by S. B. Caves
He nodded. ‘I understand that. I know it’s been a long time. I’m sorry to have come by. I’ll let you get back on with your evening.’ He had begun walking down the path when she called out to him.
‘You think I don’t want to get him? She was my twin sister, Jack. When she died it was like—’
‘Like a part of you died,’ he finished. ‘You’re not the only one.’
She looked at him a moment, chewing the inside of her lip. ‘I miss her, and I know you do too. But what you’re talking about isn’t right.’
‘Why not?’ he asked. It wasn’t a challenge. He was genuinely interested.
‘Because it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just go around—’ She stopped herself, looked down at her toes. Maybe she was counting to ten before she said something she’d regret. ‘You don’t even know it’s him, Jack.’
‘Craig Morley.’
‘What?’
‘Craig Morley. That’s his name. I had one of my colleagues do a dummy delivery to his flat. So that’s the name of the man that ruined our lives.’
She opened her mouth to say something when a figure appeared behind her. He was younger than her, had his ears and nose pierced, and was scruffy in a deliberate way that irritated Jack.
‘What’s going on?’ he said gently.
Emily pointed her cigarette at Jack. ‘This is my brother-in-law, Jack. Jack, this is Roger.’
‘Brother-in-law?’ His brow creased for a moment and then smoothed over when the penny dropped. ‘Oh, your… I see.’ The defensiveness melted away and he was suddenly all smiles. He turned to Jack and gave him a sheepish wave.
Jack nodded. Roger waved again, and then said quietly to Emily, ‘When are you coming in? I’ve got it on pause.’
‘Just watch it and let me know what happens,’ she said irritably.
‘All right. How long are you going to be, though?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Roger, I don’t know, I don’t have an egg timer on me.’
Roger flinched, visibly wounded, and slunk back into the house without another word. When he was gone, Emily laughed humourlessly, shaking her head. ‘And that’s Roger.’
‘Seems like a nice guy.’
Ignoring him, she said, ‘Jack, listen to me. If you think this Craig person is the one that killed Kate,’ she gulped, ‘then you should go to the police.’
Jack eyed the surroundings, searching for curtain-twitchers. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it out in the open like this.’
‘Stop being paranoid. Nobody’s listening to us. Look, if you think it’s him you should go to the police and let them handle it.’
‘Oh yeah? So he can get some fancy solicitor to talk his way out of it? Too much time’s passed. If they couldn’t pin him down then, then there’s no way they’ll get him now. It wouldn’t even go to trial. And let’s say it did. What’s he gonna get? Twenty years and be out in ten? No, not a chance.’
Emily took a drag on her cigarette. She was silent for a long time, tapping her thumb on her lip, thinking.
‘You shouldn’t do anything stupid,’ she eventually said. ‘Not until you know for sure.’
‘I do know for sure.’
‘No, you don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.’
Slowly, he said, ‘I was there, Emily. You weren’t. I saw him.’
‘That’s not enough,’ she hissed. ‘That’s not enough to do what you’re thinking of doing.’
‘All right,’ he relented, rubbing his face with his hands. His mouth was so dry he could’ve struck a match on his tongue. ‘What about if I can prove it’s him?’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know yet, but let’s say I can prove it. Would you want to help me then?’
She considered the question for what seemed like a very long time before answering. ‘You need to understand where I’m coming from. I think about the boy that killed Kate every single day. I think about him probably more than I think about her. If I knew for certain where he was right now, I’d buy a gun and I’d shoot him dead.’
A gust of breath bellowed out of Jack. ‘He deserves it, Emily. He…’ the words evaporated from his mouth. He felt himself welling up, remembering Kate’s face, that beautiful smile, the way her cheeks would flame red when she was embarrassed. He gritted his teeth together, the muscles tightening in his jaw. ‘I don’t want him to think he got away with it. I want him to suffer. The way we’ve suffered. I just think…’ He broke off, turned his back on her and wiped the sleeve of his coat across his eyes. ‘I don’t know, maybe I’m being an idiot, but I just want her back.’
