Chain Reaction (22 page)

And then she leapt up and followed her sister, slamming her bedroom door behind her.

Wearily, Len shook his head. ‘They’re too young for this, Babs. You mustn’t blame them, they’ve been to hell and back.’

‘And hasn’t Jody? Don’t you think he’s been there, too? Sometimes I honestly have to wonder if any of you ever really did love that boy.’

‘Stop it, love, stop it!’ She poured out the cruellest words she could find in order to justify herself. Off we go again, thought Len, the same old arguments and tensions as before. Living on edge all the time as they tore themselves apart to discover where they’d gone wrong. Shouting, crying, blaming, blaming. At least, since the house was half-sold, Babs was a broken-hearted wreck but there was a sense of lightness, the chance of a new tomorrow, clearing the debris of the past. His wife would get better eventually; her pain would ease and there was hope of Jody’s acquittal. But now with all the uncertainty again, with new life pulsing through her again—well, now she’s back to the start.

She was instantly worried that the police would pick Jody up and deliberately manhandle him out of revenge. She feared he would be cold, frightened, alone—you’d think the lad was still a baby—and end up in more trouble at the end of the day, caught breaking and entering for money. She hurled her accusations at Len. ‘You should have given him more! Only a hundred pounds? How could you be so stingy?’

Len was torn between upsetting his wife more, and sheer common sense. ‘For his own sake I think I was probably wrong to give him anything at all.’

‘How can you speak like this about your own child! If it was one of the girls you wouldn’t think twice.’

‘Jody’s circumstances are vastly different…’

‘And whose fault is that?’

‘I really don’t know, Babs, I really don’t know. Perhaps, after all, it is nobody’s fault, nobody’s but Jody’s.’

‘Well, now we will just have to hope and pray that Dawn and Cindy keep quiet about you two meeting. They’ll be questioned, of course?’

‘We will all be questioned.’

‘And are you going to tell the police that you saw him?’

He had neither the courage nor the cruelty to deny her. ‘No, pet. No, I’m not.’

‘Well, I’m glad to hear that!’

When the morning paper came out, the news of the ‘dramatic’ escape was plastered all over the front page. The focus of their hatred was Jody; the two other lads who’d escaped with him were on remand for far lesser crimes, dangerous driving and inflicting bodily harm. They called Jody a fiend in so many words, tried and condemned by the innocent words, ‘charged with the rape of a twenty-three-year-old handicapped woman’.

And that seemed to say it all.

A police car was stationed outside the house. The Middleton family was questioned, but all denied having seen or heard from Jody. Their phone was bugged, their mail was opened; they felt like cornered animals. There were long silences in the house and much straying of uneasy eyes. Len stayed home from work in case there was a repeat of the attacks they had suffered after Jody’s arrest.

The police were up to their eyes in it, dealing with the public’s fury that a man accused of such a crime could just walk out of jail when he pleased. An enquiry was demanded. In fact, Jody and his mates had escaped from the local hospital, having first inflicted wounds upon themselves and then deliberately infected them. Easily done when you think of the primitive sanitary provisions in most of the country’s jails. In the hospital lavatory they had overcome their accompanying officer and that poor man, suddenly a hero, was now in hospital suffering from severe concussion.

‘But Jody wouldn’t harm a fly. Is he badly hurt?’ cried Babs, overwrought.

‘There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him when I saw him,’ said Lenny.

‘Would you have noticed?’ she asked sarcastically.

‘I think I would have mentioned something if he’d been limping,’ Len suggested quietly. He wanted to say, ‘He’s my boy, too.’

But Babs snatched the paper off him. ‘Where were their wounds? Does it say?’

‘I think you’ll find the press more concerned with the prison officer they attacked.’

‘More concerned with him than three boys who are meant to be innocent until proved guilty.’

He tried to make his voice sound kind. ‘Well, that’s the way of the world, pet. And you know that.’

‘I certainly ought to by now,’ said Babs.

It was that same night that Jody came home. Still an athletic lad in spite of prison conditions, he approached through the unlit garden, climbing onto the garage roof and from there in through the bathroom window. He secretly, sadly spent that night sleeping in his own room for fear of disturbing them, as if they could sleep anyway. It was in the morning, soon after dawn, that he crept into his parents’ bedroom and woke them up.

