descent into four years of Rebecca’s absence. Jack had telephoned ahead and had asked the mortuary staff to prepare the body for identification, and he was certain now that the teams of morticians would be doing their best to make the impossible possible: to make the dead look like the living. He never understood this: the clothes, the makeup, the dressing of hair carefully to cover up the raised and fleshy wound than encircled the scalp, haphazardly re-stitched together after the post-mortem. He didn’t see the point. You only needed to touch the skin, the soft rubbery feel of the skin against the stiffened joints, to realise that there was nothing left that was living.

  They had travelled in silence for the first fifteen minutes, save the fidgeting of Elizabeth’s feet. Her mind had been flooded with deathly stills ever since he had told her that she would have to identify the body, thoughts racing through her mind like the dancing disjointed images of a Victorian zoetrope. In truth, she was terrified.

  “Detective, I have never seen a dead body before.” As he glanced over at her, her green eyes glistening in the advancing sun like almost-ripe olives, he wondered how he of all people could possibly help her.

  “Call me Jack, OK?” She nodded, a small smile pulling up the side of her mouth. It was a soft smile, although tinged with sadness. What it must feel like to have your family choose to leave you, he thought to himself.

  “What will I have to do?” she asked, as the Explorer bobbed along the country lanes. He remembered the building, the small room that looked almost like a church, with its small stained glass window and sympathetic strangers. He could still see the white cloth covering the table, and feel the rough texture of its open weave. Some days, he thought he could still smell the bitter stench of their burnt flesh.

  “You will be asked to go into a room. She will have been placed there. When you are ready,” he paused, taking out a cigarette as he held the wheel with one hand. He offered her one, but she brushed his offer aside much like he had seen her do with Graham and his interjections. He cracked the window and she moved in closer to him. “They will lift the cover for you to see her face. Just the face.” She listened intently, every word scalding her like a hot poker. You will see her face. You will see her face. You will see her face. She said the words over and over in her mind. Not since she had stood at the gravesite and understood so clearly that she had not buried her sister, had a single day gone by in the last four years that she had not wanted to see her sister’s face. Now, she couldn’t think of anything worse. She would rather be any place in the world than here in this car, and on the road to that place. She didn’t answer him. She simply listened, the words sitting heavily in her throat like a piece of indigestible meat. If she could have coughed them back out, she would have spat them out all over the car.

  “How far away is it?” she asked like an impatient child.

  “Another couple of hours. You need the loo?” She didn’t. She didn’t need anything other than the impossibility of turning back around and heading back to Haven. She had insisted that Graham didn’t come, but now she would have given anything for his company.

  “Yes,” she lied, “maybe a coffee, too. Do you mind?” He shook his head. He knew her game: any tactic to delay the inevitable. He had played this game before too.

  Pulling off the motorway, she held on to the door handle as they turned the corner. He drove pretty recklessly, or so she thought, much more used to Graham’s sensible saloon car driving. In many ways, Graham still took care of her, always assuming that he knew more, or had more experience, with his additional ten years of life. She didn’t mind. She actually liked it, the simple life that she had chosen. To wake in her own time, to potter in the garden, to work as it flowed her way rather than chase it, and to while away time perusing Haven below her as she sat atop the cliffs at the end of her garden, her kingdom below her as she climbed over the fence and sat with her legs dangling over the water below.

  They sat in the booth on overfilled imitation leather seats which stuck to her bare legs; she was still wearing the shorts from her time in the garden before her best and worst fears were confirmed by Jack and his little brown file. They ordered their coffee, although she wasn’t sure that she actually wanted it. What she wanted to do was throw up, and as she had held her head over the foul smelling pan in the service station toilets moments before, she had wretched and wretched, but nothing had come up. Sat opposite this man, his receding hair line and tired, yet still handsome face staring back at her, she realised that she didn’t know him at all. She had willingly sat in his car for the last hour, driving into unknown territory with a complete stranger. She sipped on her coffee and prayed that it wouldn’t come back up all over the white plastic table.

  “You must have thought I was crazy when I called you on that Sunday night.” She wanted to talk to him. She wanted to know who this man was. If he was going to help her find out what happened to Rebecca, she had to know what she was working with. “Crazy woman thinks dead sister is still alive, huh?” She laughed as she said the words, the gentle laugh that teeters on the edge of tears of sadness.

