"Started Early, Took My Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atkinson Kate)
Treasure
Leeds: ‘ Motorway City of the Seventies’. A proud slogan. No irony intended. Gaslight still flickering on some streets. Life in a northern town.
The Bay City Rollers at number one. IRA bombs all over the country. Margaret Thatcher is the new leader of the Conservative Party. At the beginning of the month, in Albuquerque, Bill Gates founds what will become Microsoft. At the end of the month Saigon falls to the North Vietnamese army.
They had been told that it was on the fifteenth floor of the flats in Lovell Park and – of course – the lifts were broken. The two PCs huffed and puffed their way up the stairs. By the time they neared the top they were resting at every turn of the stair. WPC Tracy Waterhouse, a big, graceless girl only just off probation, and PC Ken Arkwright, a stout white Yorkshireman with a heart of lard. Climbing Everest.
They would both see the beginning of the Ripper’s killing spree but Arkwright would be retired long before the end of it. Donald Neilson, the Black Panther from Bradford, hadn’t been captured yet and Harold Shipman had probably already started killing patients unlucky enough to be under his care in Pontefract General Infirmary. West Yorkshire in 1975, awash with serial killers.
Tracy Waterhouse was still wet behind the ears, although she wouldn’t admit to it. Ken Arkwright had seen more than most but remained avuncular and sanguine, a good copper for a green girl to be beneath the wing of. There were bad apples in the barrel – the dark cloud of David Oluwale’s death still cast a long shadow on police in the West Riding, but Arkwright wasn’t under it. He could be violent when necessary, sometimes when not, but he didn’t discriminate on the grounds of colour when it came to reward and punishment. And women were often
Despite pleas from her teachers to stay on and ‘make something of herself’, Tracy had left school at fifteen to do a shorthand and typing course and went straight into Montague Burton’s offices as a junior, eager to get on with her adult life. ‘You’re a bright girl,’ the man in personnel said, offering her a cigarette. ‘You could go far. You never know, PA to the MD one day.’ She didn’t know what ‘MD’ meant. Wasn’t too sure about ‘PA’ either. The man’s eyes were all over her.
Sixteen, never been kissed by a boy, never drunk wine, not even Blue Nun. Never eaten an avocado or seen an aubergine, never been on an aeroplane. It was different in those days.
She bought a tweed maxi coat from Etam and a new umbrella. Ready for anything. Or as ready as she would ever be. Two years later she was in the police. Nothing could have prepared her for that.
Tracy was worried that she might never leave home. She spent her nights in front of the television with her mother while her father drank – modestly – in the local Conservative club. Together, Tracy and her mother, Dorothy, watched
Her stomach rumbled like a train. She’d been on the cottage cheese and grapefruit diet for a week. Wondered if you could starve to death while you were still overweight.
‘Jesus H. Christ,’ Arkwright gasped, bending over and resting his hands on his knees when they finally achieved the fifteenth floor. ‘I used to be a rugby wing forward, believe it or not.’
‘Ay, well, you’re just an old, fat bloke now,’ Tracy said. ‘What number?’
‘Twenty-five. It’s at the end.’
A neighbour had phoned in anonymously about a bad smell (‘a right stink’) coming from the flat.
‘Dead rats, probably,’ Arkwright said. ‘Or a cat. Remember those two dogs in that house in Chapeltown? Oh no, before your time, lass.’
‘I heard about it. Bloke went off and left them without any food. They ate each other in the end.’
‘They didn’t eat each other,’ Arkwright said. ‘
‘You’re a bloody pedant, Arkwright.’
‘A what? Cheeky so-and-so. Ey up, here we go. Fuck a duck, Trace, you can smell it from here.’
Tracy Waterhouse pressed her thumb on the doorbell and kept it there. Glanced down at her ugly police-issue regulation black lace-ups and wiggled her toes inside her ugly police-issue regulation black tights. Her big toe had gone right through the hole in the tights now and a ladder was climbing up towards one of her big footballer’s knees. ‘It’ll be some old bloke who’s been lying here for weeks,’ she said. ‘I bloody hate them.’
‘I hate train jumpers.’
‘Dead kiddies.’
‘Yeah. They’re the worst,’ Arkwright agreed. Dead children were trumps, every time.
Tracy took her thumb off the doorbell and tried turning the door handle. Locked. ‘Ah, Jesus, Arkwright, it’s humming in there. Something that’s not about to get up and walk away, that’s for sure.’
Arkwright banged on the door and shouted, ‘Hello, it’s the police here, is anyone in there? Shit, Tracy, can you hear that?’
‘Flies?’
Ken Arkwright bent down and looked through the letterbox. ‘Oh, Christ-’ He recoiled from the letterbox so quickly that Tracy’s first thought was that someone had squirted something into his eyes. It had happened to a sergeant a few weeks ago, a nutter with a Squeezy washing-up bottle full of bleach. It had put everyone off looking through letterboxes. Arkwright, however, immediately squatted down and pushed open the letterbox again and started talking soothingly, the way you would to a nervy dog. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, everything’s OK now. Is Mummy there? Or your daddy? We’re going to help you. It’s OK.’ He stood and got ready to shoulder the door. Pawed the ground, blew air out of his mouth and said to Tracy, ‘Prepare yourself, lass, it’s not going to be pretty.’
 |
The suburban outskirts of Munich on a cold afternoon. Large, lazy flakes of snow fluttering down like white confetti, falling on the bonnet of their anonymous-looking German-made car.
‘Nice house,’ Steve said. He was a cocky little sod who talked too much. It was doubtful that Steve was his real name. ‘Big house,’ he added.
‘Yeah, nice big house,’ he agreed, more to shut Steve up than anything else. Nice and big and surrounded, unfortunately, by other nice big houses, on the kind of street that had vigilant neighbours and burglar alarms dotted like bright carbuncles on the walls. A couple of the very nicest, biggest houses had security gates and cameras attached to their walls.
The first time you recce, the second time you pay attention to detail, the third time you do the job. This was the third time. ‘Bit Germanic for my liking, of course,’ Steve said, as if the entire portfolio of European real estate was at his disposal.
‘Maybe that’s something to do with the fact that we’re in Germany,’ he said.
Steve said, ‘I’ve got nothing against the Germans. Had a couple in the Deuxième. Good lads. Good beer,’ he added after several seconds’ contemplation. ‘Good sausages too.’
Steve said he’d been in the Paras, came out and found he couldn’t handle civilian life, joined the French Foreign Legion.
Right. How many times had he heard that? He’d met a few guys from the legion in his time – ex-military guys escaping the flatline of civilian life, deserters from divorces and paternity suits, fugitives from boredom. All of them were running from something, none of them quite the outlaws they imagined themselves to be. Certainly not Steve. This was the first time they’d done a job together. The guy was a bit of a gung-ho wanker but he was OK, he paid attention. He didn’t smoke in the car, he didn’t want to listen to crap radio stations.
Some of these places reminded him of gingerbread houses, right down to the icing-sugar snow that rimmed their roofs and gutters. He had seen a gingerbread house for sale in the Christkindl market where they had spent the previous evening, strolling around the Marienplatz, drinking
‘Did you do that job in Dubai?’ Steve asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘I heard everything went tits up?’
‘Yeah.’
A car rounded the corner and they both instinctively checked their watches. It glided past. Wrong car. ‘It’s not them,’ Steve said, unnecessarily.
On the plus side, they had a long driveway that curved away from the gate so that you couldn’t see the house from the road. And the driveway was bordered by a lot of bushes. No security lights, no motion-sensor lights. Darkness was the friend of covert ops. Not today, they were doing this in daylight. Neither broad nor bright, the fag end of the afternoon. The dimming of the day.
Another car came round the corner, the right one this time. ‘Here comes the kid,’ Steve said softly. She was five years old, straight black hair, big brown eyes. She had no idea what was about to happen to her.
‘Egyptian. Half,’ he corrected Steve. ‘She’s called Jennifer.’
‘I’m not racist.’
But.
The snow was still fluttering down, sticking to the windscreen for a second before melting. He had a sudden, unexpected memory of his sister coming into the house, laughing and shaking blossom off her clothes, out of her hair. He thought of the town they were brought up in as a place devoid of trees and yet here she was in his memory like a bride, a shower of petals like pink thumbprints on the dark veil of her hair.
The car pulled into the driveway and disappeared from view. He turned to look at Steve. ‘Ready?’
‘Lock and load,’ Steve said, starting the engine.
‘Remember, don’t hurt the nanny.’
‘Unless I have to.’
 |
‘Watch out, the dragon’s about.’
‘Where?’
‘There. Just passing Greggs.’ Grant pointed at Tracy Waterhouse’s image on one of the monitors. The air in the security control room was always stale. Outside, it was beautiful May weather but in here the atmosphere was like that of a submarine that had been under too long. They were coming up to lunchtime, the busiest time of the day for shoplifters. The police were in and out all day, every day. A pair of them out there now, all tooled up, bulky waist-belts, knife-proof vests, short-sleeved shirts, ‘escorting’ a woman out of Peacocks, her bags stuffed with clothes she hadn’t paid for. Leslie got sleepy from peering at the monitors. Sometimes she turned a blind eye. Not everyone was, strictly speaking, a criminal. ‘What a week,’ Grant said, making a gurning face. ‘School half-term and a bank holiday. We’ll be going over the top. It’ll be carnage.’
Grant was chewing Nicorette as if his life depended on it. He had a stain of something on his tie. Leslie considered telling him about the stain. Decided not to. It looked like blood but it seemed more likely that it was ketchup. He had such bad acne that he looked radioactive. Leslie was pretty and petite and had a degree in chemical engineering from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and working in security in the Merrion Centre in Leeds was a short, not entirely unpleasurable dogleg in her life’s journey. She was on what her family called her ‘World Tour’. She’d done Athens, Rome, Florence, Nice, Paris. Not quite the world. She’d stopped off in Leeds to visit relatives, decided to stay for the summer after she hooked up with a philosophy post-grad called Dominic who worked in a bar. She had met his parents, been to their house for a meal. Dominic’s mother heated up an individual ‘Vegetarian Lasagne’ from Sainsbury’s for her while the rest of them ate chicken. His mother was defensive, worried that Leslie would carry her son off to a faraway continent and all her grandchildren would have accents and be vegetarians. Leslie wanted to reassure her, say, It’s only a holiday romance, but that probably wouldn’t go down well either.
‘Leslie with an “ie”,’ she had to tell everyone in England because they spelt it with a ‘y’. ‘Really?’ Dominic’s mother said, as if Leslie was herself a spelling mistake. Leslie tried to imagine taking Dominic home to her own family, introducing him to her parents, how unimpressed they’d be. She missed home, the Mason and Risch piano in the corner, her brother, Lloyd, her old golden retriever, Holly, and her cat, Mitten. Not necessarily in that order. Her family took a cottage on Lake Huron in the summer. She couldn’t even begin to explain this other life to Grant. Not that she would want to. Grant stared at her all the time when he thought she wasn’t looking. He was desperate to have sex with her. It was kind of funny really. She would rather stick knives in her eyes.
‘She’s passing Workout World,’ Grant said.
‘ Tracy ’s OK,’ Leslie said.
‘She’s a Nazi.’
‘No she’s not.’ Leslie had her eye on a group of hoodies lurching past Rayners’ Opticians. One of them was wearing some kind of Halloween fright mask. He leered at an old woman who flinched at the sight of him. ‘We always prosecute,’ Leslie murmured, as if it was a private joke.
‘Ey up,’ Grant said. ‘ Tracy ’s going into Thornton ’s. Must need her daily rations topping up.’
Leslie liked Tracy, you knew where you were with her. No bullshit.
‘She’s a right fat pig,’ Grant said.
‘She’s not fat, just big.’
‘Yeah, that’s what they all say.’
Leslie was small and delicate. A cracking bird if ever there was one, in Grant’s opinion. Special. Not like some of the slags you got round here. ‘Sure you don’t want to go for a drink after work?’ he asked, ever hopeful. ‘Cocktail bar in town. Sophisticated place for a sophisticated laydee.’
‘Ey up,’ Leslie said. ‘There’s some dodgy kids going into City Cyber.’
 |
Tracy Waterhouse came out of Thornton ’s, stuffing her forage into the big, ugly shoulder bag that she wore strapped, like a bandolier, across her substantial chest. Viennese truffles, her midweek treat. Pathetic really. Other people went to the cinema on an evening, to restaurants, pubs and clubs, visited friends, had sex, but Tracy was looking forward to curling up on her sofa with
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Want to make something of it?’ Downhill from there on really.
She ducked into Superdrug to pick up some Advil for the Beck’s headache she would wake up with tomorrow. The girl behind the till didn’t even look at her. Service with a scowl. Very easy to steal from Superdrug, lots of handy little things to slip into a bag or a pocket – lipsticks, toothpaste, shampoo, Tampax – you could hardly blame people for thieving, it was as if you were inviting them. Tracy glanced around at the security cameras. She knew there was a blind spot right on Nailcare. You could have taken everything you needed for a year’s worth of manicures and no one would be any the wiser. She placed a protective hand on her bag. It contained two envelopes stuffed with twenties – five thousand pounds in all – that she’d just removed from her account at the Yorkshire Bank. She would like to see someone trying to snatch it from her – she was looking forward to beating them to a pulp with her bare hands. No point in having weight, Tracy reasoned, if you weren’t prepared to throw it around.
The money was a payment for Janek, the workman who was extending the kitchen in the terraced house in Headingley that she’d bought with the proceeds of the sale of her parents’ bungalow in Bramley. It was such a relief that they were finally dead, dying within a few weeks of each other, minds and bodies long past their sell-by date. They had both reached ninety and Tracy had begun to think that they were trying to outlive her. They had always been competitive people.
Janek started at eight in the morning, finished at six, worked on a Saturday – Polish, what else. It was embarrassing how much Tracy was attracted to Janek, despite the fact that he was twenty years younger and at least three inches shorter than she was. He was so careful and had such good manners. Every morning Tracy left out tea and coffee for him and a plate of biscuits wrapped in cling-film. When she returned home the biscuits were all eaten. It made her feel wanted. She was starting a week’s holiday on Friday and Janek promised everything would be finished by the time she returned. Tracy didn’t want it to be finished, well, she did, she was sick to death of it, but she didn’t want
She wondered if he would stay on if she asked him to do her bathroom. He was champing at the bit to go home. All the Poles were going back now. They didn’t want to stay in a bankrupt country. Before the Berlin Wall came down you felt sorry for them, now you envied them.
When Tracy was on the force her fellow officers – male and female – all assumed she was a dyke. She was over fifty now and way back when she had joined the West Yorkshire Police as a raw cadet you had to be one of the boys to get along. Unfortunately, once you’d established yourself as a hard-nosed bitch it was difficult to admit to the soft and fluffy woman you were hiding inside. And why would you want to admit to that anyway?
Tracy had retired with a shell so thick that there was hardly any room left inside. Vice, sexual offences, human trafficking – the underbelly of Drugs and Major Crime – she’d seen it all and more. Witnessing the worst of human behaviour was a pretty good way of killing off anything soft and fluffy.
She’d been around so long that she had been a humble foot soldier when Peter Sutcliffe was still patrolling the streets of West Yorkshire. She remembered the fear, she’d been afraid herself. That was in the days before computers, when the sheer weight of paperwork was enough to swamp the investigation. ‘There were days before computers?’ one of her younger, cheekier colleagues said. ‘Wow, Jurassic.’
He was right, she was from another era. She should have gone sooner, only hanging on because she couldn’t think how to fill the long empty days of retirement. Sleep, eat, protect, repeat, that was the life she knew. Everyone was fixated on the thirty years, get out, get another job, enjoy the pension. Anyone who stayed on longer was seen as a fool.
Tracy would have preferred to have dropped in harness but she knew it was time to go. She had been a detective superintendent, now she was a ‘police pensioner’. Sounded Dickensian, as if she should be sitting in the corner of a workhouse, wrapped in a dirty shawl. She’d thought about volunteering with one of those organizations that helped mop up after disasters and wars. After all, it was something she felt she’d been doing all her life, but in the end she took the job in the Merrion Centre.
At her farewell piss-up they had given her a laptop and two hundred quid’s worth of spa vouchers for the Waterfall Spa on Brewery Wharf. She was pleasantly surprised, even flattered, that they imagined she was the kind of woman who would use a spa. She already had a laptop and she knew the one they gave her was one of those that Carphone Warehouse gave away for free, but it was the thought that counted.
When she took the job as head of security in the Merrion Centre Tracy thought ‘fresh start’ and made some changes, not just moving house but getting her moustache waxed, growing her hair into a softer style, shopping for blouses with bows and pearl buttons and shoes with kitten heels to wear with the ubiquitous black suit. It didn’t work, of course. She could tell that, spa vouchers or no spa vouchers, people still thought she was a butch old battleaxe.
Tracy liked getting up close and personal with the punters. She strolled past Morrisons, the gap where Woolworths used to be, Poundstretcher – the retail preferences of the lumpenproletariat. Was there anyone in the entire soulless place who was happy? Leslie perhaps, although she kept her cards close to her chest. Like Janek, she had a life somewhere else. Tracy imagined Canada was a good place to live. Or Poland. Perhaps she should emigrate.
It was warm today. Tracy hoped the weather would last for her holiday. A week in a National Trust cottage, lovely setting. She was a member. That was what happened when you grew older and had nothing fulfilling in your life – you joined the National Trust or English Heritage and spent your weekends meandering around gardens and houses that didn’t belong to you or gazing in boredom at ruins, trying to reconstruct them in your mind – long-gone monks cooking, pissing, praying inside walls of cold stone. And you spent your holidays on your own, of course. She’d joined a ‘singles social club’ a couple of years ago. Middle-aged, middle-class people who didn’t have any friends. Rambling, art classes, museum visits, all very sedate. She joined thinking it might be nice to go on holiday with other people but it hadn’t worked out. Spent all her time trying to get away from them.
The world was going to hell in a handcart. The Watch Hospital, Costa Coffee, Wilkinson’s Hardware, Walmsley’s, Herbert Brown’s (‘Lend and Spend’ a fancy rhyme for a pawnbroker, eternal friend of the underclass). All human life was here. Britain – shoplifting capital of Europe, over two billion quid lost every year to ‘retail shrinkage’, a ridiculous term for what was, after all, straightforward thieving. And double that figure if you added the amount of stuff that the staff nicked. Unbelievable.
