Jason hoped today wasn’t his turn to be on the receiving end.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” he said. He wondered about telling her what he’d been doing, but thought better of it. Mrs. Shaw wasn’t the kind of person you told about your imaginary fights with fantasy creatures. Mrs. Shaw wasn’t the kind of person you told anything to really.
“Come here,” she said, pulling Jason into a small corner of the playground, away from the windows of the school. Away from prying eyes.
“Please, I didn’t mean to––”
“Don’t give me any of that sniveling,” she rasped again. “I get enough of it from my husband.”
Mrs. Shaw bent, bringing Jason closer as she did so. “If I ever catch you running about like that, swinging your arms again, I’ll––”
“You’ll let him go,” said a voice from behind them. It was even and soft, but had a harder edge to it underneath.
Mrs. Shaw rose slowly. Jason had never seen this look on her face before, a look you get only when you’ve been caught doing something you shouldn’t be. She immediately let go of Jason’s arm, turning round to see who had spoken.
Jason saw the man a few seconds after her, as she moved aside, allowing him a clearer view. He was about average height, with dark tousled hair, and he was wearing a shirt and trousers. As Jason looked down, though, he saw the man was barefoot.
When Mrs. Shaw realized he wasn’t a member of staff, nor did he look like anyone in any kind of authority––more like a tramp who’d wandered in through the gate––she shouted, “And who the hell are you?”
“That doesn’t matter,” he told her.
“Some kind of pervert, eh? Come to spy on the kids at playtime?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll just see what the headmaster has to say about that one, shall we? You do realize that you’re trespassing?”
He said nothing, merely stared at her.
Mrs. Shaw took a step towards him. “What’s the matter with you anyway? You on drugs or something? And where are your shoes?” She took two more steps, then paused, and took another.
The man saved her the trouble of coming any closer and covered the remaining distance himself. He grabbed her arm, just as she had done with Jason in the playground. She didn’t have time to get away. Mrs. Shaw was about to scream when he said, “Do you ever think about him anymore, Jean? Do you ever think about Oliver?”
“What… what are you talking about?”
“You can tell yourself that what happened to him was an accident, that you had nothing to do with it, but you made his life a misery. And for what? All because he was a bit overweight?”
“Who are you? How… how could you know…?”
“How did you feel when you heard the news, Jean? When you heard how he’d died? You can keep moving, but it follows you wherever you go, doesn’t it?”
Mrs. Shaw wrestled herself out of his grip and backed away, pointing at him. “You… you stay away from me!” She gave him one last look, then turned tail and ran away in the opposite direction.
Which left Jason alone with the man.
“Hello, Jason,” said the older of the two.
Jason didn’t reply. He’d been told often enough not to speak to strangers. But wasn’t there something about this man, something he recognized, however vaguely? And hadn’t he just helped Jason escape from Mrs. Shaw’s clutches?
“You’ve grown so much since the last time I saw you.”
Jason wanted to run––should be running away, just like Mrs. Shaw had done. But something was keeping him here.
“You’re not afraid of me, are you?” asked the man, coming nearer.
The nod Jason gave was barely a tremble of the head.
“Don’t be, I’ve come such a long way to see you. Probably can’t remember me, can you?”
Jason half shook his head, half nodded.
“I’m not surprised. It’s been a while. You were still a toddler when I… when I left.”
“W-Who are you?” asked Jason.
This time the man gave an answer. “I’m your Dad, Jason. I’m your Dad.”
~
When a very shaken Mrs. Shaw returned, with the headmaster in tow (he’d already had some harsh words to say to her about abandoning one of their pupils to an intruder) the man had vanished.
Jason was standing in the same spot he had been when she’d run off, but now he had his back to them and was looking down at something.
“Jason?” said, the headmaster, reaching out a hand and pulling it back again.
Jason didn’t look; he was concentrating on whatever he had in his hands.
“Jason, are you all right? Did… did that man do anything to you?”
Jason shook his head.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” asked the headmaster, walking around to the front of the boy.
Jason finally looked up, then showed him the object that was in the palm of his hand. “It’s a present.”
The headmaster picked up the tiny red car and examined it.
“He gave it to me,” Jason said. “Said to keep it safe. And he said he would see me again very soon…”
Chapter Eight
Constable Bernard Wilson was lying down on the cot in the cell when they arrived back. A policewoman was trying, unsuccessfully, to get him to take a sip of water. His face was the color of spilt milk.
Robbins indicated with a wrench of the neck that she should leave them alone, which she promptly did.
“Wilson?” asked the DCI. “Care to tell me what happened here?”
