The Backs (2013) Read online

  The air felt damper here than it had upstairs, but just as still and forgotten, devoid of molecules of perspiration or exhalation and anything human that was more recent than the ever-present debris of dead skin cells and fallen hairs.

  She had no desire to look into either the attic or the cellar, and her father had muttered to her that all the contents left behind were stored in the outhouse.

  A painted, iron patio chair lay on its side in the grass. She brought that in first, then continued towards the brick-built shed beyond. It had a black painted door that looked like it had been made from four planks with a ‘Z” of timber to hold it in place. Not locked, just full of crap, according to her dad.

  He hadn’t been wrong on either point.

  She salvaged one saucepan, one dessert spoon, an old sun-lounger and a dustbin sack filled with pairs of old curtains. She piled them into her arms and, at the last moment, added a rusty shaving mirror and a jam jar containing an assortment of ball-point pens.

  She dumped all of this just inside the playroom, then slipped out to buy enough groceries to last for the next couple of days. Once she returned, she changed her mind about sleeping upstairs and arranged the ‘bed’ and metal chair alongside one another, facing the patio doors but at enough of an angle that her own reflection wouldn’t stare back at her. In the end she didn’t use either but sat down on a folded curtain, with her back to the solid wall, and watched absolutely nothing happening out in the garden.

  Sometime later she closed the curtains, and later still, when she realized she was too restless to sleep, she scooped up the pile of post and newspapers and dumped them on the playroom floor. She sat back down on the curtain, cross-legged this time, and began at the top of the heap, with what looked like the latest freebie newspaper. As she flicked through the first few pages, familiar place names jumped out from meaningless columns of text, stories of minor crimes or complaints from parents struggling through road works while making the school run. These were people who had probably never existed in Cambridge at the time she did, or only in previous incarnations. She’d been away long enough for students to turn into parents, and for most of last decade’s burning ambitions to be scuffed into nothingness by the intervening years.

  She dumped the newspapers in one heap and, for no particular reason, started a junk-mail pile next to it. She glanced at each item in turn, learning that Cambridge now had the best opportunities for solar panels in East Anglia, the most exciting furniture store in the south, and at least three award-winning restaurants capable of dolloping their top cuisine into plastic tubs and delivering it to her own doorstep. Both the newspapers and the leaflets ran on a weekly loop, their headlines so bland that after the first few front pages each had less impact than the two-for-one pizza offer announced on the sidebar next to it. How many takeaway menus did one house ever need?

  Occasionally an envelope lay amidst the other papers. The first few were white with printed labels and postage paid by someone running a stack of envelopes through a franking machine. A couple more had cellophane windows and advertised their sender with a logo printed on the front. Jane didn’t feel so bereft of a life that she needed to investigate correspondence from Bar-claycard to feel part of the human race, yet she did reach for the first handwritten envelope with perhaps a little too much keenness. It was pale lemon in colour, and the front read The Osborne Family – which probably explained why it had slipped through the postal-redirection service. Whatever her father had registered with the Post Office, it wouldn’t have included the word Family. The writing was shaky, its uneven strokes trying to recreate a once beautiful hand. Aunt Gwen! The name flashed into her head, just a name – and the memory of her mother’s aunt once sighted at a family wedding. A rarity, in fact, like the sighting of a barred warbler; a name you knew but a face you wouldn’t recognize in your own back yard.

  It contained some kind of greetings card, and Jane slid it from the envelope. The front carried an uninspired photograph of a bunch of daffodils. Happy Easter. Months old now and from a relative disconnected by almost a decade. To Gerry, Mary and family.

  Jane stood it on the floor, and glanced at it every few minutes as she worked through the rest of the pile.

  She didn’t consider herself as having one of those addictive personalities. Yes, she’d tried cigarettes, risked £1 each week on the lottery and enjoyed a couple of bottles of beer at the weekend, but she changed her behaviour often too. Dependence scared her: it felt like avoidable baggage. Now she could understand why alcoholics needed to not drink at all, not even a sip, because, after all these years, she could still taste her childhood and it was too intoxicating to ignore.

