by K. L. Slater
‘I’m not asking you to come in with me, am I?’ Jesse said scornfully. ‘You can wait out here with the bikes. I’ll only be five minutes.’
Before Tom offered any further warnings, Jesse had disappeared through a loosely boarded door at the front and was swiftly swallowed up into the shadows.
It was a long lane and there were several other working businesses down here. A scrapyard and some kind of car repair shop. It was nearly eight at night and all were in darkness.
Tom coughed and scraped the toe of his trainer into the broken concrete of the track. It was quite spooky, being out here on his own. Silly really, but there weren’t that many places to go where it was this quiet. Where the leaves rustled behind you and the odd branch cracked as some small animal scurried invisibly through the bushes.
Like a far-off party, he heard faint voices and laughter from deep within the bowels of the building. Jesse had told Tom that infamous local drug dealer Jason Fletcher and his crew had taken over the basement, where the joinery workshop had once operated from.
‘It’s freaky, man, there’s still some metal equipment down there. One machine had this big vice on the end and Jason told me they crushed some loser’s fingers who didn’t pay for his gear.’
Tom shivered. He wasn’t a coward but these weren’t the kind of people he wanted to associate with.
The sound of wheels on the loose gravel of the track, still some way off, made Tom jerk to attention. The lane was mainly long and straight, but there was a sharp bend about a hundred yards before the spot where Tom stood. There were no headlights yet, but it was easy to guess why they might be coming here.
Only people doing business with Jason Fletcher and his cronies came this way, and if they were driving, it meant they weren’t kids like Tom and Jesse, but adults. Tom had watched enough movies to know about rival drugs gangs and the methods they used to extract information from people.
The back of his neck prickled and, almost as a knee-jerk reaction, he grabbed Jesse’s bike and tossed it clumsily behind a cluster of gorse bushes. He did the same with his own, then, as the crunch of wheels on crumbling asphalt drew closer, he dashed to crouch behind another group of bushes nearby.
These people might be already high and looking for trouble …
He tried to stay calm, but his breathing became more and more erratic as he waited, the noise of the vehicle growing louder as it neared the bend. He drew in air, feeling queasy as he inhaled the sweet, rotting smell of the damp earth and leaves around him.
Headlights flooded the area in front of the old factory, exactly where he had been standing a few seconds ago, but he was wrong about it being rival drug dealers. He gasped as a marked police car emerged from the lane, parking up outside the front of the dilapidated building.
Tom held his breath for as long as possible. He was going to throw up, he knew it. He hadn’t even got his phone with him – he’d left it on his bedside table because it was out of charge.
He watched the two police officers in the vehicle. The blue light flashed silently on the roof, casting its reflection onto the windows of the old factory and skimming the bushes where he had concealed himself. For a couple of minutes, the officers stared at the building and didn’t move at all. To a clueless passer-by, the place would have looked completely empty. There were no signs at all that anyone was inside. Tom reckoned if the police had taken the trouble to come down here, they must have had a tip-off.
One of the officers began speaking on a phone or walkie-talkie. He nodded, never taking his eyes off the building.
Don’t come out now, Tom screamed silently in his head in the vain hope that Jesse would receive the message telepathically, like in that Buffy episode he’d secretly watched in his bedroom last week because everyone knew Buffy was for girls. But Jesse had definitely said he’d only be in there for five minutes, and he’d been gone for at least ten.
Tom was quite close to the vehicle, although thanks to his dark clothing, he was completely camouflaged amongst the bushes. His cover would easily be blown if they came looking, though, particularly if they spotted the bikes glinting nearby.
Tom knew there was no way to make a run for it, the officers would see him immediately. Besides, he couldn’t abandon his bike, because his dad would kill him. It had been his main birthday a few months ago when he’d turned fourteen. His dad hadn’t wanted to fork out that much money, but his mum had managed to convince him.
He caught his breath again as both doors opened at once on the police car. The officers got out, fixing their hats, and in their thick-soled shoes moved stealthily towards the same boarded-up entrance Jesse had used to enter the building.
Tom grimaced as his left leg spasmed with pins and needles. He adjusted his posture slightly, and as he pulled his lower leg out from under his right thigh, a branch beneath him snapped, a loud noise in the otherwise unbroken silence.
Both officers turned and scanned the bushes and sparse trees.
‘Hello?’ the shorter one called, his hand hovering over his equipment belt. ‘Who’s there?’
Tom opened his mouth to make his breathing as quiet as possible. It felt as if his heartbeat had relocated into his throat. This was it. He was going to be arrested and his parents would be devastated. His mother would have a breakdown and his dad would take pleasure in grounding him for months.
At that moment he heard the far-off party sounds again, though this time the voices sounded urgent. Someone in the basement must have seen the blue lights flashing outside.
The police instantly lost interest in the area where he was hiding and began pushing at the boards on the ground-floor doors and windows. Within seconds they were inside.
Tom stood up, stretching his legs but careful to stay in the shadows. The blue lights were still flashing, but fortunately they didn’t quite reach his hiding place. He tried to decide whether to grab his cycle and just make a run for it when he saw movement at the far left of the building. As the solitary figure darted forward, he saw the familiar light-grey sweatshirt with the Simpsons appliqué on the front … Jesse!
