"Started Early, Took My Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atkinson Kate)
Jeopardy
Tracy was woken by a cry, an inchoate sound in the dark. Half comatose, she thought it was the foxes who visited the garden most nights and who made mating sound like murder. She heard the cry again and it took several seconds before she remembered that she was not alone in the house.
Courtney!
Clambering out of bed, she stumbled drowsily to the spare bedroom where she found the kid sound asleep on her back, breathing heavily, her mouth slack. As Tracy turned to go Courtney cried out again, a cawing noise that seemed to indicate distress. She flailed an arm suddenly as if she was trying to ward off an attack but the next second she was so deeply asleep that she could have been a corpse. Tracy felt compelled to give her a little poke and was relieved when she twitched, making a whimpering noise, like a dog dreaming.
Tracy sat on the bed, waiting to see if the kid was going to wake again. No wonder Courtney’s sleep was disturbed – she didn’t know where she was, who she was with. Tracy felt a pang of guilt at having subtracted her from her natural habitat, but then she recalled the murderous expression on Kelly Cross’s face as she dragged Courtney through the Merrion Centre. Tracy had seen enough bashed-up, beat-up kids that social workers had kept in families you wouldn’t give a dog to. Families weren’t always such great places to be, especially for kids.
She must have fallen asleep because the next time she woke up Tracy found herself sprawled uncomfortably across the foot of the narrow bed while daylight washed the ugly woodchip. Of Courtney, there was no sign and Tracy experienced an unexpected moment of panic as if a giant hand had clutched at her heart. Perhaps the kid’s rightful mother had appeared under the cloak of night and stolen her back. Or perhaps a stranger had climbed in through the window and spirited her away. Although what were the odds against a kid being abducted twice in twenty-four hours? Probably not as long as you imagined.
When a bleary-eyed Tracy blundered into the kitchen, however, she found the kid sitting at the table spooning her way stoically through a bowl of dry cereal.
‘You’re here,’ Tracy said.
Courtney glanced at her briefly. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘I am here.’ She returned to spooning in cereal.
‘Do you want milk with that?’ Tracy said, pointing at the cereal bowl. The kid nodded extravagantly and kept on nodding until Tracy advised her to stop.
Tracy wasn’t sure which was more disturbing, losing the kid or finding her.
Tracy had slept in a washed-out Winnie-the-Pooh nightshirt from British Home Stores that barely reached the top of her thunderous thighs and her hair was sticking out in all the wrong places. She had hastily pulled on a pair of old tracksuit bottoms to complete the ensemble. She looked dismal, probably not a million miles from how Kelly Cross looked first thing in the morning, just a lot bigger. Still, she could have been wearing a bin-liner and Courtney wouldn’t have noticed. Kids weren’t interested in what you were like on the outside. There was something definitely cheering about being with a small, non-judgemental person.
Courtney, on the other hand, had made more of an effort, dressing herself from a selection of yesterday’s new clothes. Some of them were on backwards but she had got the general idea right. Tracy ’s efforts at hairdressing the previous evening weren’t entirely successful. In the cruel light of day the kid looked hand-made. She had finished her cereal and was staring, Oliver Twist-like, at the empty bowl.
‘Toast?’ Tracy offered. The kid gave her a thumbs-up.
Tracy cut the toast into triangles and arranged them on the plate. If it had just been for her she would have slapped a doorstep on to a piece of kitchen roll and been done with it. It was different having someone to do things for. Made you more careful. ‘Mindful’, a Buddhist would have said. She only knew that because a long time ago she had dated a Buddhist for a few weeks. He was a wimpy bloke from Wrexham who ran a second-hand bookshop. She was hoping for enlightenment, ended up with glandular fever. Put her off spirituality for life.
Tracy parked Courtney on the sofa in front of the television, where she sat mesmerized by a noisily incomprehensible cartoon, weird and Japanese. Obviously the kid should be doing something more mentally stimulating – playing with Lego or learning the alphabet or whatever it was that four-, maybe three-year-olds were supposed to do.
Tracy switched on her laptop and waited for it to get up a head of steam before beginning to scroll through the wares being offered by several estate agents. Everything nice in a pleasant location – the Dales, the Lakes – cost more than twice as much as she would get for her house in Leeds. Abroad seemed a better option for all kinds of reasons. They could lose themselves in rural France or hectic urban Barcelona, somewhere where no one would think twice about their relocation.
Spain, you couldn’t give away property in Spain these days, Brits leaving in droves. Bring the kid up in the sun. Costa del Gangster. Enough career criminals did it, why not the people who’d failed to catch them?
When the cartoon finished Tracy switched over to GMTV, looking for the news. Nothing on the national or the local, still nobody missing a kid. You would notice straight away if you lost one. (Wouldn’t you?) Kelly Cross was Courtney’s mother. Had to be. No doubt about it. None at all.
They had another day to kill until Tracy could get the key to the holiday place. She wondered what they should do. There was a kids’ film showing at the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley. Or there was a Wacky Warehouse in Leeds – a play area attached to a pub, the ultimate dream of the Useless Parenting classes, and she had often passed something called Diggerland near Castleford where, apparently, kids got to drive construction machinery. Bob the Builder had a lot to answer for.
Tracy fired off an email to Leslie at the Merrion Centre (not Grant, a police cadet reject. Somewhere there was a village missing an idiot) saying that she would see them after her holiday and that she wouldn’t be in today, ‘still got a bit of a bug, wouldn’t want to hand it on to you’. That would surprise them, Tracy was as fit as a butcher’s dog normally. Constitution of an ox. She was a Taurean, born under the sign of the bull. Not that she believed in any of that stuff. Didn’t believe in anything that she couldn’t touch. ‘Ah, an empiricist,’ a man she had met at the singles social club said. He was a prof at the university, full of hot air and cold calculation. Took her to the Grand to see
The following week he took her to see
Courtney turned to look at Tracy and said plaintively, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Again?’
‘Yes.’
The kid was an eater, there was no doubt about that. Maybe she was making up for something.
‘Courtney?’ Tracy said tentatively. ‘You know how you’re called Courtney?’ The kid nodded. She seemed bored, although her expressions tended to be unreadable at the best of times. ‘Well, I was thinking, now that you’ve got a new home -’ she saw Courtney’s eyes skim the anodyne living room – ‘how about a new name to go with that?’ Courtney gazed at her indifferently. Tracy wondered if the kid had been given a new identity before, that Courtney wasn’t even her name. Was that the reason no one was looking for her, were they looking for a completely different kind of kid – a Grace, a Lily, a Poppy? (A Lucy, perhaps.) Something like acid bile rose in Tracy ’s gorge. It came, she supposed, from the well of terror that had opened up in her stomach. What had she done? She closed her eyes in an effort to blank out the guilt – futile – and when she opened them the kid was standing in front of her, looking interested. ‘What name?’ she asked.
She should get some fresh air into the kid, Tracy thought. She looked peaky, as if she’d been grown in a cellar all her life. ‘Come on,’ Tracy said when more toast had been eaten – turned out the kid liked Marmite – ‘why don’t we go out, get some fresh air? I’ll change.’ Courtney looked at her with interest and Tracy added, ‘Into different clothes.’
Tracy slipped into something less comfortable and when she returned to the living room the kid had got down from the table and fetched her pink backpack. She was as biddable as a dog although without a dog’s tail-wagging enthusiasm.
Before they could leave the house they heard a key turning in the front-door lock. Tracy had a mental blank, couldn’t think of any reason why someone would have her front-door key, why anyone would be coming into her house. For a mad moment she thought it might be her anonymous phone caller. For an even madder moment she thought it might be Kelly Cross and did a quick recce of the hallway to see what she could use as a weapon. The door opened.
Janek! Tracy had forgotten all about him.
He looked bemused by her surprise and then he spotted Courtney lingering in the doorway of the kitchen and he smiled in delight.
‘Hello,’ he said. Courtney stared blankly back at him. ‘My niece,’ Tracy said. ‘My sister’s much younger than me,’ she added, embarrassed suddenly by how old she must seem to Janek. Of course he had kids of his own, didn’t he? Poles probably really liked kids. Most foreigners liked kids more than the British did.
‘We’re on our way out,’ she said hastily before she got involved in anything more complicated about the kid’s origins.
‘Help yourself to biscuits,’ she added. What a difference a day made.
 |
He woke up with no idea where he was or how he had got there. That was alcohol for you.
Jackson wasn’t alone. There was a woman lying next to him, her face pressed into the pillow, her features partly hidden by a messedup nest of hair. He never ceased to be amazed by how many round-heeled women there were in the world. In a sudden moment of paranoia he reached over and checked the woman’s breathing and was relieved to find it sour and regular. Her skin had the bruised and waxy look of a corpse but, on inspection, Jackson realized that it was just her make-up from the previous evening, smeared and blotchy. Close up, even in the street-lit gloom of the bedroom, he could see that she was older than he had first thought. Early forties, Jackson reckoned, maybe a little younger. Maybe a little older. She was that kind of woman.
A digital clock by the bed told him it was five thirty. In the morning, he assumed. Winter or summer it was the time he woke at, thanks to his body’s own internal alarm clock, set a long time ago by the army. Up with the lark. Jackson didn’t think that he’d ever seen a lark. Or heard one for that matter.
Dawn was just cracking open the sky. It was good to get a march on the day. Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours. He had a feeling it was Thursday but he wouldn’t have sworn to it.
The nameless woman lying next to him muttered something unintelligible in her sleep. She turned her head and opened her eyes, they had the same blank quality as the dead. When she saw Jackson her eyes came to life a little and she murmured, ‘Christ, I bet I look rough.’
She did look a bit of a dog’s breakfast but Jackson bit down on his unfortunate compulsion for honesty and, smiling, said, ‘Not really.’ Jackson didn’t often smile these days (had he ever?) and it tended to take women by surprise. The woman in the bed (surely she must have told him her name at some point?) squirmed with pleasure and giggled and said, ‘Gonna make me a cuppa tea then, lover boy?’
He said, ‘Go back to sleep. It’s still early.’ Strangely obedient, the woman closed her eyes and within minutes was snoring gently. Jackson suspected that he might be punching below his weight.
He had a memory – vague at first but growing unfortunately clearer now – of dropping into a bar in the town centre, intent on casting off his golden years. He seemed to recollect that he had been looking for a
They were celebrating the divorce of one of their pack. Jackson thought that divorce was possibly an occasion for a wake rather than a knees-up but what did he know, he had a particularly poor track record where marriage was concerned. It surprised him to discover that the women all seemed to be teachers or social workers. Nothing more frightening than a middle-class woman when she lets her hair down. Who were those Greek women who tore men to pieces? Julia would know.
Despite it being midweek, the women were all drinking shooters with ridiculous names – Flaming Lamborghini, Squashed Frog, Red-Headed Slut – and Jackson felt faintly disturbed by the sickly contents of their glasses. God only knew what kind of faces they would have on them when they turned up for work the next morning.
‘I’m Mandy,’ one of the women said brightly.
‘Go on, love – fly her,’ another one said, her throat filthy with years of smoking.
‘This is how it goes,’ Mandy said, ignoring her friend. ‘I say, “My name is Mandy,” and you say…?’
‘ Jackson,’ Jackson said, reluctantly.
‘What’s “ Jackson ”?’ one of them asked.’ A first name or a last name?’
‘Take your pick,’ Jackson said.
He liked to keep conversations simple. There wasn’t much you couldn’t convey with ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Do’ and ‘Don’t’, anything else was pretty much ornamental, although throwing in the occasional ‘please’ could get you a surprisingly long way and ‘thank you’ even further. His first wife had deplored his lack of small talk (‘Jesus, Jackson, would it kill you to have a meaningless conversation?’). This was the same wife who, at the beginning of their courtship, had admired him for being ‘the strong, silent type’.
Perhaps he should have found more words to give Josie. Then she might not have left him, and if she hadn’t left him he wouldn’t have taken up with Julia who drove him to distraction and then he certainly wouldn’t have met the false second wife, Tessa, who had fleeced him and robbed him blind. For want of a nail. ‘Good wife, bad wife,’ Julia said. ‘You know in your heart which one you really prefer, Jackson.’ Did he? Which? No one, not even Tessa, had ever messed with his mind the way Julia did. ‘The Black Widow,’ she said with relish. ‘You were lucky that she didn’t eat you.’
Women were often drawn to Jackson – to begin with, at any rate – but he didn’t set much store by looks any more, either his own or (it seemed) those of the opposite sex, having witnessed too often the havoc wrought by beauty without truth. Although there was a time when, no matter how drunk, he would not have been attracted to someone like the woman he had woken up to this morning. Or perhaps standards simply fell as you grew older. Of course, Jackson, as faithful as a dog at heart, had spent a lot of his adult life in monogamous relationships where these problems had been merely hypothetical.
He had not thought of himself as priapic. Since Tessa he had been in an ascetic, almost monkish place, appreciating the lack of necessity in his life. A Cistercian. And then suddenly all the untaken vows had been broken by a muster of the monstrous regiment.
‘What brings you to this neck of the woods?’ one of the more sober of the coven asked. (‘My name’s Abi, I’m the designated grown-up,’ a fact that seemed to make her bitter.)
Jackson wasn’t big on questions and if faced with a choice he would rather be asking than answering them. Teachers and social workers, he remembered. ‘I don’t suppose any of you know Linda Pallister, by any chance?’ he asked. A couple of the women howled like hyenas. ‘You wouldn’t catch Linda dead in a place like this. She’ll be recycling cats or worshipping trees somewhere.’
‘No, she’s not a pagan, she’s a Christian,’ someone said. This fact seemed to take them to a new level of hilarity.
‘What do you want her for anyway?’ the rather petulant Abi asked.
‘I had an appointment with her this afternoon but she was a no-show.’
‘She’s in adoption counselling. Were you adopted?’ one of them said, reaching out and holding his hand. ‘Poor baby. Were you an orphan? Abandoned? Unwanted? Come to Mummy, pet.’ Another one said, ‘She’s
One of the women moved so close to him that he could feel the heat of her face next to his. She was drunk enough to think that she was being seductive when in a breathy voice she said to him, ‘Would you like a Slippery Nipple?’
‘Or a Blowjob?’ another woman shrieked.
‘They’re having you on,’ yet another one said, sidling close to him, ‘they’re the names of drinks.’
‘To you maybe,’ the first woman laughed.
‘Go on, love, give her a shag,’ someone else said. ‘She’s gagging for it, put her out of her misery.’
What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.
‘You’re scowling,’ Abi said.
‘That’s just the way I look,’ Jackson said.
‘Don’t worry, we don’t bite.’
‘Not yet,’ one of them laughed.
Jackson smiled and the temperature around him went up a degree. The treasure here was clearly Jackson. The atmosphere in the bar was so charged that there was a very real danger that these wild women might simply explode with excitement.
Well, Jackson thought, what happens in Leeds stays in Leeds. Isn’t that what they said?
‘I’m not worried,’ he said. ‘But if you’re buying, ladies, I’ll have a Pernod.’
Time to get the hell out of Dodge. Jackson slipped quietly out of the bed and found his clothes where he must have shucked them on to the floor a few hours earlier. He moved with a certain delicacy. His head felt leaden, as if the weight of it was too much for the fragile stem of his neck. He crept along a narrow hallway and was thankful that he guessed correctly which door led to the bathroom. Treating the house as a recce in hostile territory seemed as sensible an approach as any. It was a better version of the house he had been brought up in, a fact which unnerved him, the way some dreams did.
The bathroom was warm and clean and had matching bath and pedestal mats in strawberry pink. The suite was also pink. Jackson couldn’t remember urinating into a pink toilet before. First time for everything. The bath tiles had flowers on them, the supermarket toiletries were lined up neatly at the end of the bath. Jackson wondered about the woman who lived here and why she would sleep with a complete stranger. He could ask himself the same question, of course, but it seemed less relevant. Two toothbrushes stood in a mug on a shelf above the sink. Jackson considered what that meant.
He washed his hands (he was house-trained, by a line of women that stretched back to the Stone Age) and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He looked about as debauched as he felt. He had fallen. Like Lucifer.
He was desperate for a shower but more desperate to get out of this claustrophobic house. He went downstairs, keeping to the edge of the steep, carpeted staircase where the boards wouldn’t creak so much. The woman lived with someone who had left a bike parked in the hallway. Probably the same person had carelessly tossed a pair of muddy football boots down by the front door. A skateboard was propped up against the wall. The sight of the skateboard (where was the owner?) made Jackson feel depressed.
Somehow he would have preferred it if the second toothbrush had belonged to a partner or a lover rather than a teenage son. He felt suddenly unexpectedly grateful that his first wife had remarried, not because she was (apparently) happy, he didn’t give a toss for her happiness, but because it meant that she wasn’t picking up strange men (like himself) for the night. Strange men who were free to prowl around the house where his daughter was in the throes of an intense and brooding adolescence.
Jackson didn’t breathe until he had shut the front door behind him and stepped out into the misty early morning air. The day looked as though it could go either way and he wasn’t just thinking about the weather.
He set his internal compass to ‘Town Centre’ and jogged back into town at a more sedate pace than normal, hoping to outdistance a heroic hangover. Jackson had recently taken up running again. With any luck, if his knees held up, he planned to keep on running right through his golden years and into his diamond ones.
(‘Why?’ Julia asked. ‘Why running?’
‘Stops the thinking,’ he said cheerfully.
‘That’s a good thing?’
‘Definitely.’)
As a bonus, on his tour of England and Wales he had discovered that running was a good way of seeing a place. You could go from town to countryside before breakfast and move from urban decay to bourgeois suburb without breaking stride. A great way to evaluate the real estate on offer. And no one took any notice of you, you were just the madman out at dawn trying to prove he was still young.
Jackson finally reached the Best Western, where he had fully intended to spend the night rather than in the arms of a stranger. It was a long time since Jackson had had a one-night stand. ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ Hopefully not.
He took the lift up to his floor and thought he might make up some of the sleep he had lost. His appointment with Linda Pallister was at ten o’clock, a stone’s throw from the hotel. Plenty of time for forty winks, a shower and a shave and some breakfast, he thought as he entered the room. A decent cup of coffee. Even an indecent cup would do at this juncture.
He had completely forgotten about the dog.
It was waiting anxiously on the other side of the door as if it was unsure who was going to come through it. When it saw that it wasn’t the erstwhile Colin it went wild with tail-wagging. Jackson dropped to a crouch and indulged its happiness for a minute. He felt bad about leaving the dog locked in solitary all night. If he had taken the dog with him last night perhaps it could have monitored his antics, guarded his morals – a friendly paw on the shoulder at some point, advice to think twice,
He looked around the hotel room to check if any little brown gifts had been deposited and when he found nothing said, ‘Good dog,’ and, although it was possibly the last thing in the world that he wanted to do at that moment, he fetched the lead and said, ‘Come on then,’ and unzipped the rucksack for the dog.
 |
She had done nothing to help that poor mite. Suffer the little children. She thought of the little girl who had been singing her song of innocence, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, in the Merrion Centre and her horrible bully of a mother. Courtney.
