The Backs (2013)

by Bruce, Alison

  DI Marks too.

  She’d only ever seen him on the news giving updates on the case but, now that he faced her, she recognized that shrewd expression and the neat precision of his words. He’d aged, however. Who wouldn’t, doing that job? His black hair was streaked with grey and he was thinner than she remembered. But it was him all right. It made her wonder how her own father might have changed. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t think of him again, and maybe that was unrealistic, but she’d kept this bargain with herself for a long time now.

  DI Marks had escorted her to the room where she now sat, some kind of interview room but with less starkness than usual. A female officer was with him, but she seemed mute: a pair of eyes and ears, nothing more. There was a table with a single plastic chair on each side, but there were also four easy chairs grouped around a coffee table, and a box of toddler toys in the corner.

  ‘This is a room for bad news, right?’ she asked. The comment had been involuntary.

  ‘Sometimes, unfortunately,’ Marks replied.

  She realized she’d now given him a cue – an opening through which to drop his bombshell. He directed her to sit in one of the soft chairs, whereupon the black vinyl huffed wearily. And that’s when he explained that her sister had been murdered.

  She knew already, of course, but she’d only cried when she’d been on her own. She’d never spoken about it, never had the opportunity to ask questions, only to try to find answers within the news reports. And that wasn’t the same.

  She’d meanwhile stopped listening to him. Instead she stared into her lap and caught sight of her own chest rising and falling in exaggerated breaths. Becca had died seven years and three months ago. Jane thought she’d done all her crying, yet here she was still fighting tears. She drew in a deep breath, and for a second her head cleared.

  DI Marks was still speaking. ‘I’m very sorry.’ He had now said it twice; perhaps he assumed she hadn’t heard the first time.

  Those were, she realized, the very first words of condolence anyone had offered her. ‘Thank you,’ she breathed. Acknowledging them meant she’d accepted them. The tears then broke loose, erupting as though they’d only ever been buried in the shallowest of graves. She heard her own pain too, voiced along with sobs that sounded primitive but disembodied, out of her control. She realized she was shouting ‘No, no, no’ between the sobbing.

  The silent policewoman pushed a box of tissues into her hands. Jane pushed them away. Right then she didn’t want to stop to even think about what she’d done. She’d missed her sister’s funeral. Never been to visit the grave. That bastard had gone to prison, but she’d always known he wasn’t the killer. How had she thought it OK to let a guilty man go unpunished? How much respect had that shown to Becca?

  ‘Am I free to go?’ she asked.

  Marks nodded. ‘You are, but I need an address.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing about that yet.’

  ‘I still need an address.’

  ‘I see.’ She nodded, but didn’t have an answer.

  ‘A friend perhaps? It would be better for you to have some support.’

  ‘I’ll go back north tomorrow.’ Lies always found her when she needed them. ‘Back to my boyfriend. Please can I phone him? I can sort it out.’

  She could tell he doubted her; he thought for a few seconds, then let it go. ‘No one will pursue the shoplifting charge on this occasion. I would appreciate receiving an address from you, when you can. I’ll now leave you with PC Wilkes; she’ll get you in touch with victim support.’ He shook her hand and left her. Then the silent policewoman spoke for the first time: ‘Where are you going right now?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Just after three a.m. You might find a hotel but you’ll never get into a B and B at this hour. I finish at six, so I could leave you in here until then. Would you like me to fetch you a sandwich?’

  ‘No. I’m just going to clear off, but thanks. I’ve got friends who won’t mind. I can get a taxi there.’

  ‘OK, if you’re sure.’

  Sometimes people believed lies just because it suited them.

  Ten minutes later she exited through the front door of the police station, hoisted her rucksack on to one shoulder, and set off across Parker’s Piece. The sky had stayed clear, and although it was still night time, it didn’t seem all that dark. If the building itself hadn’t been in the way, she would have paused a moment to turn to the north-east and look for the faint glow that shone from beyond that horizon. Apparently it was Norway, though she couldn’t remember if she’d once been told that or just invented it. Anyhow, it was what she always chose to believe. The idea of standing in the night time of one country while looking at day-light in another still fascinated her. She’d often watched skies like that from her bedroom window because, even as a kid, her instincts had been telling her to get as far away as possible.

  That wasn’t how she felt now, though. She didn’t feel any danger walking through the city streets at night; in her mind a sleeping Cambridge was a benign Cambridge. She took her time, stopping frequently, moving aimlessly, telling herself that this really would be the final time she visited. It was only as she reached Magdalene Bridge that she realized she’d been instinctively heading towards her childhood home ever since leaving Parkside station. Again she stopped, staring at the red of the traffic lights positioned at the junction ahead. She felt the pull of seeing the house again and the pull of walking away, too.

  But tonight had confirmed that leaving somewhere behind was a whole lot more complicated than just walking away.

  She now pictured the house, standing a half storey above street level, the low mottled wall at the front of it holding in the shrubbery by means of six or seven layers of Cambridge brick. Too many rooms now for whichever parent had kept it after the divorce. She reckoned she’d know which it was just by observing it from the pavement outside. Even in the dark. Her father would change as little as possible, adhering to the stitch-in-time theory, constantly tinkering but never renewing. Her mother, on the other hand, never settled with anything for long.

