Fourteen
It was nine-thirty in the morning when Jack Fraser found himself cruising down the winding road into Haven. He was tempted to test his four by four function and give his Explorer the chance to really open up, but he thought better of it. He had stopped no less than four times trying to find this sleepy little village. Who would chose to live here, he thought to himself as he lost his way through yet another country lane, too narrow and too meandering for the safe passage of another vehicle. He had actually had to back up a couple of times, his city driving unsuitably rash for such corners, only just missing several oncoming cars in his path.
Resisting the urge to go straight to see Elizabeth Green, he decided to park up in the centre of Haven. Like a dog in a new home, he couldn’t settle until he had sniffed out this new environment looking for clues. He rolled his truck though the craters of the gravelly clearing labelled as a car park, and pulled into a shady corner. He heard and ignored a voice as he made his way over to the parking meter, rummaging in his pocket for some spare change. His heart jumped up into his throat as he felt a hand rest down onto his shoulder.
“Whoa, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you there!” The geeky looking man behind him, dressed in hiking trousers cut to the knee with his T shirt tucked in tightly smiled at Jack, his ruddy red cheeks covered in spidery veins. This face had seen too much wear. “I was calling you to tell you that the machine is broken.”
“Oh, OK.” Jack composed himself again, alarmed at just how jumpy he had been. The lack of sleep was obviously catching up with him. He needed a caffeine hit, and probably one of his just-in-case cigarettes to settle his nerves. “Should I pay you?”
“I’ll tell you what you can do, if you like, pop into that little café you can see - the one with the ice cream picture outside - and get yourself a little something. Let’s just call the parking fee our little secret.” He patted him lightly on the shoulder. The motto 'LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE - LIVE IT’ emblazoned across his T shirt appeared to offer more potential for audacious exploits than those its wearer may have the capability to sustain.
“OK, will do thanks. Mr.....?” he waited, the first building block for his mental map of faces and names of Haven almost in place.
“Mr. Lyons. Bill for short.” He sat himself back down underneath the stripy umbrella and looked to settle immediately back into a snooze, as if the whole event and discussion had merely occurred as part of an episode of sleep.
Jack headed back to his truck, the door of which he had previously left open, and threw his jacket inside. It was too warm down at the coast, and the jacket was certainly too much. He retrieved the contents of his pockets: his mobile, notepad, cigarettes, and ID badge and stuffed them into his trouser pockets. He glanced at the brown file, peeking out from just underneath his jacket. I can’t leave it there, he said to himself, so he picked it up and tucked it underneath his arm. He rummaged inside the glove compartment and found his sunglasses. Nothing expensive like the Oakley’s, sure to be worn by the local surfers as they drove down to the coast on the windy days to catch the early morning waves, and the most beautiful, at least Jack thought, time of the day. It was a long time since he had been at the coast. He had stopped going after the accident, the reminder of the noises coming from the beach as the children played and danced about in the surf too much to bear. Fortunately, the beach was quiet today, save the odd fisherman and lone man walking his dog. He stopped in front of the tea rooms, as instructed by ‘Mr. Lyons - Bill for short’. There was a menu on the outside of the window, offering scones, teas and sandwiches. Patting his stomach, he was actually a little hungry. Before he had the chance to make any further decision, the door flung open, and the little bell above it shook out its tune.
“I can put you a little table outside if you like?” The smiling face looked like it had been expecting him. Maybe she had been watching as Bill pointed him in that direction. Oh God, this place is going to smother me already! “If you’re hungry, or for a coffee?”
He thought about it. It would actually be nice to sit here, take in the sea air, and get lost in the view out to sea. But that was not why he was here; he wasn’t on a day trip.
“Thanks, but I’ll come inside. Looks nice in there,” he lied as he poked his head around the door. The lie was worth it, as her face lit up like Christmas. As she proudly pushed the door inwards and beckoned him through, he brushed past her ample body and enormous bust. He sat close enough to the window to see the activity outside, and positioned close enough to engage the overbearing woman. He set the brown file down on the table in front of him and smoothed out the white tablecloth underneath it. He picked up the red plastic menu and made a choice from the limited selection.
