Escaping Life

by Michelle Muckley

  “But people do. People choose to be alone all the time.” She put the same emphasis on the word ‘choose’, its onomatopoeic sound resonating as she drew out the word, holding it on her tongue. Her eyes dropped and her head followed. She took a long swig from the bottle. The beer had started to get warm they had been there so long.

  “I think that they probably make a mistake,” he said. “I don’t think life is to be lived alone.” There was a genuine quality about his words. They rolled out of his mouth unconsciously. Sure, he had thought about this conversation on the way back from Haven this morning, all the time his conversation from the beach with Elizabeth ringing in his head. But as he sat here now, it was as if he was exercising a verbal form of free writing, just simply letting his brain follow its own thought, saying whatever it was that came to mind with no guarding, no corrections, and no holding back.

  “Life isn’t to be lived alone. But if you don’t want to live a lonely life, you have to let people in. You have to make them belong with you,” she said. They both knew that organically the conversation had become all about them. It had easily slipped into a discussion about their situation. She was looking at him again now. She was aware that he hadn’t stopped looking at her at all.

  “What if people make mistakes, and get it wrong?” he asked. He could think of any number of his mistakes that he could be referring to, unconscious mistakes, and the harder to admit purposeful mistakes. He thought back to Elizabeth and her words from that morning at the beach. He thought about the pebbles that she had thrown into the water. He knew that he had been one of those pebbles, when his life had been picked up and tossed into the ocean a year ago. It was a year ago and two months since he had woken up in hospital, and ever since that day, he had floated along, somewhere underneath the surface of the water, bumping along with the other lost pebbles. He wanted somebody to pick him up, see him with all of his time induced imperfections, rub their thumb over him and slip him into a pocket for safe keeping. He had been slipping back through Kate’s fingers ever since she had first found him. He only hoped that this time, now that he had ridden the wave that had brought him back to the surface that she was still there to want him. That she would still see his unfinished natural beauty and want to keep it for herself.

  “Then it’s up to them to put it right.”

  “I can, you know. I don’t want to live alone anymore. I don’t want to cut you out.” He took her hand and led her to the bed. They lay back, propped up on the pillows. He knew that it was Kate, the woman who had rescued him, put him back together and nursed him through his pain, which he needed in his life. He didn’t have to say goodbye to his memories, only to be open to making new ones. A life where both old and new can live alongside each other. As he felt her breath on his skin and the grip of her hand in his, he knew that this was his place in the world. He chose not to be alone. He chose to be found.

  Twenty eight

  Jack drove Kate to the hospital the next morning. They could both feel the difference in the air between them. She trusted him more than she had before, and believed him when he said that he would be there to pick her up later that evening. He arrived a little late for work, something he only realised as he checked his watch whilst he walked across the car park. He slipped in by the side entrance, but this time the corridors were lit and vibrant, and his eyes hurt under the harsh strip lighting. There was commotion in the station, as always during the day and it was this very hum of the background, the collective roar of the chaos that he thrived on whilst he was at work. This was the reason he spent little time in his office; he liked to be out in the thick of the action, be it on the street or around the other officers. When he turned the corner, Gibb was there waiting, tie still done up too tightly and shirt still too tucked in. He looked up like an expectant pupil, sat outside the headmaster’s office waiting for judgement on a misdemeanour. Jack stopped in front of him, taking in the image before him. He thought about it for a while, mulling his words over in his head, and then decided to say it.

  “Gibb, listen. It’s what, thirty degrees in this office? Hey, Sam,” he called across the room to another officer who was no doubt browsing the internet on the computer.

  “What, Boss?”

  “What would you say; it’s thirty, thirty two degrees in this office?”

  “It’s hotter than a brothel Boss!” Sam didn’t even look up from the computer. Jack turned back to Gibb. He picked up the end of Gibb’s tie, and stood over him like a headmaster.

  “You’re not at school, and you’re not in uniform anymore. I know most people we deal with are dead, but unless you want to join them, you can lose this.” He let go of the tie. “I’m gonna get a coffee and then I want you catch me up. Alright?”

  “Yeah, OK Boss,” Gibb said, as he started to loosen the constriction around his neck, and aware of Sam sniggering on the other side of the office behind him.

  Jack returned with two cups of hot, sweet black coffee. He sipped it too quickly and burned the tip of his tongue. It felt numb immediately. He set both cups down onto Gibb’s desk and pulled up a chair. Gibb opened his mouth to speak, but stopped as Jack raised his finger up towards his mouth. He looked over to Sam.

