Escaping Life

by Michelle Muckley

  The bus meandered through the city streets, stretching and turning its way through the old city, the narrow streets slowly compressing until they eventually squeezed together and spat the bus out onto the motorway. Elizabeth hadn’t slept the night before, and the gentle rocking of the seat as the wheels bumped their way along the ground lulled her off into the early stages of sleep. Her head rocked back and forth, her eyes shutting and opening rhythmically, her mind still desperately wanting to stay awake. How could she sleep now, a new clue having been revealed only half an hour before? Her eyes were gritty from the city, her eyelids heavy like guillotines, anxiously teetering above the next of the condemned. She tried to process the day behind her, still early and in its infancy, but aged and haggard to her. She had first arrived at Jack Fraser’s apartment that morning, sleepy but resolute in her decision to remain here, to solve the case like a professional detective and then, so convinced of her decision made at Lyme beach, to return home and go back to Haven. It was true, her family did need her, her father she imagined, more than anybody else, even if they were not close anymore. But yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she should have stayed. She should have challenged Jack, she told herself. She should have made him let her stay. Yet in that instant, she knew that as strong as she was, the constant rollercoaster of emotions was almost too much to take and she needed to get back to Haven, just as much as she had needed to move there in the first place. For the last four years she had been running to escape Rebecca and her death, and yet Rebecca had thrust herself back into Elizabeth’s life once more, back from the grave, only to die again.

  Random images of an imagined life came to her as she lulled on the edge of sleep. Flashback images of life, like the flames of a fire when fed by fresh oxygen, burst into her mind: of the ravine and the smouldering car residing at the bottom of it, snapshots of her scrambling to safety, clinging to the grass of the cliffs as she hauled her way back out. Ideas of her journey to Chesterwood and the beginnings of a new life under the radar filled her mind; friends, parties, and days out imagined from nowhere and given flesh and bones as Elizabeth’s mind made them a reality. She had to think of her as a live, living person, to give her breath and blood running through her veins, for to be dead - lost for four years into empty isolation - was worse than losing her a first and second time combined.

  Their last meeting had been haunting her, teasing her like a demon. The thought of Rebecca desperately clinging on to her arms, scratching and pulling at her as Elizabeth tried to escape through the front door, Rebecca behind her and terrified of what Elizabeth didn’t know. She thought about her peeking out through the window as she left the house for the final time. In the following hours, something inside of Rebecca had told her the only way out, the only redemption and the only absolution for the thing that was weighing so heavily on her, was to disappear. But not just from her family. From the world. For four years she had been dead to everything except the ground she walked on, the air she breathed, and a random person she had coffee with at the local bus station. In all of the police work and all of the searching, the only person who actually appeared to know Rebecca, to have had any contact with her for the last four years was Barry, and the police hadn’t even found him. He had found them, completely by accident. What was it that he had said? They didn’t get on? Had he said that her father and Rebecca didn’t get on? Barry had said a lot over the last few hours, but she was too tired to recall it all and as she dropped in and out of consciousness, the lullaby of the hum from the road gently rocked her into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  Twenty three

  She awoke as the bus bumped its way over the sleeping policemen on the way into Wellbeck, the road humps designed to slow down the approaching traffic. She couldn’t recall when they were built, but she had heard about it; roughly fifteen years earlier after a child had been accidentally run over. There had been protests and demonstrations until the council had agreed to their construction and then following, news reports in the paper of the success of the people’s campaign.

  She took the next bus back to Haven, refreshed from her sleep. She picked a seat near the back where it was quieter and settled into a surprisingly soft and comfortable cushion. Barry’s words were still on her mind as she travelled home. Elizabeth knew that it had always been she who was closer to her father. There had been too many incidents where they had argued and fought. Elizabeth had always known she was the favourite. Rebecca had understood this too. But to think that she had seen their father and that he hadn’t said anything was impossible. He would have mentioned that. Even stranger still, Elizabeth thought, was how Rebecca had also told Barry that she had been visiting her on these various Saturdays at the bus station, and Elizabeth hadn’t seen or heard anything from her in all of that time. For what possible reason should she take anything that Rebecca had told Barry to be the truth? The only things of which she could be sure were those things that she experienced with her own eyes, before Rebecca had left their lives, the good things and the bad.

