Chapter 19: Guilty

Tommy Barlow pleaded guilty to all the charges levelled against him. They were, manslaughter through dangerous driving, stealing a motor vehicle, failing to stop following a motor accident, failure to report a serious motor vehicle accident, driving without a driving licence, and driving without valid motor insurance. He pleaded guilty, against his solicitor’s advice, even though much of the evidence was circumstantial. He was convicted to seven years’ imprisonment. On Appeal the sentence was reduced to five years plus the usual condition to be banned from driving for two years following his release.

He was up for parole under the early release scheme after nearly three years and a certain Chief Superintendent Haroldson spoke up for him as a character witness, which helped in some way to secure the early release.

Tommy had had a long time to think about what had happened to him all those years before. He had been a bit of a tearaway as a youth, stealing cars and joyriding was a pastime of him and his friends. Tommy was never caught, so he never had a criminal record. Gradually the other youths grew out of it, but not Tommy. Although he was the first of his friends to be married, he was the last one willing to give up his juvenile ways.

That fateful night when he walked to the shops for a pint of milk and a packet of cigarettes, casually, almost habitually, trying all the door handles of parked cars on the way, he found one that was open. The temptation was just too great for him to resist.

Just a half hour ride about, he thought, drop it off near the shops, get the shopping and then back home. Sally wouldn’t even know. Rewiring the ignition, it was like he’d never been away. The ride was superb but then, completely out of nowhere, a blue light started chasing him. He soon lost it but the incident took him a long way away from home.

He parked up by the cemetery, the one on the top of the hill. As soon as he got out of the car he heard the siren before he saw the lights. If they found the car with a warm engine they would know he had scooted through the cemetery and, with their radios, they could get a unit to cover his escape at the other side. Although there was a climbable wall on this side, there were high railings at the other end and they’d catch him easily as he would have to leave by one of the two gates. He would have to run all the way to stand any chance.

As Tommy climbed the ancient crumbling wall, a loose brick fell away. He stopped. The brick had given him an idea. The car was an automatic, with the car in first gear and the brick on the gas pedal, it would drift slowly down the hill and probably hit a lamppost somewhere, but in the confusion generated he’d easily get through the cemetery before they could block his escape route.

Tommy restarted the car, steered it into the middle of the road and, holding onto the handbrake with the brick revving the engine, he put the gear in first and released the brake. The car moved off slowly enough for him to slam the door shut. The car reached the brow of the hill, then disappeared from his view over the top. As he climbed the wall, the pursuing police car roared up the hill. Tommy leaped from the top of the wall into the darkness, the wet grassy ground made him slip and he rolled down the slope, hitting trees and gravestones with glancing blows until hitting one which stopped and winded him. He was out of it, unsure for how long, probably for a few minutes only. He was wet and cold. He got up and checked his surroundings. He hadn’t rolled far, maybe twenty to thirty feet from the wall. He made his way down the hill towards the gates. Soon, he could hear sirens, lots of them, and then he could see flashing lights.

He followed the gravel paths down the hill inside the cemetery, down to a set of gates at the bottom by the crossroads. They were locked. He was able to look through the railings though, there was mayhem everywhere. The Jaguar he had stolen was on its roof, several cars were littered around the crossroads as badly damaged wrecks. The police were cordoning off the area with tape, approaching the gate. Tommy stepped back into the shadows, unseen. The copper tied off the end of the tape on the gate railing and departed. Tommy stepped forward again to see what damage he had caused. There was a girl laying on the pedestrian crossing, several ambulance men around her. Other ambulances were also arriving on scene. There was a fire truck, the firemen cutting the roof off one of the cars in a cascade of orange sparks.

Tommy was frozen to the spot. The enormity of what he had done, ruined someone’s life, probably more than one. Ruined his own life, too, as well as that of Sally, his parents, her parents. He had made a complete mess of his life by this one stupid wanton act, what he did for fun. He wanted the ground to open up, swallow him down into the hell that he deserved.

He watched fascinated until the end. The girl, her face covered by a blanket, was stretchered away, along with the walking wounded. He counted them one by one, each of them engraved on his troubled mind. Altogether seven people taken away in five ambulances, with two fire trucks, and six or seven policemen in attendance. When it was over and the place went quiet some four or five hours later, he sat in the shadow by the wall and cried silently to himself until he fell asleep.

It was cold and raining hard when he awoke at dawn. The police were back at the scene of the accident in force at first light, combing the road surface for clues. They didn’t notice him, as the gates were unlocked by the gatekeeper. Tommy walked down through the cemetery towards the gates at the opposite end to the crossroads. He didn’t want to go through the scene of his crime.