  Jane crossed at the traffic lights, passing the Folk Museum and Kettle’s Yard, then following the road as it sloped up Castle Street and next into the narrower curve of St Peter’s Street. Ten years ago this could have been her attempting a post-curfew sneak back from a nightclub. She turned the corner from St Peter’s Street into Pound Hill, the area still suffering the same identity crisis as it had then. A patchy approach to development here had resulted in an uneasy standoff between functional seventies cubes, a few grander houses, and buildings like the Castle End Mission which remained as testament to a bad-old-days version of the same city.

  It was turning this corner that made her heart first start to thump. Again she assured herself it would look the same. Her strides suddenly quickened. From arriving back at the periphery of Cambridge, and through all the hours since, she’d been looking out specially for things that hadn’t changed. She didn’t know why she’d done that: she’d moved on, so surely everything else would have done so, too.

  Just a few yards ahead of her now, she picked out the familiar gambrel roofline of one of the neighbouring properties silhouetted against the blue-black sky. Her gaze shifted further along but, instead of seeing her old home peering over next door’s hedging, she saw just a mass of shrubbery. Her parents’ small front garden was dwarfed by it, and the only part of their house still visible from this angle was one upstairs window and a small section of shallow roof above it.

  A branch of a tree extended out at head height and, although she knew the location of the steps to the front door, the gap between the surrounding foliage revealed only blackness. She retreated to the other side of the road to wait for the clearer light of dawn.

  EIGHT

  ‘Jane?’

  She’d had enough of just staring at the house and thinking, by then. She remained in the same spot but was getting restless now.

  ‘
Jane.’

  He was off to her left, approaching the house from the opposite direction to the one she had come. She let him shout her name one more time before turning.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Her father’s face was perpetually red, as though he’d been holding his breath and forcing the blood into his head. He was now slightly out of breath and a deeper shade than usual.

  ‘To see you, obviously. We didn’t know where to find you.’

  Wasn’t that the whole point? ‘I told the police I didn’t want to see anyone.’

  ‘Campbell spotted you sitting out here and he phoned me.’

  That bloody curtain-twitcher had been dobbing her in it since childhood. She wondered how she’d missed having the feeling of the old boy’s eyes on the back of her neck. Maybe that’s what happened when you spent too long looking in the wrong direction.

  ‘So you don’t live there now? I would have thought you’d have paid through the nose to hang on to it.’

  ‘You know about the divorce, then?’

  ‘And Becca. The police told me.’

  A brief frown came and went. ‘I did live there. I bought her out, then she wouldn’t leave,’ he said.

  She guessed he didn’t want to get into an argument within the first few minutes of seeing her again, but she had no reason to feel the same way. ‘And you just let her?’ she snorted.

  ‘I didn’t want to have to fight her, not after we lost your sister . . . and you.’

  He’d never been an expert at smiling: eyes down, thinking, frowning, working were basically his thing. Her mother always remarked that he hid behind his beard. Other times she said he hid behind his sculptures, or his unkempt appearance, or his ability to disengage from any conversation. Jane had always considered him easy to read and, long before adolescence had ruined her bond with him, she had been able to spot the way his expression always softened when they spoke. He took a step towards her and she caught the whiff of sweat and dust. She recoiled swiftly, keeping a sensible gap between them.

  ‘What is she doing in there, wrecking it for you? Look at the state of the place.’

  ‘I sleep at the studio. I don’t mind.’

  Jane scowled at the house. ‘Who else is living in there?’

  ‘No one now.’

  ‘She’s got that whole fucking house to herself? That’s bollocks. She’s not cut out for living alone.’

  ‘Do you need to swear?’

  ‘Does it really matter? Really? Does it?’

  He didn’t reply to that. Which meant it didn’t, but he’d be letting himself down just to say so. ‘Jane, your mother moved away. The house is empty now. I wanted to keep it, but I realized I didn’t want to be in it. I rented it out for a while. Now it needs too much work, so I’m selling it.’

  Jane frowned at the house. ‘When?’

  ‘Right now. It’s been on the market since May.’

  May? The month of change.

  ‘No one wants it at the asking price, and I can’t afford to sell it for much less. Can’t afford to have it standing empty for much longer, either. Forget the state of the economy, it’s done nothing compared to the destructive force of your mother.’

  He wasn’t looking at her now, just staring across at his house and looking equally empty. Jane didn’t have room for sympathy, but she knew the creak of a door opening when she heard it. She didn’t say anything for almost a minute, running a fast double-check on her logic.

  She picked up her rucksack, and he glanced back at her then, and she knew she had his full attention. He didn’t seem able to find any words, and she guessed he was scratching around for something fatherly to say that didn’t instantly sound insincere.

  ‘Would you let me live there?’

  The creases in his forehead deepened. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t want to move back there.’

  ‘I don’t want you to.’ She eyed him carefully. ‘I just want a few weeks to sort myself out. All I had lined up was a fortnight on a mate’s sofa. I want a few weeks here instead.’

