The Backs (2013) Read online

  ‘On its own, it don’t—’

  Sheen allowed another long pause, Marks silently corrected Sheen’s grammar, took a breath and waited for the rest of the sentence.

  ‘But at least two times I’ve heard that Jackson’s been seen talking to Gerry Osborne. That breaks Jackson’s parole conditions, so Osborne only needs to make a complaint and Jackson’s gone. If Osborne was really so upset about Jackson coming out, why doesn’t he try to get him sent straight back in?’

  Marks didn’t comment, but instead spun the file back towards Sheen. ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Pretty much. Ask me about the case and I have it in spades, but more recently everyone connected with Jane Osborne has stayed well out of sight. Except Jackson, of course.’ Sheen placed his hand flat on top of the open pages. ‘You know I would’ve told you if there’d been anything? I do know how you feel about this one.’

  Marks just nodded.

  ‘So what really brought you?’ Sheen kept talking. ‘Seems to me you’re bogging yourself down with what you’re going to tell her once she gets here. I don’t envy you that conversation, you know.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ Marks almost managed a smile. In truth he wasn’t totally sure why he’d come to see Sheen, but maybe he just needed to share the news of Jane’s arrest with the only other person at Parkside who knew the case almost as well as he did. Marks stood up. ‘Anyhow, I thought you’d like to know.’ He shook Sheen’s hand, then turned to leave.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, you know.’ Sheen said it quietly, almost to himself.

  Marks turned slowly. ‘The chain of evidence was compromised.’

  ‘And you were only one link of that chain. There was no official blame.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘Go up and collect her yourself. You’ll feel better once you’ve spoken to her.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be appropriate.’

  Sheen snorted. ‘You know who you should send?’

  ‘Is the name DC Goodhew about to emerge from your mouth, Tom?’ One look at Sheen told him he didn’t need to wait for an answer. ‘Why Goodhew?’

  Sheen patted the file again with his flattened hand. ‘Since he discovered that Jackson’s case was on your mind, he’s been up here reading that file on several occasions. He’s smart, sneaks up here when I’m off duty, and doesn’t leave a single trace.’ Sheen tapped the side of his nose. ‘But I had a feeling someone had been at my desk, so I stayed late one night and watched for him. Besides, who else would it be?’

  Who else indeed?

  FOUR

  The world had slowed and warped in the last few hours.

  Jane wasn’t altogether surprised.

  The holding cell was a small cube of nothingness. She lay on the bench and just stared up at the ceiling. Bland and blank was what she needed right now. Walls that felt clammy to the touch, a ceiling marked with unidentified stains, and a floor that had been hit many times with enough vomit to leave the air permanently sour.

  Those particles of other people’s rancid lives would never totally leave a place like this. She imagined those particles, nicotine-stained grey and hovering like a band of dirty smog only inches above her face.

  Apparently she would be collected before midnight and then taken back to Cambridge. That gave her several hours in which to think.

  Cambridge.

  She pointed a finger into the non-existent smog and stirred it gently. First in a circle, then as a figure of eight. She considered the pattern and retracted her hand as she realized that there had been a pattern at play in her life too.

  She hadn’t seen it until now. But then, until this morning, it had only involved two occurrences. It was this third time that made it obvious what she should have noticed previously.

  She turned her head to one side and stared straight into the centre of a lopsided pentacle that some previous occupant had gouged into the stodgy gloss covering of the beige-painted wall. Patterns were everywhere when you looked for them.

  She wondered why she hadn’t recognized that first tremor of restlessness as more than just the need to change her address again. It was more than just a change of address, of course; it was a swapping of lives, a morph from current Jane to next Jane.

  Usually it crept up on her suddenly, an overpowering sense of needing to run from her current situation, something instinctual that whispered to her and told her it was time to move. She would then plan her next exit, involving a few items in a bag, a change of appearance and a change of abode. Then the quiet closing of a door, the closing of a chapter, and goodbye to yet another version of herself. Time to go.

  But in these last few weeks a different emotion had called out to her.

  Anger.

  Not anger at anyone or anything. Just anger for anger’s sake, and that should have provided the warning. She had simply woken one morning with a knot of it trying to fight its way out of her gut.

  Ade didn’t stand a chance, of course. His attempts at understanding merely made her livid. A week later and it was his indifference that incensed her.

  The mug that slid off the draining board and failed to smash was thrown at the door with enough force to sending it bouncing back to shatter on a corner of the cooker. The terracotta pot sitting on one side of the back step was kicked down on to the patio, just for the hell of it, and whether Ade had noticed it or not, Jane knew there were other items she’d trashed over those weeks – just for the hell of it too. Just to spite him, and for no real reason except having woken up and found herself in the thrall of a mood for self-destruction.

  She’d gone through the motions, just like the other times, copying that pattern of changing her identity, but without the true urge to move on. Instead she’d been rushing somewhere, anywhere, losing traction, slipping ever faster . . . until she crashed.

  The arrest.

  The worst collision possible: the current Jane brought face to face with the first Jane. It had had an inevitability, she saw that now. There had been a point of no return, like Donald Campbell skimming Coniston Water, riding it one moment then gone in the next.

