Chapter Seven

When I got home, all I wanted to do was read that folder, but I couldn’t manage to sit still. I was wondering around the house, flipping through the folder while standing up, while pacing, while sitting in different locations. I was sitting at my dinner table, then pacing back and forth before something shocking meant I needed to sit down in my lounge room on one of my arm chairs.

It didn’t take me long to read everything then to put things together. He was a small-time criminal when he was younger, and as he’d grown into a man his crimes had grown in severity along with him. Most of them were property crimes but there were a few cases of assault. They were bar fights with other men, mostly. There was one case of him and some other guys roughing someone up over drugs.

I almost couldn’t believe this was Jack. But then at the same time, I could believe it of him. I had been so blind-sighted by him I was shocked at myself.

But then, I wasn’t.

Mostly, I was just confused. I was left with my mouth agape thinking that this was all a bit surreal. I had dealt with women like me when I was on the force, women who didn’t know what their husbands or boyfriends really did for money, women who were in deep denial.

Plenty of those women were the victims of domestic violence, too, and were still in deep denial about the type of man they were involved with. I knew there was complex psychology there. I knew women stayed in the wrong relationships with the wrong men for all sorts of reasons, only, I never thought I would be one of those women. Especially when I spent so much of my time in the past helping those women.

How could I, a cop, not see the signs that he was no good? How could I not see anything was wrong?

But then, I had seen something, hadn’t I? When he turned up on his bike and I freaked out, there had been something there, something that wasn’t just PTSD. Or was there?

Then when I found my front door lock broken, I was sure that it was him. I didn’t even really make excuses for him – actually, I did, didn’t I, for a while.

No. I knew he was bad, but I was in denial. I needed someone outside the situation to give me some perspective here.

I was drowning. There was no sight of land, only there was something here in these pages I held. They were real, they grounded me. They stopped me from slipping down into the denial that could be so comfortable. The denial I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be one of those women.

Because the pages were physically there, in my hands, it was harder for me to find a way to write them off. It was harder for me to make excuses for them or to ignore them. I couldn’t excuse him for that he did to other people. For the pain and suffering he caused other men and their families in bar fights, or the thefts he executed.

There was information in here about him being involved with a bikey gang. But, I hadn’t seen a tattoo to mark him as a member anywhere on his body. Weirdly, actually, he was clean. He also had no prison tattoos, and aside from that one time, I hadn’t seen him riding a bike. Something didn’t add up. Something was wrong here.

Plus, he worked a regular job. Hadn’t I seen him down at the pub the first time in his high-visibility gear with a bunch of workmates?

Even as I tried to make real what I read, some things just didn’t make sense.

And the names, Jack and John. Whenever I said Jack, he responded. I wondered if I called him John if he would respond to that. I wondered if it was worth the risk of trying it. If his name wasn’t John, he could be offended. Wonder who the fuck John was. If he was John, he’d be suspicious of me. He would wonder how I knew who he really was and in no time at all, he’d find this folder. I knew it. Or, he would leave me because I knew too much. I didn’t want him to leave, and I didn’t want to leave him.

Did he know I was a cop? Could he spot a cop – even an ex-cop – in civilian gear? I knew the answer to that. I knew he would be able to make that spot, especially in Jerome. Jerome looked like a cop, I bet he even when he was in his birthday suit. He’d been on the force a long time and had internalised his cop-ness (if that was a thing).

I on the other hand, maybe he didn’t know about. But then he had to, there were too many small things, too many sidewards glances. There was something there, something that had always been there. He must know.

But if he knew I was a cop, he must have known it was past as he knew I had another job now. The thought of him using me to get close to a cop was an awful one. He couldn’t fake all this just to get close, just to keep an eye on what police were doing.

That wasn’t the normal MO of bikeys anyway. Dealing with them was like being hit over the head with a baseball bat. They were as fierce as they were blunt, and there was no way I could miss them or their crimes.

Then it struck me, maybe the reason he had no bikey tattoos and had a normal job was that he’d left a life of crime, but then as I thought about it, I almost laughed out loud. You couldn’t leave these gangs. You couldn’t just walk away. It didn’t happen. Once you were in, you were in for life.