Funny how she could remember the name of a child she didn’t know and had trouble recalling what simple everyday objects were called. Kettle. This morning it had taken her ten minutes to dredge up the word ‘kettle’. ‘The thing for boiling water,’ she said helplessly to Saskia. ‘Billabong. Billy. Billy boiled. You know.’
‘Billabong?’ Saskia repeated doubtfully. You could see she had no idea what that was. ‘“Waltzing Matilda”,’ Tilly said. ‘Which is my name, of course. Matilda.’ She sang a few helpful bars, ‘
Tilly frightened the girl. The madness of Lear. Poor Ophelia drifting downstream with a handbag of knives and forks – and – just this morning – a spool of red ribbon and a knitting needle, as if she had wandered through a haberdashery department in her sleep. She had played Ophelia in rep. The actor playing Hamlet had been on the short side. The audience had been restless. Tilly had understood, one expected Hamlet to have a little height.
‘Oh God, no,’ Saskia said, as if Tilly had suggested something distasteful.
Saskia was nothing like Padma, Padma was kind, always asking if she could do anything for Tilly. Sometimes Tilly felt like an invalid the way the girl treated her.
The little ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ girl was mixed up now with all the other poor mites in the world. Some stuffed baby rabbits in there too. Her own lost baby. All conflated into one small, helpless infant howling in the wind. The name of the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ girl had slipped away, she’d had it a minute ago and now… gone, the way of all kettles. Oh, lord.
She had wanted to tell the man who said he used to be a policeman about the ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ girl. Had she said something to the nice girl in the whatever centre? Muckle, mickle, metric, Merrion Centre. She had been so taken up with her own troubles that she had probably said nothing. Evil will prevail when good women do nothing. She still hadn’t found her purse, of course. Julia and Padma had loaned her some money. And even Saskia had given her a fivepound note and said, ‘This’ll tide you over.’ She was sure the girl had a good heart really even though Tilly had heard her complaining to someone on the production team.
She should have stepped in. She imagined herself snatching the child in her arms and running out of the Merrion Centre with her. She could have put her in the car (if she could have remembered how to start it) and driven off to Bluebell Cottage where she would have fed the poor little mite on coddled eggs and some of those nice Beurre d’Anjou pears that Padma had bought for her. Didn’t know how to coddle an egg, of course. Mother used to make them for her in a little china egg-coddler. Pretty thing. Coddle was a lovely word, like cuddle. If Tilly had a little girl to look after she would coddle her. Or a rabbit, a poor little velvety rabbit running from the fox or the gun.
Her thoughts were rudely interrupted by an urgent knocking at the door.
She couldn’t imagine who it could be at this hour. She opened the door cautiously. A young woman who looked familiar was standing there. She was out of breath, her insubstantial bosom heaving. She was wearing an awful lot of make-up. Beneath the make-up Tilly eventually recognized Saskia. She pushed her way rudely into the house, asking, ‘Is Vince here?’ as if her life depended on it.
‘Vince?’ Tilly said. ‘There’s no one here called Vince, dear.’
Tilly supposed that Bluebell Cottage, being a holiday let, had been occupied by lots of different people. Although why Saskia should be looking for any of them she didn’t know. She suddenly noticed the gun in Saskia’s hand. ‘Oh, my dear,’ Tilly said, ‘what on earth are you going to do with that?’
‘Cut!’ someone bellowed.
Cut? Cut what? Tilly wondered.
 |
Tracy decided to stop off at a supermarket to pick up supplies. First she loaded up the trolley with bananas, convenience food for small children. As they trawled the aisles, Tracy ’s mind had been divided between worrying about the security cameras and wondering if Courtney was going to get stuck in the shopping-trolley seat – and what she would do about it if she did – when she saw a familiar face coming towards them.
Barry Crawford’s wife. Barbara. Shit. She would want to know who Courtney was. Of all the supermarkets in all the world…
Barbara Crawford was advancing along the canned-vegetable aisle as if she was walking on pins, treating her shopping trolley like a Silver Cross pram. A zombie in full slap and heels. It didn’t matter what was happening on the inside, Barbara was always rigged out ready for an impromptu invitation to lunch with the Queen. Immaculate nails and make-up. Wool dress, gilt chain-belt, finedenier stockings, her black hair as patent as her shoes. Tracy reckoned if she was grief-stricken she would dress herself in rags, smear coal and mud on her face, let her hair turn into dreadlocks. Each to their own, she supposed. After she married Barry, Barbara spent years as an Avon lady. Ding-dong.
Barbara was wearing a rigid smile on her face that looked as if she’d put it on this morning and would be damned if she would take it off for anyone. She was the kind of wife you were glad to leave at home. The strict rules-and-duties kind, a creature of routine, married to someone whose job was anything but routine. Drove her crazy. Drove Barry to the pubs and the prostitutes. ‘What any man who loved his wife would do,’ he said. ‘Wives for the missionary position, showed you respected them, and whores for the funny stuff.’ All whores wanted was money, Barry ‘explained’ to Tracy. Wives made you pay with your lifeblood. Made Tracy glad she was no one’s wife. Most days she was grateful for her single state, relieved not to be growing old in the company of someone who looked at her indifferently over the toast and marmalade while she wondered what he was really thinking.
Those days were over for Barry now though. Lots of things ended the day little Sam died.
‘Oh shit,’ Tracy muttered as Barbara drew nearer. It was the anniversary any day now, wasn’t it? Two years. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
Courtney looked at her anxiously, her face suddenly pinched. ‘S’all right, sweetheart,’ Tracy said, ‘I just remembered something, that’s all – Barbara! Hello.’ Tracy modified her voice to a more sensitive and compassionate one, suited to the bereaved. ‘How are you?’ Tracy had been with Barry when he took the call, his hand had started to shake so much that he’d dropped the phone. Tracy had picked it up, said, ‘Hello,’ into the receiver, got someone else’s bad news at first hand.
Barry Crawford was born a miserable old git but they rubbed along. Tracy remembered when Amy was born, remembered wetting the baby’s head in a pub full of coppers. Barry a DC by then, Tracy still in uniform. (Of course.) Not long after the Ripper was caught.
‘Women are safe again,’ an inspector said to her over the congratulatory beers and Tracy was so drunk that she had laughed in his face. As if taking one mad, bad bloke off the streets made women safe.
‘To my new daughter,’ Barry said, raising his glass of double malt high to the room in general. Must have been about his sixth that night. ‘Better luck next time,’ some joker at the back of the room said.
When Amy’s own baby, Sam, was born, Amy’s husband, Ivan, was in the delivery room with her, sweating out every minute of the labour. ‘Times have changed,’ Barry said sardonically to Tracy. ‘Now you have to be
‘Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry,’ Tracy said.
‘Eh?’
‘Gloria Steinem. Early feminist.’
‘Heck, Tracy.’
‘Quote of the day on my quote-a-day calendar. Just saying.’
Barry sighed and raised his glass. ‘To my grandson. Sam.’ They were in a pub in Bingley. Birthplace of the Ripper. They should put up a plaque. Ancient history now. There were just the two of them toasting the baby this time, dinosaurs left over from prehistoric times. ‘If you don’t evolve you get left behind,’ Barry said.
‘If you don’t evolve you die,’ Tracy said.
Amy wasn’t christened when she was a baby. ‘We’re not really religious,’ Barry said. They had her christened after the accident though, while she lay on life support. ‘Just in case,’ Barry said. Clutching at straws. Amy came off life support, Sam didn’t. Ivan himself was on another ward, strung up in traction like a fly in a web. Barry and Barbara only went to visit him once, when they had to talk to him about turning off all those nice shiny machines and consigning Sam to eternity.
‘You can’t understand,’ Barbara Crawford had said when Tracy had offered her condolences at the crematorium. ‘You don’t have children, grandchildren. If only it could have been me instead.’
Tracy wondered if her own parents would have been willing to sacrifice themselves to save her. Her mother had lingered on after Tracy ’s father died and in her final days gave the impression that she wasn’t going unless she could take Tracy down with her. Her mother had the DNA of a scorpion, built to outlast a nuclear winter. The cancer got her in the end though. Nobody lasted for ever, not even Dorothy Waterhouse. The diamonds and the cockroaches were free to inherit the earth now she was gone.
Barbara Crawford was right, of course. Tracy had never experienced that feeling. Overwhelming, gut-wrenching, lay-downyour-life kind of love. Except perhaps for that one time before with Carol Braithwaite’s kid in that hellish flat in Lovell Park. And now – with this scrap of a human being sitting in a supermarket trolley. Tracy wasn’t even sure that love was the right word for this feeling, but whatever it was it made you want to weep, whether your kids were alive or dead.
Barbara and Barry’s daughter, Amy, was neither alive nor dead but floating somewhere in between. In a ‘facility’. Tracy wondered how often Barbara visited Amy. Every day? Every week? Did it become less and less frequent as time went on?
Tracy had been to see her once. Could only think of Disney – Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. Seemed a rubbish frame of reference. Tracy wanted to end it for her, do Barry and Barbara the favour they couldn’t do for themselves. Tracy never went back for a second visit. She could still see Amy, dancing with her father on her wedding day, the huge skirt of her white dress crushed against his dark suit, the comedy flower in his buttonhole. Now Amy was suspended for ever, a sleeping fairytale princess without an ending, happy or otherwise. What had Barry said?
Sam was dead though. Torn up in a car crash, the car driven by his own father, Ivan. Nearly three times over the limit, ‘driving like a maniac’, according to a witness. He’d turned out to be Ivan the Terrible, after all. Why had Amy got in the car with him, with a child? No saying, now, too late. Ivan was given a short custodial sentence, judge considered that he had ‘already paid a heavy price for a day he would regret for the rest of his life’. ‘Bollocks,’ Barry said.
Tracy could hardly bear the sight of Barry Crawford walking up the aisle of the church, staggering under the weight of the small white coffin. ‘Heavy,’ he said afterwards to Tracy, ‘for such a little thing inside.’ Red eyes washed with whisky. Poor bugger. Same aisle that he had taken his daughter up a year before. Ivan would be getting out some time soon. Tracy wondered if Barry would kill him as he stepped into the free daylight. Sometimes Tracy wondered about doing it for him, something covert. She was pretty sure she could pull off the perfect murder if she had to. Everyone had a killer inside them just waiting to get out, some more patient than others.
‘How am I?’ Barbara Crawford said as if it was a question that needed serious consideration rather than a polite greeting. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said vaguely, picking up a can of peas and scrutinizing it as if an alien had just handed it to her and told her,
Barbara put the can back on the shelf and wafted her hand in the air as if she was trying to say something but couldn’t think of the words. ‘Well,’ Tracy said, breaking away, ‘good to see you, Barbara. Give my best to Barry.’ She didn’t say,
‘Apparently not,’ Tracy said.
‘Well, anyway,’ she said to Barbara, ‘must be getting along.’
‘Yes,’ Barbara murmured. Her gaze suddenly fixed on Courtney and she recoiled slightly.
‘Babysitting,’ Tracy said, doing a three-point turn with the shopping trolley and accelerating down the dairy aisle, plucking cartons of milk and yoghurts as if cows were about to go out of fashion.
The kid, meanwhile, was quietly demolishing a packet of Jaffa cakes that she had managed to filch from somewhere. ‘Shoplifting’s a crime,’ Tracy said. Courtney offered her the packet. Tracy took two Jaffa cakes and crammed them in her mouth.
‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.
‘You’re welcome,’ Courtney said. Tracy ’s heart plummeted. Where had the kid learned manners? It hardly seemed likely that it was from Kelly Cross.
‘What would you like to do now?’ she asked Courtney. She looked like a kid who never got to make a choice, Tracy thought she’d give her one. Give the kid a choice. Give the kid a chance. Give them all a chance.
 |
Eight o’clock in the evening. Kitty was cold and had gone upstairs to fetch a cardigan. It was draughty, the wind was trying to get in the house through any gap it could.
She had been very young, it was right at the beginning of her career, had been terribly shocked by some of the things he wanted her to do. Never talked to Ian about that part of her life. She shivered. It was chillier in the bedrooms than anywhere else in the house. They kept the radiators off upstairs, Ian thought it was unhealthy to sleep in a warm room. He was always opening the windows wide, Kitty was always closing them. It wasn’t a dispute, just a difference of opinion. After all it wasn’t a subject you could come to a compromise on. A window was either open or closed.
From a drawer she took out a camel-coloured cashmere cardigan that she draped gracefully over her shoulders. Those were the words in her head,
She came down to the capital, to attend a dance academy as a full-time student, fees paid for her by her mother, and had only been there a week when a man came up to her in the street and said, ‘Did anyone tell you that you could be a model?’ She thought it was a joke, or dodgy, her mother had spent a lifetime warning her about men like this, but it turned out to be kosher, he really was a scout for an agency. And overnight she was no longer Kathryn, she was Kitty. They tried to make it one word, like Twiggy, but it never took off.
Her mother had died at the beginning of this year.
Modelling was much easier than dancing. All you needed were good bones and a certain stoic temperament. She was never asked to do anything tacky, no nudity. Lots of lovely black-and-white portraits by famous photographers. Big fashion shoots, all the magazines, and once on the cover of
It had all been over by ’69. She met Ian and decided to forgo the bright lights for security. For steadfastness. She could honestly say, hand on heart, that she had never regretted the decision.
She had wanted to be a film star, of course, but, let’s face it, she couldn’t act for toffee.
The rock star laughed and said to her, ‘Don’t give up the day job, darling.’ They slept together once, it was almost expected.
She made the film the year after she left the writer. She was under his spell for nearly two years, it was rather like being held hostage. They were the years when she should have been larking around with her friends, enjoying all the things a girl of her age would normally enjoy. Instead she was pouring his drinks and nursing his ego and having to read his tedious manuscripts. People thought it was glamorous and grown-up but it wasn’t. It was like being a nanny who occasionally had to perform sordid sex acts. He was nearly twenty years older than she was, used to get annoyed that most of the time she had no idea what he was talking about.
Kitty sat down at her dressing-table mirror and took a cigarette out of her silver case. It was engraved with her initials and inside the lid there was another engraving, a birthday message from Ian:
How much better it was now to be a lovely doctor’s wife and live in a lovely house in lovely Harrogate and look in your bedroom mirror and see your lovely white neck, lovely, lovely pearls glowing against your skin.
She stubbed out her cigarette, freshened her lipstick, sprayed a little shot of Shalimar on the delicate, veiny skin on the inside of her wrists. The faintest scars, thready bracelets like white cotton where she had tried to slice through them, a long time ago now.
Ian was downstairs reading a medical journal, listening to Tchaikovsky. Soon he would go into the kitchen and make them both a cup of something milky. ‘We’re a real old Darby and Joan,’ he laughed.
Such a great emptiness inside where a baby should be. ‘You can never conceive,’ a consultant obstetrician had told her in London, not long before she and Ian had married. Ian was at Great Ormond Street in those days, Kitty had met him in Fortnum and Mason’s. He was buying chocolates for his mother’s birthday, she was sheltering from the rain and he had invited her to have tea and scones in the Fountain restaurant and she thought, why not?
‘Do you want me to have a chat with your fiancé?’ the obstetrician asked. ‘He’s a medical man, isn’t he? Or shall I leave it up to you?’ They were speaking a polite code. Did she want him to explain to Ian how ‘a medical procedure she had undergone when younger had resulted in her being unable to conceive a baby’? But Ian, a doctor, would want to know more and he was sure to understand what that ‘medical procedure’ had been.
After she left the writer, after she threw the obscene cigarette lighter in the Thames, she had realized that she was pregnant. She ignored it, thinking it might go away, but it didn’t. She knew the writer wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in her predicament, and neither did she want him to be. She was five months gone before she had an abortion. Phoebe March had given her the name of a doctor. ‘He’ll fix you up,’ she said. ‘All the girls go to him, it’s nothing, it’s like going to the dentist.’
And it wasn’t some knitting-needle job in a grubby flat up an alleyway. He had rooms in Harley Street, a receptionist, flowers on the desk. Little man, tiny feet, you always notice their feet.
Phoebe came to visit her in hospital, bearing cheerful daffodils. ‘You were unlucky,’ she said, ‘but at least you got rid of it. We’re working girls, sweetie, we have to make tough decisions. It’s all for the best.’
Phoebe was currently playing Cleopatra at Stratford. They had been down, they often did, made a weekend of it, stayed in a nice pub. She didn’t mention to Ian that she used to know Phoebe. Kitty still thought about that little man in Harley Street. His small feet. Seemed to Kitty that he must have despised women. He messed up her insides for ever.
A gruff Scottish consultant was called in from his game of golf in Surrey to try and stitch her up. ‘You’ve been a very silly lassie,’ he said. ‘And I’m afraid you’re going to pay for it for the rest of your life.’ He didn’t tell the police though, he might have been dour but he had a heart.
She had told Ian she could never conceive, it seemed only fair. She told him that it was ‘a plumbing problem’, a defect, and he said, ‘Which doctors have you seen, which consultants?’ and she said, ‘The best. In Switzerland,’ and when he said, ‘We’ll consult more,’ she said, ‘Please don’t push me to see any more, darling, I can’t bear it.’ He was older than her by quite a bit, said he always thought he would have a son, teach him cricket and so on. ‘You should marry someone else,’ she told him on the eve of the wedding, and he said, ‘No.’ He was willing to sacrifice everything for her, even children.
‘Are you all right up there?’
‘Sorry, darling, got distracted, started tidying the drawers. Just coming.’
‘Good God,’ she heard Ian say. ‘What’s happened, Ray?’
 |
Walking the dog swallowed up more time than Jackson had expected. By the time they returned to the hotel and he had showered off the previous night’s evidence he found himself running late and had to leave the hotel again in haste. He realized that he would have to take the dog with him, he could hardly leave it to be discovered by someone coming in to clean the room. A ‘maid’. An old-fashioned word. A servant, a virgin. His sister had been a maid. A young maid. She belonged to another time when girls kept their maidenhood like a treasure.
He unzipped the rucksack and said, ‘Come on, get in,’ to the dog. Jackson hadn’t realized that dogs could frown.
Jackson ’s mouth felt as if a mouse had nested in it overnight. Several mice possibly. There was a mirror in the lift and on the way down to the lobby Jackson contemplated his somewhat dissipated reflection for the second time that morning. He couldn’t imagine that it would make a good impression on Linda Pallister. (‘When did
A takeaway bacon roll from a greasy spoon on the short walk from the Best Western helped to perk him up a little. He tore off a piece and posted it into the rucksack for the dog.