“So what would you like?” she bellowed from underneath the counter. Her head came bobbing back up, bright red, as the blood had rushed in as she bent over."Anything you fancy?”
“OK, I’ll take a ham and cheese toasted sandwich and a good coffee.” She nodded, and after only a few minutes came back through the swinging kitchen door with a large tray of goodies in her hands. The sandwich was placed on top of a doily, which in turn was placed on the most delicate of porcelain plates; the kind that, as children, you were never allowed to get your hands on. The coffee had a good aroma, rich and strong, as she placed the cafetiere on the table. It smelled so good that he was salivating, and he had to swallow hard before he could speak to her again. He let her finish laying out the crockery, all as delicate as the initial plate, and highly susceptible to breakage. Today he would luncheon like the Queen, that was if the Queen had a penchant for cheese and ham toasted sandwiches.
He finished his lunch, gently pressing his napkin against the corner of his mouth, his manners and etiquette adjusted for the ornate place setting in front of him. He paid his bill and dropped his change into the counter-top dish, tipping a little more than he knew was reasonable, and made his way towards the door. Holding the handle, he turned to ask a final question.
“Oh, before I go,” he tried to make it sound casual. He had managed to get through the lunch without revealing that he was a detective; he didn’t want to spoil his cover just yet. “I’m looking for an address: ‘Cliff Top Cottage, Sea View Lane’. Any idea where that is?” She stared with a look of distrust in her face. He could see her thinking, ‘Who is this guy from out of town? What does he want with that cottage? “I’m looking for Elizabeth.”
“Is she a friend of yours?” After fifteen years as a police officer, he couldn’t count how many times he had seen this same look. The look that said ‘You don’t belong here, what do you want? But he didn’t want to announce to the village that there was a city detective hanging around. It could kick up a right stir, he thought.
“Old friend, that’s all. I’ve arranged to meet her, just looking for where she might be.” The distrust was passing. He could see her thoughts swimming around. ‘How could it hurt to tell him? If he says he is a friend, it must be OK. He knows her name after all’. He could see there was still that inkling of uncertainty, but he was sure that given enough time, she would point him in the right direction, her small town friendliness too ensconced to dispel.
“Head up the main road, take the second left and then the second right. You’ll find yourself on a small narrow lane.” No surprises there, he thought. “Cliff Top Cottage is the last on the right. You can see it from here.” She pointed up towards a cottage perched on top of the cliffs, rising up from the beach like giants, protecting the land from the fury of the sea. It looked an idyllic place. He was about to ruin that.
Fifteen
Stepping in through the gate, the cliff top wind whipped up the scent of summer from the delicately planted borders, rich with colour and swaying in unison. It was such a different approach to the smog filled city apartment that he lived in, and that Kate hated so much. This is exactly what she keeps going on at me about, he thought to himself as he latched the gate behind him. The grey streets that led up to Jack’s building
were puddle-lined, even in summer, and there was a shroud of smog permanently hanging over the adjacent river. Here, for the first time in many months he felt that he was breathing something clean, something healthy. He felt the crispness of the weathered paintwork and the brittleness of the wood as he rapped his knuckles against the blue front door. He could hear the footsteps advancing in the hallway. They sounded heavy and strong, not that of a woman. The man who opened the door was tall and broad, his normally coiffed hair flopping helplessly onto his face, stuck between his eyes and his glasses. He looked casual, like Clark Kent, and just as likely with a quick change and slick of gel through his dark waves to render another character from another world. He could almost smell the city in him.
“Can I help you?” There it was; the strong sense of formality and automatic wariness of strangers who turned up at the door. He clearly belonged in his world and not a quaint little fishing cottage. This was what he was used to. Jack was immediately more comfortable.