Quietly, almost in a whisper, Emily said, ‘But that won’t bring her back. I wish it would, but it won’t.’ She saw his shoulders shrugging, heard him sniffle, and then watched him walk away with his hands balled into fists. ‘Jack?’
He didn’t answer. When he reached the van, Emily heard a strangled moan escape him, and knew that he had given himself permission to cry. That sound, so despairing, so defeated, made her want to cry too.
‘Jack? Let’s have dinner tomorrow. How about it?’
He raised a hand in a wave, got into the van, and drove away without another word.
Chapter Five
Emily jerked awake, her leg tangled in the quilt, a pillow clutched tightly in her fists. She had been locked in a nightmare where she was lost in the woods and could hear Kate calling her name from the darkness. The calls turned into horrible, jagged screams, and that’s when she forced herself out of the dream with her heart galloping. She sucked in air, cringing against the memory of her sister’s screams.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
Reality clicked back into place. The tinny sound of dialogue through the laptop speakers, the bluish glow on the walls from the screen, the smell of grease and barbecue sauce. What the hell was that? She looked over at Roger, who was lying on his side, turned away from her.
‘Are you eating?’
‘Hmm?’
She pulled his shoulder back, saw the plate of sausages next to the laptop, a brown smear of sauce on the sheet. It was so bizarre that for a moment she thought she’d woken up in another dream. ‘Are you eating sausages in bed?’
‘What?’ he said, almost outraged. ‘I got hungry.’
‘You got sauce on the sheet!’ She reached down on the floor for her phone, checked the time. ‘It’s two in the morning.’
‘So what am I supposed to do? Starve until breakfast?’
‘They were for breakfast,’ she said, lying back down, the anger raising her temperature.
‘They were? Well, I’ll have toast or something,’ he said through a mouthful of meat. ‘Hey, don’t be like that. I didn’t know you’d get mad, did I? You think I would have eaten them if I knew you’d get all pissy about it?’
She scrunched her eyes closed and curled into a tight ball. Her heart was still thudding and the smell of the sausages was making her queasy.
‘Hey.’ She felt his greasy fingers touch her shoulder and cringed. ‘I’m sorry, OK?’
It wasn’t OK. She wasn’t OK. She thought she had beaten the nightmares and finally escaped the awful sound of her sister’s screams. But they were back, ringing through her head like a fucking siren. Jesus Christ, those screams – like no sound she had ever heard before. She wasn’t sure if she could cope with them again. Not after the last time nearly landed her in the nuthouse. The insomnia, the boozing, crying so much she would become dehydrated and give herself a migraine. Six years of therapy undone with one visit from Jack.
If only there had been an arrest or a reason for the murder that she could understand, then maybe her life would be completely different. She might have been married with children by now. If there had just been some sense of justice, then she might have even learned how to be happy.
That eternal, unsolvable conundrum had thrown her own life into limbo. Who would want Kate dead, and why hadn’t they been found by now?
Could Jack really have found
him?
She did not fall back asleep that night.
* * *
‘You know, when you called, I thought to myself, to what do I owe this pleasure?’ Bernard laughed with his mouth closed, a habit he’d developed from all the years of teasing he got about his teeth. He shook his head good-naturedly, ‘My lucky day. It’s been what? At least a year?’
‘Something like that,’ Emily said, sipping her latte. It had actually been about three years since they last saw each other, and she suspected he knew that too.
‘Did you change your number? I tried to call you a few times but…’ He let the question linger, warming his hands around his mug.
‘You know what happened? I changed phones and they gave me a new SIM, but I had your number written down, thankfully. God, you know what I’m like. I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, I remember. Like that time we were supposed to meet for the cinema and you got the day wrong.’ He stared at her, one of his crooked front teeth resting on his bottom lip. He looked down into his cup. ‘I waited for ages.’
‘Well, I got it right today,’ she said, sticking her thumb up.
‘And remember when we were supposed to go to dinner and you cancelled just as I left my house?’