Think how many starving kids you could feed and educate with all that missing money. But then it wasn’t money, was it, not real money. There was no such thing as real money any more, it was just an act of the collective imagination. Now if we all just clap our hands and believe… Of course, the five thousand pounds in her bag wasn’t going to benefit the Inland Revenue either but modest tax evasion was a citizen’s right, not a crime. There was crime and then there was crime. Tracy had seen a lot of the other sort, all the p’s – paedophilia, prostitution, pornography. Trafficking. Buying and selling, that’s all people did. You could buy women, you could buy kids, you could buy anything. Western civilization had had a good run but now it had pretty much shopped itself out of existence. All cultures had a built-in obsolescence, didn’t they? Nothing was for ever. Except diamonds maybe, if the song was right. And cockroaches probably. Tracy had never owned a diamond, probably never would. Her mother’s engagement ring had been sapphires, never off her finger, put on by Tracy ’s father when he proposed, taken off by the undertaker before he put her in her coffin. Tracy had it valued – two thousand quid, not as much as she’d hoped for. Tracy had tried to squeeze it on to her little finger but it didn’t fit. It was somewhere at the back of a drawer now. She bought a doughnut in Ainsleys, put it in her bag for later.
She clocked a woman coming out of Rayners’ who had a familiar look about her. Resembled that madam who used to run a brothel out of a house in Cookridge. Tracy had raided it when she was still in uniform, long before she was exposed to the full horrors of Vice. All home comforts, the madam offered her ‘gentlemen’ a glass of sherry, little dishes of nuts, before they went upstairs and committed degrading acts behind the lace curtains. She had a dungeon in what used to be her coal cellar. Made Tracy feel squeamish, the stuff that was down there. The girls were indifferent, nothing could surprise them. Still, they were better off in that house, behind the lace curtains, than they would have been on the streets. Used to be poverty that drove women on the game, now it was drugs. These days there was hardly a girl on the streets who wasn’t an addict. Shopmobility, Claire’s Accessories. In Greggs she bought a sausage roll for her lunch.
The madam was dead a long time ago, had a stroke at the City Varieties when they were filming
No, not the ghost of the dead madam, it was that actress from
Dorothy Waterhouse used to boast that Tracy ’s father had never seen her without make-up, Tracy didn’t know why as she gave the impression of never having liked him. She put a lot of effort into being Dorothy Waterhouse. Tracy instructed the undertaker to leave her mother
‘Not even a bit of lippie?’ he said.
Electricity everywhere. All the bright shiny surfaces. Long time since everything was made from wood and lit by firelight and stars. Tracy caught sight of herself in the plate glass of Ryman’s, saw the wild-eyed look of a woman falling over the edge. Someone who had started out the day carefully put together and was slowly unravelling during the course of it. Her skirt was creased over her hips, her highlights looked brassy and her bulging beer belly stuck out in a mockery of pregnancy. Survival of the fattest.
Tracy felt defeated. She glanced down and picked some lint off her jacket. Things could only get worse. Photo Me, Priceless, Sheila’s Sandwiches. She could hear a child crying somewhere – part of the soundtrack of shopping malls the world over. It was a sound that was still capable of piercing the shell like a red-hot needle. A group of listless teenage hoodies were hanging around the entrance to City Cyber, jostling and shoving each other in a way that passed for wit amongst them. One of them was wearing a Halloween fright mask, a plastic skull where his face should be. It unnerved her for a moment.
Tracy might have followed the youths into the shop but the screaming child was moving closer, distracting her. She could hear the child but she couldn’t see it. Its distress was startling. It was doing her head in.
Regrets, she had a few. Quite a lot actually. Wished she’d found someone who appreciated her, wished she’d had kids and learned how to dress better. Wished she’d stayed on at school, maybe gone on and done a degree. Medicine, geography, art history. It was the usual stuff. Really she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return. She was considering getting a cat. She didn’t really like cats though. That might be a bit of a problem. Quite liked dogs – sensible, clever dogs, not stupid little lapdogs that fitted in a handbag. A good big German shepherd perhaps, woman’s best friend. No burglar alarm could better it.
Oh yeah – Kelly Cross. Kelly Cross was the reason for the screaming child. No surprise there. Kelly Cross. Prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey. A scrag-end of a woman. Tracy knew her. Everyone knew her. Kelly had several kids, most of them in care and they were the lucky ones, which was saying something. She was storming along the main drag of the Merrion Centre, a woman possessed, anger coming off her like knives. It was surprising how much power she radiated, given how small and thin she was. She was wearing a sleeveless vest that revealed some tasteful trailer-trash bruises and a set of prison tats. On her forearm, a crudely drawn heart with an arrow through it and the initials ‘K’ and ‘S’. Tracy wondered who the unlucky ‘S’ was. She was talking on her phone, mouthing off to someone. She had almost certainly nicked something. The chances of that woman walking out of a shop with a valid till receipt were almost zero.
She was pulling the kid by the hand, wrenching her along because there was no way that the child could keep up with Kelly’s furious pace. Imagine, you’ve not long learned to walk and now you’re expected to run like an adult. Occasionally, Kelly jerked her off the ground so that for a second the kid seemed to fly. Screaming. Nonstop. Red-hot needle through the shell. Through the eardrum. Into the brain.
Kelly Cross parted the throng of shoppers like an unholy Moses striding through the Red Sea. Many of the onlookers were clearly horrified but no one had the nerve to tackle a berserker like Kelly. You couldn’t blame them.
Kelly stopped so suddenly that the kid kept running forward as if she was on elastic. Kelly thumped her hard on the backside, sending her into the air as if she was on a swing and then, without a word, she set off running again. Tracy heard a surprisingly loud middle-class voice, a woman’s, say, ‘Someone should do something.’
Too late. Kelly had already stomped her way past Morrisons and out on to Woodhouse Lane. Tracy followed her, cantering to keep up, her lungs ready to collapse by the time she caught her at a bus stop. Jesus, when did she get so unfit? About twenty years ago probably. She should haul her old Rosemary Conley tapes out of the boxes in the spare room.
‘Kelly,’ she wheezed.
Kelly spun round, snarling, ‘What the fuck do you want?’ A faint glimmer of recognition on her venomous face as she glared at Tracy. Tracy could see the wheels ticking round until they came up with ‘copper’. It made Kelly even more enraged, if that was possible.
She looked worse close up – flat hair, grey corpse-skin, bloodshot vampire eyes and a junkie edginess to her that made Tracy want to step back but she held her ground. The kid, tear-stained and mucky, had stopped crying and was staring slack-mouthed at Tracy. Made her seem gormless but Tracy guessed adenoidal. Her appearance wasn’t helped by the green caterpillar of snot crawling out of her nose. Three years old? Four? Tracy wasn’t sure how you told the age of a kid. Maybe it was from their teeth, like horses. They were small. Some were bigger than others. That was about as far as she was willing to go in the guessing stakes.
The kid was dressed in various shades of pink, with the addition of a little pink rucksack stuck on her back like a barnacle, so that the general impression was of a misshapen marshmallow. Someone – surely not Kelly – had attempted to plait the kid’s stringy hair. The pink and the plaits signalled her gender, something not immediately obvious from her podgy, androgynous features.
She was a small lumpy kind of kid but there was a spark of something in her eyes. Life perhaps. Cracked but not broken. Yet. What chance did this kid have with Kelly as her mother? Realistically? Kelly was still holding the kid’s hand, not so much holding it as gripping it in a vice as if the kid was about to fly up into the air.
A bus was approaching, indicating, slowing down.
Something gave inside Tracy. A small floodgate letting out a race of despair and frustration as she contemplated the blank but already soiled canvas of the kid’s future. Tracy didn’t know how it happened. One moment she was standing at a bus stop on Woodhouse Lane, contemplating the human wreckage that was Kelly Cross, the next she was saying to her, ‘How much?’
‘How much what?’
‘How much for the kid?’ Tracy said, delving into her handbag and unearthing one of the envelopes that contained Janek’s money. She opened it and showed it to Kelly. ‘There’s three thousand here. You can have it all in exchange for the kid.’ She kept the second envelope with the remaining two thousand out of sight in case she needed to up the ante. She didn’t need to, however, as Kelly suddenly meerkatted to attention. Her brain seemed to disassociate for a second, her eyes flicking rapidly from side to side, and then, with unexpected speed, her hand shot out and she grabbed the envelope. In the same second she dropped the kid’s hand. Then she laughed with genuine glee as the bus drew to a halt behind her. ‘Ta very much,’ she said as she jumped aboard.
While Kelly stood on the platform fumbling for change, Tracy raised her voice and said, ‘What’s her name? What’s your daughter’s name, Kelly?’ Kelly pulled her ticket out of the machine and said, ‘Courtney.’
‘Courtney?’ Typical chav name – Chantelle, Shannon, Tiffany. Courtney.
Kelly turned round, ticket clutched in her hand. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Courtney.’ Then she gave her a puzzled look, as if Tracy was a Polo short of a packet. Started to say something, ‘But she’s not-’ but the bus doors closed on her words. The bus drove off. Tracy stared after it. Gormless, not adenoidal. She registered a sudden spike of anxiety. She had just bought a kid. She didn’t move until a small, warm, sticky hand found its way into hers.
‘Where did Tracy go?’ Grant asked, scanning the bank of monitors. ‘She just disappeared.’
Leslie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Keep an eye on that drunk outside Boots, will you?’
 |
‘Someone should do something.’ Tilly was surprised to find herself speaking out loud. And
Tilly had shared a little place in Soho with Phoebe March,
Not really an equal footing. Tilly’s father had owned a wet fish shop in the Land of Green Ginger – a street more romantic in name than in reality – whilst Phoebe, although she
Miss Anderson would be long dead now, of course. She wasn’t the kind to rot messily in the grave either. Tilly imagined she would have become a parched mummy, eyeless and shrivelled, and as weightless as dead bracken. But still with perfect diction.
Tilly knew her outrage was impotent, she wasn’t going to be the one to tackle the fearsome tattooed woman. Too old, too fat, too slow. Too frightened. But someone should, someone braver. A
And after all this time buried in the country she had fancied being in a city. But perhaps not this one. Guildford or Henley perhaps, somewhere civilized.
They had her holed up in the middle of nowhere for the duration of her filming. Guest appearance on
‘Senile old bat,’ she heard someone say yesterday. It was true everything was dimming.
The last thing she’d done for the telly was a
Flat-footed Father was given a desk job in the Army Catering Corps. Not much fish to sell during the war anyway, trawlers requisitioned by the navy. The ones that kept on fishing were blown out of the water, fishermen’s bodies coiling down into the cold, icy depths.
Tilly wished she had been old enough to fight in the war, to be a bold girl on an ack-ack gun.
The producers of
When she had first spotted her, the little girl was skipping along, singing, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. The anthem of children everywhere. Made Tilly think of her mother again. The little girl made fists of her hands (so tiny!) and every time she sang the word ‘twinkle’ she opened them out, like little starfish. The girl was in tune, perfect pitch, someone should have told her mother that the little thing had a gift. Someone should have said something.
When Tilly saw them again, ten minutes later, the poor child was no longer singing. The mother – a brutal woman with crude tattoos and a mobile phone clamped to her ear – was yelling at her, ‘Would you just shut the fuck up, Courtney, you’re getting on my tits!’ She was furious, pulling her along and shouting at her. You knew what happened to children like that when they got home. Behind closed doors. Child cruelty. Snipping off all the little buds so that they could never blossom.
They’d brought Tilly in to play Vince Collier’s mother because they wanted to make the character ‘more human’, more vulnerable. Tilly had worked before with the actor who played Vince Collier, when he was a teenager, and she kept calling him by his real name – Simon – instead of Vince. Seven takes today just to say goodbye to him on a doorstep.
Nice boy, Simon. Ran her lines with her all the time, told her not to worry. Gay as a goose. Everyone knew, worst-kept secret in television. You couldn’t say anything because Vince Collier was supposed to be very macho. Simon’s boyfriend, Marcello, was staying with him, rented cottage, nicer than Tilly’s. They’d had Tilly over to dinner, lots of gin and Marcello had cooked a chicken, ‘Sicilian style’. Afterwards they drank some lovely rum that the boys had brought back from holiday on Mauritius and played cribbage. All three of them gloriously tiddly. (She wasn’t a lush like Dame you-know-who.) Lovely old-fashioned evening.
She thought she’d signed up for the duration (‘My pension,’ she murmured happily over her third Twinkle) and then last week they told her that her contract wasn’t being renewed and she was going to die at the end of her run. She had only a few weeks to go. They hadn’t told her how. It was beginning to worry her in some curiously existential way as if Death was going to jump out at her from round a corner, swinging his sickle and shouting, ‘Boo!’ Well, perhaps not boo. She hoped that Death had a little more gravitas than that.
Tilly herself was beginning to feel a lack of commitment to longevity. Some days the old ticker felt like a hard little knot in her chest, other days it was like a soft, fluttering bird trying to escape from its ribbed cage. She suspected that her alter ego, poor old Marjorie Collier, was going to meet a sticky end rather than expire gracefully in her bed. And then! Just as she was coming out of Rayners’ she encountered Death, exactly as she’d feared. Thought she was going to drop dead on the spot but it was just some silly boy in a skull mask. Sneering at her, jumping up and down like a skeleton on strings. Shouldn’t be allowed.
Bluebell Cottage. That was the name of the place she was staying in. A made-up name obviously. Used to be a farm worker’s cottage. Poor peasants, all mud and blood and up at dawn with the beasts in the field. She’d done a Hardy, oh years ago, for the BBC, learned a lot about agricultural labourers in the course of it.
‘Oh, go ahead, dear,’ Tilly said, ‘I’ve been around smokers all my life.’ (It was a miracle she wasn’t dead.) She wouldn’t want to fall out with her. Tilly hated falling out with people. It was funny because Saskia was such a clean girl (obsessively so, obviously had a problem, conducting germ warfare single-handedly) and smoking was such a filthy habit. Ballet dancers were the worst, of course, lighting up like chimneys the second they came out of class. Lungs like lampblack. Tilly used to live with a ballet dancer. That was after Phoebe left the Soho flat (1960 – turned out to be quite a decade for both of them), moving on and up to live with a director in Kensington. Douglas. He had belonged to Tilly first but Phoebe couldn’t abide Tilly having something that she didn’t. Very handsome man. Batted for the other side as well, of course. Nowt so queer as folk, as they said in the north. Phoebe used him up and left him behind after a year or so. Tilly and Douglas had remained fond of each other to the end. His end anyway.
Saskia played Vince Collier’s sidekick, DS Charlotte (‘Charlie’) Lambert. Keep it under your hat but she wasn’t the world’s greatest actress. She only seemed to have two expressions. One was ‘worried’ (with the variation ‘very worried’) and the other was ‘grumpy’. Very limited range, poor girl, although, like a lot of them, she looked good on the telly. Tilly had seen her in a play at the National. She was awful, just awful, but no one seemed to notice. Emperor’s new clothes. (Shades of Dame Phoebe again.)
Now that she had her new specs and could actually
She had to get out of this God-forsaken place, make her way to the car park.
It never happened again and Tilly supposed that she had avoided it. Perhaps if she had married or found the right man, if she hadn’t been so concerned with her career. She might have a family around her skirts now, a strapping son or a friendly daughter, grandchildren. She would have a
Tilly could understand why the first people had trekked out of Africa but why they continued on, north of the Home Counties, was beyond her. She was an idiot, she should have gone to Harrogate instead. A little tootle around the dress shops and lunch in Betty’s. Should have known better. No sign now of the tattooed woman and the poor child. You didn’t like to think what kind of home life she had. She should have done something, she really should. Weep, weep, Tilly.
In a newsagent she bought a
She didn’t have enough coins so she gave the girl behind the counter a twenty-pound note but the girl gave her the change on ten.
‘Excuse me,’ Tilly said hesitantly, because she hated this kind of thing, ‘but I gave you a twenty.’ The girl looked at her indifferently and said, ‘It was a ten.’
‘No, no, I’m sorry, it wasn’t,’ Tilly said. Confrontation tied her up in knots inside. That came from Dad, all those years ago.
The girl behind the counter held up a ten-pound note that she’d taken from the till as if it was incontrovertible proof. But it could have been any ten-pound note! Tilly’s heart was thudding uncomfortably in her chest. ‘It was a twenty,’Tilly said again. She could hear herself sounding less certain. She’d been to the cashline and it had given her twenties. She’d had nothing else in her purse, that was why she had given the girl the twenty in the first place. She could hear a mutter of discontent behind her in the queue, heard a gruff voice say, ‘Get a move on.’ You would think that after all these years in the profession she would be able to slip into a role, she was, after all, most comfortable in someone else’s skin. An imperious, commanding character, Lady Bracknell, Lady Macbeth, would know how to deal with the girl but when Tilly searched inside all she could find was herself.
The girl was staring at her as if she was nobody, nothing. Invisible.
‘You’re a thief,’ Tilly heard herself suddenly say, too shrilly. ‘A common thief.’
‘Get lost, you stupid cow,’ the girl said, ‘or I’ll call security.’
She would need money to pay her way out of the multi-storey. Where did she put her purse? Tilly looked through her bag. No purse. She looked again. Still no purse. Plenty of other things that didn’t belong there. Recently she’d noticed all these objects suddenly appearing in her bag – key rings, pencil sharpeners, knives and forks, coasters. She had no idea how they got there. Yesterday she had found a cup
Mother kept a long-handled brass toasting fork hung with the fire-irons on the hearth. Always polishing the fire-irons. Always polishing everything. Father liked things clean, would have got on well with Saskia. The toasting fork had three wise monkeys on the top of the handle.
She emptied the contents of her handbag on to the passenger seat. A mysterious tablespoon and a packet of crisps – cheese and onion. She hadn’t bought those, she didn’t like crisps, how had they got there? Definitely no purse. Fear squeezed her heart. Where was it? She’d had it in the newsagent. Had that horrible girl taken it, but how? What was she going to do now? She was trapped in the car park. Trapped! Could she phone someone? Who? No point in phoning anyone in London, not much they could do. The nice production assistant who had made her appointment at the optician’s, what was her name? Tilly drew a blank. Something Indian and therefore more difficult to remember. She went through the alphabet – A-B-D-C-E – a method that often helped to prompt her memory. She went through the whole alphabet and came up with nothing.
Perhaps she was just being highly strung. That’s what they said about her when she was a child. Family doctor prescribed an iron tonic – thick green stuff like mucus that made her gag although not as bad as castor oil or syrup of figs, gawd, the things they used to give the poor suffering child. Highly strung indeed. Artistic temperament, that’s how Tilly preferred to think of it. As if an iron tonic could cure that.