Hope McMaster had been silent through his Greenwich mean time night, which was her New Zealand day. If Linda Pallister couldn’t enlighten him about Hope McMaster’s origins then he had no idea what path to take next. A family tree was a fractal, its branches dividing endlessly. Julia, being from middle-class stock, could trace her family back to the Ark but for Hope McMaster there weren’t even bare roots.
A young woman, a secretary maybe, her function was unclear, appeared and said, ‘Mr Brodie? My name’s Eleanor, I’ll show you to Linda’s office.’ This was an improvement. He hadn’t got past reception yesterday before being told that Linda Pallister wasn’t available to see him. Eleanor had a plain face and limp hair that looked as if it resisted styling. And a fantastic pair of legs that seemed wasted on her. Just observing, not judging, Jackson said silently in his defence against the monstrous regiment.
He was carrying a folder. He had bought it yesterday in a pound shop. Way back in his days as a military policeman Jackson had learned that carrying a folder could convey a certain official authority, even, occasionally, menace. In interrogations it implied you had a cache of knowledge about a suspect, knowledge that you were about to use against them. Not that Linda Pallister was a suspect, he reminded himself. And they definitely weren’t in the army any more, he thought as he followed Eleanor’s shapely pins down a corridor. The folder was plastic, a lurid pink neon not found in nature that detracted somewhat from any authority invested in it. It contained nothing even vaguely official, only a flimsy National Trust guide to Sissinghurst and an estate agent’s details for a thatched cottage in Shropshire that had briefly, very briefly, tickled his fancy.
Eleanor was the chatty sort, Jackson noticed rather wearily – lack of coffee was beginning to take its toll on him. She stopped outside a door and knocked on it. When there was no answer she said loudly, ‘Linda? Mr Brodie’s here to see you.’
Absence of Linda left Eleanor at a loss as to what to do with him and Jackson said, reassuringly, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll wait outside her office.’
‘I’ll try and find Linda,’ she said, scurrying off.
Twenty minutes later and there was no sign of either Linda or Eleanor. Jackson thought there would be no harm in having a quick look inside the mysteriously absent Linda Pallister’s office. He carried the authority of the folder, after all.
It was a mess. Her desk was home to a jumble of things – clumsy ornaments that seemed to have been made by children, pens, paperclips, books, paperwork, a Marks amp; Spencer sandwich, as yet unopened, although the date on it was yesterday’s. There were haphazard stacks of paperwork and folders everywhere. She didn’t seem like the tidiest of people.
The sandwich was sitting next to an open appointments diary. All Linda Pallister’s meetings for today, including his own, were crossed out, which didn’t seem like a good sign. He flipped back through the diary, idly, not looking for anything (‘Stop snooping through my stuff!’ Marlee had yelled at him when she caught him looking through her diary).
Yesterday, the two o’clock appointment that she had cancelled with him (‘J. Brodie’) was duly crossed out, as was every appointment after ‘B. Jackson’ at ten o’clock. It seemed an odd coincidence of names. The two Jacksons. Was she confused or had this other, earlier Jackson upset her so much that she started cancelling everything?
When Jackson made the first appointment with Linda Pallister he had spoken with her on the phone. He didn’t say he was a private detective, because he wasn’t, he insisted to himself. It was just this one case. (‘A specious argument,’ he imagined Julia saying.)
At first, Linda Pallister sounded perfectly normal, pleasantly efficient – a demeanour at odds with the state of her office. The mention of Hope McMaster’s name didn’t change things – Hope had already been in email contact with her over her missing birth certificate – nor the names John and Angela Costello, but when he mentioned Dr Ian Winfield she seemed to be thrown completely off balance.
‘Who?’
‘Ian and Kitty Winfield,’ Jackson said. ‘He was a consultant at St James’s. She was a model, Kitty Gillespie. They were Hope McMaster’s adoptive parents.’
‘They-’ she began to say and then clammed up. Jackson had been intrigued but assumed whatever the confusion was it would be cleared up when he met Linda Pallister. He was hoping, for example, that she was going to be able to explain why John and Angela Costello didn’t exist.
Hope McMaster had pulled a thread and everything she had believed about the fabric of her life had started to unravel.
You and me both, Jackson thought. Hope McMaster’s past was all echoes and shadows, like looking into a box of fog.
The dog was sound asleep in the rucksack on the floor. Either that or it was dead. Jackson gave it a gentle prod and the rucksack squirmed. He thought of the woman he had woken up next to. He didn’t usually have to check that his inamoratas were alive the morning after. He unfastened the rucksack and the dog opened one weary eye and looked at him with the resignation of a pessimistic hostage. ‘Sorry,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ll go for a walk after this.’
The sandwich was egg and watercress. Not Jackson ’s favourite, although he was so hungry that it was beginning to look attractive. The bowl of pasta yesterday evening on the Headrow had provided an inadequate cushion for the alcohol and dissolution that had followed. The bacon roll from earlier had disappeared into the maw of his hangover. He heard a clock strike eleven. It sounded like a church clock, incongruous somehow in this area. It seemed he had been forgotten about.
Jackson gave up and wrote a note of the ‘I was here’ variety on the back of one of his cards. The card –
He placed the card on top of the sandwich, where hopefully Linda Pallister would notice it. Yesterday’s egg and cress was in turn sitting on top of a photograph, almost entirely obscured by the sandwich’s triangular box. The photograph was jumping up and down shouting at him, asking to see the light of day. It almost leaped into his hands when he uncovered it. Unframed, dog-eared, an old snap. He hadn’t seen it before but he had definitely seen the subject recently. Snub nose, freckles, an old-fashioned caste to the plump features – the spit of Hope McMaster in the photograph taken on her arrival in New Zealand. On the top edge of the photograph there was the mark where a rusty paperclip had attached it to something.
The photograph from Linda Pallister’s desk had been taken on a beach. A British beach, judging by the way the child was bundled in outdoor clothes. Despite the fact that she looked freezing she had a big grin on her face. Her hair was worn in cock-eyed bunches. First thing you would do with an illicit child would be to cut that long hair, adopt a disguise with a new haircut. Spiky, urchin. New hair, new clothes, new name, new country.
He would have sworn on oath that he was holding in his hand a photograph of Hope McMaster. He turned it over. Nothing. No helpful name or date, unfortunately, nonetheless Jackson experienced a visceral feeling, something that he recognized from his days in law enforcement. It was the reaction of a dog to a bone, a detective to a great big fat clue. He didn’t know what the photograph meant, he just knew that it meant something tremendously important. He thought about the ethics of taking the photo for all of two seconds before placing it in his wallet. Photographic evidence, you never knew when you were going to need it.
Enthused by his discovery and working on the theory that one clue generally led to another, he started to rake through the debris of paperwork on Linda Pallister’s desk. Nothing. No references to Winfields or Costellos. He tried the drawers in the desk. More confusion and chaos. But there in the last drawer – it was always the last drawer, the last door, the last box – was another object trying to claw its way out of the darkness. ‘Eureka,’ Jackson murmured to himself.
It was a folder, an old manila one, and there on the front of it was a small rusty paperclip, just the same size as the after-image on the photograph of the girl with the cock-eyed bunches. Jackson, in an instinctive sleight of hand, slipped the folder inside his own neonpink plastic one. He felt like a spy who had just discovered a dossier of secrets. In the nick of time too, as Eleanor, she of the great legs and not so great face, finally put in a return appearance. He caught the look on her face, a mixture of distaste and confusion which eventually resolved into something more cryptic. Women usually needed to be acquainted with him a little longer before he saw that expression on their faces.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re still here. In fact, you’re
‘Ms Pallister hasn’t turned up,’ he said, spreading his arms wide, a conjuror demonstrating innocence, as if he might have been hiding Linda Pallister on his person. Eleanor frowned.
‘Have you actually seen her this morning?’ Jackson queried mildly.
Eleanor’s frown grew deeper. She had the sort of face that should be kept in neutral. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Maybe she’s ill,’ Jackson suggested. ‘Maybe it was the sandwich she didn’t eat.’
The frown developed into something threatening. Jackson left before he was turned to stone.
He retreated to the nearest café, a little Italian place where he wasn’t disappointed in his assumption that they would know how to make coffee. He took a corner table and over a double espresso examined his stolen trophies.
The thin card of the manila folder was soft and felted with age. This was what folders used to be like before they became pink neon plastic. He had dealt with enough of them in his time. Of course, even the pink neon was an anachronism now in the days of the paperless office. Not something Linda Pallister had heard of, he thought, remembering the Dickensian piles of papers and files in her messy office. You could hide a small child – or a dog – in there and not notice it for days.
He opened the folder expecting to find something surprising – a clue, a secret, even a piece of bureaucratic tedium – but the surprise was that there was nothing at all. Jackson turned the manila folder upside down and shook it, just to be sure.
Nonetheless, despite being empty, the worn beige folder did have something it wanted to say. There was a small typed label affixed to the top left-hand corner. No one used typewriters any more, it was like seeing a message from a primitive culture, a lost time. ‘Carol Braithwaite,’ Jackson read. ‘Case worker: Linda Pallister’ and a date, 2 February 1975. Linda Pallister must have been very young at the time. Jackson would have been fifteen in 1975, a year older than his daughter was now. Getting up to no good, bunking off school, petty thieving, minor vandalism, sinking the good ship Woolworths. It was a long time ago.
And across the front of the folder was written the name ‘WPC Tracy Waterhouse’ again, this one in faded black biro, and another date, 10 April 1975. There was a phone number too, dating from before the national codes were changed. The year was the same year that Hope McMaster was adopted. April was the month that was on her adoption certificate, the one that didn’t exist officially. She had scanned it and emailed it to him, along with her birth certificate, which also didn’t exist officially. If they were forgeries they looked pretty genuine, although he supposed a scan wasn’t the best way of telling. His own forgery of a wife had been in possession of a pretty genuine-looking birth certificate, not such a hard thing to create.
In her appointments diary, Linda Pallister had written, ‘Phone Tracy Waterhouse,’ and here was Tracy Waterhouse’s name thirty-five years ago. Jackson took the photograph out of his wallet and looked at the stocky, wholesome little girl, with cock-eyed bunches. As he always knew it would, the paperclip on the folder fitted exactly over the rusted impression on the photograph.
Schrödinger, whoever he was, and his cat, and anyone else that felt like it, had all climbed inside Pandora’s box and were dining on a can of worms. Jackson felt the beginnings of a headache, another one, on top of the one he already had.
 |
Tracy was surprised that more kids weren’t killed on so-called play equipment. People (parents) seemed blithely oblivious to the peril of small bodies arcing high into the sky on swings they weren’t strapped into, or of the same small bodies launching themselves from the top of a slide when they were knee-high to a gnat. Courtney was astonishingly reckless, a kid without reck was a dangerous thing.
Other children in the play park yelled and screamed and laughed but Courtney was merely determined to test everything, including herself, to the limits, like a dogged little crash-test dummy. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of pleasure involved. Abused kids – and there were many forms of abuse – were frequently shut down and closed off to enjoyment.
It was a beautiful day again and the crowds in Roundhay were already out in force, half-naked white bodies lying like corpses on the green grass, people desperate to get some rays and some fresh air. That’s what parks had always been, breathing spaces for the poor who lived six long days a week in factories. All those little kids, slaves to the machines, their tiny helpless lungs full of damp wool fibres.
Perhaps it was insanity to be out like this, they were exposed to the world and his wife, but then – what better place to hide a child than in plain sight, in a play park surrounded by parents and little kids? People took kids
Tracy was relieved when Courtney clambered off a giant chicken on springs and announced, ‘I’m hungry.’ Tracy checked her watch, they had been in the play park barely fifteen minutes. It felt like hours. She handed over a banana.
‘OK?’ she asked when it was finished and Courtney gave her a solemn silent thumbs-up sign. She was economical with language, and why not? Perhaps when you were little you thought you might use up all your words at the beginning and not have any left for the end.
Tracy wiped away the green maggot of snot emerging from one of Courtney’s nostrils and congratulated herself on remembering to buy tissues in the supermarket. From her bottomless bag Tracy scavenged the corpse of the doughnut she’d bought in Ainsleys a million years ago, tore it in half and shared it with the kid, sitting on the grass. (‘Cake? Before lunch?’ she heard her mother’s voice say and Tracy answered silently, ‘Yes. What are you going to do about it, you old cow?’)
When Courtney had finished her half of the doughnut she licked each finger religiously before giving another silent thumbs-up to Tracy, and then she took out the contents of the little pink backpack and laid each item, one by one, on the grass for perusal:
the tarnished silver thimble
the Chinese coin with a hole in the middle
the purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it
the snow globe containing a crude plastic model of the Houses of Parliament
the shell shaped like a cream horn
the shell shaped like a coolie hat
the whole nutmeg
a pine cone
The pine cone, Tracy noted, was new. She wondered where it had come from. It was like that game they used to play at children’s parties where you had to remember the objects on a tea-tray. They probably didn’t have parties like that any more. Pin the tail on the donkey, pass the parcel – someone’s dad standing by the record player and lifting the needle on ‘The Runaway Train’ or ‘They’re Changing Guard At Buckingham Palace’. Nowadays they all went to ‘indoor soft play areas’ – Rascals and Funsters – and ran amok. Tracy had been called to one of those places in Bradford once. They thought a kid had disappeared, turned out it was at the bottom of a ball pool and nobody could see it. It was fine, alive and kicking, literally. Paedophile heaven.
Tracy picked out the cream horn-shaped shell and rolled it in her palm. When she was a child her father used to pick up a box of three cream horns from Thomson’s cake shop in Bramley every Friday evening on his way home from work in the town hall. Tracy couldn’t remember when she had last eaten a cream horn, couldn’t remember the last time she had stuck a shell to her own shell-like and listened to the sea. Tracy realized that at some point in this reverie Courtney had surreptitiously retrieved the shell and was packing her treasure away again.
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Tracy sighed. ‘How about we have our picnic? Heaven forfend that we should go more than ten minutes without eating.’
Tracy had lugged with her an old plaid blanket from the boot of the car. She rolled it out and spread out the picnic fodder they’d bought in the supermarket – tuna rolls, cartons of apple and orange juice, packets of crisps and a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate, the latter neutralized – in Tracy’s mind anyway – by a small bag of carrot sticks. It was the kind of picnic (possibly minus the carrot sticks) that she would have liked when she herself was a child, instead of the cold hard-boiled eggs that her mother used to pack, alongside flabby white-bread sandwiches that had been spread thinly with meat paste before being wrapped – for some arcane reason – in damp lettuce leaves. They had taken these meagre provisions with them on Sunday drives in the family Ford Consul – to Harewood House, to Brimham Rocks or to ‘Brontë country’ – as her mother always familiarly called it, even though she had never read a book by a Brontë, or indeed any book unless it had been helpfully condensed first by the
Tracy couldn’t think of these Sunday outings without remembering what it felt like to craze a boiled-egg shell and peel away the membrane from the solid greyish white beneath. Sick-making. She suddenly remembered how her father would sometimes pop an egg whole into his mouth, like a conjuror, and part of the young Tracy had expected a dove or a row of flags to emerge in place of the egg. They had seen something similar once in a summer show in Bridlington. Top of the bill was Ronnie Hilton, long past his heyday but nonetheless a Yorkshireman and therefore someone to be proud of.
Tracy ’s father was a war veteran, the Green Howards, landed on Gold beach on D-Day. He must have seen things but if he had he never said. Sometimes a war was wasted on people. He was born in Dewsbury. Shoddy capital of the world. It said something about a mill town that it couldn’t aspire to even second-rate cloth, weaving instead the lowest quality from rags and shreds. A filthy trade, shoddy. A town where now women drugged and kidnapped their own kids for money. The Ripper was questioned in Dewsbury after being caught in Sheffield. Routine patrol, his luck running out, theirs running back in, late in the day. Tracy remembered being in a corner shop when she heard the news, buying crisps and chocolate for her and her partner. On the beat. The bloke behind the counter had the radio on and when the news came on he yelled, ‘They’ve caught him, they’ve caught your Ripper!’ He was second-generation Bangladeshi and Tracy didn’t blame him for denying ownership of Sutcliffe. She couldn’t remember where she was for all those other newsworthy world events (probably in front of the box, getting the news on the telly), although she was in a TV repair shop buying a new scart lead for her DVD player when she saw the second of the World Trade Center buildings fall. You usually expected
On the day of Charles and Diana’s wedding, an event that Tracy would have liked to watch (although she would never have admitted to it), she was co-ordinating house-to-house after the so-called honour killing of a woman in Bradford. Fairytale wedding.
Had the kid ever been to the seaside? ‘Have you ever been to the seaside, Courtney?’
Courtney, mouth stuffed with tuna roll, shook her head and then nodded it.
‘Yes
‘Yes,’ Courtney mumbled.
‘Yes?’
‘No.’
It was an unfathomable exchange. They would go to the seaside. And pantomimes and circuses and Disneyland Paris. They would go to the seaside and paddle in the waves. Cautiously. Before the kid, Tracy would have thought,
She should buy a camera, state-of-the-art digital, so she could start preserving the kid’s new life in inkjet. It would look better if there was evidence of her existence in Tracy ’s own life. She had an old camera somewhere, nothing as slick as the ones you got nowadays. There hadn’t been much point in using it, she hadn’t encountered much of anything worth photographing. She mostly went on solitary outings and there was no pleasure to be had from views of landscapes with no people in them. Might as well just buy a postcard.
Tracy ’s father – wore the trousers, wielded the camera – had documented their lives for years. He had been in the habit of taking a photograph of the Christmas tree every year. There were other photographs of the family, opening presents, drinking a decorous sherry, even pulling a cracker, in which parts of the tree, a swoop of tinsel, a drooping branch, might feature but not
Most of those photographs were jumbled with others in a box in Tracy’s back bedroom, no way of knowing which Christmas a tree belonged to, only the same uninspiring baubles every year in slightly different arrangements, the tinsel star on top, more like a ragged starfish than a star to guide wise men by, and the exhausted pipecleaner gnomes perching drunkenly at the ends of the branches, the tips of matches for noses and eyes. When Tracy ’s parents reached seventy her father ceased buying a tree. ‘Why bother?’ her mother said when Tracy came round on Christmas Day. Cheer and merriment, something lovely, Tracy thought, but too late for any of that.
If she sifted through the box with an archaeologist’s vigilance, Tracy wondered, would she find some clue as to why her parents had embraced their drab lives with what could only be called enthusiasm?
Would she find her younger self in that box and be surprised at how far she had come, or be depressed by the distance between? Ronnie Hilton at the Spa Theatre and a lifetime ahead of her. ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’. Pass the parcel. It was funny, Tracy had spent a lot of time trying to put her lacklustre childhood behind her (where it belonged) but ever since she’d come into possession of the kid she kept being reminded of it, shards and chips of memory. The mirror cracked.
