"Started Early, Took My Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atkinson Kate)
Arcadia
She woke with a jerk. Something unnatural had disturbed her sleep. Not birdsong, not an alarm clock, not the first bus grumbling its way past the top of the street. Tracy shot out of bed and hurried to the landing window from where you could get a good view of the street. A street crawling with police. Two uniforms knocking on the door opposite. A couple of squad cars parked further up the street. A plainclothes she recognized, Gavin Archer. More uniforms. They were doing door-to-door in Tracy’s street. Could only mean one thing, they knew she’d been at Kelly’s house last night. They knew about the kid. They’d probably seen the security tapes in the Merrion Centre, seen Kelly Cross swapping the kid for cash like a street corner drug deal.
Two uniforms coming this way.
Tracy went into mental overdrive. Made a dash for the bedroom, pulled on her old tracksuit and ran along the hall to Courtney’s room. The kid woke up quickly as if she was used to having to exit houses with little warning. Tracy put her finger to her lips and whispered, ‘Shush.’ Something else the kid seemed to understand. The kid jumped into action and seized the precious pink rucksack and the even more precious silver wand.
They padded quickly downstairs. Just as they reached the hallway, the doorbell rang, loud and insistent. A wave of adrenalin cascaded through Tracy’s body. She snatched up her bag, pushed the kid into the red duffel coat and hustled her to the back door. Tracy fumbled with the lock, her hands shaking. When she finally got the door open she hefted Courtney under one arm – it was like trying to run with a small sheep – and made a dash for the back gate. No one in the lane. Tracy pulled open the door to the lock-up, bustled the kid into the back of the car and said, ‘Buckle up.’
Tracy’s heart was knocking so hard it was making her chest feel sore. She came out of the lane, turned left, drove away sedately. Passed an empty police car and a uniform on a doorstep speaking to a sleepy woman. A dog van coming the other way ignored her. Tracy made her getaway, moving through them all like a ghost.
Behind her, a grey Avensis with a pink rabbit hanging from its rear-view mirror glided stealthily away from the kerb, like a big fish. It was cut off by one of the uniforms, asking questions.
Tracy decided it would be safer on the deserted back roads. They could hang around in the vicinity of the National Trust holiday cottage she had booked. She could get the keys to the cottage at two in the afternoon. Not keys exactly, just a code for a keypad on the door that a housekeeper activated ahead of their arrival. They wouldn’t have to see anyone, talk to anyone. Then they could be invisible, off the radar, like stealth fighters. She only needed a day or so.
The kid fell asleep. It was foggy on the back roads. The fog felt good, like a friend. What had she done? One minute she was buying a sausage roll in Greggs, the next she was on the run from murder and kidnapping. Not that she’d murdered Kelly Cross, she just felt as if she had. Next time she was tempted to buy a kid, Tracy thought, she would take out some kind of warranty against buyer’s remorse. A twenty-four-hour test run to make sure that she hadn’t picked one that came trailing clouds of gory baggage. As if. As if she was going to go and buy another kid. No chance, she was sticking to this one like glue. Thick and thin, hell and high – oh, bugger and blast – suddenly there in front of them a deer stepped delicately out of the fog and into the road, and stood there, surprised, like someone who finds herself unexpectedly on a brightly lit stage in front of an audience.
Tracy heard someone scream, thought it might be herself, wasn’t sure she’d ever screamed before. She slammed on the brakes, yelled, ‘Hold on!’ to Courtney, remembering all the things she’d heard about people running into cows, horses, deer, kangaroos, even sheep, and not walking away alive. She prayed to the particular god who kept kidnapped kids from being killed by wildlife. Tracy closed her eyes.
There was a thud, like driving at full speed into a wall of sand. Tracy was socked in the face by an airbag. It hurt like hell. She was going to have some great bruises. She spun round to check on Courtney. No rear-side airbags, that was a good thing, kids got injured by them. Courtney wasn’t hurt, didn’t even look surprised. ‘OK?’ Tracy said. Kid gave her a thumbs-up. You had to love her.
The windscreen looked as if someone had thrown a rock into the centre of it. A starburst clock. Thank God, the deer hadn’t come through the windscreen and into the car. That would have been too much.
‘Stay here,’ she said to Courtney and clambered out of the car. The deer was lying on the road, illuminated by the headlights. A female, a hind. It was panting, making nasty tubercular sounds. Tracy knelt down next to it and its eyes rolled wildly. There was a huge gash across its neck and blood was pumping out from somewhere beneath its body. It made a frantic effort to struggle to its feet but this was a deer that was going nowhere, today or any other day. It was horrible to see an animal so wounded. Tracy felt more for the deer than she had for Kelly Cross. She had to put it out of its suffering but she could hardly whack it with a jack in front of the kid.
Courtney appeared at her side. ‘Bambi,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah,’ Tracy said. ‘Bambi.’ More like Bambi’s mother. Disney had a lot to answer for. No intention of getting
To Tracy’s relief, the animal grew quieter, no longer trying to lift its head. Tracy welled up. Poor bloody thing. Courtney patted her hand. The deer’s eyes grew dull and it gave a great shuddering breath and lay still.
‘Is he dead?’ Courtney whispered.
‘Yes,’Tracy said, swallowing hard. ‘She. She’s dead. Gone to join all her friends in deer heaven.’ Sacrifices, to save the kid. Save the kid, save the world. Tracy put out a hand and stroked the deer’s flank. The kid passed the wand over its body.
The Audi was as mortally wounded as the deer. ‘I guess we’ll have to walk,’ Tracy said. ‘Find a garage.’ She heard the sound of another car approaching, the noise baffled by the fog. The fog didn’t feel like a friend any more.
They were going to have to take their chances. Tracy just hoped the car wasn’t being driven by the police. A grey car materialized out of the grey mist. An Avensis. ‘Shit,’ Tracy muttered as the driver climbed out of the car and approached through the gloom.
Tracy grabbed the kid by the hand and hissed, ‘Run.’ She could hear him shouting behind her as they crashed through the undergrowth. ‘Tracy? Tracy Waterhouse? I just want to talk.’
‘Yeah,’ she muttered to the kid, ‘that’s what they all say.’
She stopped and sat on the ground, exhausted, at the foot of a big tree. ‘Get our breath back,’ she muttered to Courtney. Had life with Kelly Cross been so bad, compared to this? Would Kelly still be alive if Tracy hadn’t bought the kid off her? The kid knelt next to her, picked up a skeletal leaf left over from autumn and tucked it into her backpack. Her priorities were different from Tracy’s.
The wood seemed to enfold itself around them. Tracy thought of Sleeping Beauty. They could die here and turn into leaf mould before they were found. A crack broke the silence, startling them both, and Tracy wrapped her arms round Courtney and clung on to her. Nerves screwed tight as piano wires.
‘Are there wolves in the wood?’ the kid whispered.
‘Not as such,’ Tracy said.
She understood she was on the edge of everything now, the abyss ahead, behind the darkness, desperation the only way forward. Kid smelled of last night’s shampoo, and something green and sappy. A woodland nymph.