Think about something else and then it’ll come. Hopefully. She checked herself in the rear-view mirror, adjusted her wig. Who would have thought it would come to this? At least it was a very good wig, made by one of the best, cost a fortune. No one could tell. Made her look younger (well, one lived in hope), not like the awful rug she had to wear to be Vince Collier’s mother. Looked like a Brillo pad. She wasn’t completely bald, not like Mother had been at this age (like a billiard ball), just rather thin on top. Nothing more laughable than a bald woman.
Padma! That was the girl’s name. Of course. Tilly fumbled for her phone, she wasn’t very good with mobiles, the buttons were so small. She put on her new spectacles and peered at the phone. Wrong ones, she needed her reading specs but when she found them she realized that she couldn’t remember how to use the phone, not the foggiest. She took her specs off and looked through the car windscreen, gazed out at the other parked cars. Everything a blur. She didn’t have the faintest idea where she was.
She put the phone down on the passenger seat.
When you were lost you needed a map. Ariadne and her thread, Tilly the
Anyway there wasn’t a policeman to be seen anywhere.
The newsagent was familiar, she had definitely been here before. She put her spectacles on and opened up the
She reached the foot of an escalator. The
‘Have you paid for that, madam?’ he asked, pointing at the
‘Do you have a receipt for that, madam?’ The spotted youth’s voice boomed and receded. The curtain of Northern Lights vibrated and shrank, disappearing to a pinpoint of black. ‘Please, excuse me,’ Tilly murmured. Going down, she thought but then a pair of strong arms had her and a voice was saying, ‘Steady the Buffs. Hold on there. Are you OK, do you need some help?’
‘Oh, thank you, I’m all right really, you know.’ She could hear herself panting. Like a hart. Her heart pulsing like a fleeing hart.
‘I was looking for a policeman,’ she said to the man who had asked her if she needed help.
‘Well, I used to be one,’ he said.
The nice man who used to be a policeman steered her into a room. The spotted youth led the way. Bleak little room, painted in several different shades of institutional beige. Reminded her of the sick room at school. There was a Formica-topped metal table and two stiff plastic chairs. Was she going to be interrogated? Tortured? There was a girl there now instead of the spotted youth, she pulled out one of the chairs from the table and said to Tilly, ‘Stay here, I’ll be back in a minute,’ and was as good as her word, returning with a cup of hot sweet tea and a plate of Rich Tea biscuits.
‘My name’s Leslie,’ the girl said, ‘with an “ie”. Do you want one?’ she said to the man who used to be a policeman.
‘No, you’re all right,’ he said.
‘Are you American?’ Tilly asked the girl, making an effort to enter into polite conversation. Tea, biscuits, chat. One should keep one’s end up.
‘Canadian.’
‘Oh, of course, so sorry.’ Tilly usually had a good ear for accents. ‘I lost my purse, you see,’ she said.
‘She’s not going to be arrested for shoplifting, is she?’ the man who used to be a policeman said.
Shoplifting! Tilly moaned with horror. She was not a thief. Never knowingly stolen so much as a pencil. (All those knives and forks and key rings and packets of crisps couldn’t be stolen because she didn’t
‘Are you going to be OK?’ the man asked, crouching down next to her.
‘Yes, yes, thank you very much,’ she said. So nice to encounter a proper gentleman these days.
‘Right, I’ll be off then,’ she heard him say to the girl.
‘Feel better now?’ the girl called Leslie said when the man had gone.
‘Are you going to prosecute me?’ Tilly asked. She could hear the wobble in her voice. Tilly supposed the girl thought she was doolally. Not that Tilly blamed her. She was a stupid old woman who couldn’t find her way home.
‘No,’ the girl said. ‘You’re not a criminal.’
The tea was wonderful. Tilly could have cried when she took her first sip. It restored her in every way. ‘Silly me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, I just went blank, you know? No, of course you don’t,’ she added, smiling at the girl. ‘You’re young.’
‘It must have been the shock of losing your purse,’ the girl, Leslie, said sympathetically.
‘There was a woman,’ Tilly said, ‘she was being horrible to a child. Poor little thing, I wanted to find someone who would do something about it. But I didn’t. You’re really not going to arrest me?’
‘No,’ Leslie said. ‘You forgot yourself, that’s all.’
‘I did!’ Tilly said, immensely cheered by this idea. ‘That’s exactly it, I forgot myself. And now I’ve remembered myself. And everything will be all right. It really will.’
 |
He thought of Leeds as a place where it always rained but the weather today was perfect. Roundhay Park was full of people who were anxious to wring a good day out of the English climate. Hordes everywhere, didn’t anyone have a job to go to? He supposed he could ask himself the same question.
He came across an unexpected picture of happiness. A dog, a small scruffy one, was racing around the park as if it had just been released from prison. It disturbed a flock of pigeons intent on an abandoned sandwich and the birds rose up in a flutter of annoyance when it yapped excitedly at them. It started off again, running at full tilt and skidding to a halt, a second too late, next to a woman lying on a rug. She yelled and threw a flip-flop at it. The dog caught the flip-flop mid-air, shook it as if it were a rat, and then dropped it and ran off towards a small girl who screamed as it jumped up, trying to lick the ice cream in her hand. When the child’s mother threatened it with blue murder the dog ran off and barked for a long time at something imaginary before finding a broken branch that it dragged round in circles until its attention was caught by the scent of something more interesting. It truffled around until it found the source – the dried turd of another dog. The dog sniffed it with the delight of a connoisseur before growing bored and trotting off towards a tree where it lifted its leg. ‘Bugger off,’ a man nearby shouted.
It seemed as if the dog didn’t belong to anyone but then a man lumbered up, bearing down on the dog, barking orders at it, ‘YoufuckinglittleshityoucomewhenIcallyou!’ He was a big guy, with a mean expression on his face, barrel-chested like a Rottweiler. Add to that the shaved head, the weight-lifting muscles and a St George’s flag tattooed on his left bicep, twinned with a half-naked woman inked into his right forearm, and,
The dog was wearing a collar but instead of a lead the man was carrying a rope, thin like a washing-line, with a noose at one end and without warning he grabbed the dog by the scruff and lassoed it. Then he hitched the dog up in the air so that it started to choke, its small legs paddling helplessly. Just as suddenly the dog was dropped to the ground and the man aimed a kick that connected with the dog’s delicate-looking haunch. The dog cringed and started to tremble in a way that made his heart go out to it. The man yanked on the rope leash and pulled the dog along, shouting, ‘Going to put you down, should have done it the minute that bitch left.’ Dogs and mad Englishmen out in the midday sun.
A commotion was growing quickly, agitated people protesting loudly at the man’s behaviour, a jumble and hum of angry-sounding words –
He shot off a couple of pictures of the man hitting the dog. Photographic evidence, you never knew when you were going to need it.
A woman’s voice rose shrilly above the others, ‘I’m calling the police,’ and the man snarled, ‘Mind your own fucking business,’ and he continued to drag the dog along the path. He was pulling it so fast that a couple of times it tumbled head over heels and scraped and bounced along the hard surface of the path.
Cruel and unusual punishment, he thought. He had been around violence in one form or another all his life, not always on the receiving end of it, but you had to draw the line somewhere. A small, helpless dog seemed like a good place to draw that line.
He followed the man out of the park. The man’s car was parked nearby and he opened the boot and plucked up the dog and flung it inside where it cowered, shivering and whimpering.
‘You just wait, you little bastard,’ the man said. He already had his mobile phone open, holding it to one ear as he raised a warning finger to the dog in case it made a move to escape. ‘Hey, babe, it’s Colin,’ he said, his voice turning oily, a cage-fighting Romeo.
He frowned, imagining what would happen to the dog when the man got it home. Colin. It seemed unlikely it would be good. He stepped forward, tapped ‘Colin’ on the shoulder, said, ‘Excuse me?’ When Testosterone Man turned round, he said, ‘On guard.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Colin said and he said, ‘I’m being ironic,’ and delivered a vicious and satisfying uppercut to Colin’s diaphragm. Now that he was no longer subject to institutional rules governing brutality he felt free to hit people at will. He might have been around violence all his life but it was only recently that he was beginning to see the point of it. It used to be that his bark was worse than his bite, now it was the other way round.
His philosophy where fighting was concerned was to keep clear of anything fancy. One good, well-placed blow was usually enough to lay a man down. The punch was driven by a flash of black anger. There were days when he knew who he was. He was his father’s son.
Right enough, Colin’s legs went from beneath him and he dropped to the ground, making a face like a suffocating fish. Strange squeaking and squealing noises came from his lungs as he fought for breath.
He squatted down next to Colin and said, ‘Do that to anyone or anything again – man, woman, child, dog, even a fucking tree – and you’re dead. And you’ll never know whether or not I’m watching you. Understand?’ The man nodded in acknowledgement even though he still hadn’t managed to take a breath, looked in fact like he might never take another one. Bullies were always cowards at heart. His phone had clattered to the pavement and he could hear a woman’s voice saying, ‘Colin? Col – are you still there?’
He stood up and stepped on the phone and ground it into the pavement. Unnecessary and ridiculous but somehow satisfying.
The dog was still cowering in the boot. He could hardly leave it there so he picked it up and was surprised to find that it was warm even though it was shivering all over as if it was frozen. He cradled it against his chest and stroked its head in an effort to reassure it that he wasn’t another big man about to beat it up.
He walked away, the dog still in his arms, glancing back once to make sure that Colin was still alive. It wouldn’t have bothered him too much if he was dead but he didn’t want to find himself on a murder charge.
He could feel the dog’s frightened little heartbeat, a pulse, against his chest.
‘The Ambassador?’ Jackson said, looking doubtfully at the small dog. ‘What kind of a name is that?’
He was drifting, a tourist in his own country, not so much a holiday as an exploration. A holiday was lying on a warm beach in a peaceful country with a woman by your side. Jackson had tended to take his women wherever he found them. He didn’t usually go looking.
He had been living in London for the last couple of years, taking over the rent on the little Covent Garden flat in which he had briefly shared a counterfeit marital bliss with his fake wife, Tessa. A man called Andrew Decker had killed himself (somewhat messily) in the living room of the flat and Jackson was surprised how little this bothered him. A specialist trauma-scene cleaning company had come in (now there was a profession you wouldn’t want) and by the time Jackson had changed the carpet and disposed of the chair that Andrew Decker had shot himself in you would never have known that anything untoward had happened. It had been a righteous death and Jackson supposed that made a difference.
Jackson ’s official identity was all in the past – army, police, gumshoe. He had been ‘retired’ for a while but that had made him feel as if he was redundant to the world’s needs. Now he called himself ‘semi-retired’ because it was a term that covered a lot of bases, not all of them strictly legal. He was off the grid a lot these days, picking up work here and there. His specialist subject on
‘I know that.’ Didn’t make any difference, he would go on looking for all the lost girls, the Olivias, the Joannas, the Lauras. And his sister, Niamh, the first lost girl (the last lost girl). Even though he knew exactly where Niamh was, thirty miles away from where he was at the moment, mouldering in cold, damp clay.
Lowering his expectations of cars, Jackson had been pleasantly surprised by the third-hand Saab he bought in a dodgy auction in Ilford. There were a few unhelpful clues to the Saab’s previous ownership – a light-up Virgin Mary on the dashboard, a creased postcard from Cheltenham (
Before Tessa, Jackson had enjoyed expensive cars. The money his second wife stole from him had been an unlooked-for legacy – two million pounds left to him by a batty old woman who had been his client. It had seemed an immense sum at the time, diminished now in comparison to the trillions lost by the masters of the universe, although two million would still probably buy you Iceland.
‘Well,’ his first wife, Josie, said, ‘as usual, you were the architect of your own downfall.’ He hadn’t exactly been left destitute. The proceeds of the sale of his house in France hit his bank account the day after Tessa emptied it. ‘ Jackson lives to ride another day,’ Julia said.
Of course, he had never really felt entitled to the money and Tessa’s theft of it felt more like a turn in the wheel of fortune than outright robbery. Not a proper wife but a trickster, a grifter. Tessa wasn’t her real name, of course. She had taken him for the longest of cons – seduced, courted, married and robbed him blind. It seemed the perfect irony that the policeman had married the criminal. He imagined her lying on a beach somewhere in the Indian Ocean, a cocktail in hand, the classic movie ending for a heist. (‘Well, women were deceivers ever, Jackson,’ Julia said, as if she were complimenting her sex rather than condemning it.) Finding people was his forte, ironic therefore that his errant wife had so far completely eluded him. He had followed clues, a trail of breadcrumbs that so far had taken him everywhere and led him nowhere. He was good but Tessa was oh-so-much better. He almost admired her for it. Almost.
He was still looking for her, his search unfurling across the country, tracking her like a lazy hunter following spoor. It wasn’t so much that he wanted his money back – a lot of it was in shares that had fallen into the financial basement – he just didn’t like being taken for a fool. (‘Why not, when you are one?’ Josie said.)
In the company of the Saab, he had been to Bath, Bristol, Brighton, the Devon coast, down to the toe of Cornwall, up to the Peak District, the Lakes. He had avoided Scotland, the savage country where both his heart and his life had been in danger twice now. (The best of times, the worst of times.) Third time even unluckier, he suspected. But he had ventured into Wales which he was surprised to like, before driving through the suffocating rural peace of Herefordshire, Wiltshire, Shropshire, the fatlands of Gloucestershire, the post-industrial blight of the Midlands. He had zigzagged across the Pennines to take in the bleak victims of Thatcherism. The coal gone, the steel gone, the ships gone. Like most countries, he discovered, the puzzling jigsaw that was his native land seemed to be at odds with itself. A disunited kingdom.
Since disengaging from the rat race Jackson had found himself increasingly drawn to the less direct ways. He had become a dawdler on the back roads, following the thread veins on the map. A traveller on the scenic route, idly put-putting around the green and leafy byways, searching for the lost pastoral England that was lodged in his head and his heart. A golden, pre-industrial age. Unfortunately that Arcadian past was no more than a dream.
‘ Arcadia ’ was a word that Julia had taught him one lost weekend in Paris that felt like a lifetime ago now. They were visiting the Louvre and she had pointed out Poussin’s painting of
Julia might have been instinctively attracted to all kinds of nonsense but at heart she was a classicist. She was also very
And now he was looking for his own Arcadian bower. What had begun as a rather vague search for Tessa had morphed into a quite different purpose. He was a man on a real-estate mission. He was looking for a peg to hang his hat on, an old dog looking for a new kennel, one untainted by the past. A fresh start. Somewhere there was a place for him. All he had to do was find it.
He had saved the best to last. North Yorkshire, God’s own county, the gyre he had been circling around all this time. None of his other stops on his peregrinations could exert the same pull on the lodestone of his heart as North Yorkshire did. Of course, Jackson was a West Riding man himself, made from soot and rugby league and beef dripping, but that didn’t mean he was about to go and live there. The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.
He set the SatNav for the heart of the sun, or, to be more accurate, York. The voice on Jackson ’s SatNav was ‘Jane’, with whom he had been in a contentious relationship for a long time now. ‘Why not just mute her?’ Julia said reasonably. ‘In fact, why do you need her at all, you’re always going on about what a good sense of direction you’ve got.’ He
‘Get a life, sweetie.’
‘Go east, old man,’ he had muttered to himself as he tapped his coordinates into Jane and prepared to cross the spine of the Pennines again and return to the cradle of civilization.
Slightly south-east, Jane corrected him silently.
He had been trying to visit all of the Betty’s Tea Rooms – Ilkley, Northallerton, two in Harrogate, two in York. A genteel itinerary that would have done a coachload of elderly ladies proud. Jackson was a big fan of Betty’s. You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty’s, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable food and the fact that the waitresses all looked as if they were nice girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped this morning. It was the way that everything was exactly right and fitting. And clean.
‘The older you get, the more like a woman you become,’ Julia said.
‘Really?’
‘No.’ Long after their relationship had ended, after Julia had herself married and had the child which for a long time she had denied was Jackson’s, she was still chattering away in his brain.
If Britain had been run by Betty’s it would never have succumbed to economic Armageddon. Over a pot of house blend and a plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in the café in St Helen’s Square in York, Jackson fantasized about being governed by a Betty’s oligarchy – Cabinet ministers in spotless white aprons and cinnamon toast all round. Even Jackson in his most aggrandizingly masculine moments would have to agree that the world would be a better place if it was run by women. ‘God created Man,’ his daughter Marlee said to him a few weeks ago, and for a moment Jackson thought that her adolescent pessimism had made her turn to some kind of fundamentalist Christian religion. She registered the look of alarm on his face and laughed. ‘God created Man,’ she repeated. ‘And then he had a better idea.’
Ha, ha. Or LOL, as his daughter would have said.
In York he had spent many hours in the great cathedral train shed of the National Railway Museum where he paid tribute to the
As well as teashops Jackson had also discovered an unlooked-for delight in bagging the ruined abbeys of Yorkshire on his journey – Jervaulx, Rievaulx, Roche, Byland, Kirkstall. Jackson ’s new pastime. Trains, coins, stamps, Cistercian abbeys, Betty’s – all part of the semi-autistic male impulse to collect – a need for order or a desire to possess, or both.
He still needed to collar Fountains, the mother of all abbeys. Years ago (decades ago now) Jackson had been on a school trip to Fountains Abbey, a rare thing, Jackson hadn’t gone to the kind of school that had outings. All he could remember was playing football amongst the ruins, until a teacher put a stop to it. Oh yes, and trying to kiss a girl called Daphne Wood on the back seat of the coach on the way home. And receiving a thumping for his pains. Daphne Wood had a tremendous right hook. It was Daphne Wood who had taught him the value of getting in there with one swift, mean blow rather than prancing around with a duellist’s finesse. Jackson wondered where she was now.
Rievaulx was sublime but his favourite abbey so far was Jervaulx. Privately owned, with an honesty box at the gate and no English Heritage branding, the ruins had touched his soul in some inarticulate and melancholy place, the nearest thing to holiness for an atheistic Jackson. He missed God. But then who didn’t? As far as Jackson was concerned, God slipped out of the building a long time ago and he wasn’t coming back, but, like any good architect, he had left his work behind as his legacy. North Yorkshire had been designed when God was in his pomp and each time that Jackson came here he was struck anew by the power that landscape and beauty had over him these days.
‘It’s your age,’ Julia said.