‘Time to move. Why don’t we go to the lake and feed the ducks?’ There were some crusts left from their picnic, the kid had polished off everything else. Perhaps Tracy had kidnapped a cuckoo, a giant’s child. She would pay for that, imagined the kid growing bigger and bigger, puffing up until she filled the car, the spare room, the whole house, eating up everything in sight, including Tracy. Kidnap what looks like a kid and find out too late that it’s going to be the death of you. Like Greek tragedy. She had been to a production of
Of course with Medea it was the other way round, she killed her kids, she wasn’t killed by them. As a plot, Tracy didn’t find it shocking, it happened all the time.
The ducks had no appetite, half of Leeds already seemed to be out, tossing the remains of their sliced whites to the indifferent wildfowl. The rats would be out later to mop up the soggy leavings. Courtney, clearly not one to waste food, ate the crusts herself.
Courtney was drooping. Kids should come with wheels attached.
‘How about an ice cream?’ Tracy said. Courtney gave her the thumbs-up. Tracy wanted to give the kid everything, but all the ice creams in the world weren’t going to make up for Kelly Cross and whatever horrors she represented.
They walked back across Soldier’s Field, both of them clutching a cornet, strawberry for Courtney, mint choc chip for Tracy. The Ripper had attacked two victims in Roundhay, one lived, one died. Luck of the draw. ’76 and ’77. Two years after the Lovell Park murder. They never connected that to the Ripper, but it made you wonder. Wilma McCann, his first victim, was murdered only six months after Arkwright had broken down that door in Lovell Park, and before that Sutcliffe had been practising. Arkwright told Tracy that he had heard that someone had confessed to Carol Braithwaite’s murder in prison and then had died. Seemed a convenient sort of way of clearing up a crime.
‘Tracy?’A little voice interrupted her thoughts. It was the first time Courtney had addressed her as anything. It made her want to cry. Could she get her to call her ‘Mum’? What would that feel like? Like flying. Wendy in
‘Come on,’ Tracy said. ‘There’s a Toys “R” Us in Batley. We’ll have a bit of a drive.’ Because going back to her house in Headingley was disturbing. Alone with a kid in her house. Like a proper parent. How did you do that? Tracy had no idea. She suddenly remembered Janek. No, of course she couldn’t go home while he was there. Looking at Courtney with his sad Polish eyes, questioning who she was, where she had come from.
 |
Next on his list of tasks was the purchase of a sizeable stock of plastic nappy sacks for the onslaught of dog shit that was inevitably coming his way. Jackson felt more of an upstanding citizen once he was fully equipped. He supposed he should have looked to see if the plastic sacks were biodegradable before planning to weigh the planet down with even more debris, but some days there was only so much a man could do.
This was followed by a visit to an old-fashioned barber’s that he had spotted earlier, near the Best Western, in order to effect a transformation, courtesy of a number one haircut and hot shave with a straight-bladed razor, from which Jackson emerged half an hour later feeling as shorn as a new-born lamb (or a convict). A
The dog had been allowed to accompany him into the barber’s shop and sat watching the proceedings intently, as if storing up an experience that it might need to explain later. The barber turned out to be a dog lover, said he ‘showed pugs’, a statement which Jackson took a little time deciphering.
He also demonstrated that the dog knew how to shake hands, ‘or shake paws, I should say’, he laughed.
‘Right,’ Jackson said.
‘We share eighty-five per cent of our genes with dogs,’ the barber said.
‘Well, we share fifty per cent of our DNA with bananas,’ Jackson said, ‘so I don’t think that really means anything.’
Smuggling a dog in and out of places was proving easier than Jackson would have imagined, not that it was a topic he had ever given much attention to before now. He couldn’t believe the number of places that dogs weren’t allowed. Kids – not that he had anything against kids obviously – kids were allowed everywhere and dogs were much better behaved on the whole.
Next on his list was the Central Library, where he combed the archives of the
His rucksack, currently resting on the floor, started wriggling as if it was about to produce an alien life form. A small, muffled bark came from inside and a snout struggled through the opening in the zip. Probably time to go, Jackson thought.
Even with an updated code the phone number for Tracy Waterhouse had proved a dud when Jackson tried it, long fallen into disuse. Was Tracy Waterhouse a warhorse, still on the force after all this time? Extremely doubtful.
It seemed to Jackson that if Tracy Waterhouse had been a member of the West Yorkshire Police Force in 1975 then there would be records. And if not records then someone who might recall her, although the chances of someone remembering a humble WPC from the seventies seemed remote. Policewomen in the seventies were still regarded as tea-makers and hand-holders.
The dog was restless, despite sharing a ham sandwich with Jackson and having lifted its leg against several walls and the odd scrubby urban tree. It had spent a lot of the day so far confined to prison and Jackson supposed it wanted a good walk. There were very few places for dogs and men to exercise in Leeds, the town centre seemed to be almost devoid of green spaces.
He decided it might be best not to take it into the police station, so he tethered it to a hitching-post outside Millgarth Police HQ, positioning the dog in the line of fire of a CCTV camera at the entrance. That way if someone stole the dog at least there would be a record of it. ‘Call me paranoid,’ he said to the dog, ‘but you can’t trust anyone these days.’ Millgarth was possibly one of the ugliest buildings he had ever seen, built like a Crusader fortress, some time in the seventies, to keep the enemy at bay.
Jackson explained to the sergeant on the duty desk that he was a private detective working for a solicitor. An aunt of Tracy Waterhouse had left a small legacy in a will but the family had lost touch (‘You know how it is with families’), all they knew was that she had been a constable with the West Yorkshire Police in 1975. Lies were best kept simple (
A man who looked like a washed-up boxer came out of a room at the back and, dropping a file on the desk, said, ‘What’s that?’
The desk sergeant said, ‘This bloke’s looking for a WPC Tracy – what was it?’ he said, turning to Jackson.
‘Waterhouse.’
‘Waterhouse,’ the desk sergeant repeated to the beat-up boxer, as if he was translating from a foreign language. ‘Uniformed constable with us in…?’
‘1975,’ Jackson supplied.
‘1975.’
‘Tracy Waterhouse?’ the beat-up boxer said and laughed. ‘Trace? You know Big Tracy, Bill,’ he said. ‘Detective Superintendent Waterhouse, recently of this parish.’
‘Does that mean she’s dead?’ Jackson puzzled.
‘God, no, Tracy’s indestructible. Detective Inspector Craig Peters, by the way,’ he said, holding out his hand to Jackson.
‘Jackson Brodie,’ Jackson said, returning the handshake. He didn’t recollect the West Yorkshire Police Force being so affable during his misspent teenage years.
‘Tracy retired at the back end of last year,’ the inspector said. ‘Went to the Merrion Centre as head of security.’
‘Oh, Tracy
A door further down the corridor burst open and a grizzled old copper came barrelling out. They didn’t make them like that any more, which was probably a good thing. He glared around the reception area and Peters said to Jackson, ‘DS Crawford and Tracy go way back.’To Crawford himself, stomping towards them, he raised his voice and said, ‘Barry – this bloke’s asking after Tracy.’
‘Tracy?’ Crawford echoed, coming to a stop and glaring suspiciously at Jackson. Jackson supposed after a lifetime in the force you began to look at everyone suspiciously. Although he had his regrets, Jackson was glad he had got out when he had. ‘Jackson Brodie,’ he said, holding out his hand. Crawford shook it reluctantly. Jackson repeated the story about the will and long-lost cousin Tracy. He sensed he might be on shaky ground, he couldn’t know for sure that Tracy actually had any cousins, but Crawford said, ‘Oh yeah, I seem to remember her mother had a sister in Salford. They weren’t close, I seem to recollect.’
‘That’s right, Salford,’ Jackson said, relieved that he’d mined the correct seam.
DI Peters said, ‘I was saying to him, Tracy works at the Merrion Centre now,’ and it was his turn to be glared at by Crawford.
‘What?’ Peters shrugged. ‘It’s not a state secret.’
‘Yes, well,’ Crawford said to Jackson, all bluff and bluster, ‘don’t go bothering her at work. And I’m not giving you a home address so don’t even ask. She’s going on holiday, in fact she might already have gone. I’ll give her a ring and tell her you were asking for her.’
‘Well, thanks,’ Jackson said. ‘Tell her I’m staying at the Best Western. Hang on, I’ll give you my card.’ He handed over one of his
Charmed I’m sure, Jackson thought. What an old curmudgeon. As Julia would have said. An old curmudgeon who had been around for a long time. Jackson wondered if there was a way of introducing Carol Braithwaite’s name without it seeming odd. He decided there wasn’t but went for it anyway.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he said casually. Crawford was already halfway along the corridor. He stopped and turned, hackles raised. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What?’
‘I just wondered – does the name Carol Braithwaite ring any bells with you?’
Crawford stared at him. ‘Who?’
‘Carol Braithwaite,’ Jackson repeated.
‘Never heard of her.’
The dog looked uneasy, when Jackson collected it outside Millgarth. It was very small in the grand order of things and must, he supposed, feel vulnerable most of the time. ‘Sorry about that,’ Jackson said. They were turning into Wallace and Gromit, he could feel it. Soon he’d be calling the dog ‘lad’ and sharing cheese and crackers with it. There were worse things, he supposed.
‘I’m looking for Tracy Waterhouse,’ Jackson said to the man, more youth than man, who eventually appeared from behind a nondescript grey door in the Merrion Centre. Ravaged by acne, if you knew Braille you could probably have read his face, he had a name badge that announced him to be Grant Leyburn. He looked like he was swimming in a very small gene pool. Jackson felt a twitch of disappointment that the pleasant Canadian girl wasn’t available.
‘Tracy Waterhouse. Is she here?’ Jackson asked.
‘No,’ Grant Leyburn said sullenly. ‘She isn’t.’
‘Do you know where I might find her?’ Jackson persisted.
‘She’s on holiday from tomorrow. Not back for a week.’
‘What about today?’
‘Sick.’
‘You can’t give me a phone number, I don’t suppose?’ Jackson said. ‘Or any other contact details?’ he added hopefully.
Grant raised an overgrown eyebrow and said, ‘What do you think?’
‘I’m guessing no?’
‘Got it in one.’
Jackson fished out a card and handed it over. ‘Maybe you could give this to her when she’s back?’
‘A private detective?’ he said with a sneer. ‘Another one. She’s very popular.’
‘Another one?’ Jackson puzzled.
‘Yeah, someone here earlier.’ He glanced up suddenly at a big round security camera suspended from a ceiling. It looked like a small spaceship. He frowned and said, ‘Someone’s always watching.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Jackson said.
He placed the photograph of the girl with the cock-eyed bunches on a chair near the bedroom window where the best light was. He took a photograph of it with his phone. It had a slight ghostly aura, the photograph of a photograph, twice removed from life. Virtual reality.
He flicked through the photographs on his phone’s camera roll until he came across the one taken on Hope McMaster’s arrival in New Zealand. If not the same child as the one shivering on a British beach then an identical twin. In both photographs the little girl was grinning from ear to ear, already a child with exclamation marks in her brain. If it was a photo of Hope McMaster then it confirmed one thing, she had not appeared fully formed out of nowhere. She had a past. She had once stood, shivering and grinning, on a windswept beach and someone had taken a photo of her. Who?
It would be the middle of the night in the topsy-turvy world that Hope McMaster inhabited.
Jackson googled ‘Carol Braithwaite’ on his phone and came up with nothing. Any combination of Carol Braithwaite/murder/ Leeds/1975, plus any other word he could throw in the mix, came up with nothing. Carol Braithwaite was an adult in 1975 so she couldn’t be Hope McMaster, but she could be Hope’s mother. He had found no mention in the newspaper report of any children but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Was the girl in the photograph Carol Braithwaite’s daughter? Linda Pallister dealt with children nobody wanted, had she dealt with Carol Braithwaite’s? Finessed an under-the-counter adoption? An act of goodwill perhaps, giving a small child a good home and saving it from festering in the system.
The only record he could find online of any girl being abducted in 1975 was the Black Panther’s victim Lesley Whittle. The kidnapping of a small girl would have been news headlines and if she was never found it would reverberate through the media for years. In his time Jackson had looked for plenty of children who were missing, he had never looked for a child who
It was more likely that Hope McMaster had been unwanted and simply been given away. That would explain why there was no record. When Jackson was a child a lot of unofficial ‘adoptions’ took place, leaving no paper trail behind them. Illegitimate kids taken in by their grandparents, growing up thinking their mother was their sister. Barren sisters taking in a surplus nephew or niece, raising them as a prized only child. Jackson’s own mother had an elder brother she had never met. He had been given away to a childless aunt and uncle in Dublin before Jackson’s mother was born and he was ‘spoilt’, according to Jackson’s jealous mother. ‘Spoilt’, in his mother’s vocabulary, meant that he had an education, went to Trinity College, became a barrister, married well and died in bourgeois comfort many years later.
Linda Pallister was the key, all he had to do was talk to her, something she seemed to be going out of her way to avoid.
Neither Tracy Waterhouse nor Linda Pallister were in the phone book but that was no surprise. Police and social workers kept a low profile in public otherwise every nutter and ex-con would be hammering on their door at midnight. Jackson went on to 192.com, friend of snoops and investigators who had no access to official records.
There he found one ‘Linda Pallister’ and four ‘T. Waterhouse’s, one of those a ‘Tracy’. He had plenty of credits with 192.com and was able to get addresses for both women. They knew enough to go exdirectory but weren’t savvy enough to remove themselves from the electoral register, which was how 192.com had got hold of their details. It shouldn’t be allowed, but it was, thank goodness.
Jackson retrieved the Saab from the multi-storey car park at the Merrion Centre where it had been corralled since he arrived in Leeds yesterday. He wasn’t sure of the protocol of dogs in cars. You saw them all the time staring out of the back or hanging out of the passenger window, their ears fluttering in the slipstream, but an unsecured dog was an accident waiting to happen. When he was in the force there had been a woman killed in a traffic accident. She braked suddenly at a red light, and her Dalmatian in the seat behind her carried on travelling. Broke her neck. Stupid way to die.
The dog had hopped on to the back seat as if this were its accustomed place but Alpha Dog, Jackson, said, ‘No,’ sternly. The dog was unsure but eager to please, studying Jackson’s face for a clue. ‘There,’ Jackson said, pointing at the front seat passenger footwell, and the dog jumped in and settled down. ‘OK,’ he said when he was finally satisfied that the dog wasn’t going to be hurled through the car like a missile. ‘Let’s go and find us some women.’ He put Kendel Carson’s ‘Cowboy Boots’ on the car stereo, a song that wasn’t as redneck as the title suggested.
He started the engine and adjusted the rear-view mirror. Catching sight of himself in it he was surprised anew by his military buzz-cut.
Linda Pallister lived in a traditional semi near Roundhay Park. The curtains were drawn even though it was the afternoon. It had the air of a house in mourning. Jackson rang the bell and knocked hard but there was no answer. He tried the back door with the same result. The mysteriously absent Linda Pallister remained just that, mysteriously absent.
Jackson knocked on the door of the neighbouring house. He struck lucky with the woman (‘Mrs Potter’) who answered the door. He knew the type – they were usually watching reruns of
‘She had a visitor last night,’ Mrs Potter duly reported. ‘A man,’ she added with relish.
‘Have you seen her today?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t spend all my time watching the neighbourhood goings-on, I don’t know why people would think that.’
‘Of course not, Mrs Potter,’ Jackson said, feigning empathy. It was never a tactic that worked well for him (especially with women) but that didn’t stop him trying. ‘Look,’ he took one of his cards out of his wallet and handed it to the woman, ‘if she comes back, could you give her this and ask her to give me a ring.’
‘Private detective?’ she said, reading the card. He needn’t have bothered with empathy, the idea of a private detective was intriguing enough for her to say, ‘Call me Janice.’ She dropped her voice as if Linda Pallister might be eavesdropping on them. ‘Can you tell me why you’re interested in Linda?’
‘I could but then I’d have to kill you,’ Jackson said. For a moment, the woman looked as if she believed him. Jackson smiled. Yep, willing to give a woman a cheap thrill at the drop of a hat these days.
There was more life inside Tracy Waterhouse’s house down the road in Headingley, although unfortunately not coming from Tracy herself. The front door was open and a man was packing tools away in a van. Tracy, he informed Jackson in an East European accent (your classic Polish builder, Jackson supposed), had gone out this morning and he didn’t know when she would be back. ‘But I hope she will be,’ he said and laughed. ‘She owes me money.’
Despite Jackson’s claim to be Tracy’s long-lost cousin the workman wouldn’t give him Tracy’s mobile number. ‘She’s a very private person,’ he said.
Instead of collecting Cistercian abbeys, now it seemed Jackson was collecting women who were missing in action.
 |
He sat in his car in the car park and dialled Tracy’s mobile. It went to voicemail and he left a message. Barry’s car smelled of freesias, Amy’s favourite flower. Why hadn’t she had them in her wedding bouquet instead of those stupid orange daisy things? There was no flower that meant anything to her now. All Ivan’s fault. Blame him for everything. He was coming out on Saturday, a pal of Barry’s in the prison service had given him the date and time. Barry would be there to greet him.
He was taking the freesias to Sam’s small grave. He went more often than he ever told Barbara. They visited the grave separately. Barbara left things that turned his stomach – teddy bears and toy trucks. He always left freesias.
Barry raked through his pocket for the card that the Jackson bloke had given him but couldn’t find it anywhere. He phoned Tracy’s number in the Merrion Centre and a prize pillock answered and said she was off sick. He phoned her home number and there was just a generic answer-machine message. Finally he phoned her mobile and left a message. Phoned again and left a second message. Remembered something else, left a third message.
Something was up, but what exactly? Tracy didn’t have any cousins. Didn’t have any family at all, she was the only child of only children. She had nobody in Salford, that was for sure. He had to warn her if someone dodgy was after her. Linda Pallister had mentioned a private detective named ‘Jackson’ snooping around and now here was this clot turning up at Millgarth looking for Tracy.
Before Amy’s accident he used to feel sorry for Tracy, one of those women who’d sacrificed motherhood to the job. They reached the menopause and realized that they hadn’t had kids, that their DNA was going to die with them and nobody was ever going to love them the way a kid would. Sad, really. But after Amy’s accident Barry envied Tracy. She didn’t have to feel unbearable pain every living second of every living day.
He started the engine and drove to the cemetery, breathing in the scent of freesias all the way.
 |
‘Are we going home?’ Courtney asked when Tracy strapped her back in the car seat outside Toys ‘R’ Us. The boot was full of stuff, most of it plastic. All those tiny ancient marine life forms falling to the ocean floor to come back to life one day as a Disney Fairies Tea Set.
At Courtney’s request Tracy had also bought a dressing-up costume, a pink fairy outfit, complete with wings, wand and tiara. Courtney had insisted on getting changed into it in the car and she was now sitting stiffly in the back of the car in a pose that reminded Tracy of the Queen at her coronation.