‘Come on, let’s keep moving.’ She hauled herself to her feet, picked up the kid. She was too small to keep running. Wasn’t that what had made Tracy take notice of her in the first place? Tracy had assumed that Kelly Cross was running with the kid because she was late or impatient or just plain bad but perhaps she hadn’t been running
Was the Avensis driver trying to get the kid back, was she someone’s property, a paedo ring maybe? The Avensis driver looked like he might be harbouring a pervert inside his grey skin. Was he this so called private detective, the Jackson bloke?
‘Where are we going?’ Courtney asked.
‘Good question,’ Tracy puffed. ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea.’
The trees started to thin and there was light ahead. Go towards the light, that was what they said, wasn’t it?
They crashed out of the wood. And nearly got run over.
Said he used to be a policeman. Anyone could say that.
 |
He had woken dead on five thirty as usual. When he switched on the bedside light in his bedroom in the Best Western the first thing that Jackson saw was the dog standing next to the bed, staring intently into his face as if it had been willing him to wake. Jackson growled a greeting and the dog wagged its tail enthusiastically in response.
He drank a poor man’s cup of instant coffee in the room and gave the dog its breakfast. It wolfed its food down in seconds. Jackson was beginning to see that the dog always ate as if it was starving. He understood because it was the same way he ate. First rule of life, acquired in the army, reinforced in the police – if you see food, eat it because you don’t know when you’ll see it again. And eat anything that’s put in front of you. Jackson had no qualms where meat was concerned, he could eat his way from snout to tail without any queasiness. He suspected that the dog was equally omnivorous.
Half an hour later and he was checked out and ready to hit the road. Marilyn Nettles was going to have two unexpected visitors. One man and his dog. He’d been planning to go to Whitby anyway so, clearly, fate was talking to him. In a difficult foreign language, like Finnish, it was true, but you couldn’t have everything.
He informed SatNav Jane that he was heading for the coast on the scenic route and then, like Lot before him, he left the city behind without a backward glance.
The tracking device that the room-service waiter had attached to the dog’s collar was currently in the Saab’s glove compartment. Jackson had considered placing it on a long-distance lorry, imagining with some satisfaction the misdirection caused by an Eddie Stobart eighteen-wheeler pulling up in Ullapool or Pwllheli, but then he might not discover who wanted to keep tabs on him. Pursuit was a two-way enterprise, quarry and hunter united in the quest, not so much a duel as a duet.
The tracking device was a nice bit of kit. Jackson had no idea they made them so small these days. It was a while since he’d had reason to purchase anything from a spyware site. He would like to buy something similar for Marlee, a gadget so tiny that she would fail to notice it because she would never (‘
Was the dog chipped? ‘Colin’ hadn’t looked the type to care enough about a dog to chip it but then Colin didn’t look the type to own a dog that didn’t exactly advertise his machismo. He was a pit bull man, right down to his St George’s tattoo and his shaved head. Did the dog, in reality, belong to a wife, a mother, a child? Was someone waking up each morning and feeling a lurch of sorrow for their missing pet?
What had been a light veil of mist in Leeds had grown thicker as he drove. It held the promise, although not the certainty, of a glorious day later, but in the early hours it had made driving perilous. He regretted now not having cashed in the prescription for spectacles that an optician had given him.
‘Things seem a bit blurry,’ he had said to the impossibly young girl testing his eyes. He wanted to ask if she was qualified but felt oddly vulnerable in the dark as she stared into his eye with a torch, so close that he could smell the mint on her breath.
‘Yes,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘The lenses in your eyes are growing harder. It happens at your age.’ Some things grew harder with age, some things grew softer.
On the road less travelled all kinds of wildlife were gambling recklessly with their lives on the unforgiving tarmac. A narrow miss with a badger a few miles back had tuned his reflexes up a notch. Jackson liked to think of himself as a knight of the road. It would be a shame to tarnish his shining armour with the blood of the innocent. He flicked the switch on the light-up Virgin Mary on the dashboard. The Mother of God might not have the candle wattage of the Saab’s full beam in her belly but perhaps she had a different kind of protective power. A sanctified figurehead leading him through the valley of darkness.
A sudden dip took Jackson, the Saab and the Holy Mother into a denser pocket of fog. It was like flying through a cloud and Jackson almost expected the Saab to buck with turbulence. In the cottonwool heart of the dip he saw a flash of silver and
For a split second Jackson thought she was a deer – a mile or two back there’d been a barely visible road sign displaying a stag that looked as if it was running for its life. The woman looked that way too. No bears and wolves any more, the only predators women ran from nowadays were men. She wasn’t alone, she was dragging a child by the hand, a small one, wearing a red duffel coat. The coat was a dark flare in the fog.
Jackson absorbed all of this in the nanosecond between spotting the woman and child and slamming on the brakes in an effort to avoid making roadkill out of the pair of them. The dog, startled awake by the Saab’s emergency stop, remained safely lodged in the footwell of the car and gave him an unreadable look. ‘Sorry,’ Jackson said.
When he got out of the car he found the woman down on all fours like a cat, gasping for breath. Jackson was sure the Saab hadn’t come into contact with her. And she was a big woman, maybe not as much of a buffer as a deer but he would have noticed the dunt, surely? ‘Did I hit you?’ he puzzled. She shook her head and, sitting back on her heels, managed to wheeze, ‘I’m out of breath, that’s all.’ She nodded in the direction of the child standing impassively by, and said, ‘I was carrying her. She’s heavier than she looks. Good brakes,’ she added, glancing at the Saab, inches away from her.
‘Good driver,’ Jackson said.
The child’s red duffel coat was open, revealing a gauzy pink dressing-up costume beneath. A fairy, an angel, a princess, they were all pretty much cut from the same cloth as far as Jackson was concerned. It was an area of retail Marlee had familiarized him with, somewhat against his will. A battered star-topped silver wand indicated ‘fairy’. Was this the flash of silver he had seen in the fog? The girl was clutching the wand, two-handed like a battleaxe, as if her life depended on it. Jackson wouldn’t have liked to be the one who tried to wrestle it off her, she might be small but she was a punchy-looking kid.
The rest of her ensemble was also the worse for wear. There was a rip in the skirt and bits of twig and leaf were caught in the cheap fabric. It reminded Jackson of a production of
He helped the woman struggle to her feet. She was wearing a tracksuit that only served to emphasize how broad in the beam she was, built like a collier, Jackson thought. She had a big, practical handbag strapped across her front.
Jackson wondered if she shouldn’t be even a little wary of the fact that she was stepping into the vehicle of a complete stranger in the middle of nowhere and, for all she knew, was walking into a worse nightmare than the one she had left behind. Who was to say that the Saab driver wasn’t a murderous psycho, combing the countryside for prey?
‘I used to be a policeman,’ he said, for reassurance. Although, of course, that was exactly what you would say if you were hoping to trick someone into getting into a car with you. (Perhaps it was himself he was trying to reassure, perhaps it was the woman who was a psycho.)
‘Yeah, me too,’ she muttered and laughed a grim kind of laugh.
‘Really?’ he said but she ignored him. ‘Is someone after you?’ he asked. The woman and the child both turned instinctively to look towards the wood. Jackson tried to imagine something flying out from trees that he didn’t feel up to dealing with and, short of an armoured tank (or a small wand-wielding girl), came up a blank. Instead of answering the question the woman said, ‘We need a lift.’
Jackson, also not one to waste words, said, ‘You’d better get in the car then.’