  “You picked up that Barry guy over in Woodside yet, Sam?” Sam was shuffling about on his desk, trying to look as if he was in the middle of something other than the national headlines and half way through his breakfast.

  “Err, what Boss? What did you say?”

  “Barry Locke. Woodside. Pick him up and bring him down here. Give him a few hours in a cell and interrogate him a bit. If he knows anything else he’ll spill it by then. Address is in the paperwork.” Sam was up and out of his seat, and already on his way out of the office. Jack knew that he would stop by the canteen before he left, but at least he was on his way. He turned back to Gibb, whose tie was now neatly folded on the corner of his desk, like a useless paperweight. “So, fill me in.”

  “Right, well Boss, prints came back a match. Got virtually a full set of prints from the door of the locker and a partial print from the key itself. It’s our woman alright.”

  Jack was nodding. “Good. Good start. Look, there is no doubt now about who she is, or that this key is hers. What we need is to put her life together.

  “I think we should call the Press, Boss.” Gibb was referring to the journalists.

  “Agreed. I already called Elizabeth, the sister, on the way to work. She is sending me a photo. Check the office e-mail and get it printed off.” Gibb was already on his feet and heading towards his computer. “Then call them in. Press Conference, two pm.”

  Gibb was standing over the central office computer. “Yeah, photo’s here Boss. Got it.”

  “Good. You got that report handy? The one from the guys at Wellbeck.”

  “Top drawer, Boss.” Jack opened the drawer and shuffled the brown files around until he found the file from Wellbeck. The last time he had only scanned it. He wanted to know everything about this case. He dropped the report onto the desk and took a sip of his coffee. His tongue was still numb. He opened the file and recapped the initial page of the report.

  ‘April 4th, 2006. 9pm. The surface of the road is wet from the rain. The road bends to the right, and at the corner of the bend on the left hand side of the road the barrier is broken. Assume broken in crash. No tyre tracks on road. Approaching the edge of the road, the cliff falls away to form a deep ravine, which looks to go maybe twenty metres down? There is a vehicle noted at the bottom. Vehicle is on fire, even with the rain. Vehicle is upturned; it is not possible to see the top of the car at all. Large amount of debris is noted, possible items from the car. Visible windows appear smashed, as expected. Driver’s door open. Ground search will be started immediately. Fire service en-route.’

  ‘April 4th, 2006. 9:45 pm. Scene of accident secured for investigation. Initial approach to ravine reveals a potential passage. There is no debris from the car. No shards of glass noted on the ground at the entrance to
the ravine. The embankment is heavily damaged from the impact of the car. The ground is not easy going but passable. This could lead to potential disruption of evidence. Making my way down to the site of the crash, there is a brown bag noted on the side of the ravine. Contains chewing gum, hairbrush, purse, and mobile telephone. Purse searched. Contains three credit cards, twenty pound note and loose change. ID noted as Rebecca Jackson. Car approached. Driver’s door open. Driver’s seat belt is not engaged. Nothing remains but a metal shell and a few metal objects from inside the car. No identifiable body or human parts. ID check completed. Family called.’

  He continued reading the later entries.

  ‘April 5th 2006 7:30 am. After the initial searches in the dark, another search was conducted at first light. Reveals a slightly different picture. There are tyre tracks running along the surface of the ravine. They are difficult to see because of the heavy rain, but consistent with tyres running over the surface of the ground. The edge of the road is sharp tarmac, and on the edge there appears to be shards of metal. Lab guys coming in. There is no visible damage to the trees on the other side of the ravine. The road has an uphill gradient approaching the curve in the road. At the bottom of the ravine there is a large boulder that looks like it has some blue paint on it, consistent with the blue of the car, which is a Fiesta 05 plate. The front of the car is buckled. Top smashed. Significant scratching of underside of car noted consistent with damage sustained from the edge of the road tarmac.’

  He sat back in his seat and tossed the file back down on the desk, running the mental images of the crash scene over and over in his mind. Gibb was still printing off the picture of Rebecca. He took another sip of coffee, it was cooler now and he let the flavour sit in his mouth, sloshing the fluid around a little before swallowing it down.

  “Hey Gibb. When you were in uniform, you deal with many RTA’s?” It was a long time since Jack had had any dealings with road accidents, particularly those that toppled over ravines in unexpected circumstances.