  It had been late afternoon when Elizabeth took the call from Auntie Sarah. They never spoke on the telephone, and when Elizabeth answered and heard Sarah’s soft and unusually cautious voice she knew that something was wrong. She agreed to meet her at the house. Auntie Sarah wouldn’t tell her why. As Elizabeth turned the corner into the street where she had grown up, the familiar grass verges and wide open cul-de-sac were littered with police cars and ambulances, with cops buzzing around on the grass outside her house. It was a sinking feeling: already, there was no possible way to believe, once the mess of cars and vans was cleared, that everything would be as it had been only half an hour before. She could see the flashing blue lights reflecting back and forth in the huge windows of the oversized houses, scattering through the leaves of the trees like sickening disco lights. As she pulled up in the car, the officers approached her, primed and waiting expectantly for her arrival. By the time she arrived there, there was no body lying bloodied on the kitchen floor, neck swollen and bruised, eyes void and red from blood that had haemorrhaged into the once white sclera. Instead, there was just a simple white tape outlining where the body had once been. Somebody had broken in, she told herself. Somebody broke in and got killed, as she glanced around the room looking for signs, like shattered glass and blood splatter from a stranger’s gun. Instead, all she found was Rebecca, still huddled tightly in the corner and surrounded by police officers, her body trembling, poisoned by its own adrenaline. Where is Daddy? Where is Mummy? Did Rebecca own a gun? Elizabeth crouched down next to her asking over and over again what had happened. Rebecca had remained silently terrified in the corner of the kitchen, pressed up against the wall, her knuckles white with fear and body paralysed.

  Through muffled words, Rebecca had realised that it was Elizabeth next to her; her fear diminished now that Elizabeth was there and next to her. She grabbed her tightly, pulling her down unsteadily towards the floor. She clung onto her like a baby orang-utan, her tight fingers gripping her arms, and her face buried into her shoulder. “It’s OK, Becca. It’s OK,” said Elizabeth, having no belief that even she trusted her own words. She knew that something was very wrong. She looked up at the nearest officer, the same one who had rushed in after her as Elizabeth had raced through the house. “Please,” she begged, “what is going on?”

  The officer explained that her father was outside in one of the ambulances, being treated for shock; in another one was the neighbour who had stumbled into this hornet’s nest of horror, and in the final ambulance lay her mother’s body, stiff, cold, and dead. And murdered. She felt Rebecca clinging on to her more tightly than ever. It was the only time that she had wanted to let the world just consume her, to let the world around her collapse and fall apart. When she heard the final words of the police officer, his honest and well trained face delivering the words he had so carefully chosen, that Rebecca had been found here in this very corner terrified and repeatedly muttering the word ‘Betty, Betty’, she kne
w that she had to be strong. She had to be there for Rebecca.

  As the bus pulled into the car park, she realised that she hadn’t even been aware that they were approaching Haven. She waited for the bus to traverse over the lumps and bumps on the ground, and then made her way to the front of the bus.

  “Bye, have fun.” She turned to see the smiling face of the driver, open and familiar as he pulled the lever to release the doors. A shot of air spewed out from the doors’ pneumatics, whooshing out and letting the hot August sea breeze stream in. Elizabeth wasn’t perturbed by his overt friendliness. It almost sounded strange after spending the last twenty four hours in the city. She rarely travelled back to the city now; she didn’t feel like she belonged there anymore. She felt suffocated in the haze of smog as it sat above the ground, choking you slowly and subconsciously. It was only when you stepped out of it, into real air and felt the swell of the ocean that you could realise how suffocating life could be surrounded by concrete and cars. She smiled back at him, his warm face bathed by the sunlight, his eyes squinting and crippled in the daze.

  “Thanks, I’ll try.” She wasn’t sure what she was promising to the driver to try and have fun with. The fun had been sucked out of her life long ago, the moment that Auntie Sarah had first made that telephone call; the moment that she had found Rebecca huddled on the floor of their parents’ kitchen, the sister she knew lost forever. She had learned to laugh again, but she knew that she saw the world through different eyes now. The normal sense of fun and easiness about life, she had decided, were for those people in the world who could still look upon it with a sense of naivety. When you have survived the capabilities of the human condition, the willingness of some who seek to destroy the life of another, you see the world in its true colours, for what it really is. Her blinkers were off and as much as she tried, she just couldn’t block the reality, her reality, out.

  Twenty four

  Jack had watched her leave as the bus pulled out through the grand arched doorway of the station. This place had been built long before he had been born. There was a plaque that read, ‘The first covered bus station in the United Kingdom, 1926’. What had really been built was a giant box, onto which a large ornate façade had been constructed to give the whole place the grand feel of the Victorian era. The bricks were a burnt red, with simple and elegant lettering in relief that read ‘Chesterwood Bus Station’. The first buses that bobbled through the doors on the previously cobbled streets were open-topped and solid wheeled, providing nothing like the comfort that Elizabeth had ridden away in today. The new bus station of Chesterwood, then an affluent town and yet to grow into the pulsating monstrosity of a city as it stood today, had been described by its mayor at the Opening Ceremony, as ‘a place of the people, for the people’. Guests at the Opening had been presented with ornate metal gifts, as the sunlight filtered through the glass, looking almost molten with its imperfections as it refracted the light through it. The windows had since been bricked up, after riots in the early nineteen-eighties had resulted in them being smashed. The grandeur had been lost, yet it was still a place for the people, even if those people no longer came from the cream of society’s high class.