He adjusted the mirror to try to look at the woman in the back seat. He couldn’t see her face, however, as she had twisted herself round awkwardly in order to keep watch out of the rear window of the car. It wasn’t worth the effort. If anyone was behind them there would be little chance of spotting them in this fog. Or vice versa. He adjusted the mirror so that he could inspect the small girl sitting next to the woman. The girl raised her eyebrows at him, an inscrutable gesture.
Eventually, the woman turned round to face the windscreen and stared straight ahead. She had bruises blooming on her face and dried blood on her hands.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘You’ve got blood on you.’
‘It’s not mine.’
‘That’s all right then,’ Jackson said drily. Both his new passengers had the same slightly stunned look that he had seen many times on survivors. They looked like refugees from a disaster – a fire or an earthquake – people who had abandoned their home in the clothes they stood up in. Domestic abuse, he supposed. War on the home front – what else would a woman and child be running from?
Minutes passed before the woman said to him, ‘My car broke down,’ as if that explained the state of the pair of them. Sighing wearily, she added, more to herself than to him, ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘It’s only half seven in the morning,’ Jackson puzzled.
‘Exactly.’
When he glanced in the mirror again he saw that the woman had strapped the child in. The seat-belt was much too big and looked as if it might strangle her if he braked too quickly. It was a long time since he’d had a child-seat in a car. If he ever drove Nathan he had to borrow one from Julia, something which annoyed her out of all proportion, in Jackson’s opinion anyway.
Although he might not have admitted it, he felt slightly unsettled – the fog, the woods, the
She didn’t seem to care where they were heading, anywhere except where she had been seemed to be a good direction. Jackson was no longer sure it mattered which way you went, you never ended up where you expected. Every day a surprise, you caught the wrong train, the right bus. A girl opens a box and gets more than she bargained for.
‘Don’t you want to know where I’m going?’ he asked after what seemed like an eternity of silence.
‘Not particularly,’ she said.
‘Magical mystery tour then,’ Jackson said cheerfully.
 |
‘I can’t help but worry about you, son. I’m your mother, it’s my job to worry.’
‘I know, Mum, and don’t get me wrong, I love you for it, but I’m OK, I really am.’
‘Oh, all right, on you go then, but just remember, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ (
‘The line,Tilly, is actually “All work and no play makes
‘Really?’
‘I think it’s supposed to be amusing in some way.’
‘Amusing? Is it?’ Tilly puzzled.
‘Blame the writer, darling, not me. We’re playing to a low common denominator here.’
Never underestimate the intelligence of an audience. That was what Douglas used to say and, as in so many things, he was right, of course.
‘Can we run it again, Tilly, please?’
She heard someone mutter, ‘Oh Christ, just leave it or she’ll come out with every Tom, Dick and Harry before she gets to “Vince”. If ever.’
The actor playing Vince gave Tilly a wink. She knew him quite well, knew him as a boy, he was with the Conti school, did a turn as Oliver in the West End – or was it the Artful Dodger? – but damned if she could remember his name. It was a shame that everyone thought names were so important. A rose would smell as sweet by any other. And so on.
‘Do you want to get a cup of tea? You’ve got some time, Miss Squires.’ The nice Indian girl had Tilly’s call sheet, Tilly just couldn’t keep her hands on it. ‘Thank you…’ Pima? Pilar? Pilau! ‘Thank you, Pilau.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Ooh dear, that inflection, Tilly thought. What had she said wrong now?
‘Pilau? Like pilau rice. I find that quite offensive, you know, Miss Squires. Like calling someone “Poppadom”. My name’s
‘Me?’ Tilly gasped. ‘Never, oh, never, dear.’
In her defence (a poor defence, it was true), Tilly wanted to say, ‘My baby was black’ (or at any rate, half-black) but no baby existed to prove that. No baby that had grown into a strapping man. Tilly always imagined him looking rather like Lenny Henry. Phoebe came to visit her in the hospital afterwards and said, ‘Well, it was for the best. Even you have to admit that, Tilly.’
‘Do I?’
The nurses were all horrible to her, starchy and unforgiving, because the baby they had sluiced away without even showing her hadn’t been as white as the lilies, as white as the snow. ‘It would have been a
‘You would have had such a difficult time,’ Phoebe said. ‘You would have been ostracized. And the work would all have dried up. It’s for the best this way.’
Of course, that was 1963, the sixties had only just got started. Tilly hadn’t cared, the baby could have been purple and yellow with polka-dots and stripes and she would have loved it.
It was just chance (but then isn’t everything?). Phoebe had been invited to some kind of diplomatic party and twisted Tilly’s arm to come along with her. For cover, of course. Phoebe was having an affair with a Cabinet minister – married, naturally, all very hushhush. It was anybody’s guess who else she was sleeping with, she could easily have been the Christine Keeler of her day but she was too lucky to be found out. Always lucky. In life and love. And so there they were at this party and Phoebe dumped her the minute they walked in the door.
All sorts of people at the party, a famous elderly actor, camp as coffee, and a lot of beautiful young things, boys and girls. That model Phoebe knew, Kitty Gillespie, and a film star, a man, who would soon drop out of this bright, shiny world to go to India and find himself. They were all mixed in with guests from various embassies, a photographer from
‘Good evening,’ a deep voice said and Tilly turned round and saw this lovely young man smiling at her. Black as the ace of spades. (Would the girl – Padma, Padma, Padma, surely if she said it enough she could remember –
‘I don’t know anyone here,’ he said. ‘Well, now you know me,’Tilly said. He was from Nigeria, he said, a secretary to an attaché or some such, Tilly never quite understood, but he knew how to have a proper conversation – he had been to Oxford and Sandhurst, sounded more English than Prince Philip, and he was so intrigued by everything that Tilly had to say, unlike some of Phoebe’s friends who were forever looking over your shoulder to see if someone more interesting had entered the room.
Anyway one thing led to another – conversationally – and Tilly invited him round to the little Soho flat the following night, said she would cook him a meal, she had no idea how to cook anything, of course. He seemed quite lonely, homesick, well, Tilly understood that, she had felt homesick all her life, not for her own home, just the idea of a home.
Her flatmate – the ballet dancer – was on tour so they had the place to themselves. She made a spag bol, it was a difficult dish to burn but Tilly managed it. But there was some nice bread and a decent piece of Stilton and afterwards tinned peaches and ice cream and he brought a lovely bottle of French wine, so the evening wasn’t an unmitigated disaster and afterwards one thing led to another – not so much conversation this time – and there she was the next morning lying naked in bed next to an equally naked black man and her first thought when she opened her eyes was
She made coffee, proper percolator coffee, and ran down to Maison Bertaux and bought pastries and they ate them in bed. Felt like a tremendous adventure, felt like a romance.
She had a rehearsal to go to and he had work, of course, mysterious diplomatic work, and they walked together to Leicester Square tube station. It was a beautiful spring morning, everything felt clean and fresh and full of promise. Tilly had stood on tiptoe and kissed him goodbye right there in the station, a white girl kissing a black man in public. Desdemona to his Othello, except he wasn’t going to be twisted by jealousy and end up murdering her. No opportunity – never saw him again.
She was so tired. Usually enjoyed an egg roll at this time of the morning but didn’t feel like it today. A nice reviving cup of tea, just what the doctor ordered. No sign of Padma anywhere, probably just as well.