  “Yeah, quite a lot. Why?” Gibb had worked in the motorway police section for over a year. He had seen more crashes than he cared to remember.

  “Ever see anything go over a cliff? A ledge? A ditch even?” Gibb stood there for a moment, the printed photograph held limply in his hand. Jack could see her blonde hair and ripe green eyes smiling back at him. She was laughing in the photo. He assumed that Elizabeth had taken it. Gibb walked over and took a sip of his coffee. Jack thought how instant the change was. Losing the tie was a good idea, he thought to himself.

  “Yeah. Part of the M6, up north. It splits, north bound lanes are high, southbound low. Car went straight over, through the northbound barrier. Almost cleared the lanes below, crashed right at the far edge of the road. Nearly went all the way over. Burst straight through the barriers. Must have been doing at least a tonne.”

  “Didn’t just sort of roll off? The barrier didn’t break the speed of the car?”

  “No. Smashed straight through.”

  Jack leafed through the papers. He found the name at the end of the report. ‘Quinn Myers’. He picked up the phone, and dialled zero. He got the front desk, and in the background it sounded like chaos. “Put me through to Wellbeck - Quinn Myers”.

  When Quinn Myers picked up the phone, he grunted a cursory ‘Myers’, in a scratchy Irish accent. It wasn’t the soft, slow drawl of the southern Irish cities. It was the hard-edged vernacular voice of a northerner. It was the kind of voice that barks, rather than speaks at you.

  “Detective Myers, Fraser here from Chesterwood. I would like to talk to you about a previous case of yours.” He could hear the sigh in the background. Either that or Myers was smoking at his desk.

  “What case? What yis wanna know?

  “Think back four years, Myers. Case of Rebecca Jackson.”

  “Aye.” He was speaking slower now, his interest sparked. Jack hadn’t expected him to remember that quickly. “What is yis up to dredging up that past?”

  “You remember the case?”

  “I do, aye.” Jack was convinced that Myers was smoking now, and he waited whilst he took in what seemed a long drag of tobacco. “Young blade like that I’m not goni forget, am I? Beautiful she was.”

  “True. She’s also dead. But not four years ago. Turned up on one of my beaches, and she sure as hell ain’t been there for four years.”

  “What a banjax!” Jack had no idea of what that meant, but he could hear the surprise in Myers’ voice. “I’m not surprised, I’m not.”

  “You’re not surprised? I just read your report. The case was settled with an insurance payout.”

  “Well, if yis read the report, yis’ll know what I said. Yis think that there car flew over the edge out of control? Not a fecking chance. That metal barrier was broke all along, it was.”

  “I’m listening.” Jack invited him to keep talking.

  “Tyre tracks be damned all the way down the glen. No damage except to the car and the bottom of the glen. No broken trees. No tyre left on the road. No body. Open door. Yis got nobody in that car when it went over the edge.”

  “So why did the insurers pay out?”

  “Jackson’s got the nicker, they do. Got some young hallion lawyer, they did.”

  “What?” Jack couldn’t make sense of what Myers was saying. “I don’t understand.”

  “They’s got the cash. Lawyer told a right tall tale. Made it look like we fecked up. Contaminated the evidence. They said the investigators messed up the scene so much so that it couldn’t be proven what had really happened. So.....” his voice sounded as if he was about to deliver the verdict, a synopsis of everything that had gone before. “She was dead. Gone in that car. But I never believed that she was.”

  “Think she had help?” His mind was already starting to race with wild theories.

  “No evidence to suggest it, there wasn’t. Only a little Fiesta. She could’ve knocked that ting over the edge herself.”

  “And the reason. Why would she do it?”

  “Yous think I know. There was talk, alright. About the mother. You know how she died?”

  “Yeah, it sounded pretty horrific, to find her like that.”

  “Aye, to be sure. But,” he said, as he sounded as if he was about to deliver the punch line to a joke. Jack couldn’t think of anything funny. “What if she didn’t find her? What if she was there all along?”

  “You mean that she saw it happen?”

  “I’m not saying that, I’m not. But there was talk. Before we could interview her, she was gone. I saw her before she left. All she wanted was her sister. Wouldn’t talk to us ‘bout anything else. She had the bejesus scared out of her, by something.”