Tommy knew what he had to do, he had to get away from Nottingham, away from his wife and family. If he had to live with the guilt, he couldn’t live with saddling them with the stigma of his crime. He couldn’t even face them this once, let alone day in and day out, it would eat him up alive. Better to make a clean break, he thought. He had enough shopping money in his pocket to get a bus ticket to another town. But then he thought if he was still Tommy Barlow, wouldn’t they be able to track him down easily?

He needed a different name, a new identity. Just then he passed a brand-new headstone, so fresh that it stood out from all the rest, it must’ve only just been erected. He read the crisp inscription chiselled into the shiny marble: “Robert Neil Morris, born Nottingham 30/11/1958, the only beloved son of Gerald and Christina Morris, died 14/3/1980, age 21 years. Rest in Peace.”

He pulled the shopping list out of his pocket and scribbled down every detail of the inscription onto the back of it. Somehow he made it to the bus station and took the first coach out, all the way down to London. After he bought his ticket and while he was waiting for the coach to arrive, he looked up Gerald Morris in the phone book on a public call box. There was only one in the parish close to the cemetery. He added that address to his shopping list. Surely he could get lost down in London, find some kind of work, somewhere to sleep. Exist, hardly a life but then, he thought, he had no entitlement for a life of any value. The incident had sucked all the joy out of his life.

He slept in a shop doorway that first night, in Regent Street of all places. He only knew it existed before from the Monopoly board game he used to play as a boy. Hot soup was brought around during the night by the Salvation Army. He asked the volunteers if they knew where he could find work. Someone told him the name of a church hall where he could enquire for temporary employment. He queued up at that hall at first light with a number of other young men. There was plenty of casual work around, it appeared.

A volunteer at the church hall was very helpful. ‘Bob’, as he now called himself, told the volunteer that he had been robbed of everything while he had slept on the streets, drivers’ licence, wallet, everything. Fortunately, Bob lied to the volunteer as if he was born to it, he didn’t have a credit card to steal. No problem, offered the volunteer, this happens all the time to people on the road. He took down Bob’s details and said he would take care of it for him.

In the meantime, the volunteer arranged a bed for the night and a day’s work with a team of builders renovating a Georgian building, where he helped to mix plaster for the skilled plasterers and modellers. He was paid cash in hand at the end of the day, which the church hall kept in their safe for him. The next day he was carrying bricks, the day after that he got half a day digging a flooded ditch. At the church hall, he was provided with some worn but clean change of clothes. Sunday, after church, he helped wash down graffiti off a tiled wall in a road underpass, for which he received double pay.

On the Monday, after another day at the Georgian renovation, when he was painting walls and ceilings all day, the volunteer had some good news for him. Handed to him was a duplicate National Insurance card in his adopted name and an address for a cheap lodging house. He took his money out of the safe and booked a room at the lodging house for a couple of weeks. With his bundle of cash he opened a new Post Office savings account and deposited the money he had saved.

By the end of the week he had a permanent job at an engineering shop underneath some railway arches near Paddington station. He was amused that he seemed to be living his life on a Monopoly board; he would find a top hat and a dog next, he thought with the first smile he had allowed himself for a week. He was back working with lathes. It felt good to be doing something that used his skills rather than simply labouring. The money was good too, much better than he had earned in Nottingham, and the company were pleased with his work and asked few questions of him.

He needed a birth certificate, the girl in the office said, and told him where he could send off for a duplicate, which came in within ten days. He did the same thing with his driving licence, a valid copy of which duly arrived in the post without any problem. For the hell of it, he applied for a passport while he was on a roll, his foreman more than happy to lie on the form that he had known Bob for over two years. The girl in the office then said he needed a bank account, as the company were switching over from weekly cash pay to monthly cheques in a couple of months. Tommy took his cash and valid identification papers down to the bank and he opened up his first bank account.

It was as easy as that. He was no longer Tommy Barlow! but Bob Morris.

When he collected his seventh week’s wage, there was an additional cheque inside for several hundred pounds. He queried it with the office, the helpful girl informed him that the tax office had changed his tax code from the emergency one he started with and discovered that he had overpaid his tax in a previous financial year. Therefore he was entitled to a rebate, which was too much to pay him in cash.

He stayed at the firm for six months until he heard that one of his colleagues was moving to Germany. An engineering company over there had recently expanded and were looking for skilled engineers. They were paying a comparative fortune to anyone who could prove they could do the job. There was nothing keeping him in England any more except heartache, so he followed his friend and worked for five years in Germany, cheaply renting a flat with other engineers.