She hobbled off to the catering truck. A bit wobbly this morning. Her hip was hurting. Ladies who lurch. The doctors had started talking about a replacement. She didn’t want an op. All alone, being shipped off into the darkness. An anaesthetic like death.
 |
He was so lost in thought as he clumped along the corridor that Barry nearly collided with a woman from the lab. Chinese, no hope of getting that name right, always referred to her as ‘that Chinese woman from the lab’. Lucky he didn’t call her a Chink, he supposed. She was waving a bit of paper around, asking him, ‘Have you seen DI Holroyd? We’ve got a fingerprint back from the house in Harehills.’
‘Kelly Cross? Quick work.’
‘It was on file, one of our own. Ex-Superintendent Tracy Waterhouse. It’s probably old. It’s unlikely it’s connected to the murder.’
‘Yeah,’ Barry agreed. ‘Very unlikely. Their paths must have crossed at some point.’
Like last night maybe. Kelly Cross, tart with no heart, bashed in the head, stabbed in the chest and the abdomen. Body discovered by a fellow waste-of-space crack whore who lived on the same street. What had Tracy said the other night?
He hadn’t been to Tracy’s new house before, hadn’t been invited. She’d had a Polish builder working in there for ever and anyway she wasn’t exactly the kind to throw a housewarming. The front door was locked but the back door was wide open and Barry knocked and stepped inside, saying loudly, ‘Tracy? Trace? Are you at home?’
The
There were some kiddy’s toys lying on the floor. Barry picked up a little blue plastic teapot from the carpet. Amy used to have a doll’s teaset. Why did Tracy have kids’ things in her house? Had something bad happened to her? Tracy could look after herself. Thirty years on the force, a heifer of a woman, anyone with any sense would think twice before messing with her but something felt wrong.
He drove to the Merrion Centre to make sure she had left for her holiday. He showed his warrant to a spotty youth, he liked to cow spotty youths with his credentials. ‘Looking for Tracy,’ he said to the cowed spotty youth.
‘Has she done something? There was a private detective here looking for her the other day.’ That bloody Jackson bloke, Barry thought, poking his nose in. ‘I thought maybe you’d come to pick up the tapes?’ the spotty youth said.
‘Tapes,’ Barry said vaguely. He had learned a long time ago to avoid words like ‘yes’ and ‘no’. They backed you into corners you couldn’t get out of.
‘Yeah, security tapes. You were sending someone over. That woman who was murdered last night-’
‘Kelly Cross?’
‘Yeah, well known to us, and you. Apparently a policeman remembered seeing her in here on Wednesday. You wanted to see the tapes, see if she was with anyone. Thought they’d send a grunt to pick them up,’ he added, ‘not a superintendent.’
‘I am a grunt,’ Barry said. ‘I grunt all the time.’
There were three tapes, grainy black-and-white. He watched them back at Millgarth, took hours. Tracy flitted in and out of view occasionally, on patrol on her new beat. He’d almost dropped off to sleep when Kelly Cross finally came into view, dragging a kid behind her. Seconds later, there was Tracy again, on her heels. Tracy was yomping along as if she was about to storm a fort.
There were another two cameras outside, trained along the street in both directions. Barry picked up Kelly again on one of them. She was at a bus stop with the little kiddy standing next to her. Then Tracy hove into view again and she and Kelly Cross had a brief exchange of words. A bus arrived and Kelly suddenly disappeared inside it. Tracy was left on the pavement, holding the little girl’s hand. After a few seconds the pair of them walked off, out of reach of the camera.
Kids who disappeared after their mothers were murdered. Yeah, Barry could see why Tracy would have got herself involved in something like that. But kiddies who disappeared
Barry ejected the tape, fitted it into the inside pocket of the coat that was hanging on the back of his chair. He found a clerical assistant in the corridor and said, ‘Tell DI Holroyd that the tapes from the Merrion Centre have come, will you. Two of them.’
Perhaps this Jackson bloke had managed to find Tracy. Seemed unlikely that a so-called private detective could find her when Barry had failed. Still, worth a shot, he thought. Said he was staying at the Best Western, didn’t he? Shrugged himself into his coat. ‘Barry Crawford is leaving the building,’ he said to the desk sergeant.
Outside the Slug and Lettuce on Park Row there was a big builder’s skip. Barry tossed the third tape from the Merrion Centre into it.
What was it they said – discretion was the better part of valour?
 |
‘What do
‘What?’
‘What do you think, Barry?’
They’d come from Elland Road, where a good-natured match had got bumpy at the end. They’d brought the horses in. Tracy didn’t think horses should be used for crowd control, it was like sending them into battle. Barry was with them, trying to avoid buying a round.
It wasn’t that Tracy valued Barry’s opinion particularly but no one seemed to want to talk about it. Carol Braithwaite was being swept under the carpet like a bit of rubbish. ‘She was somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter. We don’t even know the cause of death.’
‘Strangled,’ Barry said.
‘How come you know?’ Tracy asked. Barry shrugged. ‘No one seems to be doing much, case just seems to be disappearing,’ Tracy said. Three days since Arkwright had put in that door in Lovell Park but it was as if it had never happened. Tiny piece in the paper by that Marilyn Nettles woman and that was it. ‘It doesn’t even feel as if anyone’s looking,’Tracy said. ‘And you,’ she added, turning accusingly to Barry, ‘what were you doing there anyway?’
‘What are you getting at?’
Tracy thought of Lomax and Strickland in Lovell Park, both looking shifty, behaving like Special Branch, knowing more than they were saying.
‘Have they spoken to you at all?’ she asked Barry. He shrugged. ‘You’re doing a lot of shrugging, Barry.’
‘Ah, the mysteries of CID,’ Arkwright said. ‘Ours not to reason why. It seems pretty straightforward to me. The poor lass picked up a punter, took him back to her flat and he turned out to be a wrong ’un. It happens.’
‘The oldest profession,’ Barry said, as if he was a man of the world. ‘Ever since there’ve been whores there’s been people killing them. They’re not going to stop now.’
‘And that makes it OK, does it, Barry? The whole door-locked from-the-outside thing, what about that?’
‘What’s your point?’ Barry said. ‘You think a couple of CID blokes knocked off a prozzie and then covered it up? That’s nuts.’
Sounded almost reasonable to Tracy’s ears.
‘You’re talking through your hat, Tracy,’ Barry said. ‘You’d better not spread rumours like that, you’ll be out on your arse quicker than you can say “Eastman”.’
‘They had a witness,’ Tracy said. ‘He was four – so what? He said to me, he told me, his father killed his mother. Shouldn’t they at least be trying to find out who his father is?’
‘I’m sure they are,’ Barry said. ‘But it’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Barry’s right,’ Arkwright said. ‘It’s an ongoing investigation. They’re not going to come running to you every time they get a bit of information, lass.’
‘Thought I’d go and see Linda Pallister, that social worker,’Tracy said to Arkwright once Barry had left.
‘That hippy bird?’ Arkwright said.
‘She lives in a commune.’
‘Filthy nutters,’ Arkwright said. ‘Do yourself a favour, Trace. Call off the attack poodles, eh?’
An ‘urban commune’, according to Linda. Fancy term for what was really just a squat, a dilapidated old house in Headingley that was due for demolition. The residents kept chickens in the back garden. Muddy parsnips and leeks grew stunted and misshapen where once there had been a small parterre.