  It surrounded her: the cracks, dents and scars in this old house that were suddenly so familiar, and the unfurling of other random, inconsequential memories that they unlocked. Familiar shouts from the other end of the house. The smell of bolognaise catching the bottom of the pan. Waking early to the strimmer clipping off the top of the grass in their tiny lawn.

  It hadn’t all been bad, after all.

  Under the carpet the varnished floorboards were dappled with darker knot holes. Did the largest of them still look like an eye? Would the third tread on the stairs still creak at the right-hand end, and had there ever been a secret compartment behind the rectangular repair made to the landing ceiling?

  Something inside her gave way. It tremored and then it burst.

  Instinctively she scrambled towards her own room, stumbling up the stairs and grabbing at the door handle. Running to ground. A tangle of truths and doubts hit her all at once. She hadn’t been wrong. Coming home had been the mistake. Not the leaving. Not her anger. Now she had to stay and face them all. Because coming home was necessary.

  She clutched the handle, with her forehead pressed to the paintwork of the door, simultaneously wanting it open but not letting herself enter the bedroom that had acted like her comfort blanket for so many years. Neither her hand nor her head won the contest; the cold smoothness of the gloss itself was enough. Her nose and lips pressed against it . . . and she fell back twenty years, to jars of white spirit and her mother picking loose black bristles from the drying paint. Her father masking windows, then scraping streaks of dried emulsion from the glass where stray drips had still found their mark. The smell of decorating: wallpaper paste and sugar soap. The sheer newness that advertised they were building something fresh, that they hadn’t yet watched it for so long that they’d missed the moment when it began to decay.

  Damn them all – all those she had burnt up with hating. And damn them even more for reminding her that it hadn’t only ever been that way.

  She’d cried once already during the last twenty-four hours, but the unfamiliarity of crying still surprised her. She kept her face pressed to the paintwork and continued pulling the handle towards her, as though the stupidity of the tears could stay a secret between her and the door. This body-racking sobbing surprised her more than anything; it continued until her body ached and she had huddled there long enough for the paintwork to feel as warm as the skin of another human being.

  TEN

  PC Sue Gully stepped through the doorway, holding two mugs.

  Goodhew’s battered swivel chair still had enough life in its gas lift to bounce a little as he leant back in it. ‘The real McCoy?’

  ‘Yep . . . well, posh instant, but it’s in real china.’ She passed Goodhew his coffee then pulled a second chair up to one side of his desk. ‘It was actually your turn to make it.’

  ‘I know – which means you’re after something.’

  She grinned. ‘You know me.’

  He opened the top-left desk drawer and passed her an unopened packet of Jaffa Cakes. ‘Why can’t you eat chocolate digestives, like any normal person?’

  ‘I’m cultured.’

  He pretended to think that over. ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘that’s definitely not it.’

  She opened the packet and offered it to him. ‘Just one.’

&n
bsp; She made a tower of three biscuits in front of her then sipped her coffee.

  ‘I can see from your face that the Jaffa Cakes weren’t your only objective. What’s up?’

  ‘Why does there have to be a subtext?’

  ‘There doesn’t, but today there clearly is. Getting dodgy biscuits out of me is usually a bigger victory. Something more than chocolate’s on your mind.’

  She narrowed her eyes in mock annoyance. ‘Fact is, Gary, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to work out why you were out on the Gogs that night.’

  ‘We were in the car together for hours the other night, but you didn’t ask me then.’

  ‘I was still trying to work it out. So do you know how pissed off I am at having to give in and ask? You’re either going to refuse to tell me or the answer will be so obvious that I’ll be kicking myself for the rest of the week.’

