Life Ruins

by Danuta Kot

  He looked surprised. ‘I thought she was staying with you.’

  ‘You did? Why?’

  ‘Well, you said you’d seen her – I just assumed . . .’

  ‘I’ve no idea where she is.’

  He sighed. ‘It isn’t just Becca. I’ve lost my caretaker. Turns out he was here illegally, working on false papers – he did a runner as soon as he realised the police might be on their way. If we get fined it could put us in real trouble.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m short-staffed, I need someone for the café, I need someone to look after this place and I’ve got the funding people in for the next few days. I don’t have time to worry about Becca, Kay.’

  He had a point. Kay wasn’t prepared to let him off the hook, but she left the office with the hostility between them slightly reduced. As she walked towards the exit, Hannah stopped her. ‘Is Becca all right?’

  ‘I don’t know, Hannah. I really don’t. I’m worried, if you want to know.’

  Hannah nodded sympathetically. ‘Neil’s in a difficult position,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ But he could have had a bit more loyalty towards a vulnerable member of his team.

  ‘Ask Becca to call me, keep me posted about what she’s doing. It’ll all die down once this funding thing’s off his back.’

  ‘When I see her, I will.’ Kay said her farewells to Hannah, and headed back towards the bus station and her car. A bike drew up beside her, and the lad, Liam, greeted her. ‘Hey, miss.’ He treated her to the boyish grin again.

  ‘Hello, Liam.’ He’d pulled the bike across the pavement, making it difficult to get past. The bigger lad was behind her. They were effectively blocking her path. There was no overt threat, but the subtle menace was there. She knew it, and they knew it. ‘OK, what’s this about?’

  ‘Nothing, miss. We was just wondering – you know where Becca is?’

  ‘I don’t, and I’m not sure it’s anything to do with you. Why do you want to know?’

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing. Much. Hey, is it right she did some sex pics? Kiddie porn?’

  The lad behind her sniggered.

  Kay wasn’t giving in to bullying. ‘If there’s anything you want to talk to me about, I’ll listen, but you’ll talk to me properly. You’ll move your bikes and you’ll show me some respect.’

  Liam was eyeing her, mulling over his options. After a tense moment of waiting, he moved his bike out of her way. ‘You’re that Special Kay lady, right?’ he asked.

  ‘Some people call me that.’

  ‘So, what’s up with Bex?’

  ‘What’s up with Becca, Mrs McKinnon.’

  He grinned suddenly. ‘Mrs McKinnon. Can you tell me what’s wrong with Bex . . . Becca?’

  Was he responsible for the emails? ‘Becca is fine. Why do you want to know?’

  He grinned. ‘Nothing to do with you. Come on, Tez.’ The two of them stepped on their pedals and rode away.

  Chapter 38

  Becca shoved the bags from her car into the boot of Jared’s Volvo. ‘Do you really think they’ll come back?’

  Jared stood by the car, his gaze fixed on the road where it vanished among some bare trees. He didn’t turn when Becca spoke, but shrugged to show he’d heard. ‘I dunno. But we need to get moving. I’ve got a bad feeling.’

  Becca nodded. She knew about trusting bad feelings. She’d always known when He was on his way back. Her sense of dread began long before He arrived, so when she finally heard Him at the door, it was never a surprise. ‘OK. Can I drive?’

  For a moment, it looked as though he was going to agree, then he shook his head. ‘If they’re around, we don’t want them seeing you. Look, if we pass another car on the road, don’t wait, get right down. Here.’ He tossed her a black woolly hat, which she inspected without much enthusiasm. It was the kind of thing Kay might wear, but she pulled it down over her hair and looked at him. He grinned. ‘That makes you less recognisable.’

  Once she was in the car, he did a quick check then sat behind the wheel, twisting his body round to reverse out of the gateway. She heard him swear under his breath, and remembered the way his back had crippled him the first time they met. ‘You should have let me drive,’ she said.

  He didn’t respond, just said, ‘We need to get off this road. They’ll know we’ve come from Kettleness if they see us here.’