Tracy had just come off shift and was still in uniform. ‘Pig,’ she heard one of the blokes who lived in the house mutter as she passed him in the hallway. Someone else made a grunting noise. Tracy felt like arresting them, marching them out of there in handcuffs. Wouldn’t have needed much of an excuse, the sweet sickly stink of marijuana drifted from the living room.
Linda, mother hen, queen bee, was wearing sensible hiker’s sandals beneath her long patchwork cotton skirt. Her droopy hair was pulled back in a ponytail so you could see the whole of her disgustingly healthy face. She was part of some wholefood cooperative, ate brown rice and grew ‘sprouts’, not the type that came from Brussels, and made ‘cultures’ for stuff like yoghurt and bread. Linda was attending an evening class in beekeeping. All these facts conveyed righteously over a cup of tea that she reluctantly offered. They sat in the kitchen, within the circle of warmth coming from a big, ancient Aga.
The tea was horrible, not proper tea. ‘Rooibos,’ Linda said. Rubbish more like, Tracy thought. The tea was in big, clumsy mugs that ‘someone we know’ had made. ‘We bartered eggs for mugs,’ Linda said smugly. ‘One day,’ she added earnestly, ‘there’ll be no money.’ Well, turned out she was right about that.
Like Tracy, Linda Pallister was still on probation. Unlike Tracy, she had a kid, having got knocked up in the middle of whatever worthy degree it was that she had done, social admin, politics, sociology. She spent the rest of her degree hauling the kiddy around on the back of her bike to nurseries and child-minders.
The boy was wandering around the kitchen half-naked, his rubbery little penis bouncing about. Tracy felt shocked.
‘Jacob,’ Linda said. He peed on the floor right in front of Tracy and Linda didn’t seem bothered. ‘Children should be free to do what they want,’ she said. ‘We shouldn’t impose our rigid, artificial structures on them. He’s very happy,’ she added as if Tracy had said something that indicated otherwise.
Linda mopped up Jacob’s pee and, without washing her hands, cut slices from a brown cake that she’d made. ‘Banana bread?’ she offered Tracy. Tracy politely declined. ‘Watching my figure,’ she said. ‘Someone has to.’
‘What do you want?’ Linda said. ‘You didn’t come here to talk about self-sufficiency and poultry.’
‘No, I didn’t. I just wondered how Michael was doing.’
‘Michael?’ Linda said vaguely, suddenly very preoccupied with wiping Jacob’s nose.
‘The Braithwaite kiddy,’ Tracy said. ‘Is he with foster parents now, because he’s not in the hospital?’
‘He’s in a different hospital now.’
‘Where? Why?’
Linda stared at the unpalatable-looking piece of banana bread on her plate and said, ‘’Fraid I can’t say. Against policy.’
‘So no chance I could go and visit him?’
‘Why would you want to do that?’ Linda asked.
‘To see how he’s doing.’ Because I held him in my arms and it broke my heart, Tracy thought, but she wasn’t about to show any weakness to Linda Pallister.
‘I told you, he’s fine,’ Linda said, suddenly as snappy as a crocodile. When Linda found God a few years later her personality would improve a lot. One of the few arguments Tracy could muster in favour of Christianity.
‘I don’t see how he can be “fine”,’Tracy protested. ‘He was locked in a flat with the rotting corpse of his mother for nearly three weeks.’
‘Well, “fine” is perhaps the wrong word,’ Linda conceded. ‘But he’s getting all the help he needs. You should just leave it alone.’ She pulled her own kiddy close and put a protective arm around him and said again, ‘Just leave it alone.’
‘So I definitely can’t visit him?’ Tracy persisted.
‘No,’ Linda sighed. ‘No visitors. It’s a directive from above.’
For a mad second Tracy thought Linda Pallister meant heaven.
It was ridiculous but Tracy had half formed the notion that if no one wanted Michael Braithwaite she could foster or even adopt him herself. Of course, Tracy knew nothing about children and she was still living at home. She could just imagine the look on her mother’s face if she brought home a neglected, traumatized little boy.
‘He’ll be adopted by someone who will love him,’ Linda Pallister said. ‘He’ll forget what happened to him, he’s too young to remember. Children are very resilient.’
Tracy asked Len Lomax herself, didn’t intend to but she bumped into him the next day. He was coming out of Brotherton House as she was going in.
‘Sir, do you mind me asking what’s happening in the Carol Braithwaite murder case?’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Any suspects?’
‘Not as yet.’
‘You haven’t found the key?’
‘Key?’ He flinched. He definitely flinched. ‘What key?’
‘The key to Carol Braithwaite’s flat. It was locked from the outside.’
‘I think you might have made a mistake there, WPC Waterhouse. Fancy yourself as a detective now, do you?’
He stalked off righteously, climbed into a red Vauxhall Victor that Tracy recognized from somewhere. She tried to get a look at the driver, caught a glimpse of a razor-sharp bob and a beaky nose that liked to poke itself where it shouldn’t. Why was Len Lomax getting into a car with Marilyn Nettles? And why had he flinched when she asked about the key?
‘He knew about that key,’ she said to Barry.
‘That’s crap,’ Barry said. Barry got nervy every time she mentioned Carol Braithwaite’s name, why was that? (‘Because you never stop fucking mentioning her, that’s why.’) He drained his pint in one go and said, ‘Got to be off, got a date. That Barbara’s agreed to go to the pictures with me.
‘Monty Python? Oh, very romantic, Barry,’ Tracy said.
Took Tracy years to get out of uniform and into CID. You had to wonder, was it because she was a woman, or because she was a woman who asked the wrong questions? Or the right questions. Barry’s star, on the other hand, rose quickly. It wasn’t long before he was drinking pals with Lomax, Strickland, Marshall, even Eastman, a scrum of beer-swilling, fag-smoking blokes. Thick as thieves, all of them. The good old days.
She was like a terrier with the scent of a rabbit in its nose. Wouldn’t let it go.
‘And what’s her name?’ Ray Strickland said, frowning into his pint.
‘Tracy Waterhouse. She’s all right, Tracy,’ Barry said hastily, ‘but she just keeps going on about how the kiddy said his father did it. Won’t let it drop.’
A week later, Len Lomax took Barry to one side and told him that they’d lifted a bloke in Chapeltown who confessed to being Carol Braithwaite’s killer. ‘Said he was the boy’s father,’ Lomax said.
‘So, he’s been arrested, there’ll be a trial?’ Barry said and Lomax said, ‘Unfortunately not, bloke got into a fight in Armley while he was on remand, someone stuck him with a knife.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yeah, dead. In the light of everything, the kiddy, what happened to him, the whole thing will probably be dropped.’
It was only much later that Barry wondered if what Lomax had told him was true. He could just have made it up. Barry never asked questions, always took what Lomax and Strickland said as gospel. God knows why.
‘Let your lady friend know,’ Lomax said.
‘My lady friend?’ Barry puzzled. He had had one not entirely successful date with Barbara. Turned out she didn’t like Monty Python. (
‘Your WPC,’ Lomax said.
‘Tracy? OK.’ Barry wondered when he had become Strickland and Lomax’s dogsbody.