She shifted in the seat. Why had he picked the world’s quietest coffee shop to meet up? The airy jazz music was too low and there were only a handful of customers dotted around. If they’d gone to a Starbucks or a Caffè Nero the noise would’ve helped buffer these awkward stretches of silence.
‘Then,’ he said, loud enough so that the barista looked over, ‘you just give me the silent treatment for all this time. I must’ve really done something terrible to offend you so bad.’
‘Oh don’t be silly, Bernard. People lose touch. You know how it is.’
‘No, not really. That day you made me dinner at your house and then… nothing.’
She gulped the last of the coffee. ‘All right, I get it, I’m a bitch. Come on then, let’s have it.’
‘Have what?’
‘Everything you’ve wanted to say to me after all this time. Tell me what’s on your mind.’
He smiled, revealing a row of chipped wall-tile teeth, then quickly covered his mouth with his hand. ‘I don’t have anything to say. I was just happy to see you is all.’
‘You sure? I’ll give you a five-minute window.’
He opened his mouth to say something, then blushed and shook his head. ‘I was just a bit disappointed. I thought we liked each other.’
‘Bernard, we went on two dates.’
‘Three dates. Four if you include that time you cooked for me. Maybe you don’t count that, though.’
This was more difficult than she’d anticipated. She hadn’t thought he’d make her feel so rotten, but she supposed she deserved it. In the years that she was single, after Doug and before Roger, Emily signed up with half a dozen different dating apps. She must’ve gone on over fifty dates, all of them duds. Bernard wasn’t exactly handsome – he was overweight and had bad acne scars, but his profile said he had a great sense of humour, and well, if she had a laugh but didn’t find love, was that such a bad thing?
‘Well, I guess I owe you an apology,’ she said, tearing a strip from the napkin. ‘You know, in my defence, you have about ten years on me. You were just a bit too old for me is all.’
‘Age ain’t nothing but a number, babe.’
She gave him one of her good fake laughs, even though the comment creeped her out. There was something slithery about him that she didn’t like; his greasy dandruff scalp, the fingernails chewed to the quick. And there was something else that bothered her about him but she couldn’t quite remember what it was.
‘So, you still working at the station?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah. Pain in the arse. Had some nutter in the other night. Took his trousers off and tried to flush them down the toilet. Flooded his cell.’
‘Christ, what a headache.’
‘That’s not so bad. He just had mental health issues. It’s the alcoholics that are the worst.’
‘Right,’ she said, cutting him short. If she gave him the chance he’d talk her ear off about how shit his job was, just as he had on the three dates that she showed up for. ‘I was thinking about something the other day. You know when you’re booking a prisoner in…’
He sniggered. ‘It’s not jail. They’re not prisoners. Detainees.’
‘Oh, OK. Anyway, you know when one of these guys comes in, you have all their info on a system, don’t you?’
He slurped his cappuccino. A chocolate-flecked foam moustache coated his upper lip. ‘Yeah. Anyone who has been in custody is on the system.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Why’s that interesting?’
She leaned in over the table. ‘Can you keep a secret?’
His eyes almost glowed with excitement. ‘Secret? Yeah, of course.’
‘I have a friend and she’s dating someone, but I have my suspicions about him. I get a weird vibe off him and I just know he’s dodgy. You know when you get a dodgy vibe off someone?’ He nodded, his jowls wobbling. ‘Well, I tried to tell her that and she got all angry with me. Anyway, she always gets involved with the crazy guys, so I thought…’
‘You thought you’d use me to check out his history, to help your friend’s love life. Is that it?’
She shrugged. ‘Well, I also wanted to see how you were doing too.’
‘Oh, I just bet you did.’
‘You really think I’m that much of a bitch, Bernard? I just thought I’d ask because we’re talking, that’s all.’ She tutted and looked out the window at a group of tourists posing for a group selfie by a bubble tea place. ‘Maybe we should call it a day. This has all seemed a bit awkward from the get go.’
‘No, don’t go.’ Bernard held up his palm, his face pained. ‘Sometimes I say things without thinking and I regret them later. I’m an idiot like that. I’m sorry.’
