The Backs (2013) Read Online Free PDF

the maxed-out wipers have the chance to make their next sweep.
    They’d both been watching the road ahead, and neither of them had said much, mostly because they were both very aware of Jane Osborne’s presence in the rear seat.
    Up until that afternoon he’d only seen photos of their passenger, showing a dark brunette scowling out at him. She had scowled again at Goodhew when he first addressed her today. She didn’t suit her short blonde hair, her dark eyes glaring out from beneath straight-across eyebrows, her forehead broken by a pair of vertical frown lines. They served only to accentuate the dark unhappiness that seemed to be written into her features.
    DS Tierney had dealt with the handover quickly but by the time the paperwork was complete, Goodhew had come to realize that Jane Osborne scowled at everyone.
    She’d settled into the back of their car, choosing to sit behind Goodhew and settling low into the seat. She then kept her face turned to the window, hiding behind a mask of total disinterest. For such a small space, she’d made a pretty good job of putting distance between herself and them. There had since been a couple of bursts of reluctant conversation but mostly silence.
    Goodhew had deliberately twisted the second rear-view mirror around so that he could see her clearly. But she leaned closer to the door and turned her head away, staring out the window, so it became almost impossible for him to see anything but part of her cheek and her exposed right ear. It was pierced at least six or seven times, with two studs at the lobe and a short run of identical small gold sleepers around the helix. He shifted his gaze on to the wing mirror so that each time they passed under a street light he had a fleeting view of her expression. Or lack of.
    Without warning she spoke. ‘Do my family know I’m coming back?’
    Gully answered, as Goodhew turned, ‘They know we’ve located you, nothing more.’
    ‘We can arrange for someone to meet you at Parkside,’ he added.
    Jane turned away from the window and glared at him instead. ‘A happy reunion with Mum and Dad?’
    He hesitated, knowing they’d divorced and her mum had moved out of Cambridge. He wasn’t sure if Jane even knew. ‘If that’s what you’d like.’
    ‘Right. When I ran off, it was because I’d had enough of them all to last me a lifetime. Nothing’s changed. In case you haven’t worked it out, people don’t change.’
    ‘Some do.’ It took him a few more seconds to put the dates together: if they hadn’t divorced by the time she’d run, they must have been fairly close to doing so.
    ‘Bollocks.’ She turned her head back to the window. ‘The police should’ve just let me go.’
    ‘And then you’d have run away again?’
    ‘Why not? No one gets banged up just for a bit of eye make-up.’ She turned her head back to the window, ending the conversation just like that.
    Goodhew went back to watching her in the wing mirror. People who chose not to communicate could achieve it in a variety of ways. One involved talking too much, bouncing around and over a subject and filling the room with chatter. Also the look-you-in-the-eye lie could be effective, and the head-hanging withdrawal often worked too. Everything about her said
Back off.
It was written right through her, as though she had carefully considered every aspect of her outward appearance and engineered each one to send out the same message. Maybe that’s what was needed when you ran away from home at fifteen. Or maybe, if the world had already had that much of an isolating effect, running away might seem like the sensible option.
    The rain was now pounding his window, the wing mirror, her window and everything in between. He doubted she realized that he was watching, though he couldn’t see her that clearly anyhow. It was her constant watchfulness that intrigued him, that and the question of how much she actually knew.
    It had been just over seven years since her sister Becca