Like a child having nightmares.

At first they were too alarmed to make out what was happening. ‘It’s OK!’ With a finger to his lips Jody countered the fear on their haunted faces. ‘This is the last place they’ll think to look. They had someone watching all night out the front and I still got past them.’

‘Are you on your own?’ In the premature daylight Len shivered. Anxiety like a deadening bruise was a lead weight in his head. Deep within him love and fear struggled for supremacy. He stared into his son’s bright eyes and saw no shame in them, only his own, reflected there.

‘I’m alone, Dad. I left the others.’

‘You’re hurt, love,’ Babs cried, homing in on the one thing she thought she could cure. ‘The papers said you were hurt. Come here.’

‘It’s nothing, Mum.’

‘Let me see,’ she fussed.

Jody, this boy who still needed them both, lifted his T-shirt. The jagged knife-wound there was painfully inflamed, but only superficial. His mouth twisted slightly. ‘I’ve given it a clean-up as best I could.’

‘Come here, come into the bathroom with me and we’ll do a proper job on it.’ Horrified by the sight of his injury, Babs was happy now she could fuss over him. Anything physical she could handle, just like when he was little.

Lenny sat on the edge of the bed and heard the sink filling with water and the First-Aid tin being brought down from the shelf. The sound of gentle commiserations flooded into the bedroom with the shard of cold fluorescent light. ‘How on earth did you do this, Jody?’

‘It was easy, Mum. We had to make it seem like we’d had a fight, you know, to make it convincing.’

‘But it looks like a knife. It must have hurt so much! What were you doing with a knife?’

‘There’s more knives and drugs in there than there are on the outside.’

‘Oh Jody, love. You really need a doctor.’

‘Daren’t do that.’

Babs has lost a stone in weight since Jody was arrested and the marks of her recent experience—shock, shame, guilt, bereavement—linger for all to see beneath her pallid skin.

Len wanted to ask his son how long he intended to stay. Was he merely passing through or was this an open-ended visit? But he held his tongue. He dropped his head in his hands. He wished he could discuss these matters sensibly with Babs but where Jody was concerned she could no longer act in a rational manner. Nonetheless, in this intolerable situation she must be made to see the detrimental effect Jody’s presence here would have on his sisters. It was too much to ask of Dawn or Cindy, already so miserable and confused. Len, scared out of his wits to think that his son had spent one night here with nobody knowing, wanted to ask what would happen next, what was demanded of him and how he was expected to cope, as a father, with this new crisis.

Jody couldn’t stay here in Ribblestone Close, not with the hue and cry at its peak. The police, with a heavier presence than normal would soon seek him out. Good grief, they’d see him moving about the house through the windows, it was as simple as that.

Len wanted Jody to go before the girls woke up and saw him.

In his dressing gown and slippers he followed his wife and son downstairs to the kitchen where the curtains were still drawn against the new day. Babs started a fry-up, Jody, his chest now expertly bandaged, tucked into cornflakes while Len put the kettle on.

Babs kept her voice low and conspiratorial. ‘You can’t stay here, love. You know that, don’t you?’

Thank God it was Babs who said it, not him.

‘I could spend the days up in the attic and come downstairs at night.’

Babs shook her head while Jody watched her anxiously.

‘But I have to stay here, Mum,’ he protested. ‘Where else would I go?’

Babs concentrated on cracking the eggs one by one into the pan. She started to push them round roughly. ‘You can’t stay here because of Dawn and Cindy. They are already too badly disturbed. If it was just your father and me, of course it would be different.’

‘The girls don’t need to know where I am.’

Babs pushed aside the already browned bacon, leaving more room for the eggs. ‘Jody, don’t be silly. For your own sake you mustn’t stay here.’

Scarcely noticing his mother’s firm answer Jody went on like the child he still was. ‘I’ve got it all worked out.’

‘They are likely to burst in here any moment and search this house.’

‘But I
have
to stay here. There’s nowhere else.’

‘We’ll make sure you’ve got all the money you need and suitable clothes in a rucksack.’

Neither was listening to the other. There were two separate conversations going on in the room. ‘Mum, they’ll catch me the minute I step out of here. Please, please…’

‘And we can always arrange to meet you…’

‘How, Mum? How, when they’ll probably bug the phone?’