‘Are we going home?’Tracy repeated thoughtfully as if it wasn’t so much a question as a philosophical conundrum. What did Courtney mean by ‘home’? Tracy wondered. Where was it? Kelly’s undoubtedly squalid pad, or somewhere else?
There was stuff you did with kids and stuff you didn’t. For all of her working life Tracy had witnessed the stuff you weren’t supposed to do with them. Building sandcastles on a beach, feeding bread to ducks, eating a picnic sitting on a plaid blanket in the park – these were things you did with kids. Stealing them was one of the things you didn’t do. Bottom line. She had taken a child that wasn’t hers.
‘Actually,’ Tracy said, ‘we’re not. Not going home just yet. Couple of errands to run.’
It took half an hour in the bank to empty her account of its savings. Kid got through a banana and an apple. Tracy had brought her passport with her, knew the drill on fraud prevention, didn’t stop the teller behaving as if she were robbing the place. Security cameras everywhere and thirty thousand in cash in her handbag. Hard not to look guilty.
After that they went to see her solicitor and Tracy gave him instructions to sell her house. Solicitors were slow-moving animals, you couldn’t get out of their offices in under two bananas. Could you overdose on bananas? She could hear her mother’s voice, ‘You’ll turn into a cheese and onion crisp if you carry on eating them like that.’ (She hadn’t.) And the bananas were small, ‘fun-sized’, according to the supermarket label. Tracy ate one in the car, wondered what people did before bananas. She didn’t understand what ‘fun-sized’ meant in the context of a banana. She’d arrested a guy once peddling kiddy porn,
‘Are we going home
‘Soon. First we’re going to see a man.’ In the rear-view mirror she caught the frown pinching Courtney’s face and added, ‘A nice man.’
Nice-ish, anyway, if her memory served her. On the surface. He was also a conman, a thief and a fixer but Tracy didn’t mention that to the kid. He lived in an impressive house in Alwoodley, bought, no doubt, with the proceeds of a life in crime, and was commendably pokerfaced when he opened his front door to find Tracy and a small pink fairy standing in front of him.
‘Superintendent,’ he said genially, ‘and a friend. What a pleasant surprise.’
‘I’m retired,’ Tracy said.
‘Me too,’ Harry Reynolds murmured. ‘Do come in.’
He was a dapper little bloke – cravat, crease in his beige twill trousers, the kind of smart slippers that could pass for shoes – and had picked up his bus pass quite some time ago, although Tracy doubted somehow that Harry Reynolds travelled on public transport, especially as there was a Bentley parked on his driveway.
He led them into a knocked-through living room – high-quality patio doors and a koi carp pond almost directly outside, as if Harry Reynolds wanted to view the expensive fish without having to leave the airlock of his house.
Inside, the walls were covered with framed school photographs of two children, a boy and a girl. Tracy recognized the uniform of a feepaying prep school with a name she never knew how to pronounce.
‘The grandkids,’ Harry Reynolds said proudly. ‘Brett’s ten, Ashley’s eight.’Tracy presumed that Brett was the boy and Ashley the girl but you could never be sure any more. The rest of the décor was hideous, big glass vases that might have been regarded as ‘art’ in the seventies, sentimental china ornaments of clowns with balloons or sad-faced children with dogs. A big brass sunburst clock adorned one wall and on another a football match was being played out on the biggest TV screen that Tracy had ever seen. Crime pays. There was a surprising smell of baking wafting through the house.
‘Don’t want to interrupt the game,’ Tracy said politely, although years in uniform policing dirty Leeds United home matches meant that she would have happily put a sledgehammer into the screen.
‘No, no,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘It’s a shit game, excuse my French, pet,’ he added in Courtney’s direction. ‘Anyway, it’s on Sky Plus, not live, I can catch up later.’ He had the kind of Yorkshire accent that Tracy thought of as ‘aspirational’. Dorothy Waterhouse’s accent.
Harry Reynolds switched the TV off and settled the pair of them on puffy sofas, as big as barges, that were upholstered in an outmoded mauve leather. It seemed an undignified end for a cow. He excused himself and went to fetch ‘refreshments’. The sun was shining hotly on the garden but the windows and doors were all closed, the whole house hermetically sealed against the outside world. Tracy felt her blouse sticking to her back. The waistband of her big pants was cutting her in half. She always swelled during the course of the day. How did that happen? she wondered.
Courtney sat silently, staring out of the window. Maybe Kelly had drugged her. Nothing new there, think of the gallons of laudanum mothers used to ply their kids with to keep them quiet. These days more kids were being slipped tranquillizers and sleeping pills than people realized. If it had been up to Tracy she would have sterilized a lot of parents. You couldn’t say that, of course, made you sound like a Nazi. Didn’t take away from the truth of it though.
Tracy’s phone rang.
Harry Reynolds came back into the room, carrying a tea-tray.
‘Problem?’
‘Nuisance call,’ Tracy said dismissively.
‘Want me to do something about it?’
Tracy wondered what ‘doing something’ would be for someone like Harry Reynolds.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s probably one of those computer-generated calls. From India or Argentina or somewhere.’
‘Bloody blacks,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘Taking over everywhere. It’s a different world these days.’ He set the tray down. Teapot, cups and saucers – nice china – orange juice and a plate of scones. Butter, a little dash of jam. He pushed the plate of scones towards Tracy. ‘Fresh batch from the oven, made them myself,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to keep yourself busy, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ Tracy said. ‘Busy, busy.’ She was going to pass on the scones but she couldn’t resist. She’d been motoring all day on nothing more than two Weetabix and half a stale doughnut. Oh yeah, and two Jaffa cakes. And a tuna roll from the picnic. A packet of salt and vinegar crisps. A handful of carrot sticks, although they hardly counted. It was surprising how it all added up. She joined Slimming World last year and had to keep a ‘food diary’. After a while she started making the diary up.
‘Made the raspberry jam as well,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘There’s a pick-your-own place off the A65, just past Guiseley. Do you know it?’
‘No, don’t think I do.’ As if. Tracy had never picked anything in her life apart from scabs and daisies and the latter was more of an assumption than an actual memory. She nibbled on a scone. It was warm and buttery in her mouth and the jam was both sweet and tart at the same time. She ate the rest of it, trying not to look greedy.
‘Naughty but nice,’ Harry Reynolds laughed, biting into one of the scones.
The scones made Tracy aware of a lot of things she might have missed out on in life. Like taking a turn off the A65 to a pick-yourown-fruit place. She’d been called out to a murder there once, just south of Otley. A prostitute who’d been taken for her last ride and dumped in a ditch. She’d heard rumours that Harry Reynolds had had his fingers in that particular pie, running girls and porn in the sixties, but he didn’t seem the type to Tracy. Naughty but nice. She thought of the madam in her house in Cookridge handing out sherry and shelled nuts. That was the seventies, of course. Nothing innocent. Norah, that was her name. Norah Kendall.
‘Did you know Norah Kendall?’ she asked Harry Reynolds.
‘Oh, Norah,’ he laughed. ‘She was some woman. Good business head,’ he added admiringly. ‘It used to be a different world, didn’t it, Superintendent? Mucky books round the back and men in macs flashing the occasional schoolgirl. Innocence.’ He sighed nostalgically.
Tracy bit down on her response. She didn’t remember the innocence.
‘You can’t tell a good girl from a prostitute these days,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘They all dress like they’re on the game, act like it too.’
‘I know,’ Tracy said, surprised to find herself agreeing with someone like Harry Reynolds. But it was true, you looked at young girls, crippled in heels, dressed like hookers, stumbling around pissed out of their brains on a Saturday night in Leeds town centre and you thought, did we throw ourselves under horses for this, gag on forced feeding tubes, suffer ridicule, humiliation and punishment, just so that women could behave worse than men?
‘They’re worse than the blokes these days,’ Harry Reynolds said.
‘It’s biological,’ Tracy said, ‘they can’t help it, they’ve got to attract a mate and breed and die. They’re like mayfly.’
‘
‘Didn’t think of you as a classicist, Harry.’
‘I’m like an iceberg, Superintendent. I go deep.’ He bit into a scone with his shiny false teeth and ruminated. ‘Too many people on the planet,’ he said. ‘You cull deer, but you’re not allowed to cull people.’ It was an unfortunate echo of what Tracy had been thinking a moment ago. It sounded more fascist coming from his mouth than it had in her mind.
Had Harry Reynolds had people murdered? Tracy wondered. Possibly. Did that bother her? Not as much as it should have done.
‘I see our friend Rex Marshall finally found the eighteenth hole,’ Harry Reynolds said.
‘Not my friend,’ Tracy muttered, her mouth full of carbohydrate. ‘Not yours either, I wouldn’t have thought.’
‘Members of the same golf club,’ he said. ‘It’s like being in the Masons. Lomax, Strickland, Marshall, they all enjoyed having a round with yours truly. Even Walter Eastman in his day.’
‘I don’t know why I’m surprised.’ Tracy swallowed the last of the scone and said, ‘Harry?’
‘Superintendent?’
‘Remember 1975?’
‘Cricket World Cup came to Headingley in the June. Australians against us. England all out for ninety-three. West Indies beat them in the final. Say what you like about the blacks, they can play cricket.’
‘Yeah, well, apart from that. Do you remember the murder of a woman called Carol Braithwaite?’
‘No,’ he said, gazing out at his fish. ‘I’m afraid I don’t. Why?’
‘Nothing. Just wondering.’
The kid had already hoovered up her juice and two scones and was looking slightly more animated. Her silver tiara had tilted and her mouth was smeared with raspberry jam. The wand was resting on the sofa next to her. She made fists with her hands and then opened them up into stars. This seemed to be the ultimate sign of approval. She picked up the wand again, returned to duty.
‘Careful with that,’ Harry Reynolds said, smiling indulgently. ‘Don’t want you casting any spells.’
Courtney stared at him.
‘She’s a right chatterbox, isn’t she?’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘She’s all there, is she?’
‘Of course she is,’ Tracy said crossly. She dabbed at the raspberry jam on Courtney’s face with a tissue, to no effect. There were also archaeological remnants of tuna roll, doughnut and chocolate. Tracy realized that when she was in the supermarket again she would have to take it to the next level. Wet Wipes.
‘So… long time no see, Superintendent,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘Both civilians now, eh? Another scone?’
‘No, thanks. Well, maybe. Go on then. Are you really out of the game, Harry?’
‘I’m over seventy,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘My wife died since I last saw you. Cancer. I nursed her to the end, died in my arms. But I can’t complain, I’ve got a wonderful daughter, Susan, and the grandkids stay over all the time. I spoil them rotten, but why not? Used to be different in my day, a clip round the ear and bread and dripping for your tea if you were lucky…’
Tracy could feel herself nodding off. Wondered if Harry Reynolds would mind – wondered if he’d even notice – if she were to lie down on his bigger-than-a-cow sofa and have a little snooze.
‘… and, of course, they come every Sunday for a big roast, all the trimmings. I like to make a proper pudding – fruit pie, steamed sponge, jam roly-poly. Hardly anyone does that any more, do they? Yorkshire puddings – who makes them any more?’
Tracy could almost smell the scent of fatty roasting meat and overcooked vegetables. For a second she was back in the bungalow in Bramley, the dead air of Sunday mornings, her mother ‘partaking’ of a small schooner of sherry.
‘You used to think of Sunday lunch as an immovable feast,’ Harry carried on. ‘Time immemorial, you didn’t think it would be replaced by a pizza or takeaway from the Chinky. No wonder this country’s going to the dogs.’
Tracy bit into another scone to keep herself awake. She felt as if she’d accidentally wandered into the middle of a Werther’s Original advert. Did all criminals turn soft if they survived to old age? (Did police detectives? Probably not.) Maybe they could just move in with Harry Reynolds now that he’d transformed from career criminal into twinkly – albeit fascist and racist – granddad. How many bedrooms in this house? Four at least. Plenty. They could make themselves scarce at the weekends, or Courtney could stay and play with Brett and Ashley.
‘Is this your kiddy?’ Harry Reynolds asked. The tone was off-hand, pleasant, but suddenly there was less of the whole twinkling thing going on.
‘I’m here on business,’ Tracy said.
‘I thought you said you were retired, Superintendent.’
‘Different kind of business,’ Tracy said.
The shopping they had bought this morning in the supermarket was still in the boot of the Audi. Tracy imagined anything fresh in there slowly rotting, turning to mush in the plastic bags. It was mostly stuff to take with them to the holiday cottage. Self-catering – you always bought five times what you needed. No way was she cooking tonight.
‘Let’s go out for our tea,’ she said to Courtney once they were both strapped in the Audi. Courtney nodded, kept on nodding. A nodding dog. ‘You can stop now,’ Tracy advised her. The nodding slowed down. Stopped.
Before setting off Tracy listened to her voicemail, dreading bad news from Barry. Message one.
Nobody could invest the words ‘private detective’ with as much scorn as Barry. Jackson? Name meant nothing at all to her. Was he after the kid? Had he been sent to get her back? She was going to give him a wide berth whoever he was.
There was a grey Avensis flitting in and out of the rear-view mirror. Tracy was sure it was the same car that had been parked near them in the supermarket. She’d noticed it because of the pink rabbit hanging from the rear-view mirror. ‘Air-freshener bunny’. Bloody stupid thing, she’d been given one by her ‘secret Santa’ last year. Secret Santas and vice didn’t go together somehow. The Avensis disappeared from view. Could it be the Jackson bloke?
‘Keep an eye out for a grey car,’ she said to Courtney. Did kids her age know all the colours? Could the kid sing the whole rainbow?
‘Do you know what colour grey is?’
‘It’s the colour of the sky,’ Courtney offered.
Tracy sighed. Therapist would have a field day with this kid.
They ate supper in the local Chinese. The kid peered closely at the menu and Tracy said, ‘Can you read, Courtney?’
‘No.’ Courtney shook her head and continued to examine the menu.
She proceeded to dig her way through a plate of Singapore noodles. ‘I think there’s a fat kid inside you trying to get out,’ Tracy said. Courtney paused between mouthfuls and stared at Tracy. A few stray noodles hung out of her mouth, like a walrus’s moustache. ‘Not literally,’Tracy said. She sighed and dished out more steamed jasmine rice. ‘My fat kid escaped a long time ago.’
When they finished, not before Courtney had packed a plate of banana fritters with ice cream into her hollow legs, Tracy paid the bill with two twenties peeled off her roll of thirty thousand but raking in vain through her purse for some change, said to Courtney, ‘I haven’t got enough for a tip.’
Courtney stared at her, doing her imitation of a sphinx, and then delved into the depths of her pink backpack and retrieved the purse with the monkey’s face on it and took out four one-pence pieces that she placed carefully on the saucer, muttering, ‘One, two, three, four,’ under her breath.
‘How high can you count, Courtney?’
‘A million,’ Courtney said promptly.
‘Really?’
Courtney held up her left hand and slowly counted off four fingers and a thumb, ‘One-two-three-four-a million.’
‘That’s it?’
Courtney stared steadfastly at her. Tracy could see a noodle lodged between her front teeth. Eventually she held up the index finger on her right hand and said, ‘A million and one.’ She hadn’t finished with her generous tip. She was peering in the backpack, finally coming up with the nutmeg, which she placed with the coins. The waiter removed the saucer with waiter-like inscrutability and like a magician produced a fortune cookie and handed it ceremoniously to Courtney. She placed it carefully in her backpack without cracking it open.
‘Let’s go home,’ Tracy said.
Before they got anywhere near the house in Headingley, Tracy’s phone rang. Her heart sank the moment she heard the strident rant at the other end. Kelly Cross wanting a pound of flesh that Tracy didn’t even realize she was owing. She could take it. She could take whatever she wanted. Sometimes you just had to step up. Sleep, eat, protect. Especially the protect bit.
 |
The stench inside was unbelievable. Decomposition. Tracy wouldn’t be able to get it out of her nostrils for days. It was on her skin, her uniform, her hair. Years later she just had to think about the flat in Lovell Park and she could smell it. Kiddy was just standing there in the hallway when they broke in. Filthy, nothing but skin and bone, looked like a famine victim.
Still knackered from climbing fifteen flights and putting in an unexpectedly resistant door, Ken Arkwright moved his beefy body with surprising speed along the hallway and snatched the kiddy up, passed the emaciated little thing to Tracy and started searching in the other rooms.
Tracy held the weightless little body and stroked the dirty hair and murmured, ‘Everything’s all right now.’ Couldn’t think what else to say, what else to do.
Arkwright reappeared and said, ‘No more kiddies, but…’ With an inclination of his head he indicated a door he had opened further up the hallway.
‘What?’ Tracy said.
‘In the bedroom.’
‘What?’
Arkwright dropped his voice to a whisper and said, ‘The mum.’
‘Shit. How long?’
‘Couple of weeks by the look of it,’ Arkwright said. Tracy felt her stomach heave. Told herself to hold on, to think about Dad’s roses, Mum’s Izal, anything that didn’t smell of rotting flesh.
She carried the kiddy through to the living room, glanced in the bedroom as she passed, shielding the kiddy’s eyes, even though they were already closed. She had a glimpse of something on the floor, couldn’t make out what it was but she knew it was bad.
Detective Constable Ray Strickland and Detective Sergeant Len Lomax, first officers from CID on the scene in Lovell Park. They certainly took their time. Tracy looked out of the living-room window, all those dizzying flights down, and saw them finally arriving in a flurry of macho brakes but instead of rushing into the building they got out of the car and stood next to it, deep in conversation – or argument, it was hard to say from this height. There was something conspiratorial in their stance.
‘What the fuck are they doing?’ Arkwright said and Tracy replied, ‘Dunno. Where’s the ambulance? Why is it taking so long?’ What if the kiddy pegged out now? It was a miracle that the kiddy had managed to stay alive all this time – must have grubbed around in cupboards for food. ‘Don’t die, please,’ Tracy murmured, more prayer than request.
Tracy and Arkwright had walked all over the place. The contamination of evidence must have been phenomenal. You didn’t think so much about that then. Now they would have scarpered the second they saw the body, not gone back in until the SOCOs had combed every inch.
Tracy watched as a bicycle rolled up. A girl dismounted and the two detectives pulled apart from each other. The girl was wearing a long smock that looked like a nightdress and her two curtains of hair hung limply on either side of her pale face. Arkwright said, ‘Ey up, the hippies are here.’
‘But where’s the fucking ambulance?’Tracy said. Before she joined the police she had never said so much as ‘damn’, now she cursed like the best of them. She watched as the girl said something to Lomax and Strickland, all three of them wheeled round and came into the building.
‘Listen,’ Arkwright said, cocking his head to one side. ‘That ruddy lift’s working now, would you believe it? It’s like the universe has got one rule for them and one rule for us peasants.’