Of course, these were the very same rich and powerful abbeys that in the Middle Ages farmed the sheep, the golden fleeces which provided the foundation of the wool trade and England’s wealth and which led in turn to the Satanic mills of the West Riding, and thence to poverty, overcrowding, disease, child exploitation on levels beyond belief and the death and destruction of the dream of Arcadia. For want of a nail. Those mills were museums and galleries now, the abbeys in ruins. The world turns.
The day that Jackson visited Jervaulx it had been deserted apart from the everlasting sheep (nature’s lawnmowers) and their fat lambs and he had wandered amongst the peaceful stones where wild flowers sprang from between the cracks and wished that his sister was laid to rest in a place like this instead of the mundane municipal cemetery that had been her last stop on earth. He had unfinished business there, a promise never given to a dead sister to avenge her senseless death. He supposed Niamh would always be calling him home, the siren song of the dead, for the rest of his life.
‘All roads lead home,’ Julia said.
‘All roads lead away from home,’ Jackson said.
Josie, his first wife, had once said to him that if he ran far enough he would end up back where he started but Jackson didn’t think that the place he had started from existed any more. He had returned a few years ago, taken Marlee to meet her dead relatives, and he had found that it wasn’t the town he remembered. The slag heaps were levelled, the mine’s machinery long gone, only the pit-head wheel remained, cut in two and planted on a roundabout on the outskirts of town, more like an ornament than a memorial. There was not much evidence to show that it had ever been a place where his father had spent his life toiling in the velvet dark.
Niamh herself had been underground nearly forty years – too late to track down clues, sniff out DNA, interview witnesses. The coffin was closed, the case as cold as that clay she was buried in. When she was murdered his sister was just three years older than his daughter was now. Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let’s face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.
Seventeen, Niamh’s life hardly begun when it was halted. His sister couldn’t stop for death, so he had, very kindly, stopped for her. Emily Dickinson. Poetry? Jackson? Believe it or not.
Poetry had started to get under his skin a couple of years ago, round about the time he had almost died in a train crash. (In synopsis, Jackson ’s life always sounded more dramatic than the mild ennui of living it every day.) He didn’t think the two things necessarily had anything to do with each other, but in his resurrected life he had decided to catch up, rather late in the day, with some of the things he had missed out on in his impoverished education. Like culture, for example. While living in London he had committed himself to a programme of self-improvement, feasting from the liberal banquet on offer in the capital – art galleries, exhibitions, museums, even the occasional classical concert. He developed a bit of a taste for Beethoven, the symphonies at any rate. Lush and tuneful, they seemed designed to address the soul. He caught the Fifth at the Proms. He’d never been to the Proms before, put off by all those jingoistic Last Night shenanigans, and, indeed, the self-important Promenaders proved to be over-privileged smug wankers but Beethoven hadn’t written the music for them. He had written it for Everyman, in the guise of a middle-aged trooper who was surprised to find himself moved to tears by the triumphant blossoming swell of brass and horsehair.
Not a lot of theatre, Julia and her actor friends had killed off any hope for him in that arena. He had made the mistake of taking Marlee to three hours of bum-numbing Brecht, by the end of which he wanted to shout out, ‘Yes! You’re right, the earth revolves around the sun, you said that when you first came on stage, you’ve been saying it ever since, you don’t need to keep saying it. I get it!’ Marlee slept through most of it. He loved her for that.
This attempt at betterment had extended beyond paintings and piano recitals and museum artefacts, he had also been grimly working his way through the world’s classics. Fiction had never been Jackson ’s thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things – death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale. But poetry had wormed its way in, uninvited.
As he left Jervaulx, Jackson had placed a twenty-pound note in the honesty box – more than any English Heritage fee but it was worth the money. And besides, he liked the fact that even in these days and times there was someone willing to trust to a man’s honesty.
When he was thirteen Jackson had spent one of the better summers of his life staying on a farm called Howdale on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. He was never sure how this rural idyll had come about, church or state, one of them was probably involved somewhere along the line – the parish priest or his social worker must have organized it, he supposed. The social worker had been a temporary acquisition, appearing out of the blue one day in the middle of the worst year of his life and disappearing just as mysteriously a few months later, even though it was still the worst year of his life. The social worker was there (apparently) to help guide him through that terrible year of bereavement which began with his mother dying of cancer and ended with his brother killing himself after their sister was murdered. (‘Top that if you can,’ he occasionally found himself thinking grouchily when he was a policeman and listening to some stranger’s less impressive lament.)
The holiday at Howdale had been a reprieve from the bleak afterlife he was sharing with his father, an angry man with a heart of coal. At the time, Jackson didn’t analyse his feelings of grief, nor did he wonder why a pleasant, elderly man he had never met before (‘I’m what they call a volunteer, lad’) drove him from his small, soot-encrusted terraced home to the green outback of the Dales, dropping him in a farmyard where a herd of black-and-white cows were in the act of shouldering their way into a milking parlour. Jackson had never been close up to a cow before.
The farm was run by a couple called Reg and Joan Atwell. They had a grown-up son and daughter. The son worked for an insurance company in York and the daughter was a nurse at St James’s Infirmary in Leeds and neither of them was interested in running the Atwells’ fifth-generation farm. The wolf child that Jackson had become must have been a severe trial for the Atwells’ patience, but they had been unusually tolerant and kind people and Jackson hoped he hadn’t disappointed them, and if he had he was certainly sorry now.
He could still see the farmhouse kitchen with the Rayburn that was always hot and was home to a big brown teapot containing tea the colour of old oak leaves. He could still smell the huge breakfasts, porridge with cream and brown sugar, fried eggs, ham, bread and home-made marmalade that Mrs Atwell served up. Two farm workers joined them at breakfast, men who had already put in half a day’s work by the time they sat down to breakfast.
There was an ancient sofa in the kitchen, covered with a scratchy crocheted throw, where they sat in the evenings. The Atwells more or less lived in the kitchen. The sheepdog, a Border collie, Jess, would lie on the rag rug in front of the Rayburn. Mr Atwell would say, ‘Make room on the sofa for the boy, Mother,’ but Jackson often as not sat on the rag rug with Jess. It was the only time before or since that Jackson could recollect feeling close to a dog. His family never had a pet and, when he had his own family, his wife, Josie, had restricted their pet ownership to the small end of Creation – hamsters, guinea pigs, mice. When she was little his daughter, Marlee, used to have a pet rabbit, Muffin, a big brute of a thing with floppy ears that used to square up to Jackson as if he was in the ring with it and prepared to go the distance. ‘Pet’ wouldn’t have been the word Jackson would have used to describe it.
He had given a Border collie to Louise. A puppy. It had been an unconscious choice. He had fled from Scotland, and DCI Louise Monroe, and in his place he had – unconsciously – left a creature close to his emotional heart. She was better off with the dog than with him. He could never be with Louise now. She was within the law, he was outside it.
There had been some talk of him staying on at Howdale at the end of the summer but unfortunately he had been returned, by the same mysterious, elderly gentleman, to the grim comforts of home. Jackson wrote to the Atwells (the first letter he had ever written), thanking them for their hospitality, but heard nothing back until several months later their daughter wrote to him (the first letter Jackson had ever received) to ‘inform’ him that her parents had died within a month of each other, her father first, of an unhealthy heart, and then his wife of a broken one. Jackson, having imbibed guilt in his Catholic mother’s milk, felt the unspoken accusation that he had somehow contributed to their untimely deaths.
He sometimes wondered, if the Atwells had been in possession of stronger hearts, would they have kept him? Would he have become a farm boy, would he even now be driving a tractor up on the hills with a sheepdog riding shotgun? (For want of a nail.)
For a while, after his
When he was sixteen Jackson joined the army. He embraced his new austere existence with the zeal of a warrior monk discovering the profit of discipline. He was broken down and then built up again, his one and only allegiance to his new, brutal family. The army was tough but it was nothing compared to the life before. Jackson was just relieved to have a future at last. Any future.
If his mother had gone to a doctor sooner with her cancer instead of suffering the archetypal ancient martyrdom of the Irish mother, then perhaps she would have hit his brother about the head with a rolled-up newspaper (a common form of communication in their family) and told him to get off his backside (he was nursing a foul hangover) and get out into the rain and meet his sister off the bus. Then Niamh wouldn’t have been attacked by her unknown assailant who raped her and strangled her and then threw her body into the canal. For want of a nail.
After his visit to Jervaulx, Jackson had gone on a pilgrimage to find Howdale again. Working on instinct, with a little help and some hindrance from SatNav Jane, he made his way down back roads until he came to a sign that announced
Jackson climbed out of the car and looked around. There was a small children’s play area where Joan Atwell had hung her washing, a large gravelled turning circle where a run-down old barn had once stood. A group of people of all ages (they called that a family, Jackson reminded himself) was hanging out, drinks in hand, on a lawn that had once been the farmyard. He caught the primitive smell of searing meat. At the sight of Jackson, the adults in the group looked uneasy and one of the men raised his voice, ready for belligerence, a pair of barbecue tongs clutched in his hand like a weapon, and said, ‘Can I help you?’
Jackson had no taste for hostility in these surroundings and so he shrugged and said, ‘No,’ a response which seemed to unsettle the group further.
He climbed back in the Saab and caught a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror. Someone slightly feral looked back. He hadn’t shaved for several days and his hair flopped dirtily in his eyes. There was a lean and hungry look about him that he didn’t recognize. At least he still
His definition of elderly had changed as he himself had moved nearer to the event horizon of death. When he was twenty, old people were forty. Now he was over the hill of his half-century the definition began to stretch towards something more yielding, but nonetheless once you hit fifty there was no escaping the fact that you had a one-way ticket on a non-stop service to the terminus.
He drove off, aware that the barbecuing family were watching him all the way down the drive. He understood, he would have been wary of himself as well.
In Knaresborough Jackson had sought out Old Mother Shipton’s Cave, a destination that had once been a stopover on that school trip to Fountains. The schoolboy Jackson had gazed in surprise at the petrified items in Old Mother Shipton’s Cave – umbrella, boots, teddy bears – hanging beneath the well. The alchemy of the Dropping Well was due simply to the high mineral content of the water and yet even now the adult Jackson still found something strangely affecting in its preservation of mundane objects. His younger self had thought that ‘petrified’ meant ‘terrified’ and had wondered if he were to become too frightened by something, or someone, would he end up like those inert, everyday objects? It didn’t work like that, he knew now. It wasn’t being frightened that turned you into stone, it was being the one who did the frightening.
After Jackson had almost died in the train crash he was grateful to have survived but there was a part of him that had feared that being saved would turn him soft and he would become one of those grateful evangelists of positive living (
He would never be free of her now that they were united through their son. Two become one. As the Spice Girls might say.
He had met Julia at Rievaulx. He tended to meet her on neutral territory these days. There had been an unfortunate incident a couple of years ago when a tired and emotional Jackson had turned up on the doorstep of the Dales cottage she was sharing with her arty, überbourgeois husband, Jonathan Carr, and bluntly ‘explained’ to him that Nathan was not, as Jonathan thought, his child. And he had the evidence to prove it, Jackson said, triumphantly waving the results of a DNA test in his face.
There was, naturally, some violence but it hardly mattered. Jackson had threatened a custody suit but he was aware that he was blustering and Julia knew it too. (Jonathan Carr’s opinion didn’t count, not to Jackson anyway.) Jackson didn’t want to bring up another child, with or without Julia, he just wanted to establish the fundamental principle of ownership.
Now there was an unstated delicacy in their triangular relationship. The man who fathered the boy, the man who was raising him and the treacherous woman at the apex.
He had met Julia and Nathan not at Rievaulx itself but on the Terraces above, from where there was a panoramic vista of breathtaking beauty. It brought out the Romantic soul in Jackson, once hidden in a dark, deep mineshaft but lately peeking its head, unabashedly, into the daylight. He might have become a harder version of himself on the outside but on the inside the spirit could still soar. Rievaulx, Beethoven’s Fifth, a mother and child reunion.
They had strolled between the two Grecian temples – follies, built to amuse eighteenth-century aristocrats, now in the custody of the National Trust. ‘Crikey, fancy having all this as your private picnic ground,’ Julia said. ‘Imagine.’ She sounded even more husky than usual. ‘High pollen count,’ she said, shaking a packet of Zyrtec at him. Jackson was relieved that Nathan showed no sign of having inherited his mother’s lungs (or, indeed, her histrionic disposition).
‘No one should be allowed to own a view like this,’ Jackson said.
‘Ah, you can take the boy out of his collectivist past, but you can’t take the collectivist past out of the boy.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ Jackson said.
‘Is it?’
Nathan skipped ahead of them on the grass. ‘The boy’, Julia called him, bonhomous with love. The only boy. Men were a continual presence in Julia’s life but always of peripheral importance, including, Jackson suspected, her arty-farty husband (hats off to the man who managed to stay married to inconstant Julia). But not the boy, the boy beamed hotly at the centre of her universe.
‘Does Jonathan know you’re here?’ he asked.
‘Why should he?’ Julia said.
‘Why shouldn’t he?’ Jackson said.
She ignored the question. There was nothing you could do with her, she was impossible. (In that, at least, she was constant.)
‘Bare ruined choirs and all that,’ Julia said, changing the subject. ‘Shakespeare, the dissolution of the monasteries,’ she added instructively, having over the years realized the great black holes in Jackson ’s general knowledge.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that. I’m not entirely ignorant.’
‘Really?’ she said, absent-mindedly rather than ironically. Her attention was all on the boy, none on the man. Jackson had, in fact, learned a great deal about the shock and awe of the Reformation in the course of his wanderings around the abbeys of Yorkshire but there was no point in being didactic with Julia, she was always going to know more about everything than him. She was the product of a sound education and a good memory, while, let’s face it, Jackson was in possession of neither.
Jackson ignored Julia in turn, gazing meditatively (some – mostly women – might say mindlessly) at the amphitheatre, nature’s heavenly bowl, that contained Rievaulx. Even in ruins the abbey was matchless, celestial. Awesome.
‘Cheer up, sweetie,’ Julia said, ‘it may never happen.’
‘It already has,’ Jackson said gloomily.
Jackson had occasionally to remind himself that there was a third purpose to his leisurely Byzantine progress around the country. Everything came (and went) in threes, as far as he could see. Three Fates, three Furies, three Graces, three Kings, three monkeys, a threepersoned God.
‘Three-headed dogs,’ Julia added. ‘To the Pythagoreans, three was the first real number, because they saw it as having a beginning, a middle and an end.’
Jackson was working on behalf of a client. Despite the fact that he was no longer a private detective, despite the fact that he no longer
He should have said no, in fact, he was pretty sure he did say no when Hope McMaster sent him a long email (too long, a life story) out of the blue at the end of the previous year.
Exactly how Hope McMaster had got hold of a contact address for him was unclear but somewhere along the line – as was so often the case – it seemed to involve Julia (‘a friend of a friend of a friend’). Nowhere in the world was safe. Julia probably had friends on the moon (or friends of friends of friends, ad infinitum). And somehow six degrees of separation from Julia always ended up at Jackson.
In the course of his lackadaisical odyssey around the country Jackson had been able to dovetail neatly the stalking of his thieving false wife with the pursuit of Hope McMaster’s case. Cornwall, Gwynedd, Doncaster, Harrogate were all locations where he had tried unsuccessfully to hunt down Hope McMaster’s mysterious identity. ‘So,’ Julia said, as they left Rievaulx Terraces behind them and headed towards the comforting arms of the Black Swan in Helmsley, ‘you’re basically looking for two women, your wife and Hope McMaster, and you have no idea who either of them really are.’
‘Yes,’ Jackson said. ‘Exactly so.’
On the outskirts of Leeds, he had netted Kirkstall Abbey. It was the first abbey he had come across whose stones were incongruously blackened with industrial soot from the days when all the golden fleeces were turned into bolts of cloth. Tomorrow he had an appointment with a woman called Linda Pallister, an adoption counsellor with Social Services who Hope McMaster had already been in contact with. Hope’s lawyer in Christchurch had drawn up a power of attorney, instructing Jackson to act on her behalf. Jackson had hopes for Leeds. Leeds was the place where it had all started for Hope McMaster and he very much hoped it would be the place where it would all finish.
Linda Pallister failed to keep the appointment. ‘Linda’s had to go home, I’m afraid. A family emergency,’ a woman on reception at Social Services told him. ‘But she said to reschedule for tomorrow.’
After Linda Pallister had failed to keep her appointment with him, Jackson had spent what was left of the afternoon wandering around – a
He reckoned that the last time he was in Leeds must have been more than thirty years ago. He used to come here as a boy when it represented the height of metropolitan sophistication, not that ‘metropolitan’ was a word in his vocabulary in those days and ‘sophistication’ didn’t rise much above buying a packet of ten Embassy and sneaking into an X-rated film. Jackson remembered shoplifting in Woolworths in Leeds. Petty things – sweets, key rings, batteries. His father would have flayed him alive if he had found out but it had never really seemed like stealing, just a cheeky flouting of authority. Now Woolworths didn’t even exist any more. Who would have thought it? Perhaps it would still be going if kids hadn’t kept on nicking the sweets and key rings and batteries. Over the years all that ill-gotten loot probably added up to a fortune.
In the Merrion Centre he had come to the aid of a confused old woman that a security numpty was trying to haul away. ‘Are you OK?’ he had asked her. ‘Do you want some help?’ Jackson voiced his personal mantra, ‘I used to be a policeman,’ which seemed to act as a reassurance. There had been something familiar about her but he couldn’t put his finger on it. She was wearing a wig which had slipped to an unfortunately jaunty angle. Jackson hoped someone would put him down before he got to that stage. He supposed he would end up having to put himself down. He planned to go out on the ice (
His final stop had been Roundhay, a leisurely stroll, he thought, some sunshine and fresh air away from the urban crowds. He had not expected to walk away as a dog owner. The interrupted journey, the unexpected gift, the unforeseen encounter. Life had its plots.
Later, looking back, Jackson could see that his failed appointment with Linda Pallister was the moment when it all started to go wrong. If she had kept their rendezvous he would have spent a constructive hour or so, would have felt satisfied and purposeful, and might quite possibly have undergone another evening in a hotel, eating a roomservice meal and watching a bad pay-for-view movie, instead of spending a restless time, blacking out for large portions of it and having meaningless, promiscuous sex. For want of a nail. Blame Linda Pallister. In the end everyone else would.