  “Something like that. You have to admit, it sounds pretty farfetched.” He thought about adding that he couldn’t think of anything worse than dealing with the case of a car crash, and how he had desperately wanted to rule it out and tell her that her sister’s case was putting flashback images in his mind that he could barely find the words to describe. Instead, they both sat nodding in mutual agreement. “Why the notes in the paper? I don’t understand that.” It was only now that he realised that they hadn’t even discussed this. After seeing her face, the blonde hair and green eyes too much proof to ignore, the other questions that had been forgotten were drip feeding back to him now.

  “When we were kids, we used to sit with our mum on a Sunday morning. We always read the announcements together.” As the centre of his eyebrows arched inwards, his lips pursing like the scalloped edges of shellfish, she could see he found their old activities strange. Her teeth were clenched together like a defensive fortress. How dare he ridicule our old habits, she thought. “It was nice. We did it every week with lunch, the three of us.” The once beautiful memories of a sweet and happy childhood seemed to get more and more tainted every time she brought them ou
t, never more so than right now at this dinner table. He could see the hurt on her face; it welled up in the corner of her eyes, and for the first time he could see that whatever past events had gone before her, the woman before him now was forged from steel. Those tears would fall again at their own peril.

  “Sorry.” He realised that he had reacted just a little too spontaneously.

  “It’s OK. I guess it’s a bit strange,” she relented, “but they are good memories.”

  “Why didn’t she send it to your Mum?” He didn’t even consider the question. His careful policing had been put to the test on this case. He was always on top of things; he always had things sussed. Now, he had been so wrong about this case at the beginning, it was as if he had called all of his skills into question and his thought processes had been left tattered on the floor.

  “Because she’s dead. She died four days before Rebecca went missing.” Jack, who was about to sip at his coffee, the hot brown nectar already on his lips, put his cup down cautiously, his mind scratching about on the floor in amongst his tattered skills and thoughts, desperately trying to piece things together.

  “You’re telling me that Rebecca and your Mum went missing within a week of each other?” She nodded. She knew where this conversation was going, and she didn’t want to be there.

  “But my mother didn’t go missing.”

  “What happened to her?” He couldn’t believe that he didn’t know this already and he moved in to her closer, his elbows sliding his upper body across the table. He waited, knowing from the way her eyes had dropped, and seeing that her shoulders had tightened, that she didn’t want to say anything. The hairs on his arms stood up, the shiver of tension washing over his exposed skin. He waited for the answer, tongue almost hanging out panting.

  “She was murdered. Strangled.” She propped herself up on the table. She was almost covering her mouth with her hand, as if muffling the words would somehow make them easier to say.

  “By whom?” He waited. He knew her answer already. She didn’t need to say anything. She shook her head, shrugging her shoulders, hands up. She didn’t know, but he was willing to bet his life on the fact that somebody did.

  “You might not know.” He waited, as she raised her head, her eyes meeting his. “But I’ll bet you that Rebecca did.”

  “You’re crazy!” she shouted. “Why wouldn’t she say anything?” her voice returning to a whisper. “Why wouldn’t she go to the police?” The very idea that Rebecca knew and did nothing was too much for Elizabeth. She wouldn’t have left their mother to lie in a mortuary for a month, and then cold in her grave, her mangled blue neck with a limp and lifeless head, her killer loose, free and unpunished. “Impossible.” He was rummaging in his brown file now, his hands delving as deep as they could, looking for the freshly evidenced letters that Elizabeth had given him. He pulled everything out and dropped them onto the table.

  “Look,” he said, pointing at the first letter. “It’s time to learn the truth.” He underlined and tapped the letters. “Letter two, the same thing. Look here at the words. ‘You have to learn it for yourself to believe. I had to save you’.” He was staring at her now, and he could see that finally she was starting to see. It was becoming clearer to her, as the random words formed into coherent sentences and all of the comforting ideas that she had surrounded herself with, to somehow make the last four years bearable, were being washed away, leaving room for only the facts. “Your mother was murdered, Elizabeth.” The words stung as they hit her ears, no matter how much time had passed. “Rebecca knew who did it. She disappeared for you. To save you.” His voice was soft as he said the words. He wanted to try and replace some of the cushions that he was ripping out from under her. It was at that moment, as she picked up the letter, that she first saw it. It was the sea salt frizzy lock of blonde hair, peeking out from underneath the corner of the brown file that attracted her attention. It looked the same as her hair after she had spent the day down at Haven beach, sat on the harbour wall and chasing the molten flow of ice-cream down her arm. As she picked up the cover of the brown file, she saw the green eyes peeking into view. But these were not her eyes. When she looked in the mirror, her eyes shone like two green emeralds, perfectly cut for their brilliance and radiance, the multifaceted surface glimmering in the light. These eyes that looked back at her showed none of that same beauty. These eyes were hollow. These eyes were dead: the sunken devoid cheeks and greying skin a meagre milieu for such once precious stones. If he had still needed any convincing, Jack had the confirmation that he needed as the two faces, one dead and one living, lined up in front of him together.