‘Remember, Crawford, discretion’s the better part of valour.’ Barry had no idea what he was talking about.
 |
The lights of a petrol station loomed out of the fog and the woman said, ‘Can we have a pit-stop, please?’ Jackson pulled the Saab on to the forecourt and she led the kid by the hand to the toilets round the back.
‘Just be a sec,’ she said. The kid looked back over her shoulder at Jackson. She was gazing at him as if she was wondering whether he was about to leg it and leave them in the lurch. She hadn’t said a word so far. Jackson wondered if she was mute, or perhaps just traumatized. He gave her his reassuring Queen Mother wave and she semaphored slowly back with her silver wand.
He supposed it might be a good idea to stock up on supplies. The garage wasn’t big but it still managed to sell everything from bunches of flowers and bags of smokeless fuel to foodstuffs and top-shelf magazines. Eight o’clock in the morning and the place was deserted, just one young, very bored girl at the counter, watched over by a couple of CCTV monitors that allowed her to keep an eye on the pumps. She was chewing on a piece of her long, stringy hair, as if it were liquorice. The girl was small and slim and Jackson wondered if she should be out here all on her own. It would be too easy to overpower her and force her to open the till, or worse.
Once inside he had trouble deciding what to buy. He supposed he should get something for his new acquaintances, the kid had a little backpack but it seemed doubtful it was filled with rations. He bought bottled water, milk and juice, a couple of pasties, apples, a bunch of bananas, a packet of nuts, chocolate, some dog treats and, lastly, a plastic cup of black coffee to take away. The shop was bigger inside than it was outside.
Back in the Saab Jackson waited. He sipped his coffee. Hot and wet and that was about all. It tasted vaguely of rust. He opened the packet of nuts and threw a handful in his mouth. He heard a train somewhere, muffled by the fog, and wondered where it was going. A cow bellowed nearby, low and moody, like a foghorn. It was at times like this that he felt like taking up smoking again. He waited some more. He wondered if he should go and see if the pair of them were OK. Perhaps there had been some kind of emotional breakdown in the toilets.
He watched as the girl in the garage came out from her sanctum and started hauling the buckets of flowers and bags of smokeless fuel out front. Whatever they were paying her, he thought, it didn’t seem like enough. She paused on the threshold, clutching a plastic bucket of flowers that were already tired inside their cellophane shrouds, the same kind of weedy-looking bouquets that were propped against trees or stuck through wire fencing to indicate where some unfortunate cyclist or pedestrian had been knocked off the planet. A rotting pile had been left at the site of the train crash. Someone had shown him a photograph later. The bouquets had been placed at the bridge above the track. Kitsch-looking soft toys and teddy bears too.
The girl from the garage cast a suspicious glance in Jackson’s direction but then her attention was drawn away from him as a black Land Cruiser suddenly appeared out of the fog, slowing to a stop on the other side of the forecourt. It waited with the engine running, looking vaguely menacing, like a pent-up bull waiting to go into the ring. Before Jackson could form much of a thought about it (such as what a stupid, badass kind of vehicle, who do they think they are, warlords, gangsters?), a man – a cross-bred species, half rugby fullback, half silverback gorilla – climbed out of the passenger side and also made his way round the back.
The driver then climbed out of the Land Cruiser and started to approach the Saab. Brothers-in-arms. Both men had the doughy faces of people reared on a diet of fat and potatoes and were dressed in leather jackets that had last been fashionable some time in the seventies, unless you lived in Albania where they had never become démodé and possibly never would.
Before he reached the Saab the woman reappeared, screaming her head off at Jackson. She lumbered across the forecourt like a charging rhino, carrying the girl under one arm while with her free hand she was struggling to remove the bag that was strapped across her front. The silverback gorilla was on her heels but not for long because she managed to pull the bag over her head and, holding it by the strap at arm’s length, in one surprisingly graceful movement – more ballet than hammer throw, the kid under her arm forming a kind of ballast – she twirled round and socked the guy following her full in the face with the bag. He went down like lead. Jackson flinched inwardly and wondered what a woman would carry in a handbag that could do that kind of damage. An anvil? Thatcher would have liked a handbag like that.
The driver of the Land Cruiser changed trajectory and started heading towards the woman. Jackson was halfway out of the car, intending to head him off, but the woman yelled and gestured at him to get back in the Saab. He did, surprised at his own obedience to her barking parade-ground tones.
The girl from the garage, ignorant of the ruckus that was developing, stepped out uncertainly on to the forecourt, holding a bucket of tulips. Unfortunately the driver of the Land Cruiser, running towards the Saab as if he was heading for the try-line, failed to swerve in time and sent the girl flying across the concrete, tulips spilling everywhere. It put the driver off his stride long enough for the woman to fling the kid in the back seat of the Saab and lunge in after her, bellowing at Jackson, ‘Drive, drive! Just fucking drive, will you?’
Again, obedient to orders.
In the rear-view mirror he could see the girl still sprawled motionless on the ground. She would be lucky if something wasn’t broken. Like her head, for example. He could make out the shape of the guy who had been handbagged, still out cold on the ground, but then everything behind them was swallowed by the fog. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw that the woman had pulled the kid down on to the floor of the car and was snailed protectively over her body. Did she think they had guns? When there were guns around, Jackson preferred being inside a vehicle that was armoured and official rather than a thin-skinned family saloon, manufactured in a neutral country.
Domestic abuse didn’t quite seem to fit the bill any more.
‘Who were those goons?’
‘I haven’t got the faintest idea,’ she said.
‘They seemed to be after you.’
‘Looked like it,’ she said.
Jackson was still on adrenalin overload but the other occupants of the car appeared imperturbable. In the footwell, the dog remained determinedly asleep. Jackson was pretty sure it was pretending. How long before it regretted its choice of new pack leader? The kid also had a pretty good poker face on her and his Amazonian hitchhiker was raking through her bag as if finding a lipstick or a tissue was more interesting than contemplating the carnage in their wake. They had made an attempt to clean themselves up a bit in the garage toilets. He noticed that the woman no longer had blood on her hands. Jackson felt there might be a metaphor hiding in there somewhere.
He thought of the guy she had smacked with her handbag, laid out cold on the concrete.
‘What have you
She removed a big black Maglite and displayed it for his appreciation in the rear-view mirror. It looked like old police issue. They weighed a ton, no wonder the guy hadn’t bounced back up again. She was taking no prisoners, that was for sure. She replaced the Maglite and returned to delving in the bag, finally coming up with a mobile phone. Jackson assumed that she was going to phone in the incident at the garage.
‘Are you phoning the police?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she said and promptly rolled down the window and threw the phone out of it. He turned round and looked at her.
‘What?’ she said.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked when Jackson took his own phone out of his pocket. Another chippy woman, Jackson thought with a sigh. Chippy women wherever he went. Chippy mothers who begat chippy daughters and so the circle of chippiness was unbroken.
‘Phoning 999.’
‘Why?’
‘The girl in the garage,’ he said, with exaggerated forbearance. ‘An innocent bystander,’ he added, thinking of the tulips, the primary coloured spearheads scattered across the forecourt.
‘Innocent bystander?’ the woman said. ‘What innocent bystander? Is anyone really innocent?’
‘Kids? Dogs?’ Jackson offered. ‘Me?’
She snorted derisively in the way that a woman married to him ten years might have done.