I was a cop once. I needed to remember that about everything else. Right now, too, I was in the mood to find excuses for him, but there was no excuse for this. He was a criminal, and he’d done his time. I knew that criminals did plenty more crime than we know about that they were never caught or prosecuted over. I knew that if he’d done this much, he would have done more.

How I had missed all of this was beyond me.

Shaking my head, I stood up and went to pour myself a cup of tea. I put the folder down on the kitchen bench next to the tea – which was just a little hot to drink – before pacing again.

What was I going to do about this? Should I do anything at all?

Jerome obviously wanted me to keep an eye on him. He likely did this to keep me safe too. No, scratch that, he would have done this to keep me safe about everything else. Knowledge is the best preventative anyway and he knew it. The more I knew about Jack (as he would always be to me, even if it wasn’t his real name), the better off I would be. The better position I would be in when it was time to leave.

But would I leave?

I knew I should. I knew it made sense to leave and that I should consider it. I knew it wasn’t for me to decide to stay when I held all of this personal information about everyone who I had worked with on the force, and all of this information about police and policing that wasn’t available to the public. I owed so much to my ex-colleagues and to the force. I didn’t want to give them up for some guy after all. If Jack really did do all of this to get close to me as an ex-cop, I owed it to my colleagues to do something.

But when I would get the idea up there in my head that I had to do something, I had to let him go, I would find reasons not to do anything at all. Then I would find reasons why he wasn’t exactly who he appeared to be.

At some time around two AM (because I couldn’t sleep with this inside my head) I decided it was time to stop agonising over this.

I had read somewhere that if you sleep on something, your subconscious does the heavy lifting for you, that it makes decisions or something. I was willing to believe that just to get some sleep as I had been up way past my bed time and needed to rest my eyes.

Lying down, I decided to just relax and let sleep take me, in the morning I would hopefully have some better ideas of what was going on. I would hopefully be able to ‘just know’ what to do because right now logic and reason were fighting with my heart, and my heart was way more persuasive than my head.

Before I went to sleep, I toyed with places to put the folder, then, remembering the recent break in (as if I could forget it) I put the folder underneath my head.

The police when they visited had said there had been a number of these in the area and I likely wasn’t targeted specifically. Likely what had happened was there was a few young people targeting houses where people lived alone or were out and stealing their valuables.

It was a common crime, and one I wouldn’t let disturb me in my home.

There was so many crimes I had seen in my time on the force that this one never bothered me when I had to investigate breaking and entering cases before. Surely I shouldn’t be bothered when it happened here, out of all the other things that could have happened here anyway. At least that’s what I told myself, that it shouldn’t bother me. Of course it did, as it was my own home. But this was only a theft, it wasn’t like they had come into my home wielding machetes, holding them to my throat and demanded I hand over cash and other valuables.

It wasn’t like someone broke into my house specifically to hurt me.

That night when I slept though, my dreams were filled with dark figures. When I woke early the next morning with a start, I could see Jack standing beside my bed in the pre-dawn light. He was staring at me. In my mind, I knew I was still dreaming, so I reached for the light.

Once the light was on, I turned back to find Jack was gone. It was a dream, but I couldn’t help the feeling that there was someone else in the house. I shot out of my bed and checked every room, including cupboards. By the time I had returned to my own room, I wasn’t checking spaced as seriously anymore, as I knew it was just a dream.

But when I was checking the cupboards in my bedroom though, I felt air dancing over my skin. Looking up and over, I could see my window was open. Taking two steps, I questioned myself. Had I left it open before I slept?

I stood there, staring at the open window, wondering to myself if I had left it open. It was summer, and the nights were warm, but I couldn’t think. Had I left it open?

I was sure I hadn’t, but if I hadn’t, how else was it open?

Then I thought back, maybe Jack really was here. But if he was, wouldn’t I have seen him leave when I reached for the light? When I turned back, he was gone but, but, no.

He had been standing next to my window, staring at me. It is possible he jumped out the window while I was fumbling with my lamp.

Had he been here, and if so, why?