When he returned to England he secured a job back in the Midlands in Buxton and, on checking the price of houses in the area, found he had saved enough for a substantial deposit for a three-bedroom house. Once the house had been secured on a mortgage, he furnished the place simply and advertised for a couple of lodgers, the income from whom paid the mortgage. He could therefore afford to pay off the original loan at more than double the rate, which significantly cut down the amount of interest he was paying.

In seven years, by the time he fell in love with and married Jennifer Diplake, he had paid off the mortgage completely. When Jennifer was carrying their third child, Tigger, six years later, they traded up to a four-bedroomed house in a very nice part of the town, with an affordable mortgage.

He had always been aware of Jennifer’s first affair with his supposed friend Richard on the cruise in which they were supposed to have been having their second honeymoon. Tommy rarely drank alcohol, and he had poured most of his drink away without anyone realising, so the roofie he had been administered by Richard only knocked him out for a half an hour or so.

He came round, finding himself naked and in bed with the equally naked Emma, Jennifer’s best friend. He couldn’t wake the woman up and, as he tried to clear his hazy mind, he recalled that neither of them appeared to have drunk very much. Emma had quietly told him earlier that she and Richard were trying for a baby, so she was sticking to soft drinks throughout the evening, other than the one round that Richard had got in.

Tommy quickly surmised from this that they had been drugged. Listening at the interconnecting door between their two cabins revealed the sound of lovemaking from his room. That confirmed the reason for the knock-out drug.

He lay back on the bed in Emma’s cabin considering his options. Leaving Jennifer would mean leaving the kids, who were now his life. Later, he heard them getting up and come through to the cabin where he and Emma were in bed. So Tommy pretended to be still dead to the world as they manhandled him back into his original cabin, Jennifer all the while wailing to Richard how the whole thing was a big mistake.

This had the effect of putting a damper on the rest of the cruise, Tommy pretending to be unwell. Jennifer assumed that he was suffering after-effects of the drug. Emma was also very ill, which substantiated Tommy’s reaction which caused him to withdraw from any enthusiastic enjoyment of the remainder of the cruise.

Many years later he heard from Jennifer that Emma had miscarried during the cruise, which understandably depressed Jennifer for some time. Tommy kept close to Richard after the cruise. He regarded the odious creep as his enemy, whilst meeting him for drinks regularly, monitoring anything happening between his wife and Richard.

Tommy worked hard to get himself fitter, realising that he had become flabby during those first ten years of his marriage. He was in his mid-forties, his wife of ten years just thirty years old. He decided that the reason for her straying was to a large extent his own fault, it was unfair to place all of the blame on her. He took up jogging, just around the local park to start with, then running further afield, even jogging to and from work once he was up to. He concentrated on his life with the children, encouraging their interests and becoming more and more involved with them, including activities at the school.

In time he thought he had managed to rebuild his relationship with Jennifer. He believed the encounter with Richard may have been a one-off mistake that she regretted and would not repeat.

That was until December almost two years before his incident in the Chesterfield wood.

Bob, as he was happy to be called, received an anonymous email from an internet café, containing several still photographs of his wife having sex with a man whose face had been digitally fogged.

However, Tommy easily recognised the torso, it was one of the teachers on that last summer trip with the children; Tommy couldn’t even remember his name. For some reason that teacher had resented Tommy’s popular relationship with the children, as a parent. This was based on several years of being involved with them on residential and daily trips, where they fitted in with his shift pattern. The teacher had even come down to the level of challenging Bob to a race in the swimming pool at the residential location. Tommy hadn’t swum in years but was supremely fit through his running. The teacher was a gym and games teacher apparently and wanted an excuse to show off his prowess in the pool. He had put together a two-length freestyle race involving all the teachers and parents on the trip, their favourites being cheered on by the children. The teacher built up a strong lead on the first length but Tommy got into his rhythm and overhauled him by a long chalk at the finish, accompanied by rousing encouragement and celebratory cheers from the majority of the children.

The affair the teacher had with Jennifer appeared to be petty revenge on this teacher’s part for being shown up in what was otherwise a meaningless contest that Tommy had assumed was just for a bit of fun.

Tommy was in the process of consulting a lawyer about divorce when Jennifer resigned from the PTA, stating that the work had all got too much for her. She did not say anything to Tommy about what happened. Tommy checked the photos again, they were stills and her eyes appeared closed. Was she drugged? Memories of the cruise came back to him. He could forgive one mistake, a second one was a different matter.

