Alone Again, Or…?

Do you have any idea how many people have died here? I mean, since this place was built, in ’68. Some of them were accidents, yeah, back when this building was a dye house and factory regs were a lot less stringent than they are now. Then there’s the ones who died because of the job, bladder cancer mostly, from working with the Benzedrine dyes. Most of them hung on till long after the business was bust and the building condemned, but they still see this as the place of their death. They still feel connected to it. And finally, there’s the ones that came here later. A couple of them were accidents too – the kid who fell off the roof of the outhouse, impaled on the railings like so much hay on a pitchfork; or the tramp who froze to death in the winter of ’97 – but most of them were anything but. They were deliberate.

It was the day I passed out in the office and nobody noticed, that’s what finally did it. Two hours I was there, slumped forward over my desk with a slime of drool pooling down into the spaces between my keyboard. I remember because I’d sent an email to Wilson just before four, and the next thing I knew the cleaner was nudging me awake with the whine of her hoover. By then, everybody else had gone. It was a Friday, so most of them probably knocked off early. They were going out for a meal or to the cinema, to Pinky’s, that new club up on Cheapside, or else having a quiet night in with a loved one. They all passed my desk on their way, not one of them stopped to ask if I was OK. Two hours, unconscious. What if I’d been dead? Would it have taken till Monday morning? Would a cold, drool-dried stiff finally have made these heartless creatures take notice? Or would it just have been, ‘Jim’s in early again, looking a little peaky, better not get too close – don’t want to catch anything’? If that. Would it even have been that?

Between 1991 and 2002, seventeen local women went missing, aged between sixteen and thirty-eight. Three of them were prostitutes, the rest just happened to have dared walk home alone wearing the wrong outfit, the one that caught his eye. Simon Duncan Godrich, the Wakefield Strangler. That’s what they called him, once it all came out. Seventeen women, all of them buried within the grounds of the old Jennings Dye House. They say it took the jury only seventeen seconds to reach a verdict, and it’d have been quicker than that if we’d still had the death penalty. I don’t know what the women here think about that. They don’t ever talk about it. I tried to get them to one time, and it was colder inside that night than out in the yard. Objects flew threw the air, the mirror in the gents shattered into spiderwebs. I’d thought maybe it would be good for them. Help them move on and that, though if I’m honest… the last thing I’d want is for them to move on, any of them. What would I do without them?

The doctor said it was stress. I was working too hard. Not sleeping. The body can’t cope like that for long, it has to shut down – go into recovery mode. She gave me a pamphlet on breathing and relaxation techniques, and a prescription for some herbal, non-addictive, sleeping tablets. I wanted to tell her: it’s not the things I’m doing that’re making me feel like this – it’s the things I’m not. But she wasn’t interested. She had other patients to see. Back at the office, they didn’t even know I’d had the morning off. They thought I’d just popped out for a bag of crisps from the man at the kiosk.

“You should have told us you were going,” said Alan. “You could have got us a Twix.”

Read the complete story here.