He hurried to the gorse bushes and grabbed Jesse’s bike.
‘Quick,’ he said breathlessly, pushing it towards his friend. ‘Go! Go now.’
Jesse didn’t speak, he grabbed the bike and jumped on it, pedalling for his life. Tom’s bike had got tangled in long weeds, and he wrenched it out, jarring his shoulder in the process. Voices shouted and there were suddenly figures outside the building.
‘Backup is on its way!’ he heard one of the officers call out.
At last Tom managed to pull his bike free of the foliage. He jumped into the saddle, scooting towards the bend and then onto the straight part of the lane. He saw Jesse’s rear reflector disc shimmering in the distance, and he kept his head down and his feet pumping the pedals.
A few minutes later, he emerged onto Sherwood Hall Road. Jesse was sitting outside the Ravensdale pub, still in the saddle but bent over his handlebars, wheezing. When Tom got close, he realised he was laughing deliriously.
‘Oh man,’ Jesse spluttered, clapping a hand on Tom’s back. ‘Now that’s what I call a close shave.’
‘Yeah. One I don’t ever want to have again,’ Tom said breathlessly. ‘Let’s get going.’
‘It’s fine, man.’ Jesse laughed, pulling out a crumpled packet of cigarettes and lighting up. ‘Just chill.’
If they’d kept pedalling, manoeuvred their bikes into the quieter side streets, they’d have probably been OK. But five minutes later the police car pulled up at the side of them and before they registered what was happening, an officer jumped out.
Jesse gave his address and phone number and said that Tom was his brother. The officer looked doubtfully from one boy to the other but he wrote down the details anyway. Then he rang Bridget in front of them.
* * *
Five minutes later, Bridget pulled up in her little battered Fiat. Tom knew if it was his mum the police had rung, she’d have g
one absolutely mental. But Bridget was supercool and didn’t even direct a threatening glare in Jesse’s direction.
The police radio burst into life in the car and, whilst the officers briefly conferred about something, Bridget grabbed Tom’s arm.
‘I need you to take the rap for this, Tom,’ she hissed. ‘Jesse’s already got two cautions, he can’t afford any more trouble. Say it was you who wanted to go to the old factory, that you forced Jesse to go with you, yeah?’
Tom looked wildly at the police officers as they approached them again. He looked at Jesse, who winked at him, and at Bridget’s pale, worried face.
‘Just this once … for me,’ she whispered pleadingly.
And so Tom did as she asked.
Twenty-Eight
Jill
October 2019
Saturday morning, I heard Robert leave the house and reverse the car off the drive. He tended to go into the college for two or three hours most Saturday mornings. Most of his clients were students and they often preferred a weekend counselling appointment, provided they hadn’t been out partying the night before.
I knew how they felt. I drank far too much last night. I haven’t got a clue how many glasses of fizz I knocked back but I remembered Bridget constantly topping up my glass.
I inched out of bed, visited the bathroom and then slunk downstairs for a badly needed cup of tea.
I hadn’t got so drunk I couldn’t remember crawling into bed and Robert snatching his folded pyjamas from the pillow and then stomping off to the spare bedroom, muttering to himself. I remembered most of what had been said last night, too. Sadly, that was all too clear in my mind. It wasn’t that I regretted saying any of it, but I did feel slightly worried that Tom would be furious with me this morning.
It was too late for regrets. I’d had far too much to drink and it had loosened my tongue, releasing too many home truths.
I finished my tea then sat down at the kitchen table with a notepad, pen and my laptop. I tried to clear my mind of any preconceptions I had about Bridget. Not an easy task, but my aim was to regard her like a stranger might do, to assess her without fury and resentment marring my judgement.
A librarian’s work is methodical and precise by nature. It had been so long since I’d called on those skills but I felt the reliable structure of a calm and thorough process returning to me.
Bridget’s achievements were impressive. From very humble beginnings – a dysfunctional home life including time in foster care when her father left her alcoholic mother – she had struggled for many years while Jesse was growing up. I knew all this, of course, had been a witness to it, but looking at it dispassionately helped.
Over the next hour or so, I catalogued the articles that had been written about her and her son after Tom’s trial and conviction. From the point, in fact, when Bridget had appeared to be courting attention from the press.
Jesse’s death was the watershed. The awful moment when many parents would have slid so fast downhill it would be nigh on impossible to claw their way back again. Conversely, Bridget appeared to flourish.
In less than a year after his death, she had spoken to most of the national newspapers and magazines and begun her zealous campaign for the Young Men Matter movement. She’d provided carefully selected photographs to accompany her words. Jesse looked young and fresh and handsome in all of them. No images of him looking dazed and unwashed, the way he usually did when he’d visited our house. There were also photographs of Jesse with Tom, and in all of them, Tom looked a little shifty. He had dark stubble in one, his eyes half open in another, whereas Jesse looked bright and full of life next to him. Even if you hadn’t read the article, you’d get the impression that Jesse was a shining star whose life had been cruelly snuffed out by his suspicious-looking friend.