When Lomax and Strickland arrived at Carol Braithwaite’s door, the besmocked girl was trailing on their heels. ‘Linda Pallister,’ she said with a curt nod in the direction of Ken Arkwright, Tracy invisible apparently. ‘I’m the social worker on call.’With her scrubbed face and robust cyclist’s calves, she looked more like a fifth-former than a grown woman with a job.
‘We don’t need a fucking social worker, we need a fucking ambulance,’ Tracy hissed at her. Strickland suddenly ran out of the room and they all listened to the sound of him throwing up in the bathroom.
‘Sensitive lad, our Ray,’ Len Lomax said.
‘No sign of the pathologist,’ Len Lomax said, ‘but the ambulance is here.’
‘Right,’ Linda Pallister said, when the ambulance men arrived at the door of the flat. She took the kiddy off Tracy, Tracy holding on just a second longer than necessary. ‘It’s OK, I know what I’m doing,’ Linda Pallister said and Tracy nodded mutely, suddenly afraid that she might cry.
When they’d gone, Tracy said to Len Lomax, ‘I asked the kiddy who did it, who did this to Mummy.’
‘And?’
‘Said “Daddy”.’
Lomax laughed, a brutal sound in the dead quiet. ‘It’s a wise child that knows its own father. And as for that bint,’ he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the bedroom where the woman’s decaying body was still lying, ‘I’d bet a hundred to one that she couldn’t name the father.’ He took out his notebook with a strangely theatrical flourish and looked around as if he was going to conjure clues out of the walls.
‘Did you know her?’ Tracy asked. Lomax looked at her as if she’d just grown another head. ‘Of course I didn’t fucking know her,’ he said.
Tracy glanced at Ray Strickland. He looked shaky and green as if he was about to throw up again. He hadn’t even gone through to look at the body yet. When they first entered the flat Tracy heard them all talking in the hallway, heard Lomax say to Linda Pallister, ‘That’s the bedroom on the left, where the body is.’
‘How did he know that?’ she asked Arkwright in the pub when they came off shift.
‘Psychic,’ Arkwright said. ‘He does table-knocking and spirit readings in the Horse and Trumpet’s snug on Thursday evenings.’ Arkwright had a way of saying things so dead-pan that Tracy took him seriously for a second.
‘Think the next round’s yours, lass,’ he laughed.
Neither Lomax nor Strickland bothered with a statement from Tracy.
‘What could you have to say that he hasn’t said?’ Lomax said, jabbing a finger in Arkwright’s direction.
Barry, of all people, pitched up, said, ‘Sir?’ to Strickland.
‘Getting to be Ray’s bum-boy, isn’t he?’ Arkwright murmured to Tracy. Strickland said something inaudible to Barry and then Barry looked as sick as Strickland. They disappeared into the small, cold kitchen, where empty packets of cereal and anything else the kiddy had been able to find were strewn across the floor. It was a miracle that the kiddy hadn’t died of hypothermia, let alone starvation.
Lomax said, ‘Bugger off,’ to Arkwright, ‘and get knocking on a few doors. And take her with you,’ he said, nodding his head in Tracy’s direction. Arkwright retained an admirable poker face. ‘Let’s get going, lass,’ he said.
Carol Braithwaite, the neighbours said. Blankly. Nobody seemed to know her. ‘Only moved in at Christmas,’ one of them said. ‘Bit raucous, heard a few fights.’ Hear anything else? ‘Kid crying.’ ‘She brought men back,’ another one said. The classic ‘Kept herself to herself,’ from another one. Nobody knew her. Never would now.
Of course, everything was subjective. No true fixed point in the world. Tracy was beginning to understand that.
Tracy and Arkwright, knocking on door after door in Lovell Park. Thin walls, Tracy said, you would think someone would have heard something.
Carol Braithwaite. Three ‘O’ Levels and two convictions for soliciting.
‘A good-time girl,’ Arkwright said.
‘Doesn’t look like she had much of a good time to me,’Tracy said.
One of those three ‘O’ Levels had been in needlework, another in cookery, the third in typing. Information courtesy of flower-child Linda Pallister. Carol would have made a good wife but somehow that wasn’t the path she’d taken. At school Tracy had always been wary of the domestic science crowd – methodical girls with neat handwriting and neither flaws nor eccentricities. For some reason they were usually good at netball as well, as if the gene that enabled them to jump for the hoop contained the information necessary for turning out a cheese and onion flan or creaming a Victoria spongesandwich mix. Their career paths didn’t usually lead to prostitution. Of course, if you said ‘gene’ in the seventies people thought Levi’s or Wranglers. They weren’t the hot topic they were now. Tracy wondered if Carol Braithwaite had ever played netball.
Even at school Tracy had already suspected that she would make no one a good wife. Couldn’t sew a straight seam, couldn’t even cook a simple macaroni cheese or do hospital corners. She had a knock-out right jab though. Something that she’d discovered one hectic Saturday night of catfights and drunken brawls when a leery pair of young blokes nearly had her cornered on Boar Lane. Did her reputation as a copper a bit of good but hadn’t exactly enhanced her status as a woman. (‘Built like a brick shit-house, that Tracy Waterhouse.’)
When they eventually returned after knocking on doors everyone had gone and been replaced by Barry, a lone uniform, guarding the broken door of the flat.
‘I was told not to let anyone in,’ he said officiously. ‘Sorry.’
‘Fuck off, you big nit,’ Arkwright said, pushing past him. ‘I left my cigarettes in there.’ Tracy laughed.
‘Can you tell me what happened here?’
‘Eh?’ Arkwright said.
‘Marilyn Nettles,
Tracy remembered Marilyn Nettles from somewhere but couldn’t place her until Arkwright said later, ‘She infiltrated Dick Hardwick’s leaving do.’
‘Infiltrated?’ Tracy said. ‘You mean she was in the same pub at the same time?’
‘As I said, infiltrated. She’s a nosy cow.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
Skinny, mid-thirties, dyed black hair left over from the previous decade, cut in a bob so sharp that it looked as if it would cut you if you got too close to her. She had a beaky nose that gave her a hungry look. She was the kind who would trample over the bodies of the fallen to get to the story.
‘’Fraid I can’t comment on what happened here,’ Arkwright said to her. ‘Ongoing investigation. I expect there’ll be a press conference, pet.’
Marilyn Nettles shrank from the word ‘pet’. Tracy could see her wanting to say, ‘Don’t use condescending sexist language with me, you great big ignorant police oaf,’ and having to bite down on it and say instead, ‘Neighbours are saying it was a woman called Carol Braithwaite?’
‘Couldn’t comment on that.’
‘I believe she was a known prostitute.’
‘Wouldn’t know about that either, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh come on, Constable, can’t you give me a
Marilyn Nettles did something funny with her mouth, followed up by something funny with her eyes. It took Tracy a second or two to realize that she was trying to flirt with Arkwright. She was deluded. It was like trying to flirt with a wardrobe.
‘Have you got something in your eye?’Tracy asked her innocently.
Marilyn Nettles ignored Tracy, strangely fixated on Arkwright. ‘Help a poor girl out,’ she said. She pinched her thumb and forefinger together. ‘Feed me just a little titbit? Give me something?’
With laboured slowness Arkwright delved into a pocket in his uniform and retrieved a ten-pence piece. It was over four years since Britain had gone decimal but Arkwright still referred to ‘the new money’.
‘Here, lass,’ he said to Marilyn Nettles, handing over the coin. ‘Go buy yourself a bag of chips. You need fattening up.’
She turned on her heel and stalked off in disgust towards a red Vauxhall Victor.
‘Wouldn’t like to have to get into bed with her,’ Arkwright said. ‘It would be like cuddling up to a skeleton.’ He looked at the rejected coin and spun it high in the air. He caught it on the way down and slapped it on the back of his hand.
‘Heads or tails?’ he said to Tracy.
‘You all right, lass?’ Arkwright said, draining his bitter and looking around as if he was expecting another one to materialize from nowhere.
‘Yeah,’ Tracy said.
‘Another one?’
Tracy sighed. ‘No, I’ll be off. My mum’s making her lamb hotpot.’
 |
At least he had learned his lesson, he was not going to be the foolish prey of boredom tonight. Instead he ordered something innocuous sounding on room service, no alcohol to accompany it, and when the food arrived he stretched out on the bed with his plate and picked up the remote.
Collier was a rugged but occasionally sensitive detective inspector who worked in both a gritty northern town (‘Bradthorpe’) and a green farming dale (‘Hardale’). He frequently kicked against the traces of authority in the search for the truth and was invariably vindicated at the end. He was a maverick but (as someone said at least once in the course of every programme) ‘a brilliant detective’. He was unreliable towards women but they were, nonetheless, continually charmed by him. In his own experience, Jackson had found the exact opposite to be true, the more unreliable he was (usually from no fault of his own, he would just like to point out) the less impressed women were with him.
Julia, of all people, Julia, who had ‘given up acting to concentrate on being a mother and a wife’ (a declaration that no one, particularly not Jackson, believed), had recently been cast in
‘Yes, Jackson,’ she said, with exaggerated forbearance. ‘I don’t actually have to have a medical degree or conduct post-mortems. It’s called
‘Even so…’ Jackson murmured.)
DS Charlie Lambert, an actress called Saskia Bligh, was Vince Collier’s glamorous (tough but fair, sexy but professional) sidekick. She argued, bullied, cajoled, sprinted and karate-kicked her way through the episode. She was a thin blonde with big, slightly weepy eyes and cheekbones that you could have hung washing on (as his mother would have said). Not Jackson’s type. (He had a type? What? The woman from last night? Surely not.) Saskia Bligh looked as if she bruised easily. Jackson liked his women to be robust.
Collier and Lambert. There were just the two of them, Morse and Lewis, Holmes and Watson, a double-handed duo that could solve every murder in the district with only a smidgeon of background help from semi-anonymous techies and uniforms. Jackson would like to see the pair of them work a case in the real world. Julia, in the shape of her character, existed to provide ‘a foil for their relationship’. ‘It’s not about crime, you have to understand,’ Julia said. ‘It’s about them as
‘They’re not real,’ Jackson pointed out.
‘I know that. Art
‘Art?’ Jackson repeated incredulously. ‘You call
‘You know what I mean.’
Julia was replacing a previous pathologist, a man. The actor playing him had been caught with child pornography on his computer and had been quietly transformed into a nonce in a prison somewhere. Ironic justice, a form of jurisprudence that Jackson felt a particular fondness for. Cosmic justice was all well and good but generally its wheels took longer to grind.
Vince Collier had recently acquired a mother from nowhere (caring but nagging, sensible but anxious). One of those old actresses who had been around for ever. (‘To humanize him,’ Julia explained.) Jackson didn’t think having a mother ‘humanized’ (whatever that meant) anyone. Everyone had a mother – murderers, rapists, Hitler, Pol Pot, Margaret Thatcher. (‘Well, fiction’s stranger than truth,’ Julia said.)
The face of Vince Collier’s mother was familiar. Jackson tried to remember why but the tiny people who resentfully ran his memory these days (fetching and carrying folders, checking the contents against index cards, filing them away in boxes that were then placed on endless rows of grey metal Dexion shelving never to be found again) had, in an all too frequent occurrence, mislaid that particular piece of information. This sketchy blueprint for the neurological workings of his brain had been laid down in Jackson’s childhood by the Numskulls in his
Jackson supposed that other people’s small brain-dwelling inhabitants ran their operations rather like air-traffic controllers, always aware of the location of everything they were responsible for, never sloping off for tea breaks or loitering in the shadowy recesses of rarely accessed shelves, where they smoked fly cigarettes and kvetched about their poor working conditions. One day they would simply lay down tools and walk off, of course.
Vince Collier’s mother had apparently been misfiled somewhere on the endless Dexion.
‘Killed off?’ Jackson said.
‘In the programme.’
They were drinking coffee, sitting in what seemed to be a cowshed, a chilly adjunct to the catering truck, where trestle tables were set up.
‘It’s not a cowshed, it’s a barn,’ Julia said.
‘Is it real or part of the set?’
‘Everything is real,’ Julia said. ‘On the other hand, of course, you could argue that nothing is real.’
Jackson banged his head on the wooden table. But not in a real way.
Julia was dressed for her part, in blue scrubs, her hair strained into a bun. ‘You’ve always been attracted to women in uniform,’ she said.
‘Maybe, but I’ve never had a thing for people who cut up corpses.’
‘Never say never,’ Julia said.
Jackson wondered where their son was. Neither of them had mentioned him. ‘Is Jonathan looking after Nathan?’ he asked eventually and Julia shrugged in a non-committal way.
‘He either is or he isn’t. And don’t tell me that he could be doing both at the same time. We’re not talking parallel universes here.’
She sighed heavily and said, ‘Isn’t. I’ve got a nanny, a local girl. And it’s a bit late to worry about the welfare of your son.’
‘Well, I haven’t worried earlier because you told me he wasn’t my son,’ Jackson said reasonably.
‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an autopsy at three o’clock.’
It came to him suddenly. ‘Well I never,’ Jackson said to the dog. The dog looked at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence. Vince Collier’s mother was none other than the confused old woman in the Merrion Centre. ‘I knew I’d seen her before. It was the wig that threw me.’
He watched
Real murder was disgusting. And smelly and messy and usually heartbreaking, invariably meaningless, occasionally tedious, but not this neat sanitized narrative. And the victims were often prostitutes, dispensable as tissues, both in reality and in fiction.
‘Art, my arse,’ Jackson muttered to the dog.
He waited for Vince Collier’s mother’s name to come up on the credits. Marjorie Collier, played by Matilda Squires. ‘See, I was right,’ he said to the dog.
He turned the television off and went back to his old friend Google, typing the name ‘Marilyn Nettles’ into the phone. All he ever did was search for women. He was about to give up when he found something on a site ‘dedicated to Yorkshire writers’.
‘We’re in luck,’ he said to the dog, tossing it a custard cream. ‘Marilyn Nettles, here I come.’
He was just thinking about taking the dog out for his last walk of the day and then turning in early when there was a knock at the door. The dog’s ears went on to high alert. ‘Room service,’ a voice said loudly from the other side of the door.
‘I haven’t ordered anything on room service,’ Jackson said to the dog. He might perhaps have recalled several scenes in films he had watched over the years where a waiter pushes a trolley, cloaked in white linen, into the room, a trolley which turns out to be hiding in its innards anything from a machine-gun to a voluptuous blonde. But Jackson didn’t recall any of this, so he opened the door.
‘Jesus,’ he said when he saw what was on the trolley.
‘For me? You shouldn’t have.’
The trolley was laden with a silver ice-bucket containing a bottle of Bollinger that was sweating attractively with cold. It all seemed very upmarket for a Best Western. The trolley was in the room before Jackson had the chance to point out the unlikelihood of it being for him. Perhaps a woman was trying to woo him. Not any of the women he’d encountered recently, that was for sure. The waiter – thinning grey hair, crumpled grey skin – looked more like an old fashioned, mild-mannered serial killer than your usual room-service staff. He spotted the dog on the bed and began to make a tremendous fuss of it. ‘Had one of these myself when I was a lad,’ he grinned at Jackson. ‘Border terrier. Brilliant little dogs. Cheeky little chappies.’
The guy was scratching and tickling the dog to within an inch of its life. The dog looked surprised. It seemed to have a wide range of facial expressions. Its repertoire was probably greater than Jackson’s own. He waited to see if the waiter would point out that dogs weren’t allowed in the hotel but he didn’t, eventually tearing himself away from the dog, saying, ‘Would you like me to open this for you, Mr King?’
‘Ah,’ Jackson said. ‘I’m not Mr King, think you’ve got the wrong room. Nearly got away with that,’ he said and laughed. Ha, ha.
‘I wouldn’t have said anything,’ the waiter said. He grinned and tapped the side of his nose, a gesture that Jackson didn’t think he had ever seen outside of an Ealing comedy. ‘What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’
‘I would be inclined to say the opposite was true,’ Jackson said.
‘What you
‘Get you anything else, squire?’ the waiter asked, backing the trolley out of the room.
‘No. Thank you,’ Jackson said. When he had gone Jackson looked at the dog. The dog looked at Jackson. Jackson sighed and sat on the bed next to it. The dog wagged its tail but Jackson said, ‘Keep still, there’s a good boy,’ and ran his finger round the inside of the dog’s collar until he found the tracking device. He showed it to the dog. ‘Amateurs,’ he explained.
 |
One of the things that you definitely didn’t do with kids was to drive with them in the back of a car through red-light districts at night, looking for a prostitute. In the badlands, near the junction of Water Lane and Bridge Road, an unmarked squad car from vice prowling for kerb-crawlers cruised past them in the opposite direction. Did they recognize her? Tracy drove sedately on, wondering if they had noticed the kid in the back.
Kelly Cross wanted more money. No surprise there then. The puzzle was how she had got hold of Tracy’s mobile number. (
All the lovely places. Bridge End, Sweet Street West, Bath Road. A wasteland. Literally. No one to hear you scream. A couple of prostitutes on the swing shift, huddled up against a wall. Offhand, smoking fags like connoisseurs. One was raddled by life, the other one looked underage, shivering, glassy skin, coming down off something.
As Tracy brought the car to a halt her phone rang. Barry. Oh, for God’s sake. The only way to stop him was to speak to him.
‘Where
‘Bath Road,’ she said, watching as the younger of the two women began tottering towards her car. Thigh-high boots with hooker heels, short denim cut-offs, little strappy vest, nasty jacket.
‘What are you doing there?’ Barry puzzled.
‘Looking for someone. What do you want?’
‘Did you get my messages about this Jackson bloke?’
‘Yes, I’ve got no idea who he is,’ Tracy said.
‘Want me to do something about it?’ Barry asked. The echo of Harry Reynolds’s words to her earlier. She rolled down the car window and the young prostitute, more child than woman, looked confused at the sight of her. ‘You looking for business?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘Yeah,’ Tracy said. She produced a twenty-pound note like a lure and said, ‘Different kind of business.’
‘Tracy?’ Barry said. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I didn’t say but this Jackson bloke, whoever he is, asked about Carol Braithwaite.’
‘Carol Braithwaite? Look, I’ve got to go, Barry. I’ll phone you later.’ She snapped the phone shut and shouted, ‘Hang on,’ to the girl who had taken the money and was about to scarper. She returned reluctantly to the car and was joined by the older woman who, catching sight of Tracy, said, ‘Trace, ’ow yer doing?’
‘Bloody brilliant,’ Tracy said. ‘Quiet tonight, isn’t it?’
‘Recession. And we’re being undercut all the time by crackwhores. There’s girls offering full strip and sex for ten quid. It’s a different world, Tracy.’ It was what Barry had said, what Harry Reynolds had said. Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different.
‘Yeah, terrible,’ Tracy said. ‘Everything discounted. I’m actually looking for Kelly Cross.’