  ‘But if it’s just you . . .’

  She saw his face change as if he’d just remembered something. ‘Shit for brains,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry, Not you. Me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Whitby, for starters. You can get some boots there.’

  ‘I can’t afford boots.’

  ‘You’ll need some if we’re going to find where that video was taken. Look, we can pick up a cheap pair and you can pay me back.’

  Pay him back how? It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, it was more . . . sometimes trusting anyone, even Kay, seemed like a loser’s game. ‘No. I’ll get them.’

  ‘OK. You don’t have to— Hang on. Get down!’

  She ducked down until her head was below the level of the windows. Jared threw something over her – his jacket, she realised as she slid down into the footwell. The fabric smelt of rain and grass and, faintly, a smell she was starting to recognise, of him. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘There’s a car coming along the road. Shit! We were so fucking close to the turn. Hang on.’

  She felt herself pitched towards the door as Jared swung the car round a tight bend. She waited for the push of acceleration as he pulled away, but he kept up the same steady pace. ‘Move it!’ she hissed.

  ‘That’s really going to work, right? They see us, we shoot round the nearest corner and hit the gas? Might as well stick a big sign on the car saying “Here we are!”’ The air tasted stale and she was starting to feel too warm and shut in. ‘Did it work? Can I come out?’

  ‘Wait . . . they might . . . Shit! They’re following us. I should’ve . . . Fuck. Fuck!’

  Becca felt her throat close. It was like being under the covers at her mother’s house – pulling them over her head and feeling the same sense of being pinned down, being trapped, as a heavy weight descended on the bed and His voice said, How’s our Rebecca, then? She’d never answer, and He’d laugh and go downstairs again, but later – not always, but sometimes – she would hear the footsteps again, slower, quieter, and the voice that came through the darkness would not be the warm, light-hearted voice of before.

  It whispered.

  It menaced.

  It promised terrible things.

  Becca, you know that’s not true . . . not true . . . not true . . .

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She was back in the car with Jared and her head was spinning. She felt sick. ‘I can’t . . . it’s hot. There’s no air down here.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ The cloth covering her face was pulled away, and the world came back. ‘I was just playing safe. They went past. I think they wanted to check us out. They’ve gone.’

  Slowly Becca sat up. She was aware of Jared’s glance. Had she said anything? What had she said?

  ‘You don’t look too good. Do you want to stop for a bit?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘We can stop if you—’

  ‘I said I’m fine. Right?’

  ‘OK, OK. I’m going to stop anyway. First off, you look like you’re going to throw up and I don’t want to spend the next half hour cleaning puke out of the car. Second, if we stop and take a break, that car will be miles away by the time we get back on the road. I don’t know if they were anything to do with us, but I’d rather not run into them again.’

  The sick feeling was getting worse. She couldn’t throw up all over his car, but . . . ‘I don’t mind. Stop if you want to.’

  He pulled in by the side of the road and wound down a window, then started rummaging in the side pocket. The air was freezing, but as it blew into her face, she felt the dampness of her skin start to dry, th
e nausea in the back of her throat start to fade.

  She’d never told anyone, not after the police. Not Kay. Not even Matt.

  She got out of the car and let the breeze blow over her, welcoming, for the first time, the bone-numbing chill. The road was bordered by low hedges and the land stretched all around them, flat until it dropped away to the sea in the far distance. Her mother’s house was miles away. Bridlington was two hours behind them, Leeds was weeks away, but all those places had followed her here.

  Jared came and stood beside her, taking a swig of water. He stood with one hand in the small of his back, stretching to ease it. He was washing down some pills, she realised, and remembered their conversation in the car park in Brid. ‘I thought you didn’t need that stuff.’

  His mouth tightened. ‘They’re painkillers, right? What I don’t need is you going on about it.’

  She shrugged. It wasn’t her business, but she didn’t like drugs, didn’t like pill-heads.