  “Elizabeth, I’m sorry.” It had been a genuine mistake. “I had been trying to keep them away. I hadn’t realised that I had taken it out.” She placed the photographs back, dead face down on the Formica table in front of them. She swallowed back down the contents of her stomach, and took a large glug of coffee. She looked at him straight in his eyes, desperately needing to see life and hope.

  “Jack,” she paused, “I need to call my father.”

  Seventeen

  Elizabeth sat waiting in the foyer of the police station. It was swelteringly hot, and the small fan that whirled round and round was doing nothing but blowing warm air in her direction. Her legs kept sticking to the plastic waiting room chairs, just as they had in the service station and she couldn’t stop shuffling about in her chair and walking around the small claustrophobic reception. This place and these chairs were not intended for two hours of immobility. People came and went frequently, but she barely heard them, their activity nothing more than a background humdrum of commotion. Occasionally, somebody would shout out, proclaim the injustice of their arrest temporarily snapping her back to reality, but she soon tuned it out, the dead face of her sister once again filling her mind. Detective Fraser had been out a couple of times to check on her whilst she waited for the arrival of her father, but other than that, she sat in silence, waiting.

  She could see the outline of Edward Jackson as he approached the front doors of the police station, his features shadowed with the sun behind him. His frame was unmistakable; his metre broad shoulders and six-foot-six height too familiar to be any other person. When she was little, she used to call him the B.F.G, after the big friendly giant in her Roald Dahl books. He was her protector for so many years, and as he would snuggle up next to her, his big oversized giant hand stroking her childish body and the prickly stubble that had grown by the end of a long day, leaving a red rash across her cheek, he would stay next to her until she slept. It was many years since he had made her feel safe; it was many years since she had felt more than an obligatory connection to call once every couple of weeks, and many more since she had last felt like the six year old girl who craved to be at his side in the shadow of his imposing physique, her little chubby arms wrapped around his leg. She had always been a daddy’s girl. Now, as he approached her, flicking his hands in front of his face as the wall of heat hit him, his body completely blocked out any of the sunlight that was pouring through the doors as he stood before her. Elizabeth sat motionless, waiting for him to say something. Too much time had passed since they had seen each other, and too many awful things had happened that had destroyed part of them both, and they no longer had the easy going reunion that should permeate a meeting of father and daughter.

  “Elizabeth. What’s going on? You barely made any sense over the telephone.” His well educated accent still intimated to his affluent past of boarding school elocution lessons, the mark of the upper middle class family from which he came. Elizabeth could recall many visits to her grandparents’ home; it was the kind of building that either intimidates or excites a child. Their own home was big and she, if she had wanted to, could get lost in it for a whole day without having to see another person, or explain what she was doing to her parents. But her grandparents’ place - well, that was something else. It was a huge, ornate Victorian property with more land than house, and a river flowing at th
e bottom of the garden which kept out unwanted ramblers. On Saturday afternoons, after they had been presented to their grandparents, fully inspected and stamped with their seal of approval or disapproval, a man in a black and white suit, whom they always called ‘The Penguin’, would waddle them through into a small playroom towards the back of the house. They would pass through several doors, the ceilings slowly tapering lower and lower, and the corridors narrower and narrower until the small room, stuffed with toys, came into view. As small girls, Rebecca and Elizabeth loved the adventure of having their own playroom, but as they grew older and the toys became more and more redundant, the visits to the grand old house and the need to stay away from view, confined to their outgrown playroom, became more and more of a chore.

  “Daddy, it’s Rebecca.” Her face grew tighter and she could see that she had already angered him.

  “Elizabeth, really, how many times do we have to go over this? You have dragged me down here for all this nonsense!” His jaw was set tight, the tension contorting his shoulders so that they hunched together, his neck disappearing within them. There was a time that Elizabeth would have been able to convince him of anything; there was a time that the only words he had for her were mild soothing words that fluttered into her ears like the angels in the stories he would tell her before she slept. There was a time, when he always believed her, and she him. Now, with a dead mother and wife, and a dead daughter and sister between them, the void was too deep an abyss to bridge. There was no place for angels anymore.