Beth pushed past him to check on the PC, feeling his pulse first, then his brow. “His heart’s racing, and he’s quite hot.”
“My heart’s racing as well,” snapped the detective. “There’s a man out there on the loose who’s…” He let the sentence evaporate.
“What happened?” asked Beth this time. “Where did your… prisoner go?” She hated using that word, but couldn’t think of anything else to call the man. They’d been keeping him here against his will, after all.
Wilson looked at her, his eyes large. “He… he told me things,” was all he would say.
“I don’t suppose he told you where he was going by any chance? After you let him out.” Robbins’ voice had lost none of its harshness.
Beth scowled at him. “Steve, can’t you see he’s still in a state of shock?”
“Aren’t we all? But we need to find this man and we need to find him right now!”
“You think I don’t know that? But this isn’t help––”
“He… he told me my aunty and uncle were safe and well. Told me he’d seen them,” Wilson interrupted.
“And you let him go because of that? Because he told you he knows your family? Jesus Christ!”
“My aunty died in 1985 of cancer, my uncle ten years later. T-They brought me up.” Now it was Wilson’s turn to snap. He sat up and his voice had a chilling edge. “T-Told me things only they could know.”
Both Beth and Robbins were silent.
“What did you find in the coffin?” asked Wilson. “He wasn’t there, was he?”
Robbins ignored the question, and repeated his own. “Where is he now, Wilson? Do you have any idea?”
“I’m right, aren’t I?” said the policeman, but Robbins still didn’t answer him. Wilson turned again to Beth. “Who is he, doctor? What is he?”
“Right now, he’s missing,” she replied. “And we need to find him if we’re to answer any of those questions.”
“Sir?” came a voice from behind. It was the WPC again. “You’re wanted on the phone.”
“Can’t it wait? I’m busy here.” Robbins flapped at a fly that was buzzing around his head, making its bid for freedom through the open door.
“It’s about the man from this cell,” she told him. “There’s been a sighting.”
~
“I should have seen this coming. Why didn’t I send a uniform to keep an eye on the place a
s soon as I knew he was free?” Robbins banged the steering wheel with the palm of his hand.
Beth, in the passenger seat, stared out the window at the small school they were approaching. The red brick of the building, and gray-slated roof, looked remarkably like her old primary school. “No wonder your stomach is always playing up. Which, by the way, I’ve told you to get looked at... Listen, you weren’t to know this would happen.”
“You read the gravestone same as I did: ‘Devoted son, husband and father’. He’d already visited Mrs. Daley. There was a huge probability he’d try to get in touch with his… with the son again. Shit!”
Robbins was still reluctant to recognize the man as Matthew Daley, even after what he’d seen. She recalled the conversation they’d had on the way to the station when he’d asked her for theories. “How about this: Matthew Daley dies, is pronounced, then buried. But he’s not really dead.”
Robbins grimaced. “What do you mean, not really dead? How can he not be dead when he’s had a fucking autopsy?”
“Happens more often than you think,” she replied. “Patients even wake up in the middle of autopsies sometimes. Or when they’ve been buried prematurely. The medical term for it is Catalepsy, where the patient suffers from a form of temporary paralysis and appears dead.” Sleep well, it had said on the gravestone––and perhaps that’s all he had been doing, just sleeping. “The latest thing now is to put a web-cam in the coffin so you can keep checking on the deceased.”
Robbins pulled a face. “Beth…”
“Ask Poe, it scared the crap out of him.”
“I suppose you’ll be saying next that he’s alive and well and still churning out stories,” Robbins said snidely.
“Now you’re just being a dickhead.”
“Can we just cut to the chase?”
“Okay, so say he does wake up for some reason. Starts banging on the coffin––”
“Nobody would hear him.”
“Say that they did,” Beth argued. “Say someone dug him up then just put everything back the way it was.”
“Why? Why would they do that? And why would he wait until now to come back?”
“I’ve no idea. You’re the detective.”
“But the state of him, Beth… How could anyone recover?”
“I don’t know. A freak of nature, recuperative powers, something to do with the blood…”
“None of which was picked up in the autopsy.”
“Perhaps it was where he worked.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Steve, that place was closed down because of all the leaks. God knows what working there for so long might have done.”
He waved his hand dismissively.
“At least we have some samples from the coffin. We can work on a DNA match now.” And they’d left it at that, not getting any further at all. Now here they were, looking for a man who should have been inside that coffin but wasn’t. A man who had come to see his little boy.