‘I get it, you don’t want to involve the police,’ he said. ‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’
‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘And anyway, is anyone really a
‘It’s not a case of semantics,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ve just left that girl and I would say, yes, “innocent” and “bystander” pretty much cover her role in the proceedings.’
‘Semantics,’ she murmured. ‘Big word for this time of day.’
Your average upstanding citizen tended to phone for the emergency services in these circumstances. Fugitive, criminal, woman with a lethal handbag, what was her story? Jackson sighed. ‘Seeing as I appear to be helping you escape from something that seems pretty dodgy, to say the least, can I take it on trust that you’re on the side of good?’
‘Good?’
‘As in the opposite of bad.’
‘Because I’m a woman? A woman with a child? Doesn’t always follow.’
The child in question was now asleep. The silver wand, no longer really fit for purpose, had finally slipped from her slack fingers. He hoped this wasn’t a routine kind of day for her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Because you said you were police.’
‘Again, doesn’t always follow,’ she said with a shrug.
‘I’m still going to phone it in.’ He half expected her to knock him out with the Maglite but at that moment the kid woke up and said, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Got any bananas in there?’
‘It just so happens,’ he said, producing a bunch from the plastic carrier bag on the passenger seat. Like a magician. Or a fool. He was a cocky so-and-so. Was he really ex-police? He seemed a bit on the wimpy side, the sort that liked to rescue damsels in distress but not if it involved too much hardship. He was quite attractive, she’d give him that, but that was possibly the last thing on Tracy’s mind. Dodging and weaving to escape mysterious men who were chasing you could do that to a woman. Being a woman could do that to a woman. He had a silly little dog, you had to wonder what attracted a man to an animal that size.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said.
‘No you don’t,’ Tracy agreed.
‘Banana? Apple? Dog treat?’ he offered. The girl took an apple. ‘Would Mummy like something?’ Jackson said, looking at Tracy in the rear-view mirror.
‘She’s not my mummy,’ the kid said, matter-of-factly. Little kick to Tracy’s heart.
‘The things kids say,’ she said, returning his gaze in the mirror. ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to have an accident. You’ve got a fairy on board.’
Who were those guys back at the garage? A pair of leather jacketed thugs working in tandem, but for who and why? The first one had banged open the door of the toilets while the kid was washing her hands. He opened his mouth to say something but before he could spit anything out Tracy kneed him hard where it hurt the most. And ran. Someone wanted that kid back, didn’t they? And it wasn’t Kelly Cross, she didn’t want anything any more. Would never want anything ever again.
The Saab driver dialled 999 while driving, phoned it in anonymously, reporting an ‘incident’, made it sound serious. He came across as a professional rather than – his pet obsession, it seemed – an ‘innocent bystander’. ‘Send an ambulance,’ he said authoritatively.
‘Using a mobile phone while driving,’ Tracy said when Jackson finished the call. ‘That’s a crime right there.’
‘Arrest me,’ he said.
Her own phone had been like a beacon, flashing her identity out to anyone who might be looking for her. Anyone could find you if you had a mobile. A woman on the run with a kidnapped kid shouldn’t be advertising herself. She had thrown the phone out of the car window. They were outlaws now.
They were on roads that weren’t familiar to her, places that meant nothing – Beckhole, Egton Grange, Goathland – but then signs began to appear for the coast. Tracy didn’t really want to go to the coast, she wanted to get to the holiday cottage. She could see that there was an argument to be made for staying with this man. Without him she was a lone woman on the run with a kid who didn’t belong to her. Together they were a family. Or something that resembled a family to anyone looking for them. Tracy contemplated sticking with him a bit longer, dismissed the idea. She reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Pit-stop again, I’m afraid,’ she said ruefully.
He drew to a halt. They were in the middle of nowhere. Tracy liked the middle of nowhere better than the middle of somewhere.
‘That dog could probably do with getting out as well,’ she reminded him. ‘Stretch its legs, powder its nose.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’re probably right.’
They all climbed out of the car. Tracy moved a short distance away to a discreet little limestone outcrop hillock. ‘I’m not needing,’ Courtney whispered to her.
‘Good,’ Tracy said, watching the dog bounding off into the heather, the man following it. All Tracy needed was for him to be further away from the car than she was. And to be slower to react. And on the whole to be more stupid. Turned out he was all of those things. She seized the kid’s hand and said, ‘Come on, quickly. Get back into the car.’
The fog was their friend again. Before the Saab driver knew what was happening Courtney had scrambled into the back seat and buckled herself in. You had to hand it to the kid, she was pretty good at the old fast exit. Tracy got in the driving seat and turned the ignition. Within seconds they were half a mile further down the road than Jackson Brodie.
His phone was on the passenger seat. Tracy slowed down and threw it out of the car on to the verge.
A hundred yards further along the road Courtney said, ‘He left his bag.’
Tracy stopped this time and hauled the rucksack over to the front seat, opened her door and threw it out.
‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ she said.
 |
Barry went into the Best Western, his warrant card blazing a trail ahead of him. The woman behind the desk was taken aback by his bullish entrance. She was wearing full air-hostess make-up, a suit that was a size too small for her and had her hair pinned up in a style so complicated it had surely needed a couple of Victorian ladies’ maids to arrange it that morning. On the lapel of the jacket was a badge that said
‘Well, I thought he was a bit strange?’
‘Strange? How?’ Barry asked. Barry didn’t think there was anything left in the world that would seem strange to him these days. She was an Aussie. They were everywhere.
‘Bit, I don’t know, paranoid? He always looked as if he was sneaking around. One time I thought he had something concealed in his jacket and he always carried his bag with him, a rucksack. You think “terrorist” these days, don’t you? He definitely seemed a bit dodgy. What did he do?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Barry said. ‘If I could just get a look at his room?’
There was nothing in the hotel room. The Jackson bloke had checked out early this morning and the chambermaid who had cleaned had done a good job. Barry couldn’t see any helpful clues as to who he really was – no pubic hairs curled up in the corner of the bathroom or a big greasy thumbprint on the underside of the toilet seat. He had left nothing behind, apparently, apart from a generous tip for the maid. Shame he hadn’t left a note pinned to the wall explaining what exactly he was up to.
Barry took a miniature of vodka from the minibar and sat on the single bed and drank it down in one. He felt tired all the time. He put his head in his hands and stared at the carpet, noticed something the chambermaid had missed – a hair. It didn’t look human. He tweezered it up with his fingers and examined it closely. Looked like a dog hair.
This Jackson bloke had come searching for the truth about Carol Braithwaite, hadn’t he? Linda,Tracy, Barry. Bit players, walk-on extras in the drama of Carol Braithwaite’s death. Maybe it was time the main players stepped up to the stage. End of days now. Barry was going down in flames, he might as well take a few more down with him.
What he would really have liked to do right now was to lie down on the bed and have a snooze but he heaved himself up and drank down another miniature vodka. Then he filled up the two small bottles with water and replaced them in the minibar.
He couldn’t go on. He didn’t have it in him. The reckoning was coming. For Barry. For everyone.