‘So, do you want another coffee? Croissant?’
‘No. Relax, please. I’ve put you on the back foot, haven’t I?’ He raked his sausage fingers through his thin, shiny hair. ‘I actually think it’s rather admirable, you wanting to help your friend out. If you can help her avoid a scumbag before she gets too invested, then that’s a good thing.’
‘That’s what I was thinking.’
‘I’ll check it out for you,’ he said, lowering his eyes. He gave her a half-smile, making a conscious effort to keep his lips closed. ‘Is he black? I’ll bet he is.’
‘Sorry?’
‘This boyfriend. Is he a spade?’
The question unbalanced Emily. She now remembered the other reason why he bothered her so much. On more than one instance, he had let loose a casual racial slur, sliding it so effortlessly into the conversation that it was almost subliminal. Whenever he recalled something about his job, he would mention this coon that got done for shoplifting, or a sneaky chink that had been involved in an insurance scam.
She cleared her throat and smiled. ‘Look, Bernard, you don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to put your job at risk or anything.’
He waved her off. ‘It won’t. I’d be glad to help. Really I would.’
Emily smiled and saw his face redden. The guilt fell on her like a hammer.
‘I never understood that,’ he said. ‘Why is it the bad guys get all the good girls?’
Chapter Six
Jack pecked at the keys with his index fingers, looking up at the screen after every word to ensure there weren’t any squiggly red lines under them. He sat at his workbench with his cranky old laptop that squealed and whirred every time he pressed enter. Between this ancient laptop and the spyware-infested work computer, Jack was just about ready to pull his hair out. He’d been scanning Google with a fine-tooth comb since he’d got back from seeing Emily, sitting in the cold garage with the hideous luminescence of the bare light bulb dangling above his head. He hadn’t m
oved to eat or go to the toilet in a very long time, and when he finally opened the garage door to get a glass of water, he was confused to be greeted with darkness. He checked his watch, saw that it was just after eight in the evening, and realised he’d been cyberstalking Craig Morley on and off for almost twenty hours straight.
In the kitchen, he ran the cold tap, filled a glass and gulped the water down. He did this a couple more times until the beating in his head began to ebb, and then splashed his face with water to chase away the grogginess. All that time staring at the screen had numbed his brain and his eyes burned when he blinked. He leaned against the counter looking out at the garden that he had let go to seed. He had never really had much interest in a garden beyond the patio where he could sit and have a cold beer on a hot day, but Kate was the complete opposite. ‘You don’t get it,’ she’d say whenever he questioned why she spent so long toiling under the sun in her floppy hat. ‘If you have a nice garden, it’s like having another room in your house.’ Whenever her vegetables began to show or her fruit started to ripen, she always took great pride in showing him. ‘It’s crazy to think, isn’t it, we can eat these for dinner and we didn’t even buy them in the shops.’ And when she did throw the potatoes and carrots together in a casserole, he’d say how lovely it all tasted, much better than anything you could get at the supermarket, although he couldn’t really tell the difference.
In the last couple of years, the garden had begun to bother him more and more. He would take his coffee out into the misty morning air to assess how much work was needed to get it back on track. Wild flowers grew amidst the jungle of weeds, and thorny vines snaked their way through the foliage, culminating in a snarled mass around the base of a pear tree that no longer bore fruit. A bird feeder swayed in the breeze; it had once attracted blue tits but was now nothing more than a rotten reminder of his wife’s smile.
Craig Morley. He concentrated on the name until the shame of his unkempt garden dissolved into anger and he could feel the vein throbbing in his neck. He hadn’t been able to find much on the man beyond an archived local news article from 2006 detailing Morley’s sentencing for robbery, for which he received six months in Feltham Young Offenders Institution. The article showed a mugshot of Morley that almost knocked Jack off his stool. That was the face he remembered: the upturned, piggish nose, the long black hair tied into a bun, the peach fuzz moustache, and of course, the eyes. He looked exactly the same as when Jack saw him smiling out of the car window.