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Tracy phoned in sick to cover her tracks. ‘Bit of a tummy bug, I think, I’m just going to go home early,’ and Leslie said, ‘No problem, I hope you feel better soon.’ Then Tracy sneaked back into the car park to pick up her Audi A4 and drive with Courtney to a Mamas and Papas store in Birstall Shopping Park where she bought a car seat that cost an arm and a leg. She spent the entire drive to the retail park waiting to be arrested for lack of the said car seat and in a fit of paranoia had got the kid to lie down on the back seat, just like a proper kidnap victim. Tracy felt as if there were a neon sign on the roof of the car that screamed, ‘This isn’t the mother!’ She gave the kid the Greggs sausage roll to keep her occupied. There was a plaid blanket in the boot and Tracy wondered if the kid would freak out if she covered her with it. Probably. She decided against it.
An uneasy tour of the Mamas and Papas store revealed what Tracy had always suspected – children were mind-blowingly expensive. She should know, she’d just bought one, even if it was at a bargain price. Kids were all about retail. If you weren’t buying and selling the kids themselves, you were buying and selling on their behalf. Tracy felt a sudden twitch of anxiety. The two thousand pounds that remained in her bag weighed heavy. She should have handed over the full five thousand pounds to Kelly Cross. Buying the kid cheap felt like a mistake now.
Tracy left the car seat in the shop while she walked towards Gap, Courtney plodding along beside her like a doped-up dog. The kid had been pretty vocal in the Merrion Centre, yelling her head off, but now she was taking her cues from Helen Keller.
Tracy was acutely aware of all the security cameras. She imagined the pair of them on
What would she say if she was stopped – ‘It’s OK, I bought the kid fair and square’? Yeah, that would go down well when they hauled her off to the nick. She was the Childcatcher, the Bogeywoman, every mother’s nightmare. But not Kelly’s. Kelly probably saw her as her saviour. Kelly certainly wasn’t the first mother to sell her own kid. But what if… what if Kelly wasn’t actually the kid’s mother? Tracy had lost track of how many kids Kelly had spawned. Were they all in care? What if she was minding Courtney for someone else? In that case, Tracy reasoned to herself – already working up arguments for the social workers, the police, the courts – whoever her mother was, she hadn’t cared enough about Courtney to put her in a safe pair of hands. Handing your kid over to Kelly Cross was like handing her over to a pit bull. Bottom line – the kid was at risk.
She remembered Kelly Cross standing on the bus platform before the doors closed, the puzzled look on her face as she said,
She knew someone who could find out more for her. Linda Pallister. She was still in fostering and adoption, wasn’t she? If she hadn’t retired yet, she could find out the status of Kelly Cross’s kids.
Tracy couldn’t remember when she had last seen Linda Pallister. It must have been at Barry Crawford’s daughter’s wedding, three years ago. Detective Superintendent Barry Crawford, Tracy ’s ex-colleague. Linda’s daughter, Chloe, was best friends with Barry’s daughter, Amy, and was the chief bridesmaid, a fright in burnt-orange satin. ‘I had “bronze” in my head for their dresses, you know,’ Amy Crawford said ruefully to Tracy. Nothing in the poor girl’s head but mush now that she inhabited the land of the living dead. Her own dress had been the usual overblown white garment, her bouquet made up of raffish orange and yellow flowers. The men’s buttonholes were a single orange gerbera, like something a clown would squirt water out of. (‘I wanted something a little bit different,’ Amy said.)
‘Very cheerful,’ Barbara Crawford, mother of the bride, had commented, wincing at the gaudiness of it all. Barbara herself tastefully overdressed in turquoise silk (‘Paule Vasseur,’ she murmured to Tracy as if it were a secret). It had been no parish tea affair for Barry and Barbara’s one and only, but a lavish case of overspend. Politely, no one mentioned that the bride’s belly was already straining at her wedding dress.
The bridesmaids’ shoes were burnt orange too, their pointy feet poking out from beneath jaundiced dresses that looked like the sunset at the end of the world. Their bouquets hung from their arms on ribbon-like handbags, big pomanders or perhaps colourful cannonballs. ‘I tried to suggest something different, I really did,’ Barbara Crawford said in the loudest
Amy’s husband was called Ivan.
‘Actually, I think it’s because he had a Norwegian grandfather,’ Tracy said.
‘Norwegian?’ Barry said incredulously, as if she’d just announced that Ivan’s family came from the moon. Ivan was a financial adviser, Tracy had consulted him when she was wondering where to stash her annual ISA. ‘Pop in and have a chat, no charge for a friend of Barry’s,’ he said to her at the wedding. He seemed a nice enough chap, pretty harmless on the whole, which was about the best you could hope for from a human being, in Tracy ’s opinion. Unfortunately, he went bankrupt shortly afterwards and lost the business. No one wanted financial advice from a man who couldn’t even keep his hands on his own money. Barry implied there was fraud involved but when Tracy went to see Ivan to retrieve some paperwork he explained that he had lost a flash drive with all his clients’ details on it. ‘Must have slipped out of my pocket,’ Ivan said miserably to Tracy. Most of his clients took away their business after that. ‘I would have done the same,’ Ivan said.
‘Not even a traditional fruit cake,’ Barbara fretted, coming across Tracy forking up the chocolate sponge and butter cream wedding cake.
‘Well, at least it’s not orange,’ Tracy said.
Of course, Tracy was in no position to make style notes about anything. Uncomfortable in a powder blue, polyester-mix two-piece that was giving off so much static she worried she would spontaneously combust before they got to the cutting of the cake. She’d bought a hat but didn’t wear it because it made her look like a man in drag. Tracy could count the number of weddings she’d been invited to on the fingers of one hand, whereas the funerals she had attended in her time were stacked to the rafters. Murder victims mostly. Never been to a christening. Said something about your life, didn’t it?
The burnt orange had been a particularly unfortunate choice for Amy’s friend Chloe Pallister with her mousy hair and tallow complexion. ‘Mother of the bridesmaid, never mother of the bride,’ Linda Pallister said, sidling up to Tracy, smiling hopefully. She didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Linda Pallister’s own wedding clothes, a black velvet T-shirt and a skirt that seemed to have been made out of tiedyed cobwebs, couldn’t have been more out of place. Linda was also sporting a large assortment of silver rings and bracelets as well as an enormous crucifix on a leather shoestring. The crucifix looked more like penance than religion. Linda had become a Christian in the eighties, an unfashionable decade for evangelism, although Linda had gone, uncharacteristically, for straight-down-the-middle C of E. No sign at the wedding of Linda’s eldest, Jacob. Tracy had heard a rumour that he was a bank manager.
‘Your Chloe looks lovely,’ Tracy lied.
If Tracy phoned Linda Pallister and started asking about Kelly Cross’s kids she’d be flagging herself up, wouldn’t she?
She took the kid for lunch in Bella Italia. Kid worked her way through her own weight in penne and Tracy nibbled on some garlic bread. She had lost her appetite. The kidnapper diet. Tracy had done them all in her time – grapefruit, F-Plan, cabbage, Atkins. Selfinflicted torture. She’d been a big baby, a big child, a big teenager, it seemed unlikely that she would suddenly become a small, postmenopausal woman.
In Gap, Tracy bought clothes for Courtney, holding them up against her to gauge their fit, rather than going by the labels which didn’t seem to relate to the kid’s actual size. ‘How old are you, Courtney?’
‘Four,’ Courtney said, more of a question than an answer. She fitted the ‘2-3 year’ clothes easily. ‘You’re small for your age,’ Tracy said.
‘You’re big,’ Courtney said.
‘Can’t argue with that,’ Tracy said. Unsure of the rules of engagement with a small child, Tracy had decided it worked best if they both pretended they were grown-up and conversed accordingly.
She bought more clothes for Courtney than she had intended, but they were so nice and pretty, the kind of clothes Tracy never had when she was a little girl. Half a century ago her mother had dressed her in limp pinafore dresses and nylon jumpers with brown lace-up Clarks shoes, a look which even a cute kid, let alone Tracy, would have had trouble pulling off. Her parents had been over forty when Tracy was born, already old before their time. ‘We’d given up,’ her mother said, as if it had been a relief to do so. ‘And then you came along.’
Her parents had been too much at war with each other to bother with their child. They had battled passively, locked together in silent hostility while Tracy lived in the solitary confinement of the only child. Tracy thought of herself as a war baby even though the war was long over when she was born.
Courtney wiped her ever-present trail of snot on the sleeve of her grubby pink top. Tracy would have to buy tissues, tissues were the kind of thing that people who looked after kids carried in their bags at all times. There must be a caravan of kid-related supplies that she needed but Tracy had no idea what they might be. It would be helpful if kids came with instructions and a list of requirements.
Tracy ’s final purchase for Courtney was a red duffel coat in the sale, a garment that a younger Tracy, dreary in brown gabardine, had always coveted. The duffle coat had a soft plaid lining and real wooden toggles. It was an article of clothing that said someone cared. If it hadn’t been so warm in the shop she would have suggested the kid wear it straight away but Tracy could feel the sweat trickling uncomfortably down her back and the kid looked positively overcooked.
Tracy was flagging. She had read somewhere that shops and museums were the most tiring places for people. The kid looked dog-weary. ‘Do you want a carry?’ Tracy said.
Her knees almost buckled under the weight. Who knew a tiny kid could be so heavy? She had the gravity of a small, dense planet. Tracy staggered back to Mamas and Papas with Courtney in her arms and retrieved the car seat and fixed it in the Audi. She’d had the kid less than three hours and she felt mangled by exhaustion, no wonder the parents she saw in the Merrion Centre walked around like zombies.
She helped Courtney into the car seat, was surprised when the kid strapped herself in. Should they be able to do that? If you could fasten a buckle it meant you could unfasten one as well. ‘Don’t undo that,’ she advised the kid. ‘There are a lot of bad drivers on the road.’ The kid murmured a kind of assent. Her eyelids were blue with tiredness and she had the stunned look that Tracy had seen on abused kids. You had to wonder. It would hardly be a surprise, more likely than not, in fact. The things people did to kids could make your brain hurt. Hot needle, et cetera. Or maybe, like Tracy, the kid was just worn out with the turn the day had taken. It was four o’clock in the afternoon but time had become elastic, stretching out the day to infinity.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that Courtney was already asleep, making little buzzing sounds, like a large bee.
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Jackson wondered what a dog might need. Food and a bowl to eat it out of, he supposed. He found both in a shop called Paws for Thought. He sensed he was entering deep into unknown territory. He had a new role. He knew who he was, he was a dog owner. He found it hard enough coping with having a son, the dog felt like even more of a stretch.
‘Lovely Border terrier you’ve got yourself there,’ the woman behind the counter said.
‘Is it?’ Jackson said, studying the dog. He had assumed it was some kind of mongrel, not a breed. It certainly looked like a mongrel, and not a particularly prepossessing one either. There were traces of blood on the dog’s snout and on his fur and the woman said, ‘Oh dear, has he been in a fight?’
‘Sort of,’ Jackson said.
The woman gave the rope around the dog’s neck a disapproving glance and said, ‘What’s the poor little chap’s name?’
Jackson ran through a mental list of names that might be more suitable than the one the dog already had and came up with nothing, apart from Jess, but that name was owned for ever by the Atwells’ sheepdog.
‘The Ambassador,’ he finally owned up. ‘He’s called The Ambassador.’ The dog’s ears perked up attentively. Jackson wondered where the dog had got its name from. He tried to imagine its big, ugly owner – ex-owner – shouting ‘Ambassador!’ into the depths of a field. In Roundhay it had been a torrent of expletives that had flowed from Colin’s mouth. He supposed it was a joke, imagined someone saying, ‘The Ambassador needs brushing’ or ‘The Ambassador’s asleep in his basket.’
The pet-shop woman raised sceptical eyebrows and said, ‘The Ambassador? I would have thought that was a name for a bigger dog.’
‘He’s big inside,’ Jackson said defensively.
The woman swept her hand around the shop and said, ‘Anything else? How about a coat? For the dog,’ she added when Jackson looked at her blankly. It seemed to Jackson that nature had given the dog a perfectly good coat so he said no but bought a leather lead and left before he got carried away by, say, the small four-legged sailor uniform that was hanging behind the counter, complete with jaunty little hat.
Jackson took out his Swiss Army knife and, showing it to the dog, said, ‘Man’s best friend.’The dog sat passively while Jackson cut through the tightly knotted rope around its neck. ‘Good dog,’ Jackson said.
When Jackson first encountered the dog it had seemed unruly but now seemed merely full of spirit, walking nicely on the lead, no pulling or messing about, and appeared delighted to be in Jackson ’s company. He wondered if he looked foolish striding along the streets with a small dog on a lead trotting purposefully by his side. He wondered how women felt about men with small dogs. Would they think he was gay? Would they find him more trustworthy than a man without a dog? (Hitler liked dogs, he reminded himself.)
He found himself pausing at traffic lights. He would normally have made a heroic dash across the road (or a lunatic dash, depending whose side you were on – Jackson’s or most of the women in his life) but now he was waiting stoically for the green man, suddenly transformed into a parent again by being in charge of something smaller than himself.
Back in the vicinity of the Merrion Centre (he wondered how the confused old woman had got on, he had trusted the Canadian girl not to call the police) he checked into a somewhat unsightly Best Western and asked for a double room because he didn’t like to think of himself as a single man in a single room. (‘You seem to be living the life of a travelling salesman,’ Josie said.
‘Let’s hope you don’t turn into a giant insect,’ Julia laughed.
‘Eh?’ Jackson said.)
The hotel gave him a twin-bedded room, which seemed worse, the unoccupied bed like a reproach somehow.
Jackson was a naturally frugal traveller. ‘Tight as a tic’s arse’ is what his brother would have said. He had been brought up on prudence and thrift – or to put it another way, in poverty – and the older he got the more he found himself reverting to parsimony. That didn’t mean that he was beyond the occasional startling largesse, to Betty’s waitresses, for example.
Jackson had stayed in some of the best hotels in the world but now he found himself quite content to sleep within the bland budget walls of the Travelodges and Premier Inns that he encountered along his nomadic route. They were places where you paused and moved on and nothing stuck to you. Waking in the middle of the night there was something comforting to be found in the drone of the engine of the hotel as it sailed on into the morning. He knew who he was in a hotel, he was a guest.
After his six months on the road he was beginning to wonder if he even wanted to stop. Jackson Brodie, the rambling man. A vagabond. Hotels were becoming boring, but what about a caravan? Josie’s parents had been in possession of a small Sprite that they had loaned to Jackson and Josie in the early days of their marriage when they still qualified as newly-weds and Jackson, just back from the Gulf and out of the army, had thought of enlisting in the French Foreign Legion if this was what his life was to be from then on – caravanning holidays in the company of Little Englanders. Now, though, he could see a certain charm in his ex-in-laws’ obsession with loading up the wagons and moving on, pioneers of the open road.
He could fit out a caravan (he imagined Romany rather than Sprite) as neatly as a little boat and a shipshape Jackson could boil up water on an open fire, catch rabbits with little wire traps, sleep with the smell of woodsmoke in his hair. Apart from the odd accidental roadkill or the mercy killing of a victim of myxomatosis, he had never knowingly dispatched a rabbit but supposed he could if it was a necessity. Especially if it was a big rabbit called Muffin.
On reflection he wasn’t a caravan man. And, truth be told, he was growing tired of his vagrant life. He wanted a home. He would like a woman in that home. Not all the time, he had grown too used to his own company. There was a time when he had been a man who only felt fulfilled when facing life shoulder to shoulder with a woman. He had enjoyed being married, perhaps more than his wife had. His real wife, not the crooked trickery which had been his second wife. (‘A Fata Morgana,’ Julia said. ‘A mirage.’)
Julia had once told him that the ideal partner was one that you could keep in a cupboard and take out when you felt like it. Jackson thought it unlikely that there were women out there who would acquiesce to being kept in a cupboard. Didn’t stop men trying to find them though.
Sensing animals would not be welcome in the Best Western he had sneaked the dog in, concealed in his rucksack. Beforehand, in the car park, Jackson had tipped out half the bag’s contents and invited a not entirely compliant dog to enter into the bespoke space. With some encouragement from Jackson, the dog had eventually settled into the innards of the bag. There was something to admire in the dog’s character. ‘Good dog,’ he said, because praise seemed to be called for.
Once he was in the room he released the dog from its prison. He opened a can of dog food and dumped it in the bowl he had bought and the dog ate as if famished. There was a ‘hospitality tray’ in the room with tea, coffee, a kettle and cups and saucers. Jackson took one of the saucers and filled it with water from the bathroom. The dog drank as if it had been in a drought.
He had dropped into a chemist on the way to the hotel and picked up an ad hoc first-aid kit and now used the TCP and cotton wool to clean up the dog’s scratches. The dog stood stoically while it was prodded and poked and only flinched slightly when the antiseptic touched broken skin or Jackson found a bruise. ‘Good dog,’ Jackson said again.
Jackson flicked the switch on the kettle and made a mug of tea, dividing the little packet of biscuits between himself and the dog. When he had finished, the dog jumped up on to one of the twin beds, circled round and round until it appeared satisfied, and then curled up and fell asleep immediately. It was the bed Jackson would have chosen for himself, being nearest to the door (a room for Jackson was all about exits) but the dog, despite its size, had a remarkably unmovable look about it.
Jackson ’s phone vibrated in his pocket like a hefty trapped wasp. Two messages. The first was a text from Marlee asking him if she could have her birthday money early. Her birthday wasn’t for another six months, which seemed to Jackson to give ‘early’ a new meaning. It was a blatantly mercenary message with a perfunctory ‘love you’ added at the end. He thought he would sit on it and make her sweat for a few days. He had never imagined, when his daughter was small and infinitely, eternally lovable, that he would ever develop a combative relationship with her.
The second message was more benign – an email from Hope McMaster.
Jackson sighed and tapped out a message.
There was an immediate response from Hope McMaster.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Jackson said to the phone, sounding to his own ears disconcertingly like his mulish daughter. ‘No,’ he had told her the last time they were together, ‘you cannot have a tattoo, no matter how “pretty”, or a ring in your belly button, a blue streak in your hair, a boyfriend. Especially not a boyfriend.’