‘Me mam?’ the younger one said.
Jesus, Tracy thought. Would the circle never be broken? She was acutely aware of Courtney in the back. Was this her half-sister? Was this the fate Courtney would have been destined for if Tracy hadn’t rescued her? The older woman – Liz, if Tracy’s memory served her – peered into the back of the car.
‘Yours?’ she asked Tracy, sucking thoughtfully on her cigarette.
‘Not exactly,’ Tracy said. Not much reason for dissembling with this pair, what were they going to do – stagger off to the nearest police officer and grass her up?
‘Nice outfit, pet,’ Liz said to Courtney, who in reply made a papal kind of gesture with her silver wand.
‘Do you recognize her?’Tracy asked. All three of them scrutinized the kid in the back seat. She was halfway through an apple and paused mid-bite. Rosy red, eaten by Snow White. The apple and the wand, the orb and sceptre of her sovereign regalia.
‘No, sorry,’ Liz said.
‘Nah,’ the younger one said, to Tracy’s relief.
‘Have you got a name?’ Tracy said to her.
‘Nah.’
Tracy looked at the girl. A
‘No, go on really,’ Tracy said, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Chevaunne. C-h-e-v-a-u-n-n-e, I have to spell it every time, it’s a fucking pain. It’s Irish.’ At least the girl could spell, even if it was only her own misspelled name. Kelly Cross was so thick she couldn’t even spell ‘Siobhan’. Kelly’s mother had been Irish. Fionnula. Tracy had been around so long that she’d seen three generations of prostitutes pass her by. ‘A right Gyppo,’ Barry used to say. Gypsies and Irish were interchangeable as far as Barry was concerned, both equally bad.
Tracy turned her attention to Liz. ‘Can you give me an address for Kelly?’
‘She
‘Harehills,’ Chevaunne butted in. ‘But it’ll cost you.’
Tracy handed over another twenty-pound note in exchange for Kelly Cross’s address. ‘Now fuck off, the pair of you,’ she said.
A grey Avensis turned into Bath Road, pulled off the road in front of them and parked on the forecourt of an abandoned warehouse of some kind, a blighted piece of real estate. Seemed a mite coincidental. Tracy looked for the pink rabbit but the car was too far away for her to see.
‘Ey up,’ Liz said and the
‘
‘Yeah, I see it, pet.’
Tracy parked in the alley that ran along the back of the street. Killed the engine, climbed out of the car and unstrapped Courtney. The last place she wanted to take the kid was Kelly Cross’s house but what choice did she have – she could hardly leave her alone in the back of a car in a seedy alley. From the first moment she saw Kelly Cross in the Merrion Centre yesterday it seemed Tracy had done nothing but make choices, an endless series of forks in the road. Sooner or later she was going to hit a dead end. If she hadn’t already.
Kelly was the only thing that linked Tracy to Courtney. Get rid of Kelly and you broke the chain of evidence leading back to Tracy. Then it would just be Imogen and her little girl Lucy. No need for Tracy to look over her shoulder for the rest of her life. Kill Kelly Cross. Even the alliteration was alluring. Her heart started to thud uncomfortably in her chest. Get rid of the link between Kelly and the kid, between Kelly and herself. Forge a new terrible bond but get rid of Kelly Cross’s claims on them. Who was better placed to commit a murder properly than the police?
The door to Kelly’s back yard was open. The yard was small and claustrophobically full of rubbish – an old washing machine, a filthy armchair, black bin bags containing God knows what. The windows of the house were filthy, cracked, full of powdery, fly-filled cobwebs. There was a piece of paper sellotaped on to the peeling paintwork of the back door that spelled out ‘Cross’ in a semi-literate hand. The door itself looked as if it had been kicked in a few times. Tracy sighed. She had spent a working lifetime knocking on doors like this.
And getting no answer.
She knocked again, louder this time, a police knock. Nothing. She gave the door a tentative push and it swung open. This was always an ominous moment in TV thrillers – nothing good was ever discovered behind the open door – but in Tracy’s experience all it usually meant was that someone had forgotten to lock up.
The door opened straight into the kitchen. She took a cautious step inside and said, ‘Kelly?’ She was half expecting Kelly to fly out of nowhere screaming like a banshee. She took another couple of steps and realized that Courtney was on her heels as if they were playing a game of statues. ‘Stay there, pet, OK?’Tracy said. Tracy took another couple of steps into the kitchen, the kid still following. Tracy pulled a chair out from the table and said, ‘Sit down. Don’t touch anything.’
Tracy put the light on. No one ever switched the light on either in TV crime thrillers. For the atmosphere, Tracy supposed. She could live without atmosphere. The whole kitchen was a health hazard. The flickering fluorescent light illuminated foil takeaway cartons, dirty pots and pans, rotten food, sour milk, a top note of alcohol and fags.
‘Kelly?’ Tracy said again, advancing into the hallway. Tracy switched on lights as she went. It was twilight outside but the house contained a deeper kind of dusk.
A small room at the back. Completely full of boxes, their insides spilling out, mostly clothes that looked only fit for shoddy. The second room was a living room, if you could call it that. About as bad as a room could get. Old fag packets, dirty plates and more takeaway cartons. Empty bottles and cans, a syringe poking out from beneath the sofa cushion, everything soiled and unsanitary. Tracy had read reports about Leeds from the nineteenth century, the poverty, the awful conditions of the industrial poor. Knee-deep in ordure. Not much different here.
No sign of a child in the house, Tracy noted, no clothes or toys or DVDs. Reluctantly, she made her way up the steep, narrow staircase. There were three doors to choose from, all of them closed. Like a fairy story. Or a nightmare. Tracy had a flashback to Lovell Park again, Ken Arkwright putting in the door with his shoulder. The smell that was released, the flies…
The bathroom was disgusting. Surely Kelly couldn’t bring her clients back here? Even the least discerning of punters might jib at entering this den of iniquity.
The second door led to a small bedroom. Completely empty. Nothing, just fluff, dust, scraps of foil, stray polystyrene chips like albino Quavers on the bare boards.
Only one door remained. Tracy hesitated, recoiling from the possibility of interrupting Kelly in the middle of providing services for one of her less selective patrons. She rapped loudly on the door and said, ‘Kelly? Kelly, it’s Tracy. Tracy Waterhouse.’ When there was no answer she warily pushed the door open.
The offal and sewage smell of death was everywhere. Even Tracy’s tough police ticker missed a beat. Kelly Cross was sprawled on the bed, her head mashed in, her belly slashed open. She looked as if she was in her work uniform, a tiny black skirt and a silver-sequinned halter top. Some of the sequins were scattered on the bed, glinting like fish scales in the harsh overhead light.
Tracy put two fingers against Kelly Cross’s neck. No pulse. She didn’t know why she was checking, as it was glaringly obvious that Kelly was dead. She was still warm. Tracy preferred her dead bodies to be cold.
Kelly Cross was dead. Tracy had got what she had wished for. It suggested a dark magic at work if Tracy’s thoughts could be translated so fast. Tracy didn’t believe in magic. She believed in darkness though.
She had seen worse in the past, although that didn’t make the foul tableau in front of her eyes any less repugnant. No time to be shocked, however. Think like the police or think like a criminal? Tracy wondered. Turned out, as she had previously expected, that it was pretty much the same, but in reverse. She rooted in her bag for a tissue and wiped all the door handles and jambs. Shame she hadn’t got round to buying the Wet Wipes yet. She had probably left trace evidence behind, a hair, a flake of skin, a scale of fish. A trace of Tracy.
Had the kid touched anything? Courtney was still waiting dutifully in the kitchen. Did she suspect anything? Her expression was, as usual, unreadable.
‘Come on, pet,’ Tracy said, her voice cracking with the effort of sounding inanely cheerful. ‘Time to go home.’
The kid dipped the wand, a magisterial blessing on the house of the dead. She slipped off the chair and Tracy shepherded her out of the house. ‘Let’s get back in the car, Courtney.’
‘It’s Lucy,’ the kid reminded her.
Courtney was asleep by the time Tracy pulled up in the lane at the back of her house. No tarmac, just a cinder-type covering, felt almost rural. It led to a row of rented lock-ups that served as handy garages for some of the car owners in the street. Tracy yanked open the door on her own lock-up and reversed into the empty space like a precision driver, killed the engine, rested her forehead on the steering wheel. She thought she might throw up.
Courtney woke with a start and said, ‘What happened?’
‘You fell asleep,’ Tracy said. ‘Nothing happened while you were asleep. We moved on a little in space and time, that’s all. We’re home. Have another apple.’ Bananas were all gone now.
The kid gave the eating of the apple a lot of attention, as if she was studying to become a professional apple eater. The thought of ingesting anything made Tracy feel queasy. She couldn’t wait to step in the shower and scrub off the smell of death that had followed her from Harehills and lingered like a foul aura.
‘Come on then.’ She sighed and opened the car door.
Courtney went to bed still wearing the pink fairy costume, refused to take it off. Tracy didn’t care, she hadn’t been in a maternal role long enough to have acquired any rules.
The kid’s treasure was laid out on the bed and she began to pack it away. When she got to the fortune cookie she stared at it for a while as if it was going to crack open on its own.
‘You have to break it,’ Tracy said. The kid stared at her. ‘Trust me,’ Tracy said. The kid smashed it with her fist.
‘Yeah, that’ll do it,’ Tracy said.
The kid removed the slip of paper from the debris of crumbs and handed it silently to Tracy to read.
‘
The kid reached over and patted Tracy’s hand. ‘And you,’ she said, sympathetic to Tracy’s exclusion from good fortune.
‘I don’t think so somehow,’ Tracy said.
‘You have it,’ Courtney said and Tracy tucked the slip of paper in her bra, a good luck charm. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said and went downstairs. She came back with Dorothy Waterhouse’s engagement ring which she’d shoved to the back of the dresser drawer. ‘Real treasure,’ she said, adding it to the contents of the backpack.
‘Yes,’ Courtney said. ‘Real treasure.’
Princess Courtney went on another adventure, a rather dauntless one involving wolves and axes and porridge-eating bears. ‘I don’t like wolves,’ Courtney said.
‘Me neither,’ Tracy said. ‘But we’re all right, they’ve been banned from Leeds.’ If only.
Once Courtney was asleep, Tracy rummaged suitcases out of the hall cupboard, hauled them into her bedroom and stuffed them with Courtney’s new Gap wardrobe and anything of her own that came to hand. Added another bag of toys. Took the supermarket bags out of the boot of the Audi and replaced them with the suitcases, put the supermarket bags in the back of the car. She’d sort them out when she got there. Everything probably inedible by now. ‘There,’ she said to herself. ‘All ready for the off, first thing.’ She sounded deranged. She sounded like her mother getting ready for the annual holiday in Bridlington.
Tracy checked on Courtney. The kid was fast asleep, snoring gently. A piglet, a kitten.
There was no Beck’s left – how did that happen? So Tracy made do with half a bottle of Chardonnay she found in the fridge, left over from who knew when. The wine looked like urine and didn’t taste much better. She could feel it roiling like acid in her stomach. Found half a packet of crisps hiding at the back of the cupboard and munched her way through them without tasting them.
When she turned on the TV the end credits for
 |
Dropped off in front of the telly. She had been watching
She was confused. What was on the box now seemed real, not television at all. There was Saskia aiming a gun at someone and shouting, ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ but she could hear Saskia moving about upstairs in the bathroom, the sound of running water. She was forever saying how dirty the cottage was and did Tilly actually know how to clean. ‘Filth everywhere,’ she said. For some reason Tilly imagined filth as a person, a man in an old-fashioned brown mackintosh, greasy and stained – a trilby shading his face. He lurked around a corner, waiting to jump out and flash her. Tilly had encountered a few like that in Soho in the old days, hanging round the back of the mucky bookshops and the strip joints. She had been propositioned a couple of times too. Tilly hadn’t been tempted, even when she was hungry for a crust. She knew for a fact that Phoebe, Dame Phoebe, had gone off for a weekend on a yacht with some rich nabob. The man looked like a frog. She came back with diamonds. Draw your own conclusions.
Yesterday Saskia had silently presented Tilly with a mat of soapy hair from the bath plughole. Enough to make a wig from. She was holding the hair on a piece of loo roll as if it was a dangerous spider about to attack her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘maybe you could, um, clear up after yourself?’
It was just a bit of hair, for heaven’s sake. People were funny about things like that. Phoebe couldn’t abide toenails, her own or other people’s. That woman went for a pedicure every single month, never cut her own toenails, not once! ‘Nanny used to do it for me,’ she said, when they were first living in Soho.
Tilly took the hair reluctantly from Saskia. ‘Oh dear, I appear to be moulting,’ she said, trying to muster some dignity.
And then suddenly Tilly was looking at herself, as if the television were a mirror. A cruel, distorting mirror. She looked terrible. Overweight, mad. That awful Brillo wig. Of course, she was watching
On screen, she was pottering around a kitchen, putting a roast dinner in front of Vince Collier, telling him he didn’t eat properly, that he needed to settle down with a nice girl. Tilly had never made a roast dinner in her life. ‘Don’t nag, Mum,’ Vince said. ‘You know you’re the only woman for me.’
To be honest, she didn’t look well. Intimations of mortality. Time’s wingèd chariot and all that. She wasn’t ready to die yet. She imagined Phoebe giving the oration at her funeral, talking about her ‘dear friend’, everyone sad for five minutes. She would be a footnote for a few years and then nothing. An unsatisfactory afterlife on Alibi and ITV3. Mind you, she had, apparently, already joined the ranks of the might-be-deads. There was a woman on set the other day, Tilly had no idea who she was, a journalist probably – middle-aged, the gushy sort, wide-eyed and faux-innocent. When she was introduced to Tilly she said, ‘Gosh, I thought you were dead!’ Just like that. How rude.
‘Don’t worry, Till,’ Julia said. ‘I put a nasty curse on her. She’ll be dead long before you.’
Julia was nice, like a normal person. More or less. Knew how to have a conversation, didn’t just talk
‘Tweets,’ Saskia said. Well exactly. Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. People couldn’t cope with empty space any more, they had to fill it up with anything that came to hand. There was a time when people kept their thoughts to themselves. Tilly liked that time. They had a blue budgerigar when she was small. Tweety-pie. It was hard to be fond of a budgerigar. Her father accidentally stood on it. Her mother said she didn’t see how you could stand on a budgerigar. Too late now to get to the bottom of what had really happened. Tilly wanted to bury it but Father put it on the fire. A pyre. She could still see its little body, the feathers flaring. She hadn’t particularly liked the bird but she had felt sorry for it and gave some time over to crying for it. Shame. Tilly didn’t want to be cremated. Thrown on the fire. She should write that down somewhere, make a will, make it clear. She’d had a horror of fire ever since Hull was bombed when she was a child. Although, of course, being buried alive would be no fun either.
Marjorie Collier was knitting now, waiting for Vince to phone her. The camera kept well away from the actual knitting. Tilly had no idea how to knit so she did a lot of sighing and resting of the needles on her lap. She was pleased with how convincing it looked. It was all pretence. Acting was, let’s face it, just plain daft. Everything was daft these days. Everything was pretence. Nothing was real any more. Baseless fabric. And so on.
Came to with a start again and struggled into a sitting position and put the bedside light on. Clambered out of bed, shuffled into her slippers and went downstairs. Sat for a while at the table, she was sure she was looking for something but she couldn’t remember what. There was a fruit bowl on the table, apples and bananas rotting quietly. Saskia never ate and Tilly forgot to. She’d offered Saskia a Polo mint yesterday and she recoiled as if Tilly was peddling heroin.
She was hungry. Fancied something delicious. Douglas used to take her for afternoon tea at the Dorchester sometimes. Lovely.
Surely something could be done about the little suffering children. All of them. Tilly would lead a crusade, the children’s crusade, no, that was something different, wasn’t it? Fighting the infidel. You still saw it, boy soldiers in Africa, she’d seen a programme on the telly. It used to be the Arabs who were the infidels, now it was us. She picked up an apple, the skin was wrinkled and it felt soft in her hand. Decomposing. That was what was happening to her mind. It was decomposing.
‘Jesus, Tilly,’ Saskia said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I am baking,’ Tilly announced grandly. ‘In fact, I am making a cake.’
‘You’re covered in flour,’ Saskia said. ‘The kitchen’s covered in flour. Every single pot and pan is out. It looks like a bomb’s gone off in here.’
‘Oh no, I can assure you bombs make much more mess,’Tilly said. ‘I was in Hull, you know, during the war.’
‘Do you know what time it is, Tilly?’
Tilly looked at the kitchen clock. ‘It’s three o’clock,’ she said helpfully. Teatime. A nice pot of tea and a dainty slice of cake would go down a treat. Mother was a good baker, an excellent pastry hand and made lovely sponge cakes, soft as clouds. Mother despaired of Tilly in the kitchen.
‘Three in the
‘Ah,’ Tilly murmured. ‘I thought it was awfully dark.’ She found that she had tears running down her demented old cheeks. It was the beginning of the end.
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He fell asleep and then woke from a nightmare. In the nightmare he was being chased by a torso, the headless, limbless body of a woman, part Venus de Milo, part dressmaker’s dummy. Jackson knew that really it was his sister. It was always his sister. She might be incorporeal now but she lived vividly in his dreams.
Jackson’s sister had been saving up for a dummy when she died. Niamh had made a lot of her own clothes. Jackson could still remember the evening dress she had been making for herself for her firm’s Christmas do. She had come to Leeds to buy the emerald green satin material. The dress was knee-length and she had stood on the kitchen table in the shoes she planned to wear and made Jackson pin up the hem. He had circled around her, measuring from the table-top to her knee, using the smooth triangle of tailor’s chalk from her sewing basket to mark the dress with little crosses.
He had experienced a strange, intimate acquaintance with both the emerald satin and his sister’s legs encased in fine-denier stockings. Their mother, not one given to compliments, never having received any herself, used to comment occasionally on Niamh’s lovely figure and shapely legs. Jackson’s mother, their father said, had legs like bedposts. If their mother hadn’t been dead for six months she would have been the one pinning up the hem. ‘A girl needs her mother,’ Niamh said, and because she was sad he didn’t say, ‘So does a boy.’ And anyway she knew that.
‘This will be easier when I have a dummy,’ she said, twirling around, trying to see the hem. Jackson thought a dummy was something that you sucked. Or one of his brother’s friends. ‘No,’ Niamh laughed, ‘a dressmaker’s dummy. You adjust it so it has your measurements.’
The dress wasn’t finished when she died, the hem still tacked with big white stitches. It hung on the back of her bedroom door, flat and limp without her body to inhabit it, as if she had suddenly been made invisible. Which she had, of course. Jackson’s brother, Francis, said, ‘Shame she didn’t finish it, she would have liked to have been buried in it.’ And then he said, ‘What t’fuck am I talking about, Jackson?