  They stood in silence for a few minutes, then he said, ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘I was fine!’ she snapped. He grinned, and her annoyance – and her worry – faded. He was helping her, and he had a point – the pills were nothing to do with her.

  ‘Yeah. I’m feeling better.’ She was about to explain about the jacket and being too warm, then realised she didn’t need to. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No problem. I needed a break too. You still want to drive?’

  This surprised her. Last time she’d driven his car – the only time she’d driven his car – she’d scraped it and almost got rear-ended by a van. ‘Yes. You still want to go to Whitby?’

  ‘Works for me. You?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  Despite Becca’s tendency to floor the accelerator on any stretch of road longer than about three metres, Jared was happy to let her take over. He needed to think. He’d fucked up. Royally. If the people following Becca were anything to do with the caravan site, then Greaseball Harry knew him, and knew his car. They’d seen Becca arrive at Kettleness, and now they’d seen him driving away. They weren’t stupid. Wherever they were now, they knew that he and Becca were together.

  If he’d just stopped to think, if he’d just taken time to chase that memory down, if he hadn’t taken the fucking pills . . . they would have got out sooner. Or they could have hidden his car as well as Becca’s, lain low. Either way, they would have been clear of it by now.

  As soon as he’d realised what he’d done, he’d felt sick, and an ache had started low down in his back, deep in the muscle where the spasms began. He couldn’t afford to be ill, not now. He’d taken more pills. It was the only thing to do. They were a quick fix, and he needed a quick fix right now.

  But already he was starting to feel spaced out and far away, as though nothing much mattered.

  And it did fucking matter.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said absently in response to some comment she made. She looked at him from the corner of her eye and he scrambled to retrieve what she’d said. Have they gone?

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  OK. A good way to kill yourself is to spend your time brooding over past mistakes. When you were climbing, it wasn’t the stupid mistake that had nearly made you fall that was important, it was the stupid mistake you were going to make if you couldn’t stop thinking about the last stupid mistake.

  They needed to drop out of sight for a while. Whitby was still the best place for that round here. Could they dump the car, hire another for a few days? Yeah, and he’d get the money for that how? It was this car or nothing. It was best to be mobile, but it would be good if they could find a place to lie low for a couple of days.

  If they couldn’t run, then they’d have to hide.

  Chapter 39

  Becca didn’t have any great expectations of Whitby. Jared directed her across the river to a maze of small streets that formed an estate of run-down houses. ‘It’s mind-your-own-business territory here,’ he said as she parked behind a car that was almost as battered as Jared’s. ‘Don’t leave anything you don’t want to lose,’ he added.

  It was cold, it kept drizzling and there was a persistent wind coming off the sea that cut through her as soon as she got out of the car. Another dump like Brid. Great.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ She huddled into her jacket, but she might as well have wrapped herself in tissue paper for all the good it did.

  ‘Not stand here getting wet?’ Jared pulled some stuff out of the back of the car. ‘They’ll be a bit big,’ he said, ‘but they’ll keep you dry. And warm.’ He was holding out a fleece and a waterproof. She looked at them. Did he really think she was going to walk around dressed like some big loser? ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Up to you,’ he said. ‘But it’s cold, and it’s going to get colder.’

  Becca glared at him, then grabbed the clothes and pulled them on. She wasn’t going to admit it, but once she was wearing them it was as if the icy wind had been switched off. She yanked the hood over her hair and wouldn’t look at him. But he wasn’t someone you could strop at, not really.

  He led them off the estate to the top of a steep hill. In front of them she could see the town, which looked like someone had tipped a load of houses down the cliff, a pile of red roofs in a sort of jumble below. As they walked down the slope, her feet sliding in her shoes – Jared was right about the boots – she could see rows and rows of masts sticking up high. And then they were on the level, walking along beside a river, and there were people – lots of people even on this cold rainy day. The cafés in Bridlington were either closed or empty – here they were full, and the smell of coffee and cooking wafted out into the street. She and Jared were just two people among the crowd. No one knew them, no one would be able to pick them out.

  She decided she liked Whitby.

