Unfortunately it wasn’t the peaceful and restful sleep that Harry had been looking forward to all day. And ever since he had received that letter, hand delivered to him by his creepy landlord, Harry’s mind had been all a blur of all sorts of unpleasant scenarios. While his landlord seemed to accept his almost true story about the late Emily, there was no way for Harry to really know whether he would just leave it at that or whether he would make further inquiries. It probably wouldn’t have taken his landlord much effort to have found out that beyond about two years ago Harry Wright wasn’t Harry Wright and that the real Harry Wright had in fact died in a car crash. It had just been a massive coincidence that Harry had been able to take over the poor man’s identity.
There Harry had been sitting in a café, going under the name John Bailey at the time, when in Harry Wright walked. The place was busier than normal for a midafternoon and there weren’t any spare tables. Harry, or rather John, was sitting there trying to loose himself behind a newspaper when the real Harry Wright wondered over.
“You mind if I sit here?” Harry had said in a rather gruff northern accent that made John winch a little.
“Pardon?” John said in the politest voice he could muster and looking around the newspaper to see the barely shaven interloper who had just clanged a mug of some dreary liquid that passed for tea down to the table.
“You mind if I sit here?” Harry then repeated his query in the same gruff tones as before. While john would rather have been left alone, he saw no reason object and gave his assent with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders and a polite enough “Sure”. With that Harry planted himself down on the chair and took a few slurps from his cup and starred almost straight ahead in John’s direction. Which john found more than a little unsettling.
“So what do you do?” Harry asked casually wondering why someone was sitting in a café almost 3pm wearing a full suit and tie.
“Oh I'm between jobs at the moment,” john replied conversationally without looking up from his newspaper.
“Yeah, me too,” Harry replied to an unasked question with more than a hint of resentment in his voice. “I was on a temp contract when they asked to leave one afternoon,” he then added with all the wounded pride of a not so innocent person.
“Didn’t they give you a reason? “ John asked barely interested in keeping this conversation going but not really wanting to leave yet.
“Something about cutbacks and needing to shed temp staff,” he added as someone brought over his food. “They said ‘it wasn’t anything personal’, but don’t they always?” Harry then added taking a noisy bite out of his bacon and egg sandwich, and John could smell the appetizing aroma of the bacon grease, which made his stomach rubble even though John felt more than a little stuffed from the large meal that he hadn’t long finished.
While Harry bolted down the sandwich Harry continued to rubble on about the inequalities and unfairness that existed in the world, especially those that seemed to affect him personally, and John managed to mumble something that was both polite and noncommittal from behind the newspaper. If he were being honest John was barely interested in what the other man had to say. When Harry had finished eating looked at his watch and then stared into the space just beyond John as though answers to his problems were writing on the wall behind John.
“You going to be here long, mate?” Harry said in John’s general direction.
“I guess so, at least 10 or 15 minutes,” John replied not really sure how much longer he would be hanging around and wondering whether he should in fact leave now. It wasn’t as if he were waiting for anything specific, it was more a case of just wasting time between this and that.
“Good, be back in a mo mate,” Harry said pushing the chair back from the table and standing up. “Then I have an offer for ya,” Harry then added before he turned wandered off in the general direction of the toilets.
“Ok,” John said more to Harry’s back than anything as he watched the other man wonder off. From just behind his newspaper John could see that Harry had left his jacket hanging off the back of his chair and, at the same moment, he also noticed the bulge in the jacket’s pocket. After gazing around the café John could see that there wasn’t anyone looking in his general vicinity. He then serendipitously reached around the table and felt the pocket of Harry’s jacket.
Inside there was what felt like a wallet and a set of keys, and it seemed that Harry had been silly enough to leave these in his jacket pocket unattended with only a complete stranger to watch over them. John’s eyes then slowly scanned around the general area where he was and, seeing he was again unobserved, John quickly stood and casually picked up the jacket as he walked out of the café. As he headed toward the door John managed to keep his attention stiffly focused on the exit and casually he opened to leave.
As he covered the short distance from where he had been sitting to the door John could feel his heart beating faster and harder in his chest and for just a brief few seconds he thought that it might even beat so fast and hard that it would burst out of his chest. John then felt the cool air of a spring afternoon’s breeze on his face, that felt refreshing after the stuffiness of the café, but that did nothing to relax his mind that expected Harry to come rushing out of the café at any moment to confront him.
Without looking back John hurried around the nearest corner, trying to walk quickly without looking like he was rushing. Then turned into a little side alley and, pressing his back against the wall, took a deep breath and waited for the inevitable.
Five, or even ten minutes, passed before John was even able to consider bringing himself to look around the corner of the wall for any sign of pursuit for the fear that the minute he did so he would be confronted by the man whose jacket he now wore guiltily around his shoulders. When, eventually, there was no sign of his would be pursuer, John eventually looked around the wall and could see no sign of Harry. He then ducked back around the wall and took another deep breath, then after quietly counting to ten John strode off in the direction he had been fleeing away from the scene of his crime.
Instead of being able to use his own car, as John now had the keys, Harry had to get a lift with a friend of his that afternoon. Who, being a few times over the legal alcohol limit, careered off the road and crashed his car into another vehicle, resulting in both the driver and the passenger, Harry, being killed. At the same time John was posing as Harry to buy a train ticket to Manchester with the money he had found in Harry’s wallet. After that John found it easy enough to slip into using the identity of Harry Wright, barely aware that had it not been for his intervention then Harry hadn’t been killed.
It wasn’t being at least partially responsible for at least one man’s death that kept Harry awake in the early hours of that morning. It was his culpability in setting in motion the events that lead to a fatal car crash that kept him passing back and forth his ill-gotten bedsit. It was more the connection between himself, Harry’s true identity that is, and Emily Baxter that worried him. A connection he wasn’t quite yet ready, or able, to sever. If someone were able to make the connection between him and Emily Baxter then Harry could soon see everything come crashing about his ears. And that was enough to keep Harry up most of the night and pacing back and forth wondering whether his landlord would be able to see past his little subterfuge or just accept his on face value.