Hope McMaster’s case had turned out to be a slow-burn affair. For months now Jackson had been reporting back to her, occasional, laconic emails that elicited an immediate chirpy response about the weather in Christchurch (
He had always thought of New Zealanders as a rather gloomy race – the Scots abroad – but Hope seemed as happy-clappy as you could get. Of course, much of Jackson ’s information about New Zealanders came from watching
Nonetheless he was intrigued by New Zealand, although not so much because of Hope McMaster as the fact that last year he had read Captain Cook’s journals and had been impressed by the heroism of his navigation and leadership. First man to sail round the world in both directions. Like the
Cook was a Yorkshireman, naturally. You could but be in awe of the first voyage, the magnificent voyage, to observe the transit of Venus, to find the mythical southern continent, that took him to Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand. Heart of oak. Sometimes Jackson regretted that he would never make his mark on history, that he would never map a new country, that he would never fight in a just war. ‘Be grateful for an ordinary life,’ Julia said, Julia who had always wanted to be extraordinary in some way.
‘I am,’ Jackson said. ‘I really am.’
But.
Imagine sailing into Poverty Bay for the first time, imagine captaining a heroic little three-masted barque to the other side of the world. A new-found land where the sun rises first.
She was two years old when she last saw England. How much could she remember about it? Nothing. How much could she remember about her life before she was adopted? Nothing.
The next planned stop on Jackson ’s itinerary after Leeds was Whitby, Cook’s old stamping ground. He rather fancied living by the sea, could see himself in an old fisherman’s cottage built from ancient ship’s timbers. Hearts of oak. He could take a bracing walk along the beach every day in the company of the dog and sink a pint in the evening with old sailors. Jackson, the fisherman’s friend.
Whitby was where Cook had served his apprenticeship and where the
Hope Winfield married Dave McMaster (
Jackson ’s own bad genes had been modified in Marlee (he hoped) by Josie’s more temperate birthright. But what hope was there for Nathan? It wasn’t just Julia’s lungs that were compromised. Her whole family had been riotously dysfunctional in a way that went beyond the Gothic. Betrayed emotionally by her parents, Julia had lost a clutch of sisters, the eldest, Sylvia, to suicide, Amelia to cancer and the baby of the family, Olivia, to murder – by Sylvia. There had been another baby, too, Annabelle, who had lived for only a handful of hours, joined in the grave shortly afterwards by the girls’ mother.
Julia was the only person Jackson knew who could outplay him in the game of personal misery. It was what had drawn them to each other in the beginning, it was what had pulled them apart in the end.
‘One by one all those little birds fell out of the nest,’ Julia said. She claimed there was ‘comfort to be had in metaphors’. Jackson didn’t see it himself. He didn’t point out to her that Amelia had been more like a ponderous bustard and suicidal, murderous Sylvia was worse than a cuckoo.
‘Christ robs the Nest – / Robin after Robin / Smuggled to Rest,’ Julia said and Jackson said, ‘Emily Dickinson,’ just to see the look of astonishment on her face.
‘You’re not ill, are you?’ she asked. ‘Or mad?’
‘Much Madness is divinest Sense,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Murder and suicide aren’t
According to Hope, John and Angela Costello, from Doncaster, were killed when a drunken lorry driver ploughed into the back of their car. Their two-year-old daughter, Sharon, wasn’t with them at the time, which seemed rather to beg the question, ‘Where was she?’ Newly orphaned, she was adopted by the Winfields, renamed Hope and shortly afterwards they emigrated to New Zealand.
‘So it wasn’t the Winfields who had given up hope,’ Julia said. ‘It was the Costellos.’
Looking back, Jackson could see that even as he was reading Hope’s introductory missive from the ether (some novels were shorter and less detailed than Hope McMaster’s emails) his intuitive antennae had been twitching. No relatives? The past obliterated? A name changed? A child too young to remember anything? A sudden removal to a faraway land?
‘Kidnapped,’ Julia had said decisively, buttering a scone, but then she always had a flair for the dramatic.
Before he had taken on the task of investigating her past he had felt obliged to remind Hope McMaster how curiosity had worked out for the cat.
‘Pandora’s box,’ Julia said, already reaching for a second scone before finishing the first. ‘Although the word
‘I know,’ Jackson interrupted. ‘I know what she did.’
‘People have a need to find the truth,’ Julia said. ‘Human nature can’t abide a mystery.’
In Jackson ’s experience, finding the truth – whatever that was – only deepened the mystery of what had really happened in the past. And perhaps Hope’s little Aaron and the squid would discover a family history that they would rather had stayed securely locked away, well out of pesky Pandora’s reach.
‘Yes, but it’s not about
Any time he spent with Julia always degenerated in the end into a mixture of comforting familiarity and irritable argument. Rather like marriage but without the divorce. Or the wedding for that matter.
Nathan had run himself into oblivion on the Terraces and one sandwich and a dish of ice cream later he was asleep in Jackson ’s arms, leaving Julia free to tackle her afternoon tea untrammelled. The soft, sandbag weight of his boy in his arms was disturbing. Jackson wasn’t sure that he wanted his heart stirred by unbreakable, sacrificial bonds.
He had been surprised to find himself daunted rather than happy when Nathan proved to be his son. It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.
Recently, Julia had begun to imply that Jackson should be ‘more of a father’ to Nathan and they should spend time ‘as a family’. ‘But we’re not,’ Jackson protested. ‘You’re married to someone else.’When Jackson had been forced into deciding which of his offspring to spend Christmas Day with he had opted for his moody daughter (a disastrous decision). Julia saw it, perhaps rightly, as a clear case of favouritism.
‘ Jackson ’s choice,’ she said.
‘I can’t be in two places at once,’ Jackson complained.
‘An atom can be in several places at once, according to quantum physics,’ Julia said.
‘I’m not an atom.’
‘You’re nothing
‘Maybe, but I still can’t be in two places at once. There’s only one Jackson.’
‘How true. Well, have a very Merry Christmas. God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son, et cetera. Jackson couldn’t even manage to give his a present on Christmas Day.’
‘Bah, humbug,’ Jackson said.
In the Black Swan, Julia licked cream off her fingers in a way that would have once looked provocative to Jackson. She used to wear scarlet lipstick but these days her lips were unpainted. In the same way, her unruly hair was scraped back and bundled into a restraining clip. Motherhood had in some ways made her into a paler version of the woman she used to be. Jackson was surprised at how much he sometimes missed the old Julia. Or maybe she was the same Julia and what he missed was being with her. He hoped not. There wasn’t room in his heart anyway. The (rather small) space available these days for a woman in the cupboard of Jackson ’s heart was almost entirely occupied by the candle burning for his Scottish nemesis, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe. An old flame flickering weakly rather than burning brightly, denied oxygen by their absence from each other. They had never had sex, he hadn’t seen her for two years, she was married to someone else and had a child by him. It was not what most people thought of as a relationship. Someone should put out the light.
‘The heart is infinite,’ Julia said. ‘Plenty of room.’ In Julia’s heart maybe, not Jackson ’s, contracted and growing smaller with every blow it suffered.
‘Poppycock,’ Julia said.
The thing was, John and Angela Costello, the purported parents of little Sharon, soon to be transformed into Hope Winfield, had never become dust. Never been totalled in a car crash, never walked the dark streets of Donny. They hadn’t died, because they had never lived.
No car crash, no death certificates, no record of a couple by that name ever having lived in Doncaster. There was no birth certificate for a ‘Sharon Costello’ with parents of that name. Just to be sure Jackson had chased up another Sharon Costello, born on Hope McMaster’s birthday – 15 October 1972 – who lived in Truro. She turned out to be a wild goose, puzzled by his interest in her.
Of course the Winfields might have changed Hope’s birth date as well as her name. Jackson would have done if he’d been trying to disguise a child.
The Winfields themselves checked out. They had definitely lived in Harrogate, home of the Betty’s mother ship, and an excuse – not that he needed one – for Jackson to spend a pleasant twenty-four hours in that town, possibly one of the most civilized places he had ever visited. But then, of course, everyone knew, Jackson in particular, that civilization was a thin veneer.
Ian Winfield was definitely a paediatrician at St James’s from 1969 to 1975, when he left to take up a post in Christchurch. And he was certainly married to Kitty, who really had been a model. Hope McMaster had emailed some of her professional photographs – Kitty Gillespie, all sixties fringe and eye make-up, a type Jackson felt a strangely instinctive attraction to. Jackson had a vague recollection in his head – ‘Kitty Gillespie, the poor man’s Jean Shrimpton’. Not such a poor man by the look of her. The sixties didn’t look like history to Jackson, maybe they never would.
The Winfields seemed indeed to have gone out of their way to adopt a child who looked nothing like them. They had been tall, dark and elegant, Hope was a blonde, sturdy, old-fashioned-looking child who had turned into a blonde, sturdy, old-fashioned-looking woman, if her photographs were anything to go by.
What had started off as an innocuous request (
Pandora advanced towards the box, the curious cat looked to be in mortal danger. ‘Perhaps there’s a cat
‘Who?’ Jackson asked before he could prevent himself.
‘You know, Schrödinger’s cat. In the box. Both alive and dead at the same time.’
‘That’s a ridiculous idea.’
‘In practice maybe, but theoretically…’
‘Is this related to atoms by chance?’
‘
After some mandatory adoption counselling in New Zealand, Hope McMaster had applied to Leeds Crown Court for her original birth certificate. Last week she received the news that there wasn’t one. Nor was there any record of her adoption ever having taken place.
‘See – kidnapped. Shall I be mother? Seeing as I am one and you’re not.’
 |
The phone was ringing when they came in the house. Tracy picked up the receiver and said, ‘Hello?’ but found only silence on the other end. There was someone there, she was sure, and she exchanged a mute dialogue with the caller, like a battle of wills. The caller gave up first and she heard the click of a receiver. ‘Good riddance,’ Tracy said. She had more important things on her agenda. Like a kidnapped kid.
They hadn’t done any food shopping – not that Tracy had enough energy to cook – and she had picked up pizza on the way home. Play it safe, all kids liked pizza, it might not be the healthiest thing in the world but right now Tracy didn’t care, as long as Courtney didn’t throw it back up again. Plenty of time for green vegetables and fruit in the future. The future was suddenly a place that you might want to be, rather than a place where you were going to have to slog it out with tedium on a day-by-day basis. A really, really terrifying place that you might want to be.
The cupboard was bare, not a bone for a dog, not a tin of beans for a kidnapped kid, just some blackening bananas sitting accusingly in a fruit bowl. Tracy hadn’t really cooked anything since Janek started on the kitchen, she’d been living off takeaways and microwaved ready meals (nothing new there, of course), but when she looked around now she realized that the kitchen was nearly finished, just decorating and the lino to go down, a few tweaks here and there. The bag with Janek’s tools sat neatly in a corner. She would have to go back to the bank and get more money for him. Only this morning the idea that he would soon be gone had been profoundly depressing to her, now it hardly seemed to matter at all. She had embarked on an unexpected and perilous adventure and it was possible that she would fall off the edge of the world.
‘Another slice?’ Tracy asked and Courtney looked at her blankly, her mouth hanging open. Would Tracy have to get the kid’s adenoids removed, did they even do that any more? She wasn’t a bonny kid but Tracy could relate to that. It took a few seconds for Tracy’s words to reach Courtney’s brain (probably be a good idea to get her a hearing test as well) and then she nodded her head, up and down, and kept on nodding until Tracy advised her to stop. Was she the full shilling?
Tracy was too wound up to eat. Only alcohol could address the state of mind she was in but she didn’t want the kid to see her drinking, she had probably been around drunks all her short life, so instead Tracy made a sober cup of Typhoo and watched Courtney eating, imagining private tutoring to bring her up to speed, a lot of visits to the ENT department, an eye test (she had a bit of a squint going on), a good haircut, followed by a thoughtful, child-centred school, perhaps one of those hippy-dippy ones – Linda Pallister might know about those. After that, who knows, kid might manage to get a place at the kind of university that was a polytechnic by another name, and Tracy would be there when she graduated in cap and gown, drinking cheap white wine afterwards with other proud parents.
Part of Tracy ’s brain was still on the beat in the Merrion Centre and hadn’t caught up with the bizarre turn the day’s events had taken. This lagging part of the brain seemed to suddenly sit up and take notice. What the hell is going on? it asked. You’re making long-term plans to live outside the law! Yes, Tracy said, to the recalcitrant bit of brain. That’s exactly what I’m doing. She was a kidnapper. She had napped a kid. She had never thought about where the word came from before.
How
Run for the hills. Or the Dales or the Lakes. Bloody good job she had that National Trust holiday cottage booked for Friday, couldn’t have timed it better even if she’d known ahead that her life was going to turn upside down. A breathing space. Time to think. Foxes in a hole, hiding from the hounds. Just in case someone came looking for them before they could make their final escape. Someone like Kelly Cross, changing her mind about the recent sale.
She would have to change her own name as well, she’d never liked Tracy. Imogen or Isobel, something feminine and romantic. She supposed she didn’t look like an Imogen. Imogens were middle-class Home Counties girls with long blonde hair and vaguely Bohemian mothers. Her surname would have to change too, something plain, unremarkable perhaps.
Was she too old to pass as a mother? IVF, followed by sudden, early widowhood would take care of a lot of questions. New names, new identities, it would be like being in witness protection. The one thing that was odd was that Courtney hadn’t mentioned her mother. No ‘Where’s Mummy?’ or ‘I want my mummy.’ No sign at all that she was missing someone. Was she a throwaway, or something precious that had been stolen?
‘Courtney,’ she said hesitantly, ‘where do you think Mummy is just now?’ Courtney shrugged extravagantly and worked her way through another slice before volunteering, ‘I don’t have a mummy.’ (Really? This was very good news. For Tracy anyway.)
‘Well, you do now,’ Tracy said. The kid snapped her head up and stared at Tracy before glancing warily round the kitchen.
‘Where?’
Tracy put her hand on her chest and said, rather heroically, ‘Here. I’m going to be your mummy.’
‘Are you?’ Courtney said, looking doubtful. As well she might, Tracy thought. Who was she kidding? (That word again.)
‘Last slice?’ Courtney gave her a thumbs-down, a small emperor in the Colosseum. She yawned. ‘Time for bed,’ Tracy said, trying to sound as if she knew what she was doing.
She gave the napped kid a bath. A lot of grime but no bruises, no obvious sign of damage. Skinny little legs and arms, thin shoulder blades that were like wing nubs. A noticeable birthmark, tattooed by some tiny misreading of the genetic code on to the kid’s forearm. The birthmark was the shape of India, or was it Africa? Geography had never been Tracy ’s strong point.
Courtney sat passively while Tracy soaped and rinsed her, untangled the scrawny plaits, carefully washed her hair and then wrapped her in a towel and lifted her out of the water. Tracy hadn’t appreciated just how small a kid really was. Small and vulnerable. And heavy. It was like being put in charge of a Ming vase, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Thank God Courtney wasn’t a tiny baby, Tracy didn’t think she would have been able to cope with the nerves.
Tracy ’s newly acquired house had last been refurbished some time in the early eighties – hardly the pinnacle of style in décor – and the bathroom suite was a sludgy avocado, the colour of Shrek. Tracy had watched all three
‘Just a sec, pet,’ she said, perching a towel-swaddled Courtney on the bathroom stool. She raked through the bathroom cabinet and found a pair of nail scissors. ‘Just tidy you up a bit,’ she said, taking a lock of the kid’s limp hair and snipping it off. Felt like a violation, but it was just hair, she told herself.
She helped Courtney into the new Gap pyjamas and said, ‘Just pop into bed, pet,’ and felt her heart moved all over again when Courtney obediently scrambled into bed, lay on her back and pulled the covers up to her chin. Christ, you could get a little kid to do anything, you just told them and they did it. Horrifying.
Tracy looked around with new eyes and realized that the small spare room with its mean little bed seemed hopelessly barren and inhospitable. There was a third bedroom but it was still full of cardboard boxes from her own move as well as all the junk from her parents’ house that Tracy hadn’t had the energy or the interest to look into – a jumble of embroidered tray-cloths, chipped plates and old photographs of unidentifiable relatives. Why unpack the stuff, she could just take the whole lot and dump it on the pavement outside an Oxfam shop.
She should have done something about the bedrooms before she started on the downstairs. Tracy had been pleased when she decorated the living room, having toiled her way through
The little spare room, papered in boring woodchip, seemed to have been used as a study. Flimsy plastic Venetian blinds hung at the window and the floor was covered in cheap beige contract carpeting. Tracy wished that she had thought ahead, bought cheerful curtains and a nice soft rug and painted the room in pleasant pastel colours. Or white. Pure and unsullied, the colour of swans and birthday cake icing. A woman with foresight would have anticipated kidnapping a kid.
Hot milk? Or cocoa? Tracy was trying to invent a childhood she had never had herself, her own self-absorbed parents having expected Tracy to bring herself up somehow. They had never taken much interest in her and it was only when they died that she realized they never would. Better parents (loving parents) and she might have turned out differently – confident and popular, with the ability to charm the opposite sex into bed and into love so that now she would have a child of her own rather than a second-hand one.
Hot chocolate, she decided, her own idea of a treat. When she came back with a mug for each of them she found Courtney sitting up in bed with the contents of her little pink backpack spread out on the thin Ikea duvet. It seemed she had a collection of totemic objects, their significance known only to their small owner:
a tarnished silver thimble
a Chinese coin with a hole in the middle
a purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it
a snow globe containing a crude plastic model of the Houses of Parliament
a shell shaped like a cream horn
a shell shaped like a coolie hat
a whole nutmeg
‘Quite a treasure trove,’ Tracy said. The kid looked up from her wampum and stared inscrutably at her and then, for the first time since Tracy bought her, Courtney smiled. A beatific sunbeam of a smile. Tracy beamed back, a bubble-burst of mixed emotion – ecstasy and agony in equal, confusing measure inside her – rising in her chest. Jesus. How did parents manage with this kind of stuff on a daily basis? She found herself blinking back tears. ‘I haven’t got a bedtime book, I’m afraid,’ she said quickly.
Tracy herself liked to read big fat Jackie Collins books. She would never have told anyone, they were like a secret vice, an unspeakable pleasure like pornography (or Disney). Hardly suitable for a kid so instead she made up a bespoke fairy tale about a poor little princess called Courtney who had a wicked mother and was rescued by a very good stepmother. She threw in a lot of mythic paraphernalia – spinning wheels and dwarves – and by the time the glass slipper was being tried for size on Princess Courtney’s little foot, the kid was asleep.
Tracy kissed her tentatively on the cheek. The kid smelled of soap and new cotton. Tracy didn’t remember ever kissing a child before and a small, primitive part of her felt as if she had trespassed, broken some natural law. She half expected something momentous to happen – for the sky to crack open like an egg or an angel to appear – and when neither of these things occurred Tracy breathed a sigh of relief. She felt as if she’d achieved something, although she wasn’t sure what.