  The first time round she had seen the smog drifting in on her, yet had been stupid enough to believe herself safe and in control.

  If I told you to put your fingers in the fire, you wouldn’t do it, would you?

  Of course not. But if I thought I knew the secret for stretching my hand into the flame and not getting burnt, maybe I would, just to show you I was capable of rising to your challenge and comprehensively shutting you up.

  She’d stood defiantly in the flames then, while feeling nothing and refusing to see her life blistering and the scars forming. Anger could deceive like that until the moment it was extinguished. That’s the moment when she’d run the first time.

  And, for the same reason, the second time too.

  The lock on the door was being opened even now, and all she wanted to do was run yet again, but this time she guessed she’d never get the chance.

  Two officers had come for her, one male, one female and both of them just a little older than Jane herself. Only the woman was in uniform, and unless the bloke was someone random, like a junior doctor or a cub reporter, she guessed he was the senior of the pair.

  He spoke first, introducing them both, but Jane blanked out their names and avoided eye contact too, deliberately not engaging.

  They led her into the underground car park and then headed for their car. The woman held open the rear door immediately behind the driver’s seat. Jane stepped in and slid right over to the other side of the car. If she sat behind the front passenger, then the only person able to observe her properly would be the driver, and he’d be too busy watching the road.

  The door closed behind her and through the window she could see only their mid-sections. She watched them talking and the policewoman offering him the car keys. He must have said no because she dropped them into her other palm. He glanced at his watch, a plain-faced analogue. It reflected the light
from the overhead panels, and for the first time Jane realized that she didn’t even know whether there would still be daylight outside. It would take three hours to get to Cambridge, give or take, but that didn’t really matter when she didn’t know when she was leaving here or likely to arrive.

  She’d become adrift from time, unanchored, and in some way that consoled her. Perhaps she could stay like that on every level: returning to Cambridge without having to attach herself to her own history, family or personal responsibilities. But that would only work if she could be in and out quickly.

  The detective was sitting in the passenger seat in front of her now, while the PC was negotiating the narrow gaps between the bumper-scuffed concrete walls leading to the exit.

  Jane spoke, but to neither in particular. ‘Who do I need to see?’

  It was the detective who answered. ‘Detective Inspector Marks will be talking to you initially.’

  Initially.

  ‘Then who?’

  He twisted in his seat and studied her for a moment or two before replying. ‘I don’t know, actually. Maybe only DI Marks.’

  ‘And what does he want?’

  ‘You’ve been missing since you were fifteen.’

  She half-closed her eyelids, setting her jaw so that she barely moved her lips as she spoke. ‘There has to be more than that.’

  He said nothing in reply, just watched her further and waited for her response.

  She allowed her jaw to jut a little more stubbornly and turned her gaze to the rain-splattered window. She then counted the street lights as, one by one, they flitted in and out of her life. She’d never see them again. Or recognize them again. She was disconnected. Anonymous. Unanchored. She would allow herself to be steered to Cambridge, then drift right back out again.

  Not a problem.

  FIVE

  On leaving Cambridge, Sue had said she’d do the first half of the journey and leave Goodhew to drive the, other eighty miles. But it seemed to DC Goodhew that, once she got her hands on a steering wheel, Gully was reluctant to let it go. That suited him fine; in fact, never having to drive at all suited him pretty well. It gave him time to think.

  She’d shown the same reluctance to hand over the keys when it came to the return journey, too. Sue was an efficient driver and they’d cleared the first hundred miles already, even though the roads were swamped with both traffic and the kind of driving rain that fills the windscreen before the maxed-out wipers have the chance to make their next sweep.

  They’d both been watching the road ahead, and neither of them had said much, mostly because they were both very aware of Jane Osborne’s presence in the rear seat.

  Up until that afternoon he’d only seen photos of their passenger, showing a dark brunette scowling out at him. She had scowled again at Goodhew when he first addressed her today. She didn’t suit her short blonde hair, her dark eyes glaring out from beneath straight-across eyebrows, her forehead broken by a pair of vertical frown lines. They served only to accentuate the dark unhappiness that seemed to be written into her features.

  DS Tierney had dealt with the handover quickly but by the time the paperwork was complete, Goodhew had come to realize that Jane Osborne scowled at everyone.

  She’d settled into the back of their car, choosing to sit behind Goodhew and settling low into the seat. She then kept her face turned to the window, hiding behind a mask of total disinterest. For such a small space, she’d made a pretty good job of putting distance between herself and them. There had since been a couple of bursts of reluctant conversation but mostly silence.

  Goodhew had deliberately twisted the second rear-view mirror around so that he could see her clearly. But she leaned closer to the door and turned her head away, staring out the window, so it became almost impossible for him to see anything but part of her cheek and her exposed right ear. It was pierced at least six or seven times, with two studs at the lobe and a short run of identical small gold sleepers around the helix. He shifted his gaze on to the wing mirror so that each time they passed under a street light he had a fleeting view of her expression. Or lack of.

  Without warning she spoke. ‘Do my family know I’m coming back?’

  Gully answered, as Goodhew turned, ‘They know we’ve located you, nothing more.’