  After hanging up the phone and finishing the coffee, Jack picked up the image that Gibb had slipped onto his desk. Rebecca’s sparkling face and unusual beauty were near perfect; the creation of a sculptor no more pleasing or admirable. But the life in this picture had been ripped apart, torn away from her. The face that he now saw before him in this image was not the one that had run away and faked her death. Her old carefree beauty had been replaced by the face that Elizabeth had found clinging to the wall in the kitchen. It was the face she had slapped the night she disappeared and been haunted by ever since. It was the face of self-imposed absence and isolation. Now it was time to find that face in the world.

  Twenty nine

  The days leading up to the weekend in Haven were impossibly long. The sun was rising in the sky by five-thirty, and as soon as it was up, so was Elizabeth. She had tried to fashion an old curtain up against the window in order to block the light, but it was of little use. The first night it had fallen down completely and the second, it had dropped sufficiently to expose the bedroom to the first glimpse of the morning sun and had let in enough light to wake her up again. She had decided that if she was awake so early that she would take an early shower. Both mornings her face appeared tired and aged as it looked back at her from the huge bathroom mirror. She sp
ent the early hours of the day before the rest of the world was awake sipping on hot tea and feeling the freshness of the breeze as it rose up and danced over the cliff face from the village below. This time in the garden was refreshing: it was before the heat from the sun could be felt, and the breeze was still carrying with it the chill of the open ocean from the night before. When she had first arrived in Haven, three years before, those first few days, when the boxes were still stacked up high and there was a constant stream of dust floating through the cottage, it had been the garden that had drawn her. It was mid-April, and the weather was still mild, summer far off with the village still resting on its laurels of independence from the tourists who wouldn’t arrive for another month or so. As she stood at the edge of the cliff not yet protected by fencing, the view of the bay before her and the only sound that of the waves as they battered the rocks and stirred up the driftwood, she thought it could have been the first time that she had really felt the earth beneath her. Before, living in the city, the only sensations were manmade: the glass of her desk, the smell of the coffee, the light of the streetlamps harsh and cold as they lit the deep valleys created by towers of concrete and steel. Here, in her own cliff top garden, for the first time she could feel nothing but the earth, its natural rhythm and its ability to make every day feel like a new beginning. To see the sun rising from low in the sky and suspended just above the water on the horizon, or setting over the cliff tops that sheltered Haven from the rest of the world, brought with it a sense of renewal. It was this that she clung to every one of those first days, and it was that same feeling she looked for now, as she gazed out across the ocean wide.

  She had seen Jack’s press conference on the television. It had made the news in Haven too, the same paper that had printed those initial letters now running images of Rebecca. There were a few journalists hanging around, trying to blend in to sneak out droplets of information from unsuspecting locals. There had been a small town meeting, which Elizabeth had decided not to attend, regarding the interest in the case. Graham had attended the meeting, believing that it was always better to be informed than out of the loop. Mrs. Lyons had organised the meeting in the town hall, which backed onto her tea rooms. Graham hadn’t known what to expect, and he had, it seemed, become an unwilling and rather conspicuous celebrity in Haven after the story had gone out nationally. It was at meetings such as these that the true heart of Haven was evident; the meeting was not about how to avoid ‘this terrible crime’, as it was being called, but more about how the village might be able to close ranks against the outsiders, uniting together for the protection of two people whom the village folk now considered their own. Mrs. Lyons had provided light refreshments in the form of tea and sandwiches and the left over scones from the day. There were just about enough to go around, but not twice over, and as the meeting had drawn to a close, all eyes had been on Mrs. Irvine, who had already eaten three scones and was taking a fourth for Mr. Irvine who hadn’t even bothered to attend. That kind of thing wouldn’t be forgotten too quickly. Mr. Truman had made a short presentation based on his experience with the Neighbourhood Watch programme about how to spot a journalist. He had detailed how they would likely be dressed in city style clothes, high heels and shirts. ‘Look for expensive jewellery and watches’. Graham had even been used as a good example. It had been unanimously decided that there was to be no communication with the journalists on their behalf. They had also agreed that Mr. Madden, who ran the local convenience store, would deliver a daily ration of milk, bread, and anything else that Elizabeth might care for, knowing full well that she didn’t wish to leave the house at the moment. It had all the potential to feel stifling and suffocating, but in the end didn’t feel like anything other than the most wonderful spirit of community support. Graham knew why Elizabeth liked it here; he had grown to love the different pace and the value of life and friendship.