  ‘My God, you have a nerve. Then what? You just bugger off again?’

  ‘I don’t know – that’s the point.’

  ‘You only came back because the police brought you?’

  ‘Yeah, and it’s been different here to what I expected. At first I couldn’t think about anything except leaving, but now I think it would be good to spend some time at the house.’

  ‘The central heating’s knackered.’

  ‘It’s August.’

  His stance changed: he positioned himself squarely and bowed his head slightly. Becca used to call it his charging-bull expression. It appeared just before he mowed his way through whatever obstacle stood in front of him.

  ‘I don’t know why I even mentioned the heating. I just don’t want you at the house. You don’t have any right to ask.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ She gave him a hard smile. ‘Thanks for telling me.’ She took a couple of steps backwards, then turned sharply away from him and started walking down Pound Hill towards North-ampton Street.

  ‘Jane?’

  She didn’t acknowledge him. He called out again but no footsteps came after her. Was it any surprise he’d never managed to find her across all those years, when following her down the hill was too fucking much?

  She’d rounded the bend and was about fifty yards short of the Punter pub when she heard him shout.

  ‘You win.’

  She didn’t slow.

  ‘Damn you, Jane. Have the house.’

  NINE

  Jane returned with the keys just before 10 a.m. There were three in the bunch; front, side and back doors. She needed to duck under branches as she climbed the stone steps up to the house itself. The steps were smooth with age, though in places patterned with bursts of pale-green lichen. The paint on the front door was crumbling, so that dark blue flakes lay amongst the leaves scattered in the open porch. Some had gathered along the narrow gap between the door itself and the threshold, pinned there as if something was dragging at them from the other side. They were last autumn’s leaves, blown in during the dry winter. It made her wonder whether the estate agent had been inside at all.

  Somehow it felt wrong to open the main door, so, even though the key was in her hand, she swapped it for the longer brass key next to it and headed for the side door. That entrance led into a four-foot-six hallway, then through another doorway into the kitchen. From there she would be able to silently observe the house, to watch it while it slept.

  The side door opened easily. The air smelt earthy, a residue perhaps of all the times wellington boots and winter footwear had been removed and left to dry beneath the row of brass coat hooks.

  The only movable item in the kitchen was a red-and-white striped mug with a missing handle and paint drips down one side. That sat on the draining board, and she put her rucksack down next to it. The stainless-steel sink was bone dry, the single spout tap over it encrusted with limescale, and an arc left by one last wipe-down lay across the surface in a milky smear.

  Her shoes made a light padding sound on the solid floor as she crossed the kitchen gently, still not ready to cause any kind of stir. To the left of the doorway lay two rooms, with the entrance hall, staircase and another room to the right. She glanced along the hall towards the front door; from this side the paintwork looked white and intact. There was, of course, nothing sucking at those dead leaves from the inside, just a benign heap of junk mail and free newspapers on the thinning carpet. Like the exterior of the front door, it too had once been dark blue. Where it met the skirting she could see the original colour, and how the weave had resembled chunky corduroy.

  Everywhere else the carpet had turned a dusty air-force blue, hers being amongst the footsteps that had caused that. Becca banging her way up the stairs, chaotic and shouting for help; Dan clattering down, heading for a date or a sports fixture, and leaving doors wide open behind him. She wondered what mark she’
d left on the memory of this house. She remembered spending a lot of her time being quiet and serious and listening to everyone else. Maybe she’d never left a mark here and that’s how she’d found it so easy to slip unnoticed through all the intervening years.

  The atmosphere began to feel oppressive, so she coughed loudly and said, ‘Upstairs then,’ just to break the silence.

  The cat that lived in one of the houses behind theirs had been a bad-tempered tom. According to his red collar and heart-shaped name tag, his name was Twinkle and, although he was clearly someone’s much loved pet, his only skills seemed to be territorial. Jane paced around the upstairs rooms now like that cat would have done. She felt the need to enter each in turn, walk about them slowly, remind herself of the view from each window, then close the door carefully behind her as she left.

  She had already made the decision to confine her living space to her old bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. But walking through the empty rooms felt like a rite. With each door she opened, she braced herself for experiencing further unexpected emotions. But instead the emptiness inside translated into blankness, nothingness, a silent vacuum. This place felt like a dusty Tussauds’ exhibit, the props and figures gone, and the deserted set exposed as something flimsy, meaningless and without any context.

  She left her own room until last. The wallpaper was almost as she remembered it, cream adorned with blue stripes and sprays of sweet pea. She had thought the decor childish at the time, but now, strangely, it seemed far too mature for her: a room she would only grow into in twenty years or so, or maybe only in a different lifetime. She’d always doubted she’d make it to thirty, never mind almost fifty. She opened the window and the fresh air squeezed past her, pushing its way all round the room. She left it to chase out the staleness and retreated downstairs to the back room that her mother had called the playroom. There was a patio door leading into a short garden, but primarily this had been the room where the three kids, a TV set and a bunch of toys had been left to socialize. And, sure enough, they’d all developed a great relationship with that TV set.