  Almost as soon as she had left, the team of expert finger printers had arrived. The area had already been cornered off as the first officers had arrived, sirens blazing and ready for action. Jack had been waiting for them, and they arrived with Gibb. They burst through the doors of the station like a riot squad, their manner electrifying to the other travellers, who quickly began nosing in to see what had been found. Jack found this over enthusiasm somewhat amusing. Young officers straight from training were always like this; every call-out in their minds the next big case, a place to earn their stripes, to blood their cheeks as if on a hunt, their prey the next available promotion for which they would fight to chase down. He stood back, knowing how all of this worked. The junior officers stood guard at the white and blue plastic tape, their job to get the area secure. There were the infantry, those that secured the defences whilst the intelligence worked incognito behind the scenes. They would warn off the baying crowd, all making assumptions about what had been found. A gun? Drugs? Body parts? They were all reasonable guesses, and all items that had been found in Chesterwood before. The fingerprinting team went about their work, delicately flicking the grey powder across the surface of the locker and those surrounding it. There were officers taking photos, and others already up on the first floor reviewing the CCTV footage from two weeks back. Jack hung at the sidelines. He patted the inside of his pocket, thinking about his cigarettes. When he was confined somewhere like this, with nothing to fill his time, he craved that chemical comfort that he was trying hard to quell. Trying to give up, he had decided, was a royal pain in the arse. He had learned to cut out some cigarettes by finding a distraction: the odour of the bacon buttie that wafted up to his apartment windows from the vendor’s van in the street below; the coffee that he would always be carrying with him; the different women with whom he spent his evenings when he felt lonely and scared of the life that he had been left with. But it was this one cigarette, the one as he watched, like an emperor above his kingdom, the other officers scurrying around the crime scene and coming to him one by one with their findings, this one was the one that he could never cut out, and he had decided not to try. Suddenly, he felt incredibly claustrophobic and needed to get outside.

  “Boss, can I have a minute?” Gibb was approaching him. For the height of summer Gibb was remarkably overdressed. He was wearing heavy woollen trousers, like those that Edward Jackson had been wearing, and a tight tie. He was new to his position and it showed. Jack could remember him only months ago when he had been in uniform; the constant air of alertness, like a Labrador eager to impress and ready for action at the short notice of his master. He hadn’t learned to be relaxed yet, it would take time.

  “Yeah. What you got for me?”

  “They have found virtually a full set of prints, the guys think they look good, and they are gonna get them back to the lab and confirm that they are from the body.” Jack wanted to tell him it wasn’t just a body. That her name was Rebecca Jackson. That she had a sister called Elizabeth who looked like an angel and whose life had been falling apart like his had been. He didn’t say anything. He just nodded his head once, briefly and sharply. “CCTV clearly shows our dead woman coming in and out of the station. We checked all the Saturdays like you said, at the times the guy - what’s his name?” Gibb started to flick through his little black note book. There were so many notes in there, it was impossible to find the information quickly.

  “Barry,” Jack offered flatly. He could see that this had annoyed Gibb. Gibb wanted to know everything. Once he had learned to relax, it was that very fact that would make him an excellent cop.

  “Yeah, Barry,” he replied, not able to make eye contact yet, his face flushed from embarrassment like fresh raspberry, swollen and ripe and ready for picking. “At those times every Saturday. We went back two months, took ages. We have got her coming in to the station every week like he said. His story checks out.”

  “Good. Get the guys back to the crime lab. They need to run the tests on that key, prints, trace it for DNA. I want the trace evidence back ASAP. Got it?” Gibb nodded, enthusiastically. “We know who she is, and once we can prove that the key is hers, maybe we can make some progress with an address.”

  It was late afternoon by the time the forensic teams had finished and the blue ticker tape was being torn down by the junior officers. The station manager had been going crazy all day, every half an hour needling at Jack to get the search finished. It looked bad to have a crime scene in the bus station. It would put people off using the bus, he said. There were buses queued up in the bays, the whole schedule thrown out by the commotion and the crowds. The journalists had turned up by early afternoon, as soon as word had spread. Jack had given an interview. They had been pressing to know if the search was related to the body that had been found on Lyme bea
ch. ‘Have you identified the mystery woman yet? When are you releasing pictures? What did you find in the lockers? Should the public be scared?’ He had given a simple statement. An item interesting to an ongoing police case had been found and was under investigation, but it had done little to quell their insatiable appetite for sensationalist theories and he dreaded what the newspaper might print the next day. There was a bustle about the station like never before and yet it was the kind of crowd that nobody at the station wanted - except for Barry. He had been right in the thick of things, helping where possible, and making coffee for everybody when he couldn’t. Jack had decided that he would get the other officers to pick him up tomorrow, take him down to the station. Barry had really hung around today, and had been helpful. But Jack had met this type before - the people who get unnecessarily involved, hanging around the case, looking in their eyes at least helpful and innocent. He could remember one young guy, a bit of a loner, like Barry. He too had hung around helping the police, giving statements and appearing on the television. He had made it into the national papers and the country had hailed him as a hero for the evidence that he had given concerning the disappearance of the local nine year old girl. When she had eventually been found, barely alive, in a sealed-off room in the locked basement of his home, it hadn’t surprised the police. Jack didn’t think that Barry was involved, but best give him a good going over, just to make sure.