Hot smoke from the pan formed a fragile dome around her. She dished out the eggs one by one. She spoke in a tired monotone as if she was alone in the room, as if she was talking only to herself. ‘We can’t have Dawn and Cindy drawn into this any further. We can’t risk being accused of aiding and abetting.’

He pleaded then, for the last time, and Len felt his own heart breaking. ‘I know how hard this is for them but it’s me whose future’s been wiped out, it’s me they are telling lies about, and you know I won’t get justice, the way everyone thinks about me…’

Babs raised her blue eyes to his identical ones. She fetched him the mayonnaise from the cupboard. ‘But you can’t stay here. You know very well you can’t.’ She lifted her shoulders as she finally sat down and pushed his breakfast towards him. Only Len knew how much this decision was hurting her. ‘It’s no good Jody, you’ll just have to go—’

‘But where, Mum, where?’

And Len, surprised, even touched by Bab’s overwhelming concern for her daughters, turned away from them both and felt like weeping at his own helplessness.

He stayed in the house for the rest of that day, hidden away in the attic, and the following night after the girls were in bed asleep, Len let him out.

Nearly six o’clock. On the early morning radio news they announce the capture of Jody’s two mates—Jody swears he never told them where he was going. They give out another description of Jody—tall, blond, freshly shaven, two earrings in his left ear—and warn the public not to approach him. If that’s not defamation of character, what is? Janice Plunket’s father is furious that his daughter’s attacker is on the loose. There is talk of him suing the Home Office. Len is praying that Babs won’t have weakened in the twenty-four hours she has had to think things over. Watching her nervous movements, listening to Jody’s pleas, he has several moments of sickening doubt.

‘I can’t stand it in there any longer, Mum. They’ll catch me and do me over and when they’ve finished I’ll never get out of there again. They’ve stitched me up, that’s what they’ve done.’

Her frightened eyes fix on her son. ‘I know, Jody, we all know that. That’s why you can’t stay here, that’s why you have to stay free.’

‘How,
Mum? If you turn me away I don’t stand a chance,’ moans Jody so full of misery.

She sympathises. She touches his hand. That awful indecision from which she has suffered of late has miraculously left her. She is back to her old, competent self again and it took Jody in need to work the magic. ‘If we keep you here they’ll find you. Believe me, Jody, this is the only way.’ Her nerve is breaking, she is half-sobbing now and pleading with him as if it’s her own life she is trying to save. ‘Get out of Preston. Go somewhere nobody knows you—go down south. We’ll be down there in six weeks’ time if all goes well, and maybe then we can take you in or—’

‘Babs!’ Lenny warns her. ‘Don’t make promises you might not be able to keep.’

At last she is moving, doing something! She paces up and down the kitchen like a General on a winning campaign. ‘It’s summertime, Jody. The West Country is flooded with visitors. Take the tent and your mountain bike, and your dad’s fishing gear. Keep your head down, keep out of their way and I’ll give you our new address, but whatever happens, Jody, don’t contact us here. Just wait till we get there and don’t give up hope.’

With a gathering anger against the injustice that threatens to take his sanity away, Len steps forward and hugs his son as if he can protect him like that, as if he could weave magic round him and render him invisible. Babs joins in, clinging hard, reduced to tears of pain and frustration. How did their lives come to this? And where will it end now that it’s started? It seems they can’t go deeper than this, for this is a fathomless despair. Jody stiffens, sways, and steadies himself with the back of a chair. He turns quickly away but cannot hide his watering eyes, or his dismay. His mother’s white-knuckled hand rests on the table, taking her weight, it’s as if she can go no further.

And one and a half hours later, when Jody leaves the house with his rucksack packed and his bike by his side and money in his pocket, she hasn’t the heart to close the back door till he’s down the lane and out of sight. The same way she acted when she was his mother and he was her child going to school.

S
OON NOW, MAYBE IN
six weeks or even a month, soon they will be gone from here. After six years of concerted effort Jacy believes that time will heal them. Time has certainly not healed Darcy and Cyd although they, too, took advantage of the expertise on offer at Wideacre House when Belle made a block booking six years earlier. The place has an excellent reputation.