When she came back downstairs the answer machine was blinking even though she hadn’t heard the phone ringing. She played the message back, worried that it might be announcing her downfall.
She was relieved that it was only Linda Pallister, although why Linda should be getting in touch out of the blue was a puzzle. There was something spooky about the way Tracy had been thinking about contacting Linda and now Linda was contacting her. When had Linda Pallister ever phoned her at home? Never, as far as Tracy could remember. Her message was even more puzzling.
Carol Braithwaite? Tracy puzzled. After all these years? Linda Pallister was phoning her about
The past was the past, Tracy counselled herself, and the past was dead or lost but the present was alive and well and asleep in the back bedroom. On the other hand… if she returned Linda’s call she could casually slip something into the conversation,
She retrieved a can of Beck’s from the fridge. She popped the top and dialled her former colleague Barry Crawford’s number. He sounded tetchy but then that was his default mode.
‘Just wondered if you’d run into Kelly Cross recently, Barry?’
‘What, the original good-time girl? Nah, I’m too far up the food chain to come across a bottom-feeder like her. Why? Missing the streets, are you?’
‘No, no, it’s nothing. There’ve been no kids reported going astray, have there?’
‘Kids? I can ask about. I don’t know if you’re too ga-ga to remember but you retired a few months back.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
Barry called her back almost straight away. Nada, nothing, no chicks fallen out of any nests. She caught the sound of a siren in the background, lots of semi-audible police chatter. Bloody hell but she missed it. ‘Where are you?’
‘In the incident van. Dead woman in a skip in Mabgate,’ Barry said. ‘Working girl.’
‘We’re all working girls, Barry. What are you doing there?’
‘Just having a shufti. I happened to be on call and caught it.’
‘Who’s the SIO?’
‘I’ve put Andy Miller on it,’ Barry said. ‘New to you. Fast-track graduate. Very shiny.’ Nothing shiny about Barry at all.
‘Gemma Holroyd. She made inspector a couple of months ago. Why don’t you make her the SIO? It would be her first.’
‘A virgin, no thanks.’
‘She’s good and she’s not a girl, Barry. They’re called women.’
‘Thought she was a lezzy?’
‘Yeah, they’re women too.’ Why even bother? Barry was as unreconstructed as they got and was going to retire and die that way, completely out of step with the way things were these days. You could have popped him back into the seventies and he would have fitted in perfectly. Gene Hunt without the charisma, Jack Regan without the hard moral centre.
‘So, who are you thinking for it?’ Tracy asked. ‘A punter, I presume?’
‘Who else?’ Barry probably thought prostitutes had it coming to them. In fact she knew he did. ‘Whores,’ Barry always said, couldn’t get him out of the habit no matter what you said to him. (‘Political correctness? About whores? Do me a favour.’)
Tracy had a sudden, unexpected memory of the endless, thankless task of indexing cards during the Ripper investigation. The police had people out taking down registrations of cars in the red-light district, spotting ones that turned up regularly, triple sightings in Bradford, Leeds and Manchester. Sutcliffe was one of those, of course – interviewed nine times, exonerated. So many mistakes. Tracy was still naïve, no idea how many men used prostitutes, thousands from all walks of life. She could hardly believe it. Gambling, drinking, whoring – the three pillars of western civilization.
Tracy could still remember the first time she saw a prostitute. She was twelve years old, in Leeds town centre on a Saturday with a schoolfriend, Pauline Barratt. A burger in Wimpy was the height of sophistication for them and the surreptitious application of Miners eyeliner in the toilets in Schofields felt downright audacious. They got into a matinee of
She was the least attractive woman Tracy had ever seen, deepening even further the mystery of what boys wanted from girls. If she thought about her mother, repressed and conventional, or her own unprepossessing twelve-year-old self, Tracy understood that there was no competition with the green-eyed woman of the night.
‘I won’t miss all this,’ Barry said. ‘Standing around in the cold looking at dead whores.’
‘Standing around? I thought you were in the incident van.’
Barry sighed heavily and said, apropos of nothing as far as Tracy could tell, ‘It’s a different world now, Trace.’
‘Yeah. It’s a better one, Barry. What’s going on, suffering from existential dread for the first time in your life?’ Probably the wrong thing to say to a man who’d lost a grandson, whose daughter was a vegetable. (‘Persistent vegetative state,’ Barbara corrected.) Some mornings Tracy woke up, especially if she’d been on the Beck’s, and wondered if she was in a persistent vegetative state herself. Stagnant.
‘I miss the good old days.’
‘They weren’t good, Barry. They were rubbish.’
‘Two weeks. Going on a cruise. The Caribbean. Barbara’s idea. God knows why. I bet you were glad to get out, weren’t you,Trace?’
‘Is the Pope a Nazi?’ Tracy forced a laugh. ‘Would have got out years ago if I’d known.’ Liar, she thought to herself.
‘You heard about Rex Marshall?’ Barry asked.
‘Dropped dead on the golf course. Good riddance to bad rubbish.’
‘Yes, well, he wasn’t a bad boss,’ Barry said defensively.
‘To you maybe,’ Tracy said.
‘You won’t be going to the funeral on Saturday then?’
‘Not unless you pay me… Barry? There’s something else.’
‘There’s always something else,Trace. And then you die and there’s nothing else. Of course it turns out you don’t even need to be dead for that,’ he said glumly.
‘Linda Pallister left a message on my answer machine,’ Tracy said.
‘Linda Pallister? That mad bat?’ Barry couldn’t stop the snort of laughter that escaped him. The laugh turned into a tremendous sigh of dissatisfaction. Tracy knew how it went for Barry – Linda Pallister made him think of Chloe Pallister, Chloe Pallister made him think of Amy, thinking of Amy pulled him down into a dark place.
‘What about?’ he asked. ‘What was the message about?’
‘She said she was in trouble. She mentioned Carol Braithwaite’s name.’
‘Carol Braithwaite?’ Barry said, as if he’d never heard the name before. Barry was a bad liar, always had been.
‘Yeah, Barry, Carol Braithwaite. The Lovell Park murder. You remember, don’t pretend you don’t.’
‘Oh,
‘I don’t know,’ Tracy said. ‘Linda didn’t say. I tried to phone her back but there was no answer. Has she been in touch with you?’
‘Carol Braithwaite?’
‘No, Barry,’ Tracy said patiently, ‘not unless she’s risen from the grave. Linda
‘No.’
‘Well, if she does, try and find out what she was on about, will you? Maybe she’s going to come clean.’
‘Come clean?’ he said.
‘About what happened to the kid.’
Tracy didn’t know why she was bothering. She had bigger fish to fry. And it was nothing to do with her any more. She was starting a new life.
‘Not if I see you first, you old mare.’
‘I’m on holiday actually, from Friday.’
‘Well, make sure you’re back in time for my leaving do.’
‘What leaving do?’
‘Ha, ha. Piss off.’
Would this day never end? Apparently not.
Just before midnight the phone rang. Who called at this time? Trouble, that was who. A spasm of fear grabbed Tracy ’s heart. She’d been found out, someone wanted the kid back. She thought of that helpless little thing upstairs in the spare bedroom and her heart cramped further.
She took a deep breath and picked up the receiver, let it just be mad-as-a-bag-of-cats Linda Pallister, she prayed. Tracy was relieved that it was just the mystery caller. They listened to each other for a minute or so. The silence was almost soothing.
 |
‘Not if I see you first, you old mare.’ Nearest he could get to affection. What was all that about?
Carol Braithwaite wasn’t a name that Barry had ever expected to hear again and then that mad cow Linda Pallister phoned earlier, babbling on about being in trouble. He hadn’t spoken to her since Sam’s funeral. Chloe had been Amy’s chief bridesmaid. He couldn’t go to that place, couldn’t think about that day, walking her down the aisle. He shouldn’t have given her away, he should have kept her. Safe.
‘Mr Crawford,’ Linda had said, ‘Barry? Do you remember Lovell Park?’
‘No, Linda,’ Barry said. ‘I don’t remember anything.’
‘Someone’s asking questions,’ she said.
‘Someone’s always asking questions,’ Barry said. ‘That’s because there’s never enough answers to go round.’
‘A private detective called Jackson came to see me this morning,’ Linda Pallister said. ‘He was asking questions about Carol Braithwaite. I didn’t know what to say.’
‘I’d keep on keeping my mouth shut if I were you,’ Barry said. ‘You’ve managed it for thirty-five years.’
And now here was Tracy phoning him, asking if Linda had been in touch about Carol Braithwaite. He had lied, of course. What was that, Barry thought, a cock crowing?
Tracy used to bang on about Linda Pallister and Carol Braithwaite, claiming Linda had made the kid ‘disappear’. At the time he’d told her she was talking through her hat. But of course she was right, everyone had known more about Lovell Park than they let on, everyone except Tracy. She’d been like a bloodhound, trying to find out. It was a long time ago. All those blokes, DCS Walter Eastman, Ray Strickland, Rex Marshall, Len Lomax, one law for themselves, one law for everyone else. Eastman long dead and now Rex Marshall had played his last round of golf too, lying in an undertaker’s somewhere with his arteries furred up like old lead pipes. Falling like skittles. Only Strickland and Lomax left. And Barry. Who’d be the last man standing?
Barry should have said something, done something, but at the time one dead prostitute hadn’t seemed very important in the greater scheme of things. When you got older you realized that every single thing counted. Especially the dead.
He turned his collar up against the cold. All the warmth of the day had disappeared. Why didn’t men his age wear hats any more? When did that stop? His father used to wear a flat cap. Tweed. He quite fancied one himself but Barbara wouldn’t allow it. She controlled his wardrobe. He would rather be out here in the cold looking at the body of a dead whore in a skip than at home with his wife. Barbara would be sitting on the sofa, all prim and proper, not a hair out of place, watching some shit on the telly, quietly seething beneath the make-up. She’d spent thirty years trying to change him, she wasn’t going to give up on the challenge now. It was a woman’s job to try and improve a man. It was a man’s job to resist improvement. That was the way the world worked, always had, always would.
Before, before his grandson died, before Amy, his lovely daughter, was reduced to an empty shell, he hadn’t minded what state his relationship with her was in. It was a traditional, old-fashioned marriage, all the trimmings – he went out to work, Barbara stayed home and nagged. He spent half his life in the doghouse for one domestic misdemeanour or another. Didn’t bother him, he just went down the pub.
After the accident there was no point to anything. All hope gone. But still he shuffled on, one foot in front of the other. Mr Plod the Policeman. Doing his job. Because when he stopped he was going to have to stay at home with Barbara every day. Face up to the futility of everything. Bloody Caribbean cruise, as if that would make things better.
‘Boss?’
‘Yep?’
‘The SOCOs say we can move the body.’
‘Not my case, lad, talk to DI Miller. I’m just an innocent bystander.’
 |
Ten o’clock. A long, lonely night stretched ahead of him.
Jackson thought about phoning Julia, last resort of the insomniac, a woman who abhorred the vacuum of a silence. She could talk anyone to sleep, could give a flock of sheep a run for their money any day, leave a donkey completely legless. Then he remembered how annoyed she had been last time he had called her late at night (‘I have to be on set at six. Is this important?’) and he decided not to risk her indignation.
Boredom drove him to read the folder of hotel information from cover to cover, the fire escape plans on the back of the door, a copy of
He came back from the dead after ten minutes, a Lazarus licked to life by a canine redeemer. The dog looked worried. Could a dog look worried? Jackson yawned. The dog yawned. There had to be more to life than this. He folded the Post-it note and put it in his wallet in case he pitched up dead and the people who found him doubted his true worth.
‘Well, the sun’s long past the yardarm,’ he said. ‘Time to raid the minibar.’ Did he used to speak out loud? Before he had the dog? He was pretty sure that he hadn’t.
He drank down a doll’s house-sized bottle of whisky and chased it with another. Leeds was famed for its nightlife, Jackson thought, why not go out and sample some of it? Just because he was in his golden years didn’t mean he couldn’t kick up his heels a little, make contact with his inner shining silver youth. Better surely than sitting in a hotel room, talking to a dog.
His sister used to go dancing in Leeds on Saturday nights with her friends. He could still conjure up Saturday evenings – Francis bolting his tea so he could get out and drink and pick up girls and Niamh in a cloud of hairspray and perfume, fretting about missing the bus. She always came home on the last bus. Until the day she never came home at all.
Later, before Peter Sutcliffe was caught and confessed, when he was still the nameless Ripper and had a large back catalogue of murders to his name, Jackson sometimes wondered if it wasn’t possible that Niamh had fallen within his evil ken. His first victim wasn’t until 1975 but he had started attacking women before that, as early as 1969 he had been found with a hammer and charged with ‘going equipped for stealing’ and only with hindsight could you see what the hammer was for. Manchester, Keighley, Huddersfield, Halifax, Leeds, Bradford his hunting ground, only a short drive from Jackson ’s home town. Niamh was strangled, Sutcliffe’s victims were hit on the head and then stabbed as a rule. But who knew what mistakes a man committed when he was still new to the job.
Why did men kill women? After all these years Jackson still didn’t know the answer to that question. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to.
He had a quick shower and attempted to spruce himself up before taking the dog out to perform its evening toilette, going through the whole palaver with the rucksack again. He wondered about buying something smaller, a terrier-sized bag, he was pretty sure that Paws for Thought would sell them. He had tried zipping the dog inside his jacket but it made him look as if he was pregnant. Never a good look. Not on a man anyway.
Jackson felt bad about the steaming brown coil the dog left behind and he had to retrieve an old newspaper from a bin to wrap it in. This was not a problem he had considered before, now he realized that he would have to buy something to pick up crap with. It was the first real drawback he’d encountered to having the dog.
He took the dog back to the room and left it lying Sphinx-like on the bed, watching him sadly. He felt its tragic abandoned eyes on him all the way down in the lift, through reception, and into the street. Perhaps he should have left the television on for it.
When he hit the street he realized that he was starving. He’d had nothing since a coffee and sandwich in the café at Kirkstall Abbey much earlier in the day. He went in search of food and ended up in an Italian restaurant that felt like a garden centre where he drank a half-carafe of Chianti and ate an indifferent bowl of pasta before heading off to look for the bright lights. After that it was all a bit of a blur. Unfortunately.
 |
She woke in the dark, no idea how long she’d been asleep. Thought she was back at home in her own bed. Took her a long time to remember she was in Bluebell Cottage. Tilly missed the noise of London, she needed it to sleep. It was dark here. Too dark. Dark and quiet. Unnatural.
Tilly sat up in bed and listened but the silence was profound. Sometimes when she listened in the middle of the night she could hear all kinds of tiny rustlings and squeaks and squeals as if mysterious wildlife was cavorting around the cottage. She was occasionally woken by a dreadful high-pitched keening which she suspected was some small creature having its life snuffed out by a fox. She always imagined foxes dressed in checked waistcoats and breeches, a hat with a feather. A legacy, she supposed, of some book from her childhood. As a child she had seen a diorama somewhere of stuffed rabbits dressed up as humans. Does in frocks and pelisses, bucks dressed like dandies and squires, a musical quartet, complete with miniature instruments. Rabbits posing as servants in mob caps, in aprons. A heartbreaking row of tiny baby rabbits tucked up in bed, fast asleep for ever. It was repellent and fascinating at the same time and it haunted Tilly’s imagination for years afterwards.
But tonight there were no rabbit hoedowns or mice quadrilles, cunning Mr Fox wasn’t seducing the henhouse, there was just a silence so deep and dark that it was like the sounds of a different dimension rather than the absence of noise.
Tilly clambered awkwardly out of bed, went over to the open window. When she drew back the curtains she was surprised to see a candle burning steadily in a bedroom window in the cottage across the way.
And then an invisible hand lifted the candlestick and moved it away from the window. Shadows flared and loomed on the wall and then the room fell back into darkness.
Suddenly she was awake again. She had been running after a little girl, running and running, down endless corridors, up and down staircases, but she couldn’t catch up with her. And then
 |
Tracy retrieved the Viennese truffles from her bag. It was in another life that she had bought them in Thornton ’s. A different life. Before Courtney. BC.
She switched on the TV. The truffles had melted and fused together. Tasted the same though, if you didn’t look at them.
If Carol Braithwaite’s life hadn’t been interrupted so abruptly she might be sitting down on her sofa now, feet up, glass and fag in hand, searching through six hundred channels and finding nothing worth watching. In the intervening years she probably wouldn’t have lived a life of much consequence but then who did? But she was long gone. You would think she had disappeared for ever but her name remained, it seemed. The cupboard door was open, the box was off the shelf, the lid was up. Why did Linda Pallister want to talk to her about Carol Braithwaite?
Linda had worked in Child Services all her life, she must have seen the worst that people could offer. Tracy had seen the worst and then some. She felt soiled by everything she had witnessed. Filth, pure and simple. Massage parlours and lap-dancing clubs at the soft end and at the other end the hardcore DVDs of people doing repugnant things to each other. The unclassified stuff that scrambled your synapses with its depravity. The young girls trading their souls along with their bodies, the bargain-basement brothels and saunas, sleaziness beyond belief, girls on crack who would do anything for a tenner. Anything. Arresting girls for soliciting and seeing them go straight back on the streets; foreign girls who thought they were coming to work as waitresses and nannies and found themselves locked in sordid rooms, servicing one man after another all day; students working in ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ (ha!) to pay their fees. Free speech, liberal do-gooders, the rights of the individual –
No end to evil really. What could you do? You could start with one small kid.
 |
A black-tie dinner-dance in the Metropole. It was in aid of some charity for kiddies – the sick or the deaf or the blind. Ray Strickland hadn’t taken much notice, just knew it was expensive. ‘Charity begins at home,’ his wife, Margaret, said. Ray wasn’t entirely sure he knew what that meant. His wife was a kind person. ‘Daughter of the manse,’ she said. ‘I was brought up to believe that you have a duty to help the less fortunate.’ ‘That would be me then,’ Ray joked.
Margaret was from Aberdeen originally. They had met one night ten years ago, in the A and E, when Ray was still in uniform, interviewing a drunk who’d been in a fight. She had come down to do her nurse’s training at St James’s, wanting ‘to see England ’. Ray told her that there was more to England than Leeds although at the time he hadn’t been further afield than Manchester. Before she met him Margaret had had plans to become a missionary in some farflung dark corner of the world. Then they became engaged and that was it, he became her mission, her own dark corner of the world.