Jackson had gone to view Niamh’s body in the undertakers. She was wearing a shroud like an old-fashioned nightdress. It came right up to her chin so you couldn’t see the marks on her neck where she’d been strangled. Nonetheless her face looked wrong, as if the corpse was pretending to be his sister and not making a very good job of it. The shroud wasn’t something she would have chosen to wear. His sister liked smart, old-fashioned clothes, high heels, soft sweaters, knee-length pencil skirts.
He had had a couple of old photographs in which she didn’t look like herself either, but not in the same way that her corpse had felt alien. He didn’t know what had happened to the photographs. Gone in the fire, he assumed. When he lived in Cambridge, after Josie left him, his house had been destroyed by an explosion. (Again, the résumé of his life more exciting than the extended version.)
Niamh would have looked much nicer buried in that green dress. Nobody would have been able to see that it wasn’t finished.
When he left home a handful of years after her death, the only thing of his sister’s that Jackson still had in his possession was a small pottery wishing well that said, ‘Wishing you Well from Scarborough’. Niamh had been on a day trip with a group of friends and had brought it back for him. Presents were all the more precious for being almost unheard of in his family. The British Museum had intact pots that had survived for thousands of years but not a shard of the wishing well remained now, the explosion having taken care of that too.
He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, knowing that sleep would be a long time returning. He wondered what the woman he slept with last night was doing at that moment. Perhaps she was out on the town again with her gaggle of friends, or, more probably, she was at home with the owner of the skateboard, fast asleep having sorted out packed lunches and school uniforms, preparing for another working day. Jackson felt a stab of guilt that he hadn’t said goodbye, but had slipped away like a fox from a henhouse. Although what difference would it have made? Really?
From the other bed came a companionable kind of canine snoring from his new partner. Let sleeping dogs lie, he thought.
His phone buzzed and he fumbled for the light by the bed.
It was a message from Hope McMaster in tomorrow’s world –
 |
‘… so it’s a late finish for us all and it’s going to be an early start tomorrow and most of us won’t know the difference because we’ll be working through. I just want to bring you up to speed on where we are now. If there’s some of you here who haven’t met me before, I’m DI Gemma Holroyd and I’m the SIO on this case.’
Barry lolled carelessly against the back wall of the incident room and closed his eyes. Two murders in two days. Same MO. Same-ish. He had two weeks to go before he was out of this place. He didn’t want to leave a mess behind. Clean pair of heels. Shut the door, last person in the building turn off the light. Goodbye to the Homicide and Major Enquiry Team.
‘To recap, Kelly Anne Cross, forty-one years old, was found at approximately ten p.m. this evening by a neighbour. Rough estimate from the pathologist puts time of death somewhere between seven and nine, we’ll have a more accurate time after the autopsy. There’s a bit of a queue, I’m afraid, we’re still processing the murder of Rachel Hardcastle whose body was found in a skip in Mabgate yesterday evening, a suspected arson in Hunslet, and a three-car pile-up on the inner ring road.
‘There’s no question that the lady was murdered, however. It was a vicious attack, she appears to have been punched in the head as well as having knife wounds to the chest and abdomen. No sign of any weapon on the premises. Similar but not the
‘Rachel Hardcastle, the lady in the Mabgate skip, and Kelly Cross were both known prostitutes. Lots of prints at Kelly Cross’s murder scene, lots of DNA, all being processed. I’m sure the lab will have useful information for us tomorrow.
‘From the house-to-house we haven’t got much yet, not a lot in the way of CCTV in that area, car registrations haven’t turned up anything. Preliminary report back on the blood pattern…’
Barry tuned out. She was efficient, he’d give her that. Neat suit, neat hair, proper shoes, plenty of make-up, not like some of the butch lezzies you saw around. Strangely, the woman she reminded him most of was his wife. But then, all women did. Perhaps not Tracy. He’d been planning on making Gemma Holroyd SIO on the next big case anyway, even without Tracy’s prompting.
He had gone down to Kelly Cross’s squalid dump of a house, sat in the incident van, second time in twenty-four hours. Barry remembered Kelly Cross’s mother, couldn’t recall her name, something Irish. A real piece of work, but good for a quick knee-trembler up a dark alley. Those were the days. Different days, different Barry. He sometimes wondered if he had his time over again and lived his life like a saint – would it make a difference? No drinking, no smoking, no swearing, no dishonesty or immorality, no whores. He could join a public library, take Barbara out to dinner, buy her flowers. Change nappies, heat bottles and try and come home every night in time to read Amy a bedtime story. He would even try to give Barbara a hand with the housework. Then maybe, just maybe, he would clock up so many Brownie points that the universe would give him a pass and Amy wouldn’t climb into a little tin can of a two-door car with her drunken husband at the wheel and her baby in the back.
In fact, maybe it would just have been easier if he had ripped his chest open the day that his daughter was born and offered up his heart as a sacrifice on an altar somewhere. And then everything would be all right. Oh, and Carol Braithwaite. He would have to tell the truth about her as well. Just to make things right. You had to make everything right before you went.
Barry sucked in air through his mouth. Drowning in air. He was in his last days. The empire crumbling, the barbarians at the gate. Not barbarians, just shiny smart-arses with degrees in criminology.
‘Anything concrete to link the two murders?’ he’d asked the Holroyd girl.
‘Both women. Both dead, boss,’ she said. She obviously didn’t like him but then not many people did.
‘Do we know if there’s anything to connect your victim to the Mabgate whore?’ he asked. ‘Did they know each other?’
‘“The Mabgate whore”,’ she said. ‘Sounds like a character in a revenge tragedy.’
Barry knew bugger all about revenge tragedy. Never wanted to, thank you. He knew a lot about tragedy though. And revenge was coming, he could smell it on the wind. Carol Braithwaite ascending, a cloud of bone and ash, looking for justice.
‘Someone is asking questions,’ Linda Pallister had said on the phone. ‘What should I do?’
‘I’d keep my mouth shut if I were you,’ Barry said.
‘… did she usually take punters back to her house?’ Gavin Archer asked. ‘Didn’t she work the streets?’ Archer was a DC. Lean and bespectacled, he came into work on a racing bike in the full Lycra scrotum-squeezing clobber, although he never raced, just commuted from the boxy, thin-walled house in Moortown that he shared with his pregnant wife. Another clever bugger.
‘We’re intending to…’
There’d been a lot of blood. Even watching the video in the incident van outside Barry could see that. Gemma whatshername had got everyone off the mark quickly. Inside the house there had been a photographer, two SOCOs, two forensic scientists, pathologist was ten minutes away. Two family liaison officers, looking for life antecedents. Good luck with that. Everyone in the house zipped and booted in bunny suits. All for a dead prostitute.
On the video screen Barry had watched the biologist tracing a blood pattern. When he first started in the police they used to wander all over crime scenes like they were out for a walk in the park.
‘Someone didn’t like her,’ Gemma said, standing next to him in the incident van.
‘That usually is at the root of murder,’ Barry said.
‘… so anyway if we can all be back here at seven a.m. sharp tomorrow for the briefing. Thanks, everyone.’
The incident room emptied, a stream of tired but eager people flowing past him. Barry felt ill, a heart attack walking. Needed a drink. He’d been needing a drink all day. All week. The last two years. The anniversary. You would think it would get better with time but it just got worse. Sam was still in his pushchair when he was killed, now he’d be toddling around, maybe having a stumbling game of kickabout with Barry. And his daughter, in limbo, because none of them could bear to talk about turning off the life support.
He should be coasting towards the end, clearing up paperwork, handing over to his successor, attending a valedictory bash or two. Had something been arranged? No sign of anything. Tracy had joked that there wasn’t one but it was unlikely. A surprise party perhaps. He couldn’t think of anything worse. Tracy’s farewell piss-up had already acquired legendary status. Everyone liked Tracy, although a lot of them had liked to pretend that they didn’t.
‘Detective Superintendent Crawford. Did you want something?’
‘Sorry, DI Hardcastle, I fell asleep there. Bedtime story too long, I guess.’
‘It’s Holroyd actually, boss, Gemma Holroyd. Rachel Hardcastle is the woman who was murdered on Wednesday night. The Mabgate whore,’ she added sarcastically for his benefit.
His phone rang. Strickland. No surprise there then. Carol Braithwaite in her rising pulling them all out of their hidey-holes.
‘Barry? How’s things?’ Ray Strickland said.
‘Things are things,’ Barry said.
‘Just phoning to see if you were coming to the golf club dinner dance tomorrow night.’
‘Golf club dinner-dance,’ Barry repeated, trying to make sense of the words. A vague memory of some fifty-quid-a-head fundraiser that he’d been press-ganged into buying a ticket for. Strickland, Lomax, they never stopped, Len Lomax the worst. They couldn’t hack being retired, losing their power, so they spent their time on charity boards, fundraising committees, magistrates’ panels, keeping their names alive in the press and the community. They weren’t doing good works, they were just denying their impotence. The nearest Barry intended to come to charity when he retired was buying a Remembrance poppy.
‘Yes,’ Strickland said patiently, ‘dinner-dance. Are you coming?’
He couldn’t sleep. Barbara, next to him in sponge rollers and greasy face, was snoring. He thought about taking some of her sleeping pills. Maybe all of them. Taking the easy way out rather than the hard way. He’d just managed to fall into an unsatisfactory doze when the phone rang. Barbara made a noise in her sleep, the low moan of a wounded animal. Bedside clock said five thirty. Wasn’t going to be good news, was it?
‘Another murder, boss,’ Gemma Holroyd said.
‘This one a working girl as well? And don’t tell me you’re all working girls.’
‘Are we? We don’t have a positive ID yet. She was found in the doorway of the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley. Head wounds, stabbed.’
‘Well, you know what they say. One’s unfortunate, two’s a coincidence, three’s a serial killer.’
‘I don’t think we should jump to conclusions, boss.’
‘Faster you jump to conclusions sooner you get to the end.’
‘Anyway if they are related sounds more like a spree.’
‘All just words, killing’s killing.’
He put the phone down and lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Leeds and dead prostitutes. Don’t use the ‘R’ word. He turned to Barbara and patted her back. ‘Want a cup of tea, love?’
He could do without a trio of dead women on his plate. If there were no women, men wouldn’t kill them. That would be one solution to the problem.
Carol Braithwaite. Wondered where that kiddy was. Locked in that flat for weeks with the mother’s body. Barry couldn’t remember his name. Tracy had banged on about him for months. Michael. That was it. Michael Braithwaite.
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The next day on the kiddies’ ward. Uncomfortable place to be. Tracy touched the little hand, slack in sleep, with the back of hers. ‘Michael,’ she said softly.
Tracy had considered taking him a teddy bear but thought that perhaps he was too old for a soft toy. When they broke into the Lovell Park flat he had been clutching a blue-and-white police car as if his life depended on it, so she bought him a fire engine instead. Tucked it in beside him. He was hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked but he looked peaceful in repose. They reckoned he’d been in the flat with his mother’s body for nearly three weeks. He had been unable to unlock the front door. No one had seen him standing on a chair at the fifteenth-floor window, waving to attract attention. He had lived off what food there was in the house – Carol Braithwaite had been to the supermarket that afternoon, there were unpacked shopping bags in the kitchen. After that, he’d pulled packets of dry food from cupboards, drunk water from the tap. It was freezing in the flat. He’d fed the meter with coins from his mother’s purse until the coins ran out.
He’d pulled a blanket over his mother to keep her warm. Tracy supposed that at first he must have slept next to her. By the time they broke in he was sleeping in a den he had made from a nest of cushions and blankets in the living room. ‘Tough little bugger,’ Lomax said. Perhaps he was a boy used to fending for himself. All this reported to her third-hand by Arkwright.
Linda Pallister appeared suddenly at the opposite side of the hospital bed as if she’d been lurking nearby. ‘You again,’ she said to Tracy by way of greeting.
‘Want to get a cuppa?’ Tracy said. ‘In the canteen? Human being to human being?’
They drank weak, stewed tea. Tracy had picked up a large Kit Kat while Linda chose a sour-looking apple. Tea and apples didn’t go together, everyone knew that.
‘What’s going to happen to that poor kiddy now?’ Tracy asked, snapping her Kit Kat into four fingers and already lamenting their finish before she’d even begun eating them.
‘He’ll be discharged, eventually, and go to a foster home,’ Linda said, biting into her green apple. ‘There aren’t any relatives.’ Big horsey teeth, would have made a good herbivore.
‘What about his father?’ Tracy asked and Linda Pallister raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Isn’t one.’
‘Can I talk to someone about the kiddy?’ Tracy asked.
‘You are talking to someone,’ Linda said. ‘You’re talking to me.’
‘You know he witnessed his mother’s murder, don’t you?’
‘He’s four years old,’ Linda said. ‘He doesn’t know what’s real and what’s a fairy tale. Kids lie, it’s just what they do.’ There was a pause while her – rather piggy – little eyes seemed to assess Tracy. ‘A man he
The manila folder had a label in one corner, the name ‘Carol Braithwaite’ typed on it.
‘She was already a client?’ Tracy asked, touching the folder. Linda slammed her hand down on it as if Tracy was about to prise it open with her eyes.
‘Miss Braithwaite was known to Social Services,’ she said primly.
‘What for?’
‘I can’t talk about individual clients.’ She stood up abruptly, clamping the manila folder to her chest.
‘You knew the kid was at risk?’ Tracy said, standing up as well, aware of how much taller than Linda Pallister she was. ‘Maybe if you’d visited you would have found Michael a bit sooner. Before he spent three weeks locked in a flat with his mother’s corpse.’
Tracy had a sudden flashback to Linda Pallister taking the boy off her in the flat to give to the ambulance men. She held him high on one hip so that he was facing over her shoulder and his eyes locked on to Tracy’s as he was being carried away. Tracy felt as if he had reached in and scooped something out of her soul. She shuddered at the memory.
‘I have a very heavy caseload,’ Linda Pallister said defensively. ‘Every case is assessed on its individual merits. And now, if you don’t mind, I have to go.’
‘Look,’Tracy said, taking out a Biro, ‘let me write down my phone number.’ She prised the folder from Linda Pallister’s grip and said, ‘Not going to look inside, honestly.’ She wrote ‘WPC Tracy Waterhouse’ on Carol Braithwaite’s file and her home phone number.
‘This is my phone number,’ Tracy said. ‘If you ring, my mum will probably answer, but just talk her down. OK?’ She added the date to make it seem more official. ‘Just, you know, to keep in touch.’
‘Keep in touch?’
‘About the kiddy. About Michael.’
‘I have to go,’ Linda said, snatching the manila folder back, her face as sour as her apple core.
‘Yeah, I know, heavy caseload,’ Tracy said.
After Linda left, Tracy returned to the children’s ward. Michael was still asleep but she sat by his bed and watched him until a doctor came round, a simpering, silent nurse by his side. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked, seeing Tracy’s uniform – she was due on shift in half an hour.
‘No, I just wondered how he was.’
‘You’re one of the people who found him?’ Tracy didn’t think of herself and Arkwright as people, she thought of them as police.
‘Yes,’ Tracy said. ‘Me and my partner.’
The nurse took the boy’s pulse, cast a dismissive glance in Tracy’s direction. Wrote something on the boy’s chart. ‘Thank you, Margaret,’ the doctor said. Well, that was a first, Tracy thought, a doctor thanking a nurse. First-name terms, a medical romance perhaps. Tracy’s mother, on the afternoons that she didn’t go to her bridge club, put her feet up on the sofa and read Mills and Boon novels.
‘Ian Winfield,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m the consultant paediatrician on the ward.’ Tracy thought he was going to shake her hand and have a chat about Michael’s condition but instead he said, ‘The boy’s doing fine, but he needs to rest now. It’s probably best if you leave.’ Dismissed. Tracy couldn’t see what harm there was in just sitting there. The nurse looked at her, ready for trouble.
As Tracy was leaving the hospital she caught sight of Linda Pallister again. So much for her heavy caseload. She was coming out of the Cemetery Tavern, deep in argument with Ray Strickland. The odd couple. He got hold of her by the elbow and pulled her close, said something angrily to her. She looked terrified. Then Ray let her go and she walked unsteadily off. No bike, Tracy noticed.
‘I went to the hospital yesterday, to see the kiddy,’ Tracy said to Ken Arkwright, over a pint of Tetley’s bitter.
‘How was he?’
‘Asleep. I bumped into that social worker. Linda Pallister.’ Ken Arkwright grunted.
‘Anything happening? Anyone being questioned?’
‘You’ve got to remember,’ Arkwright said, ‘that the police don’t have the resources for law enforcement, for old-fashioned policing. Best we can do is clean up after people’s mess.’ He ripped open a packet of salt and vinegar crisps as if it was a trial of strength and offered one to Tracy. She hesitated, as befitted a girl on a cottage cheese and grapefruit diet. The chip-shop smell of the salt and vinegar crisps made her nose twitch.
‘Well, make up your mind,’ Ken Arkwright said.
‘All right. Go on then,’ she said, succumbing finally and grabbing a handful.
‘People are their own worst enemy,’ Ken Arkwright sighed. ‘What can you do?’
‘I know,’Tracy said. They were in a pub on Eastgate frequented by refugees from the HQ in Brotherton House. That was just before they moved to the new HQ at Millgarth. A fug of cigarette smoke and the ripe smell of fresh and stale beer swilled together. Double Diamond works wonders. In 2008 Carlsberg would announce the closure of Tetley’s brewery and it would be ‘regenerated’ – restaurants, shops and apartments. ‘A sparkling destination on Leeds waterfront’. Ken Arkwright would have been dead for twenty years by then and in 2010 Tracy would be having a Mud ‘N’ Scrub Body Cleansing Massage in the Waterfall Spa, courtesy of the vouchers that were her leaving present from the force.
‘You haven’t seen Strickland or Lomax?’ Tracy asked through a mouthful of crisps. ‘They haven’t said anything more to you? About the investigation?’
‘To me? Eastman’s golden boys?’ Arkwright said. ‘No, lass.’
‘Thing is, Arkwright,’ Tracy said, ‘the flat was locked.’
‘So?’
‘I didn’t see a key anywhere, did you? We had a good look around, we had enough time, Lomax and Strickland took for ever getting there. Yale and a deadlock. Someone left and locked the door after them.’
‘What’s your point?’ Arkwright said.
‘It was locked from the
Arkwright frowned into his pint. ‘Just leave it, lass, eh? CID know what they’re doing.’
‘Do they?’
Tracy went back to the hospital the next day. Kiddy’s bed was empty, she thought, oh no, not dead, please God. She found the nurse who had been on Ian Winfield’s round with him yesterday. ‘Michael Braithwaite,’ Tracy said, fear wringing her insides. ‘What’s happened to him?’
‘Who?’
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