Brakes

“It’ll all be over soon,” the policeman said, offering his arm. “Just take a deep breath, have a look and let us know that it’s him. I know it’s difficult, but we need to be sure, and we can’t be without a formal identification.”

She’d been taken to the police station in the back of a BMW. It was the first time she’d been in a police car; under normal circumstances it would have been a novelty.  Not as a grieving widow. Manchester’s finest knew her extended family very well, but she had never had any dealings with them herself prior to meeting Charlie. The police were despised by the people she tended to know these days. She needed a new social circle, she decided.

She held onto his arm as they entered the room, immediately wincing at the sickly smell of disinfectant. It reminded her of the toilets at school. Funny how a smell could trigger memories like that, she thought. She couldn’t remember the last time she had thought about primary school. Now she stood outside a mortuary preparing to identify her late husband and she could picture it as clearly as if she was back there.

The mortuary itself looked almost exactly like she would have imagined. Smaller maybe, but other than that she guessed they were probably fairly standard. Five cadaver-length stainless steel tables dominated, the first being directly in front of the door they entered by.

The tables brought to mind violent death and bone-saws, grieving relatives and hardened cops with unsolvable cases, she thought. Too many American cop dramas were to blame for that, she knew. The floors and walls were tiled, presumably so they could be mopped and wiped clean when things got messy. The roof reminded her of the office she’d worked in a lifetime ago, tired tiles and headache inducing strip lights.

The long steel tables themselves were mercifully empty, save for the one at the end where she knew her husband lay waiting to be identified. Funny how she could tell it was him, even with the large white sheet covering his body head to toe.

“Are you ready, Mrs Jenkins?” The detective asked. He was excellent, she thought, at this. He’d been nothing but professional, but she could hear compassion in his voice. He knew what her husband had been, probably much better than she did. He had treated her with a courtesy which she appreciated, though.

“Yes,” she whispered, finding the words stick in her throat. She felt faint all of a sudden, the room spinning a little and gripped hard on his arm steadying herself.

He nodded, and the attendant in the green robe pulled back the sheet. Charlie Jenkins. Mad Charlie. She had not known what to expect, but save for a yellowish bruising around his closed right eye he could have been sleeping. She knew that they would have cleaned him up before showing her, but had not expected this – this face appeared completely uninjured. They’d said it was a heart attack that had killed him, brought on by shock.

“Is this your husband ma’am?” she heard the policeman ask, “Can you confirm that this is Mr Charles Jenkins?”

“Yes, yes it is.” She reached out to touch his hair, and kissed her finger before placing it on his forehead, just briefly. She had thought about it at length, and decided this was how she would handle it. Nothing ostentatious, but caring nonetheless. She was led out then, and was surprised to find she was crying. The detective took a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her, looking respectfully to the floor as she dabbed her eyes.

“We’d like to talk to you some more, Mrs Hooper,” he said softly, “But I can have someone take you home first. We can do it tomorrow, if that’s easier.”

“I would appreciate that,” she replied. “I’ll help you in any way that I can, but it’s been a terrible day. I need to pick up my son, too. He’s with family.”

The drive home was – if not the same car – very similar. Even the smell was the same, a mixture of light sweat, heavy cologne and leather. The uniformed policeman who was driving kept his eyes on the road, and made no attempt to talk.

They had arrived at the door earlier that morning. The older one, in plain clothes and introducing himself as Spencer. Flanked by two young WPCs in full uniform. It was like The Bill. Hats off and tucked under their arms. She had known immediately why they were on the doorstep as soon as she saw them. It wasn’t the first time she’d answered the door to the authorities, but their demeanour was so different this time.

She’d always felt embarrassed when they’d come to the house before. They had probably assumed she was like him and his family, that she was scum. She knew what he did, how could she live with herself, they would think. She did not hold that against them though, as she had spent the past year and a half asking herself the same questions. Over and over and over again.

The answer was simple. Fear. Fear for Jack. Three years old and gorgeous. Jack, with his blond curls and cheeky grin, always running about laughing, or flying between the rooms of the large flat on his plastic tractor. The love of her life. Going to grow up to be a heartbreaker, everybody said. She was grateful there was no bad blood in Jack, he’d been born before she’d met Charlie. There was none of that family’s DNA poisoning Jack.

When Charlie had first started noticed her she had been flattered. Never knew anything about him, but after a chance encounter in a bar on Canal Street he’d called her a few times and eventually she’d let him take her on a date. She’d been out for a couple of hurried drinks after work with friends, he’d been there on business. He wasn’t worried about her being on her own with Jack; in fact he had genuinely seemed great with the boy.

She had been so happy to meet someone who she thought could provide for her son. She had been naïve, but everything had seemed great. Charlie Hooper, businessman, or entrepreneur – that’s what he would tell you. Always out doing this and that, never sharing exactly what he was doing. She had been stupid, she knew now. Blinded by the hope of a better future, by the opulence she had never experienced before and by the weekends in that beautiful hotel in Paris.

Things didn’t stay that way, though. Shortly after she had moved in things took a considerable turn for the worse.

When he first stayed out all night, two months after she had moved in, she asked where he had been. He hit her, hard, and told her not to ask him stupid fucking questions. That was the first time he had raised a hand to her.

As most men who hit women do, he’d apologised profusely. Things got better briefly. Maybe he’s changed, she thought. Hoped. Her stepfather had used her mother as a punch bag for long enough that she should have known it wouldn’t stop. Desperate to believe him, she had stayed.

Then the police turned up at the door for the first time. She had asked him what it was all about. He’d kicked her in the stomach so hard she thought that she might die.

Apologised afterwards, as would become the norm. Stress, darling. Working too hard. I’ll see someone about it, I promise. I would never hurt you or Jack; I love you more than anything.

A couple of months later she had decided to leave. He had a feeling he said that she was hiding something, he said. If you leave, I will find you and I will fucking kill you. Then the boy. Do you hear me? I will kill the fucking kid.

She could tell he meant it, the tone of his voice told her so.

The policeman’s opening line had been “Hello, Mrs Hooper? I’m Spencer, from the Serious Crimes Unit. Can we come in? Would you like to sit down?”

There had been an accident, they told her. His car had failed to slow down when it should have; gone through the motorway embankment. Dead, killed instantly. Too early to say conclusively, he said, but may have been foul play. Forensics were examining the car. No easy way to say it. They’d have to ask her some questions later, he said, but first they would like her to identify the body.

She was ready for the questions. She knew there was no point in them asking was there anyone who may have wanted to see him dead. Pick a name in the criminal phone book. She found out more than she would ever have wished to know about what he did for a living. She would help them where she could and then disappear. You didn’t give up names like that then carry on as normal.

Organised crime. Protection money, loan sharking, drugs, prostitution. You name it, and Mad Charlie was involved with it. You didn’t follow that particular career path without making some enemies. She might have been blind to it to start with, but when things started to get nasty she had paid closer attention, made it her business to know things.

Later, when wee Jack was tucked up in bed and the detritus of the Hooper family had finished crying their crocodile tears and drinking the house dry, she would take the wig and the clothes she had worn to the internet café out of the cupboard and cut them into small pieces. A few days after, she would burn them. It was almost unthinkable that anyone would ever connect her to the slutty looking blonde woman in the flowery dress, but better to be safe than sorry.

After all, that woman had spent quite some time in an internet cafe in the city centre a month or two ago, reading extensively about brake cables and car failure and the like. Not the sort of thing she could afford to be connected to.

Especially considering what had happened to her husband.

The End.