  ‘It’s OK, isn’t it?’ Jared said.

  She shrugged. ‘It’s all right.’

  He grinned. ‘Come on. Let’s get across the river and down to the beach. Rain’s stopped.’

  It had, and the sun had come out. He led the way down a little cobbled lane that took them onto a bridge. There were boats on the river – lots of small, sleek ones that must belong to rich people. But there were older, scruffy boats as well that looked like they were used every day by people who worked, people like her.

  ‘What do you do, if you work on a boat?’

  ‘Fishing, mostly. There’s a fishing fleet here. Some of them take visitors out.’ He nodded towards signs up by the riverside offering boat trips. It was a bit like the sea-front at Brid, only nicer. There were stalls advertising fish and chips, and prawns and mussels and that sort of shit. The pubs were all called things like ‘The Ship’ or ‘The Jolly Sailor’. There was a dark house-kind-of-thing with a sign that said ‘The Dracula Experience’.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That? It’s Dracula.’

  ‘Yeah. But why? Why’ve they got . . .?’

  ‘This is where Dracula came ashore when he first arrived in England. If you look up there –’ he pointed across the river. On the cliff, over the sea, there was a sort of castle – ‘that’s St Mary’s church. Dracula attacked his first victim in the graveyard there.’

  She gave him a side-look. He was having her on.

  ‘Dracula’s not real.’

  ‘He is in Whitby.’ They walked along the narrow street, and he pointed out places where Dracula had been. ‘That’s where his ship was wrecked – he came ashore here.’

  ‘Yeah, but not really.’

  ‘That’s what they want you to think.’

  She knew it was just a story, but it was kind of fun to half believe it. Jared insisted that a tattooed guy walking through the cold in jeans and a T-shirt was a vampire. ‘Stands to reason,’ he said. ‘They must have sorted out the sun thing by now. Factor fifty and all that.’

  They wandered down onto the beach and walked along the water’s edge. The tide was turning and ripples started to trickle round thei
r feet. ‘When I was a kid, I used to build castles and let the tide flood them.’ Jared dug a pit in the sand with his foot and watched as it filled with water, then he turned away abruptly.

  ‘So where do you come from?’ Becca asked, when the silence stretched out. She was wary about asking questions – she didn’t like it when people did it to her.

  ‘Manchester. That’s where I was born. We moved around a lot – my dad was in the army. Then I went away to school. So I’m not really from anywhere.’

  Like her. She hadn’t moved around like he had – she’d never left Yorkshire – but she wasn’t from anywhere. She was from Kay and Matt’s house in Leeds if it came to it.

  ‘So what about your mum and dad?’

  ‘Yeah, well, they don’t really . . . I don’t see them much.’

  She could tell from the way he stopped looking at her that he didn’t want to talk about it. He picked up some stones from the sand and started skimming them across the water. ‘So how do you, you know, live?’ He’d never mentioned work or a job, but he must do something.

  ‘I’m a good climber.’ He made a face. ‘Yeah, I know, I fell. But there’s loads of companies want people who can climb, and they pay well – there’s a group of us, we pass the jobs round as we hear about them. Give me a bit more time and I’ll get back to that. And I make a bit of money out of my website – I get plenty of hits so I pick up some money from companies that advertise on my page.’

  She didn’t really get it, but it sounded cool.

  Despite the loser clothes, she was starting to feel cold, so they left the beach. Jared bought them fish and chips and they sat on the harbour wall eating, watching the boats at their moorings. Becca found herself telling him a bit about her life. He didn’t ask questions, he just listened. ‘It was OK after I went to Kay and Matt,’ she said.

  ‘She lives near here, right?’

  Becca nodded, wondering if they were going to talk about what was happening, but all he said was, ‘Nice part of the world.’

  ‘This bit’s OK,’ Becca conceded.

  Seabirds screamed in the sky above them. When Becca had finished she scattered her remaining chips on the ground, and the birds came down and fought over them, tugging the chips between them and flapping up into the air, squabbling over the paper.