  Goodhew shook his head, then smiled. ‘Three weeks ago we had several calls from motorists on that road. They reported seeing a young woman all alone walking in the dark towards Cambridge. We had four similar calls, but no one bothered to stop. We sent out a car but there was then no sign of her. If you add all the calls together, she may have been drunk, or on drugs, or beaten up or thrown from a vehicle.’

  ‘No one stopped?’

  ‘You know . . .’ And he knew she did. They’d seen it so many times, the well-intentioned who couldn’t bring themselves to intervene. Scared of being wrong, looking foolish, or sometimes scared for their own safety. Scared of opening a door that held even the smallest chance of derailing normality. ‘She was in her early twenties, with long messy blonde hair, wearing a skimpy dress . . .’

  ‘Your description?’

  ‘No, the callers’. The dress was light-coloured, stained maybe with mud, maybe not. Carrying her shoes. Obviously crying. Staggering too.’

  ‘Maybe someone did stop in the end. Was anyone reported missing, locally?’

  ‘No. I’ve also checked nationally. Nothing.’

  ‘So maybe someone stopped, gave her a lift into town, then left her to sleep it off.’

  Goodhew shrugged.

  ‘Look, Gary, there’s no crime reported. You can’t afford to spend time on this.’

  ‘Unless it’s my own.’

  She flopped back in the chair, folded her arms and fixed him with an angry stare, genuine this time. ‘So you drive up there a couple of weeks later to see if you can work out who she was?’ Gully didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Why? Because you can’t stand the idea that you’ll miss something one day, and then you won’t be able to hack the guilt.’

  ‘No one would choose to be walking up there at that time of night, not barefoot.’

  ‘So, she had a fight with her boyfriend, he drove off, left her to walk. Then felt sorry, came back. End of. You know I’m right.’

  ‘I know you’re probably right.’

  ‘And why aren’t you working on the Paul Marshall murder?’

  ‘Officially because I’m giving evidence in eleven cases this month. That means it’s court, paperwork and minor cases for the next few weeks. Unofficially I think it’s because I was off duty when I found the body. Marks doesn’t want some defence lawyer having to cross-examine me as a witness and then again as a police officer. If one appearance was discredited, the other would be, too.’

  Gully gave a wry smile. ‘Like when they try to make you give reasons for being up there in the first place?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He could see that Gully’s irritation had now completely passed. Nothing seemed to make her as happy as verbal sparring, sarcasm and a box of spongy biscuits. As if to prove the point, she tapped another from the packet, dunked it in her coffee and said, ‘The words Serves you right are on the tip of my tongue, but I’m not going to waste my breath on them.’

  The phone on his desk rang just then. He answered quickly and heard the caller take a sharp breath. It sounded like a woman.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘This is Jane Osborne. Can I talk to you?’

  ‘In person?’

  ‘Please.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m downstairs now, but out the front. I’d prefer not to come in. D’you mind?’

  ‘There’s a bench on Parker’s Piece, straight across the road from the station . . . see it? Is it free?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll be down in five minutes.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The phone cut off so abruptly that he was left with the impression that it had been heading back to the cradle even as she spoke.

  Gully raised one eyebrow.

  ‘Jane Osborne,’ he explained. ‘There’s obviously something on her mind.’

  ‘Do me a favour? Let Marks know.’

  She left the room then and, after she’d gone, he continued staring at the empty doorway until he heard a door further along the corridor close behind her. He went over to look out the window.

  Jane Osborne was already sitting there.

  The bench she occupied was the typical design of three scrolled cast-iron uprights supporting horizontal wooden slats held together by chunky nuts and bolts. Identical, in fact, to all the others positioned at regular intervals around the perimeter of Parker’s Piece. They’d been installed years before, but while the others were generally used as a pleasant place to sit and wait, or relax, or read even, this one had become an informal police-station waiting room. The place people chose to stand when they waited for news but needed fresh air or a cigarette. The place where people congregated to bitch about the police or show their support for a friend or relative who’d been dragged in. The ground all around this bench was scuffed bare, the grass having receded into a semicircle and the mud decorated with cigarette ends and beer-bottle lids. It was the one bench that was only ever used by people who needed to be at the station but also had reasons not to go inside.