He determined he would stay until Tigger left school in four years’ time. The relationship between himself and Jennifer definitely cooled from that moment on. They still made love but it was routine from his point of view and the regularity declined and he hardly ever touched her otherwise and never initiated lovemaking.

He knew absolutely nothing about her restarting her affair with Richard. It was an utter shock to be confronted by her asleep in bed with her lover on that morning he had been sent home from work early due to injury.

Even after striking Richard down, leaving the room and descending the stairs, taking time to put his trainers back on that he had removed as soon as he had entered the house, his wife of nearly twenty years had made no attempt to follow him or plead with him; all her attention had been devoted to her lover.

Angry with himself for allowing this humiliation to happen, he slammed the door behind him and tried to run off the pain that wracked him. He only half noticed that his very recent arm wound had been opened up when he punched Richard as hard as he could and the blood was seeping through his bandage.

All of these memories suddenly came flooding back like a torrent when he held his Sally to his breast on the night of the barbecue.

He could now remember every detail of diving into the two men dragging off the screaming young girl, right the way up until he lost consciousness. He dived in with no thought to his own safety, even though he was already almost at the end of his strength. All he could think of at the time was that the girl being abducted could have been JJ.

He was offered bail at his first court appearance on the Monday morning following his arrest, but he declined. He had already spent Saturday and Sunday night alone in the police cells. Later they moved him from the police station to a prison, held on remand, from which he travelled to and from court. He was appointed a lawyer by the court, who automatically appealed to the severity of the sentence. Tommy wasn’t happy about the appeal, as he felt he had a debt to pay for what he had done. A young woman had been killed, while crossing a zebra crossing, a number of people received serious injuries and several cars were involved. The litany of the damage was read out in court at the time of sentencing, which only added to Tommy’s torment. The only consolation for Tommy was that at least his father could not be a witness to his shame.

Tommy used a specialist lawyer to start divorce proceedings, which Jennifer delayed for months, during which she kept bombarding him with requests to meet with him. He ignored everything, refusing all visitors, including his children.

Brick did call on him though, and his curiosity piqued, Tommy allowed his visit. Brick pleaded on behalf of JJ that Tommy see both of them. Tommy initially refused as he didn’t want any of his children to see him in the prison, but after consideration decided he was amenable to exchanging letters with them.

Brick called on him again more than two years into his sentence, this time to ask for his permission for JJ’s hand in marriage; they wanted to become engaged. Sharing a flat in Cambridge, where they were both attending university, they wanted to make their status as a couple official but, Brick assured “Mr B” that they wouldn’t actually marry until Tommy was available to give her away at the ceremony.

From his children’s letters, Tommy vicariously lived their lives during his long incarceration. Tom hardly wrote to him at all, but Suzannah sent regular cards for Christmas, his birthday and Fathers’ Day, enclosing letters and photographs. They had married shortly before being delivered of Tommy’s third grandchild, a girl, Elizabeth Jane Morris, and, much to Tom’s chagrin, were still living with Suzannah’s parents.

JJ wrote to her father every week. She moved immediately out of the Morris family home into the Alexanders’ house. JJ shared a bedroom with Brick’s sister, Lucy, and was made very welcome by Brick’s parents. She worked part-time and during the holidays in the builders’ merchants, with all the rest of the enlarged Alexander family. She rapidly earned a reputation as someone who was helpful but not to be messed with. She had done very well at school too, and earned an excellent scholarship at Cambridge, the only university she was prepared to go to, as separation from Brick for any period of time was completely unacceptable to her.

Tigger stayed with his Mum, still in the family house where Jennifer continued to reside until such time that Tommy could return to claim his house. Jennifer was entitled to 20% share of the house, but Tommy had conceded that he was prepared to settle for 40% when the property was eventually sold. This couldn’t occur until Tigger had completed university.

Tommy regularly corresponded with his son Brett in Melbourne, eagerly awaiting news and a regular supply of photographs of the progress of his first two grandchildren.

Tommy also wrote regularly to a number of other acquaintances and a ghost writer who put his story into a book, which was eventually serialised in one of the national dailies.

Tommy was informed that his parole hearing was successful, but told that it could be up to six weeks before the release order was processed through the system. As it turned out it was three weeks later that he received almost 45 hours’ notice of his imminent release. He called JJ’s phone at the time he was allowed telephone access and was able to leave her a voicemail message. He still hadn’t heard back by the time of his release, so he wasn’t sure whether Brick was in a position to collect him or not. The prison issued a rail warrant to him, so he could catch a train home if there was no-one to meet him at the gate.