“Detective Jack Fraser,” he said holding out his badge. “I need to talk to Elizabeth Green.”
Graham ushered him through the hallway. Jack’s sturdy police shoes pounded along the bare wooden floorboards as he walked through to the kitchen, scanning the room for evidence of who lived here. There was nothing on the walls. No photographs, no trinkets on the tables, no notes pinned to the fridge. It was a beautiful place, but it could have belonged to anybody. He pulled out a chair from underneath the wooden kitchen table, sitting himself down. He stowed the brown file onto his lap and pulled himself under the table. Graham passed him by, leaning out into the garden.
“Elizabeth!” he called, summoning her inside with a strong wave. Jack brushed his hands across the surface of the wooden table. It was perfectly smooth, but it didn’t look new. It was a good solid piece of furniture that had withstood the foregoing years.
“Nice,” he motioned to Graham, glancing at his hands, looking for evidence of involvement. Calluses? Cuts? Dirt under his fingernails? He couldn’t see anything. Graham didn’t respond. He couldn’t see Elizabeth’s face as she was walking towards the French doors, her features obscured by the sun and in silhouette. But as she placed her first step inside the kitchen, her features were slowly revealed: her soft blonde hair, smooth and shiny as it hung on her shoulders, her swollen cheekbones and almond shaped lips. Then, as she took another step forward, he saw her piercing green eyes, the colour of pine needles, or kryptonite, he thought, that made her too look slightly as if she could be from another world. She was stunning, without, it seemed a scrap of makeup and with a small smudge of mud on her cheek. Her face threw him off course, audible in not only his silence, but the small intake of breath and his inability to stop staring at Elizabeth. She was the double of the dead woman, whose photograph had, until last night been taped haphazardly to his apartment floor. His mind raced between the living face before him and the hollow and lifeless face that had stalked his dreams day and night since she had been discovered on Lyme beach. It was as if she had come alive and followed him here. His stunned silence had not been lost on Elizabeth.
“You’ve seen me before, haven’t you? You’re a police officer. You’ve seen my face somewhere else.” Elizabeth didn’t need him to say anything. The shock on his face was clear, and he looked as if he hadn’t breathed since she walked through the door, his shoulders uptight and body glued to his perfectly restored chair. “We look exactly the same. We always did.” She had been waiting for this moment. She knew it would come. She knew somewhere deep inside her subconscious that she was right about the letters. From that first Sunday morning, when she had been sitting just outside the door where she was now standing and having read that first letter she knew it was from her sister. There are certain things that you don’t need proof of, to know that it’s real. Like love, you simply feel it in the trivialities of life: the gentlest of touches; the flicker of an eye as tears form in the corners, so moved by the connection to another person; the unquestionable knowledge that you would die before seeing that person harmed. These things had no proof, but when you saw them or felt them, they were as real as the person next to you. As real as the detective sat in your kitchen. She walked over to the table, past her husband, who too now realised that his instincts had been right, and she sat down at the table next to Jack.
“It’s the eyes, isn’t it? When we were together, I mean, years ago, we used to freak people out.” He needed to pull himself together. He was the cop here. He couldn’t remember in any other case being so convinced without any direct evidence. There could have been no less doubt than if the woman lying in his mortuary fridge had resurrected, sat up and told him her name. “How did you realise? Somebody called me yesterday and said Rebecca had been ruled out.” She hadn’t let him answer any questions yet. In his mind, he was trying to formulate a plan. His mind was firing left and right, a giant network of fork lightning bolts desperately searching for a place to discharge. His initial plan to come here and question her further had been thrown out of the ball park the moment he saw her, impossible now to continue to question if this woman was her sister. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said.
“I’m sorry about that,” he began as Elizabeth poured three coffees. It was time to start to piece this together. He wanted to drag out the evidence bags, and lay them out on the table immediately. He was desperate for answers. Get it together, he told himself. “It’s just that, you’re right. It’s like I have been looking at you for the last week. The woman has to be your sister.”