When they were courting, he used to meet her off her shift and they would pop across the road to the old Cemetery Tavern and have a drink. Long time now since that was pulled down. Half of Tetley’s mild for Ray, lemonade shandy for Margaret, daring for her at the time – she’d been raised in abstinence. So had Ray, of course, a West Yorkshire Wesleyan, signed the pledge and everything when he was younger. The pledge broken long ago.
In another life Margaret would have been a saint or a martyr. Not in a bad way, not in the way that other men he knew said of their wives, ‘Thinks she’s a bloody saint, she does.’ Or, ‘She’s a martyr to the housework.’ Ray valued her goodness. Hoped in some way it would rub off on him. He came to the end of every day feeling as if he had failed somehow. ‘Don’t be silly,’ Margaret said. ‘You make the world a better place, even if it’s only in a small way.’ Her faith in him was faulty. He lived his life in a state of guilt, every day waiting to be found out. He wasn’t even sure what it was he had done.
He looked around the room for Margaret and couldn’t see her anywhere.
Bigwigs. Magistrates, businessmen, solicitors, councillors, doctors, police, lots of police. The great and the good out in force to say farewell to the old year. The air was soupy – cigars, cigarettes, alcohol, perfume, all mixed with the smell of the remains of the buffet. Seafood cocktail, plates of ham and chicken and curried eggs, potato salad, bowls of trifle. It was making him feel sick. His chief superintendent, Walter Eastman, had been plying him with malts. They were all hard drinkers – Eastman, Rex Marshall, Len Lomax. ‘You’re one of us, lad,’ Eastman said, ‘so ruddy well drink like one of us.’ Ray wasn’t sure who ‘us’ was. Freemasons, police, members of the golf club? Perhaps he just meant men as opposed to women.
‘You’re on the up, Strickland,’ Eastman said. ‘DC now but you’ll be an inspector before you know it.’
Lots of bigwigs here in the room, of course. That was why Ray – selfconscious in the penguin suit that he’d had to hire from Moss Bros – was here. Eastman had persuaded him to buy the tickets. ‘It’ll be good for you, lad, t’rub shoulders with your elders and betters.’ Eastman, he was Eastman’s protégé. ‘That’s good,’ Margaret said. ‘Isn’t it?’
The women were all dressed up to the nines, satin and rhinestones – cajoling husbands and fiancés out on to the dance floor, where they grumbled their way around, doing inept foxtrots and stumbling quicksteps, desperate to get back to their fags and pints. Eastman was proud of his waltz, he was light on his feet for such a heavy bloke. He had insisted on taking Margaret ‘for a turn’ round the dance floor.
‘Your wife’s a nice woman,’ he said.
‘I know.’ Ray followed Eastman’s gaze and caught a glimpse of Margaret at the far side of the room. She was wearing her midnightblue lace and her soft hair was freshly set in concrete curls. She was thirty but the sixties had never happened for her. She looked very demure compared to some of the flesh on show, mutton dressed as lamb. Margaret was the other way round, lamb dressed as mutton. Ray admired modesty in a woman. His mother was his ideal wife but she would never have married someone as movable as Ray. No fixed foot, that was his trouble. ‘Stop doing yourself down, Ray,’ Margaret said, spooning his cold, worried back in the barren acreage of the marriage bed.
She was sitting at a table with Kitty Winfield, their heads close together as if they were sharing secrets. They made an odd pair. Kitty Winfield in black velvet, pearls around her neck, long hair sculpted up into a sophisticated do. The only woman in the room who knew that less was more. Everyone aware she used to be a model. Kitty Gillespie, as she had been in those days. They all presumed she had a racy past, she had dated famous people, she had been in the papers, she was one of the first to wear a miniskirt, but now she was pure class. Women wanted to be her friend, men held her in awe, beyond reproach, almost beyond lust. If Margaret was a saint, Kitty Winfield was a goddess. ‘
Ray knew what bonded Margaret and Kitty Winfield. Fertility. Or lack of it. Kitty Winfield couldn’t conceive a baby, Margaret couldn’t keep one inside. Margaret had endured three miscarriages, one premature stillbirth. Last year the doctors told her that she couldn’t try for any more, something wrong inside her. Sobbing all the way home from the hospital.
She had spent years doing all this knitting, little lacy things in pastel colours. ‘Have to have something on the needles,’ she said. Cupboards full of baby clothes. Sad. Now she knitted for ‘babies in Africa ’. Ray wasn’t sure that African kiddies would appreciate wearing wool but didn’t say anything.
‘We can adopt,’ he had said on that last dreadful car journey home from the hospital. That made her cry even more.
He excused himself to Eastman and made his way round the dance floor to where Margaret and Kitty Winfield were sitting. Tragedy of it was, of course, that Margaret was a nurse on the kiddies’ ward, spent all day with other women’s children. And – an irony this as well – Kitty Winfield’s husband was a kiddy doctor. Paediatrician at St James’s.
Until recently they hadn’t mixed in the same social circles. The Winfields were part of a cocktail crowd, big house in Harrogate. ‘Cosmopolitan,’ Margaret said. ‘Big word,’ Ray said. Now it was all different. Margaret always ‘popping over’ to see Kitty Winfield. ‘She understands what it feels like not to be able to have a baby,’ Margaret said.
‘
‘Do you?’
‘Why don’t we adopt?’ Ray tried again. Margaret was more amenable to the idea this time. A nurse and a policeman, churchgoers, fit as fleas, surely they would be the ideal couple in an adoption agency’s eyes?
‘Maybe,’ Margaret said.
‘Not African kiddies, mind,’ Ray said. ‘No need to go that far.’
Before Christmas they had been invited to a party at the Winfields’ Harrogate house. Margaret had fussed about what to wear, in the end decided on the midnight-blue lace again. ‘For God’s sake,’ Ray said, ‘buy yourself something new.’
‘But this is perfectly good,’ she said, so he was surprised when she came downstairs wearing a black sleeveless dress. ‘Little black dress,’ she said. ‘Kitty gave it to me. We’re the same size.’ You would never have thought that to look at them, not in a million years.
‘Do I look all right?’ she asked doubtfully. He’d never seen her wearing anything that suited her less than Kitty Winfield’s cocktail dress.
‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘You look lovely.’
Ray felt out of his depth with the Winfields. Ian Winfield was all jovial friendship, ‘Detective Constable, come to arrest us?’ he said when he opened his holly-wreathed front door, full glass in hand.
‘Why? Up to something, are you?’ Ray said. Hardly witty repartee, was it? Kitty Winfield had caught him beneath the mistletoe in the hallway and he had felt himself blush when she kissed him. It was delicate, on the cheek, not like some of the women when it felt like you were being snogged by a salmon, all lips and tongues – any opportunity to get their hands on a man who wasn’t their husband. Kitty Winfield smelled like Ray imagined French women smelled. And she was drinking champagne. Ray had never met anyone who drank champagne. ‘Won’t you have a glass?’ she said, but he nursed a small whisky all evening. The Winfields’ Harrogate house wasn’t the kind of venue where you got drunk and disorderly. Margaret liked a Dubonnet and gin these days. ‘Just a small one.’
The band in the Metropole finished up a clumsily danced cha-cha and a singer came on, looked like he’d been left over from the war. If they weren’t careful he’d start on ‘Danny Boy’ but he surprised Ray by launching into ‘Seasons in the Sun’, leading to some rebellion on the dance floor. ‘Give us something bloody cheerful,’ Len Lomax muttered. Detective Sergeant Len Lomax, a womanizing hard drinker. A rugby player. A bastard. Ray’s friend. His wife, Alma, was a hard-nosed bitch, worked as a buyer for a clothes factory. No kids, by choice, liked their ‘lifestyle’ too much. Alma was the only person Ray could think of that Margaret disliked. If Ray thought about his own ‘lifestyle’ (whatever that was) he felt an iron band tighten around his forehead.
‘Ray!’ Kitty Winfield said when he advanced upon her and Margaret. She smiled at him as if he were a camera. ‘I’m sorry, I’m monopolizing your wife.’
‘No, you’re all right,’ Ray said awkwardly. He lit her cigarette for her, she was close enough for him to smell that French perfume again. Wondered what it was. Margaret smelled of nothing more than soap.
They had been on the same table, the Winfields, the Eastmans, Len and Alma Lomax and some councillor called Hargreaves who was on the transport committee. Len Lomax had leaned across Margaret and in an undertone had said to Ray, ‘You know that the woman with Hargreaves isn’t his wife?’ Margaret made a point of pretending he was invisible. The woman in question – more grey than scarlet – was self-consciously staring at her empty plate.
‘He’s very rude, your friend,’ Kitty Winfield said reprovingly to Ray, inhaling deeply on her cigarette. ‘I felt for that poor woman. So what if they’re not married? It’s 1975 for heaven’s sake, not the Dark Ages.’
‘Well, technically it’s still 1974,’ Ray said, looking at his watch. Oh God, Ray, he thought to himself. Lighten up. Kitty Winfield made him into a dullard.
Everything a mess now at the table, the cloth stained with food and wine, dirty plates that the waitresses were still clearing. A lone pink prawn curled like an embryo on the cloth. It turned his stomach again.
‘Are you all right?’ Margaret asked. ‘You look pale.’
‘Call a doctor,’ Kitty Winfield laughed. ‘You haven’t seen him, have you?’ she asked Ray.
‘Who?’ He had no idea what she was talking about.
‘My husband. I haven’t seen him for yonks. I think I’ll go looksee. You two should dance,’ she said, rising gracefully from the ruins of the table.
‘Should we?’ Margaret said when Kitty Winfield had disappeared into the mêlée. ‘Dance?’
‘I’m feeling a bit queasy, to be honest,’ he admitted. ‘Too much of the old firewater.’
Then Eastman came over again and said, ‘Ray, there’s some people I want to introduce you to.’ Turning to Margaret, he said, ‘You don’t mind if I borrow your husband, do you?’ and she said, ‘As long as you bring him back in one piece.’
He went to the Gents and then got lost in a corridor somewhere. He hadn’t realized how drunk he was. He kept bouncing off the walls as if he was in a ship ploughing a choppy sea. He had to stop a couple of times and lean on the wall, once he found himself slumped on the floor, just trying to concentrate on breathing. Buzzing, everything buzzing, he wondered if someone had slipped him a Mickey Finn. Waiting staff going up and down the corridor ignored him. When he finally got back to the ballroom Margaret grabbed hold of him and said, ‘There you are, I thought you’d been kidnapped. You’re just in time for the bells.’
The singer from earlier was counting down, ‘… five, four, three, two, one – Happy New Year, everyone!’The room erupted. Margaret kissed and hugged him and said, ‘Happy New Year, Ray.’ The band broke into ‘Auld Lang Syne’, no one knew the words beyond the first two lines, except for Margaret and a couple of drunk, mouthy Scots. Then Eastman and some of his pals came over and pumped his hand up and down.
‘Here’s to 1975,’ Rex Marshall said. ‘May all your troubles be little ones,’ and out of the corner of his eye Ray caught Margaret flinching. Stupid bugger.
The men all kissed Margaret and he could see her trying not to shrink away from their stinking breath. The Winfields reappeared, Kitty had managed to find her husband apparently, although he looked even more the worse for wear than Ray felt. There was more shaking of hands and kissing, Kitty offering her lovely pale cheek in a way that made them all want to behave better. But not for long.
‘Gentlemen, to the bar!’ Len Lomax shouted, holding his arm out in front of him as if he were about to lead them in the charge of the Light Brigade.
Both Ray and Ian Winfield demurred but Kitty Winfield laughed and said, ‘Oh, shoo, go on, shoo,’ pushing her husband away. She hooked her arm through Margaret’s and said, ‘Come on, Maggie, these men are here for the duration. I’m calling a taxi, I’ll give you a lift.’
‘Good idea,’ Margaret said affably. ‘You have a good time,’ she said to Ray, patting him affectionately on the cheek.
‘Boys will be boys,’ he heard Kitty Winfield murmur as the two women walked away.
Men didn’t deserve women.
‘We don’t deserve them,’ he said to Ian Winfield as they rolled their way to the bar.
‘Oh God, no,’ he said. ‘They’re far superior to us. Wouldn’t want to be one though.’
Ray had to dodge and weave his way back to the Gents where he threw up every last bit of prawn, chicken and trifle. Eastman came bustling in like a man in a hurry and took up a stance at a urinal. He unzipped himself in an expansive manner as if he was about to release something that would be admired.
‘Pissing like a horse,’ he said proudly. He zipped up again, ignored sink, soap and water and, patting Ray on the back, said, ‘Good to go again, lad?’
God knows how much later. 1975 already eaten into, lost time never to be found again. Back in the Gents, leaning against a stall, trying to remain conscious. Wondered if he was going to end up in the hospital with alcoholic poisoning. He imagined how disappointed his mother would be if she could see him now.
Somehow he found himself in the kitchen. The kitchen staff were having their own kind of celebration. They were all foreign, he could hear Spanish, he’d taken Margaret to Benidorm last year. They hadn’t liked it much.
A man in chef’s whites set fire to a bowl of alcohol and the whole bowl became one great blue flame, ethereal, like a sacrifice to ancient gods. Then the man took a ladle and started lifting it from the bowl, leaving a trail of blue flame behind. He kept doing it again and again, higher and higher. It was hypnotic. Stairway to heaven.
He’d fallen. He’d had an affair with a girl in clerical – Anthea, a snappy modern sort, always going on about women’s rights. She knew her own mind, he would give her that. She didn’t really want anything from him but sex and it was a relief to be with someone who wasn’t in permanent mourning for an empty womb. ‘Fun,’ she said, ‘life’s supposed to be fun, Ray.’ He’d never thought of life like that before.
They went at it anywhere and everywhere, cars, woods, back alleys, the thin-walled bedroom in the flat she shared with a friend. It had nothing in common with what he and Margaret did in bed, where he always felt he was imposing an indignity on her and she was trying to pretend he wasn’t. Anthea did things that Ray had never even heard of. It was certainly an education. Len Lomax covered for him all the time. Lying came to Len as easily as breathing. The education was over now, Anthea said she didn’t believe in long-term relationships, was worried that he would ‘become emotionally dependent’ on her. Part of him was relieved beyond measure, he’d lived in terror that Margaret would find out, but another part of him ached for the simplicity of it all. ‘Ah, the uncomplicated fuck,’ Len said appreciatively. ‘Right,’ Ray said, although he hated the crudity of such a word being applied to his own life. ‘You’re an old woman, really, Ray,’ Len laughed.
Ray thought maybe he’d passed out on his feet because the next moment the kitchen staff were all fighting, yelling God knows what at each other. One of them threw a huge cooking pot across the kitchen that made a terrific clatter when it landed.
Staggered out, back into the bar. Bumped into Rex Marshall. ‘Fucking hell, Strickland,’ Marshall said, ‘you look far gone. Have a drink.’
If he put a match to himself he would catch fire. Burn with a blue flame. He put his head down on the bar. He wondered where Len Lomax was.
‘Have to go home,’ he whispered when Walter Eastman came over to him. ‘Before I die. Get me a taxi, will you?’ Eastman said, ‘Don’t waste money on a fucking taxi. Call the police!’ Raucous laughter from the bar. Eastman used the phone on the bar top to make a call and some time later – it could have been ten minutes, it could have been ten years, Ray had no relationship to the normal world any more – a young constable entered the bar and said, ‘Sir?’ to Eastman.
Those were the days.
 |
‘What are
‘Chauffeur for the night,’ Barry Crawford said. ‘Eastman asked me to pick up a legless DC, take him home.’
‘You’re a real brown-nose.’
‘Yeah, well, beats staying in with me mam and watching New Year crap on TV.’ He was leaning casually on the car, smoking. It was freezing out here. She should have put a thermal vest on. Every time someone came out of the Metropole they brought a wash of noise and light out with them. ‘It’s like a Roman orgy in there,’ Barry said.
‘You think?’ Tracy wondered what Barry knew about either Romans or orgies. Precious little, she suspected. They’d been through police training college together and from that she’d gathered that he was both ambitious and lazy so he would probably do well. He ‘fancied’ a girl called Barbara, a nippy girl who teased her hair into a big old-fashioned beehive and worked on a cosmetics counter in Schofields, but he was too scared to ask her out.
‘What about you?’ Barry said to Tracy.
‘On shift. Obviously,’ she said, indicating her uniform. ‘Been called to a disturbance. Some kind of brawl in the kitchen. I think they just found out they weren’t getting overtime for working after midnight or something.’ How had Barry got his hands on a panda car? Tracy had applied to do the driver’s course and heard nothing.
‘You on your own?’ he asked her.
‘I’m with Ken Arkwright. He’s off to the toilets. Who’s this DC you’re driving then?’
‘Strickland.’
‘Speak of the devil, Barry, here comes your fare for the night. Jesus, look at the state of him. You’re going to be spending the first day of 1975 cleaning up vomit.’ Ray Strickland was being manhandled out of the Metropole, supported by a couple of burly CID blokes.
‘Fuck off,’ Barry said amiably to Tracy, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out with his foot.
Ken Arkwright shambled up. ‘Ey up,’ he said to Tracy, ‘Third World War’s breaking out in there. These Mediterranean types, they don’t half know how to get worked up. We’d better get in there and call a truce before they kill each other.’
‘Well,’ Tracy said to Barry, ‘you carry on being a taxi service, Barry, and we’ll get on with some real policing.’
‘Sod off.’
‘Same to you,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Happy New Year.’
‘Yes, Happy New Year, lad,’ Arkwright said.
When Tracy looked back over her shoulder she saw DCS Eastman lean in to the driver’s window and heard him give Strickland’s address to Barry. Then he slipped him something else, Tracy couldn’t see what, money or drink probably.
‘What a twat,’ Arkwright said.
‘Barry Crawford?’
‘No. Ray Strickland.’
‘Home then, boss?’ Barry said.
‘No,’ Ray said.
‘No?’
‘No.’ Strickland leaned forward and slurred an address in Lovell Park and Barry said, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’ Strickland fell back against the seat and closed his eyes.
When they arrived in Lovell Park he almost fell out of the car. Barry watched him weave his way unsteadily towards the front doors. You had to hope for the poor bastard’s sake that the lifts were working.
Halfway there, Strickland turned and held a half-bottle of Scotch aloft as if in triumph. ‘Happy New Year!’ he shouted. He stumbled on another few yards and then turned again and shouted, louder this time, ‘What was your name?’
‘Crawford,’ Barry shouted back. ‘PC Barry Crawford. Happy New Year, sir.’
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