I had to stay as detached as possible. I bookmarked the articles as I discovered them and saved the accompanying photographs to a folder on my laptop. It felt good to actually do something.
There were photographs of Bridget, as head of the charity she’d set up, with some pretty high-profile people, including one when she’d met Prince Harry on his visit to Nottingham in 2013 and gained his public approval for her work with grieving families.
Fascinated, I studied her appearance in these photographs compared to a year earlier. There was such a marked change, I wondered if she’d engaged the services of an image consultant. She’d clearly lost weight and, I suspected, had various minor cosmetic procedures: Botox, filler and possibly one of the non-surgical facelifts I’d seen in various magazines and online beauty articles.
She wore more make-up now, but it was skilfully applied, softer. Her nose looked slimmer, her cheekbones more defined, but on closer inspection, I realised she’d used shading and highlighting techniques to good effect. It was astonishing to see, remembering as I did the days not so long before when she had looked tired, hassled and without a smudge of cosmetics on her face. Even more incredible when you realised that this woman had lost her only son – had gone on record as saying that some days she didn’t want to continue living herself.
Of course, there was no crime in pulling oneself up by the bootstraps and rising like a phoenix from the ashes. I’d seen it before: a mother or father, grief-stricken and bereft, who’d found a cause, started a charity or changed a law in the name of their lost child. The grief fuelled some kind of drive for change that helped not only them, but others too. I had nothing but admiration for it. But I’d also seen pictures of those people, and they still looked haunted, like husks of their former selves.
Bridget, though, looked rejuvenated, and that was when I realised what seemed so wrong. There was a glamour about the whole thing. A sort of satisfaction, an enjoyment of the attention she’d garnered in Jesse’s name.
Yet again I tapped my phone screen and brought up their wedding photograph. The scene looked pleasant and celebratory, but that belied the awful truth of their ‘special day’. The setting was a prison! The very place that must remind her what had happened to Jesse.
I zoned out for a moment while I pictured the scene I’d imagined for so long, the scene I had craved. Tom marrying a nice girl at our local church, the same church he’d been christened in as a baby. A dream wedding that would have taken place in a few years’ time, when he was settled into a new career and had put the past firmly behind him. He’d have been surrounded by his friends and family, by the people who loved him, who wanted to celebrate this happy new stage in his life. Later there would be grandchildren I would adore and help to raise. Bridget had robbed me of all that and she had stolen Tom’s chance of having a normal life like other men his age.
Following Jesse’s death and long after I’d snubbed her invitation to talk on the phone, she’d called round at the house. I’d been so shocked to see her standing there and she’d looked me up and down, clearly startled at how dishevelled and exhausted I must have looked. I had a sudden urge to reach out but when I took a step towards her, she visibly shrank back from me, her eyes flashing.
‘Why have you come here if you’re still so angry? At the end of all this, we’re still two mothers,’ I’d told her. ‘We’re both grieving for our sons.’
‘The difference,’ Bridget had said, ‘is that you’re the mother of a boy who’s alive and I am the mother of a boy who is dead. And I hope and pray with all my heart that one day you know how I’m feeling at this moment.’
I’d closed the door without answering. She’d hammered a few times, left her finger on the doorbell for what seemed an eternity, but I’d shrunk back into the depths of the house. I shouldn’t have shut the door in her face but couldn’t handle a doorstep argument and truthfully, I’d felt quite intimidated. Even though she’d lost Jesse, she seemed so much more pulled together than I was.
The memory, still fresh in my mind, made me uncomfortable, and suddenly I felt even more afraid for Tom. Bridget was so determined, so resolved.
What lengths might she be prepared to go to, in or
der to destroy him?
Twenty-Nine
Audrey
Audrey didn’t call at Jill’s house as much as she used to do. At one time they were always popping in to see each other but that all changed when Tom went to prison. When Jill became a virtual recluse.
This had affected their friendship in that it introduced a distance that hadn’t been there before. Their conversations lost a little depth. You only talked truthfully to people who understood you the most and you knew wouldn’t judge. Sadly, Audrey didn’t really feel this way with Jill any longer.
Once Audrey had convinced her to start working at the shop things had improved a bit. She’d given Jill a reason for getting up in the morning before she faded away. But gone were the days where they’d meet up out of work and regularly visit coffee shops or enjoy shopping trips.
Still, Audrey did still consider Jill to be a good friend and she felt it was her duty to support her, even if some of her actions were a form of tough love. She couldn’t tell Jill everything that was happening behind the scenes but her discovery online was something that would be of interest to her friend.
‘How was the dinner party?’ Audrey asked brightly when Jill opened the front door on Sunday morning.
‘Disastrous!’ Jill answered immediately. ‘But I’ll tell you about all that later. How nice to see you – to what do I owe this honour? Is everything OK?’
Jill ushered her inside and waited while Audrey slipped off her coat and shoes in the hall. She heard Robert talking on the phone and felt glad when he didn’t show his face.
‘Everything is fine.’ Audrey left her oversized handbag at the door, then reached down and plucked out her phone before hesitating. ‘There’s nothing wrong per se, but the reason I’ve called is that there’s something I think you need to see.’