They pulled up, the white and orange car following them doing the same. Valentine and Adams waited inside their car while Robbins and Beth got out and went through the school gates, pressing the buzzer at the main door. A secretary opened it and Robbins flashed his ID. They were taken through to an office where the headmaster of the school greeted them with a worried frown. “We’ve never had an incident like this before,” he assured them, “we pride ourselves on keeping the pupils safe.”
“I understand,” said Robbins. It was difficult to tell from his voice whether he was being sarcastic or not.
“Mrs. Shaw, one of our helpers who drew this to our attention, was very distressed by the whole thing and had to be taken home.”
“I’ll bet. We’ll need to talk to her later, get a statement. Now, if you wouldn’t mind…”
The headmaster gave a nod of understanding, taking them through the school where lessons were carrying on as normal that afternoon. “We’ve put him in the quiet room,” the headmaster told them. When Beth and Robbins looked puzzled, he explained, “Oh, it’s where the children go if they want to read alone or have some time to themselves.”
Inside this quiet room, which was much smaller than the other classrooms they’d seen, a little boy with tousled hair was sitting at a desk. He had a toy car in his hands, turning it over and over. The scene was like Robbins’ first encounter with the man back at the station, only in miniature. The boy seemed to have the same mannerisms, even had a look of the man they were pursuing. Robbins crouched down beside him. “Hello…” He looked back over his shoulder at the headmaster.
“Jason,” prompted the man.
“Hello there, Jason. I’m Chief Inspector Robbins.”
The boy looked at him, then continued to study the toy car.
“Do you think you could answer a couple of questions?”
The boy shrugged.
“That’s a nice car, who gave it to you?”
Jason shrugged again. Robbins looked over to Beth for help.
The doctor walked to the desk and pulled out a little chair, sitting down opposite. “Hi Jason, my name’s Beth. It’s very important that we talk to the man who gave you this. Do you know where he went?”
Jason shook his head. “He didn’t say, but I’m going to see him again. He told me that.”
Robbins gave Beth a worried look.
“Let me through. Where’s my son!” A commotion at the door to the ‘quiet’ room drew their attention and they turned to see a woman with short black hair pushing her way in, past the headmaster.
“Mrs. Hill, you got the call––” he began, but she ran to Jason and hugged him tightly, checking every inch of him over with her eyes. It was only then that she seemed aware of the other people there. “Who are you two? What were you doing with my son?”
“Please calm down, madam,” said Robbins.
“No, you calm down. I’ll calm down when I find out just what in God’s name is going on.”
“That might take a bit of explaining,” said Beth. “We’re not really sure we understand it ourselves.”
“I saw Dad today,” said Jason before anyone else could speak.
This took the woman aback. “Your Dad? Sweetheart, your Dad’s at work. You know that.”
“No, he said he was my real dad. What did he mean?”
All the color drained from the woman’s face. She brushed a hair out of her son’s eyes. “Sweetheart, that’s… that’s just not possible. Remember, we talked about this before. Your real father… he’s not with us anymore.”
“But I saw him,” Jason insisted.
The woman looked up at Robbins and then Beth, confusion in her eyes.
“I think we need to have a little chat,” said Robbins. “Alone.”
~
The dead man had watched from a distance. Watched as Robbins and the doctor arrived, accompanied by two uniforms––one of them the black man who’d come for him at the house.
Then he’d seen her arrive on foot. Caroline. Her hair was much shorter than he remembered, but still that raven black, still framing the pretty face he could recall cupping in his hands––so vividly they had to be his memories. He couldn’t stop the recollections then; they came with a vengeance and he closed his eyes to savor them. The first time they’d met at that café one Saturday afternoon, and he’d looked up from his drink to see her walk in with one of her old girlfriends. They’d exchanged quick glances the whole way through their coffees––he’d actually made his last much longer than usual––until eventually the friend, Sally, noticed and came over to him because it looked like neither of them were going to do a thing about it.
“So, you single?” she’d said getting to the point right away.
“Er… yes.”
“So is she. What are you waiting for? She’s free tonight.”
The inevitable first date complete with nerves, the ‘getting to know you’ conversations, the first time he’d walked her to her flat, and kissed her lips.
The first time they’d shared a bed, after a party when they’d drunk more than they should have, but not so much they couldn’t do anything about it when they got back to her place.
He could feel the movement of her beneath him even now, her hips arching, legs hooking around him as she often did, urging him on with her moans.
Their wedding day, her standing there in that white dress, looking almost… almost like an angel. And when he’d danced with her and looked into those deep blue eyes, he’d known he would love her forever.
Then suddenly he saw the other images again, felt the pain this time––heard the scream, cracking of bone, the blood… saw the light, saw the tunnel…
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