  Jane sat in the middle, her back towards him, but if her expression matched what he could assess of her body language, it said Find somewhere else to sit.

  It was no surprise then that she still had the bench all to herself as he crossed the road to join her. The scowl remained, and it was clear that she’d been crying, but she looked up at him with a strange bemusement. ‘I’m out of the habit of talking to anyone.’ She didn’t smile. ‘Apparently it’s “obvious I have trust issues”.’

  Goodhew didn’t know who Jane might be quoting, but the words still stung her enough to make her eyes blaze and the statement sound defiant.

  ‘OK if I sit?’

  She shrugged and moved a foot over to her left. ‘Obviously the words of an ex-boyfriend,’ she added, as though his silent query had been voiced. ‘Said plenty of other stuff too, and I always thought he was talking complete shit, just throwing all that at me because I didn’t want to do it often enough.’ She gave a short laugh, a disconnected ha. Her expression darkened again and this time her gaze drifted further afield, settling somewhere only she could see while she collected her thoughts. ‘I need to get my head straight about my family. I want to speak to my mum before I make up my mind about leaving again. You offered to contact my parents last night, so can you just call her for me?’

  ‘You can’t ask your dad?’

  ‘No.’ Another humourless snort of a laugh. ‘Even if he knew, he probably wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘I phoned, and apparently she “buggered off”. My family’s screwed, all through my life it’s been screwed . . . and once I realized, I left.’

  ‘But now you want to get in touch with them?’

  ‘Just her. I spoke to my dad in the end. I’m staying at the house we lived in, and that’s enough. I don’t know that I want to talk to him any more than that.’ She folded her arms across her chest and chewed on her bottom lip for a couple of seconds. ‘I thought I’d just want to get back out of Cambridge straight away.’ Her sentences began sounding increasingly clipped. ‘But coming back has stirred up something. That’s a bit of a revelation. I di
dn’t expect to feel . . .’ she shook her head, ‘anything at all.’

  ‘So you want me to get hold of your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  Again the scowl. ‘If I could do it myself, I would. I don’t want to be here having to ask you.’ She stood abruptly, sliding her flattened hands into her back pockets and chewing a couple of times on non-existent gum.

  Goodhew nodded. ‘OK, how do I get hold of you?’

  She glanced around, then back at him. She seemed more edgy now, as if fighting a desire to bolt. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d backed away then, told him to Fuck off and don’t bother.

  Instead she dipped into her front pocket, then passed him a receipt with a mobile number scrawled on the back. ‘Or at the house. Just don’t leave any messages with my dad, because he doesn’t live there.’

  Goodhew stood and refolded the slip of paper. ‘I won’t,’ he promised. ‘And if you happen to get in touch with her first, please let me know.’

  ‘Sure.’ Her voice held a tiny note of hesitation, like a comma instead of a full stop at the end.

  ‘Jane . . . ?’

  ‘I left the house this morning, walked down Pound Hill towards that pub, the old Town and Gown.’

  ‘The Punter?’

  ‘Yeah, whatever.’ She waved away his words, impatience pulling her back closer to him. ‘He was on the opposite side – just standing there. Saw me when I was about halfway down the road. He knows I’m back already, so maybe he wants me to know he’s here too.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Greg Jackson.’

  ‘Did he try to speak to you?’

  Jane shook her head. ‘No, he just stood there and stared at me until I’d gone past. Maybe it’s nothing to worry about.’ She took a couple of steps away. ‘I really don’t like you people, but I thought you should know. Greg’s never been someone you can predict.’

  ELEVEN

  Goodhew entered through the front door of Parkside station to see Gully waiting on the other side of the foyer, propping the door open with her shoulder. A Post-it note was held between the tips of her two forefingers. She waved it at him to indicate it was his, then stuck it to the light switch before finally releasing the door and letting it shut in her wake.