  ‘We can arrange for someone to meet you at Parkside,’ he added.

  Jane turned away from the window and glared at him instead. ‘A happy reunion with Mum and Dad?’

  He hesitated, knowing they’d divorced and her mum had moved out of Cambridge. He wasn’t sure if Jane even knew. ‘If that’s what you’d like.’

  ‘Right. When I ran off, it was because I’d had enough of them all to last me a lifetime. Nothing’s changed. In case you haven’t worked it out, people don’t change.’

  ‘Some do.’ It took him a few more seconds to put the dates together: if they hadn’t divorced by the time she’d run, they must have been fairly close to doing so.

  ‘Bollocks.’ She turned her head back to the window. ‘The police should’ve just let me go.’

  ‘And then you’d have run away again?’

  ‘Why not? No one gets banged up just for a bit of eye make-up.’ She turned her head back to the window, ending the conversation just like that.

  Goodhew went back to watching her in the wing mirror. People who chose not to communicate could achieve it in a variety of ways. One involved talking too much, bouncing around and over a subject and filling the room with chatter. Also the look-you-in-the-eye lie could be effective, and the head-hanging withdrawal often worked too. Everything about her said Back off. It was written right through her, as though she had carefully considered every aspect of her outward appearance and engineered each one to send out the same message. Maybe that’s what was needed when you ran away from home at fifteen. Or maybe, if the world had already had that much of an isolating effect, running away might seem like the sensible option.

  The rain was now pounding his window, the wing mirror, her window and everything in between. He doubted she realized that he was watching, though he couldn’t see her that clearly anyhow. It was her constant watchfulness that intrigued him, that and the question of how much she actually knew.

  It had been just over seven years since her sister Becca had died. And just a few months since the man responsible for that death had been released from prison. It was possible that Jane already knew of either event or both, but equally possible that she’d missed each brief fanfare in the press, firstly regarding the attack itself and then the trial that followed.

  Goodhew had one particular reason for having researched the case, because last year’s imminent release of Greg Jackson had weighed heavily on DI Marks. Rumours persisted that Marks had made an error with crucial evidence, a mistake which had led to Jackson being convicted merely on an assault charge – or, in the words of the less sympathetic, he got away with murder. It had seemed to Goodhew that answers were rarely that clear-cut, so he’d dug around for the details. And somehow Marks knew that Goodhew knew.

  How long he’d known was a mystery, but once Marks needed to use that information, he’d laid it on the desk between them like the proverbial smoking gun. ‘I want you to go and collect her, but don’t tell her about Becca unless she already knows. And then, if – and only if – she asks questions, I want you to answer them.’

  Goodhew had said nothing more at the time, but he understood why Marks wanted to speak to her back in Cambridge, and how long the journey would seem if she’d been full of questions and been fobbed off with three hours of I’m sorry, I don’t know. What Goodhew didn’t understand was Jane Osborne’s reaction. If she had known everything that had happened since, why hadn’t she come home? If she knew nothing, why wasn’t she questioning this journey now?

  They were just into the third hour of their journey when they came to a halt on the approach to a roundabout. Alongside stood a sign directing them straight on for Cambridge. The board was green and white, with four-inch l
etters taking the full glare of a floodlight that shone up on it from the verge. The rain had now stopped and he stole another glance at Jane via the wing mirror. The light was reflecting straight on to her face. She was staring up at the signboard too, and for a split second he saw a flicker of emotion pass across her face.

  Pain definitely, yet mixed with something else. But that expression had been so fleeting that he couldn’t pinpoint it.

  He turned and looked directly over his shoulder at her. The customary defiance was back now but, before she could stop herself, she’d already responded to the question she’d registered in his face. ‘Cambridge?’ she said. ‘That fucking place!’

  SIX

  The meeting was to be at 11.30 a.m. Jimmy Barnes arrived at the Michaelhouse Café thirty-five minutes beforehand. It would have been so easy for him to have been here even before sunrise. He was an habitual early riser but today he’d woken at least two hours too soon. The usual fear of what the new day would bring had, for once, been overridden by an unfamiliar sensation of guilt.

  Guilt because he was keeping a secret from his wife.

  He pushed aside the urge to wake her up and tell her. Tell her what? That an unknown friend of a friend might be able to help. Even starting such a conversation was too fraught with issues, the route from Good morning to I’m meeting her at eleven held too many opportunities for stepping on shaky or, more likely, collapsing ground.

  He let his wife sleep on until the alarm went off, telling himself that she’d never suspect anything was different as long as he stayed quiet at breakfast and left for work at the usual time. What was there to see in his expression but more of the same anxiety that they reflected back and forth between them.

  Back and forth.

  The tag on the tea bag swung gently from side to side as the darkening colour plumed and spread within the cup. Jimmy had ordered pastries along with the tea even though he wasn’t hungry, having bought them to sit there uneaten and justify his occupation of a table as the café filled. He’d chosen to sit up on the balcony, looking down on the entrance, and for almost half an hour he watched people arrive. They were mainly tourists taking a break in the sightseeing for some refreshment, and then leaving their bags at the table and walking across to photograph the Michael-house chapel and its famous east window.