“I know. I knew it from the start. Yesterday, even when the guy called me and said she had been ruled out, I knew really it still had to be her.” She placed a fresh coffee down on the table. He wanted to ask for a shot of whiskey instead, but decided not to. He wanted to smoke too. He had an overwhelming urge to whip out a cigarette right now, but he thought better of it. It was like he had seen a dead person brought back to life. All those times he had tried to convince himself that his wife and son were still alive somewhere; all the faces that he had tried to convince himself were theirs; all of the shoulders that he had been so close to laying his hands on. Nothing compared to the feeling of seeing this green-eyed apparition materialise next to him. She took the newspapers out from the kitchen drawer, where she had placed them on Monday morning after she had bid goodbye to Helen and David, and placed them down on the table in front of him. “I kept the letters. I thought you would want them as evidence. Once you realised.” He read the letters out aloud, as a shiver rose up each of their backs. How Jack had longed for a final goodbye. How he had longed for one last chance to hear from them. He would have given anything for that a year ago. Now, finding letters like this, left in the paper for the world to casually see four years later, somehow seemed a whole lot worse.
“That’s how I knew. She was found on Lyme beach, right?” He nodded in agreement. “She says she left me the clues. What clues?” Once again he felt the smoulder of the hidden documents, tucked on his lap. Graham joined them at the table, huddling in close like Elizabeth who, it seemed, was still making the detective incredibly uncomfortable. There was no reason to hold things back anymore. He knew the face in his little brown file was that of Rebecca Jackson. He reached down into his lap and ignoring his final moments of hesitation, he brought the brown file up to the table. He pulled out several photographs and laid them out on the table before her: a close up of a bus ticket, a key, cigarettes, and shoes all photographically catalogued before her. Graham picked up Elizabeth’s limp hand, and placed it in his. She tenderly picked up the first photograph: it was a photograph of a photograph, Elizabeth and her sister in matching dresses, her mum’s eyes staring blankly ahead. She picked up the next plastic bag. Another photograph. She saw the words ‘Christmas 1982’ crossed out. She wiped a small tear away from her left eye, releasing Graham’s firm grip and staring at Jack Fraser. In the place of the original words it said, ‘Forget Christmas. Who is missing?’
“This is the back of th
e first photograph. That’s my mother’s handwriting crossed out. This is Rebecca’s handwriting,” she said pointing at the freshly written words. “Why would she write that? Nobody is missing.”
“Well, we don’t know what that means yet. But there’s this too.” Jack handed her the photograph of the bus ticket. She examined it closely, and at first it seemed meaningless. It was then that she saw the date.
“It is from the day after she died. Or, disappeared, whatever. I don’t know anymore.” She was getting flustered and her voice was breaking, fragmenting as her mind wandered into disparate memories from the past. For the first time since the arrival of the first letter, the situation was finally getting the better of her. She needed to get out. She needed to breathe. She needed desperately to breathe the fresh cliff top air that she had first breathed in three years ago, as she sat on the nearby bench and felt free for the first time since the car had been found at the bottom of the ravine. She got up from the table that she had tirelessly restored and walked out into the garden sucking in the salty breeze, the scent of the lavender rows washing over her. She looked down to the bay through her hair as it tumbled about in the wind, and she could see the bustle of fishermen who had returned from sea, the crowds that were slowly gathering, parking their cars haphazardly as they spilled out of the car park. She wanted to get down there, sit on the wall of the harbour and forget all about the lives that had already passed. She was so angry at Rebecca, and she hit the base of her fist at the post of the fence, the only thing between her and the towering cliff top as she let the tears roll down her face. Her initial sense of elation was giving way to nothing but anger at Rebecca’s choice of absence for the last four years. She had chosen to leave her life, to leave her when she was desperately in need. Yet now she was back, really dead this time, even more impossible to comprehend a second time around. She wiped the tears away from her cheeks and started back to the house. She walked back into the kitchen, her face in silhouette once again.
Escaping Life Page 10