‘Thanks, love,’ he said, returning the plastic room key. ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport, eh?’
 |
The dog sat by his side as they both stared at the retreating Saab. ‘I don’t believe it,’ Jackson said. He felt as if he had lost an old faithful friend. ‘I
The car started to slow down and Jackson said, ‘Come on, she must have changed her mind,’ and sprinted after it. The Saab stopped long enough for his phone to be thrown on to the verge before moving off again, Jackson and the dog in pursuit. The car goaded him by stopping once more and ejecting Jackson’s rucksack. He ran after it again and just before he reached the Saab it set off again. He retrieved his phone and his bag and waited to see if anything else was going to be bailed out of the car but this time the Saab accelerated away. ‘The fairer sex,’ Jackson said to the dog. (‘Fairer in what way exactly?’ he had once asked Julia. ‘In love and war,’ she said.)
In the rear window of the car Jackson could see the silver wand moving from side to side, like a metronome. The kid’s farewell.
They were in the middle of nowhere. Phone a friend? Did he have any? Julia perhaps. Not much she could do. Ask the audience? He turned to the dog. A dumb creature. He found the packet of dog treats in his pocket, all he had salvaged from his shop at the garage. They were little biscuits in the shape of tiny bones. They looked surprisingly appetizing but he resisted and tossed one to the dog.
A taxi firm seemed like a sensible option but the phone, although it seemed to have survived its ousting, showed there was no signal up here. Nothing for it but to set off and walk. The dog, naturally, was happier with this plan than Jackson.
They hoofed it for a good half-hour before they encountered any sign of civilization. The dog heard the approaching car before Jackson did. Jackson caught hold of its collar and towed it over to the verge where they waited for the vehicle to appear out of the fog. Memories of the Land Cruiser made Jackson consider throwing himself in the nearest ditch but there was no ditch and he could see now that it wasn’t the Land Cruiser that was advancing towards them along the deserted road, it was an Avensis, a grey one.
Jackson put out his hand to flag it down. ‘Stand and deliver,’ he murmured to the dog.
The Avensis stopped and the nearside window rolled down. ‘Hello there, fancy seeing you here,’ the driver said.
Jackson peered at his face, regretting again not having bought those spectacles. Did he know him?
The Avensis driver opened the passenger door and said, ‘There’s a hell in hello, isn’t that what they say? Give you a lift, squire?’
It was the room-service waiter who had left the tracking device. Jackson looked to the dog for confirmation but the dog had already hopped niftily into its now customary position in the footwell.
Reluctantly, Jackson climbed in after it.
A small pink furry rabbit hung droopily from the rear-view mirror. If it came to a contest between dreck car accessories Jackson was confident that his own little mascot, the light-up Virgin Mary wobbling on the dashboard, attached by a sucker and bearing an AA battery in her holy insides, would win hands down against a pink furry rabbit.
‘Whitby, is it, guv?’ the Avensis driver said, tipping an imaginary chauffeur’s hat.
‘Please.’ Well, this took weird to a new level.
‘Nice mutt,’ the Avensis driver said.
‘Yeah,’ Jackson said. ‘I think you said that last night when you put a tracking device on him. Why do you want to follow me?’
‘Maybe I’m following the dog.’ He restarted the Avensis’s engine and said, ‘Right, squire, here we go. First we take Manhattan, eh?’
‘Who
‘Straight in there with the difficult questions. Who am I?’ his new friend repeated thoughtfully. ‘Who am I? Of course, you might ask – who are any of us?’
‘It wasn’t really a philosophical question,’ Jackson said.
‘Name, rank and number?’
‘Just a name would do.’ Close up Jackson could see that the man looked slightly moth-eaten. He had the ashen skin of a smoker and on cue he retrieved a packet of cigarettes from the glove compartment. ‘Want one?’
‘No thanks.’ Just accept you’ve entered into an alternative reality, Jackson counselled himself. It probably happened round about the time he reached Leeds. ‘Is this something to do with Linda Pallister?’ he hazarded.
‘Who?’
‘Or Hope McMaster?’
‘Ah,
‘Not personally,’ Jackson said.
‘What you doing all the way out here then?’
‘Well…’ Jackson said, defeated by the complexity of the story before he even started it. He settled for the simple version. ‘Someone stole my car.’
The fog had finally begun to lift, streaks of pale gold gleaming through the thinning wisps.
‘Looks like it’s going to be a nice day,’ the Avensis driver said.
‘First to see the sea,’ was always the call when they went to the seaside. Jackson, Josie and Marlee. It seemed a long time ago now that they had been a tight little family threesome. The winner (always Marlee even if she had to have the sea pointed out to her) merited three chocolate buttons. Josie rationed sweets as if there was a war on.
And no sign of the sea at all today, the coast still entombed in fog. A ‘sea fret’, they said in Yorkshire. In Scotland, the far, far north, Ultima Thule, Louise would have said ‘haar’. They were separated by a common language and an invisible border crossing. Did she ever think about him?
By the time they crested a final hill the fog had begun to roll back and Whitby started to reveal itself in all its dramatically Gothic glory – the abbey, the harbour, West Cliff, the higgledy-piggledy fishermen’s houses.
‘You can see why Count Dracula landed here, can’t you?’ the driver of the Avensis said.
‘Dracula isn’t real,’ Jackson pointed out. ‘He’s a fictional character.’
The driver shrugged and said, ‘Fact, fiction, what’s the difference?’
‘Well…’ Jackson said. But before he could embark on a convincing proof (such as
‘The police station?’
‘Report the theft of your motor.’
‘Yeah, of course, good idea,’ Jackson said. So strange had been the advent of the Avensis that it had managed to push the whole escapade with the woman and child to the back of his mind. It felt like he was in an episode of
They had slowed to a crawl, the Avensis driver peering around, a stranger in town.
‘Do you know where the police station is?’ Jackson asked.
The Avensis driver tapped the SatNav on his dashboard. ‘No, but she does.’ Jackson felt a possessive pang. In his mind Jane was a one man woman.
The Avensis pulled into the police station car park on Spring Hill. Jackson got out of the car, as did the Avensis driver. ‘Stretch my legs a bit,’ he said. This turned out to be a form of exercise that involved leaning against the side of his car and lighting up another cigarette.
‘Believe it or not, squire,’ the driver said, ‘but I think we’re both on the same side, both working towards the same end, just coming at it from different starting points.’
‘The same end?’
‘Lawks, is that the time?’ the driver said, making a great show of looking at his wristwatch. (Lawks? Who said lawks any more? Well, apart from Julia, of course.) ‘Have to go, got to see a dog about a man.’
Short of tying him up, blindfolding him and playing non-stop heavy metal in his ears, Jackson couldn’t think of a way of getting the other man to identify himself or his mission. Jackson was surprised, therefore, when the driver stuck out his hand and said, ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond. Nah, mate, joking. It’s Jackson.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Jackson said.
‘Brian Jackson.’ He searched in his pockets and finally came up with a thin card –
‘Two hundred quid an hour,’ Jackson said to the dog. ‘I’m undercharging.’
‘Plus expenses,’ the dog said. In a parallel universe obviously, the one where dogs communicate and men are dumb creatures. In this reality, the dog simply waited silently for its next orders.
He tied the dog up outside and entered the police station. The desk sergeant was on the phone and held up a finger to Jackson indicating he would be with him in a moment. The finger then pointed at a functional chair against the wall. Jackson admired a man who could communicate so much in so few words. No words at all in fact, just a digit.
The desk sergeant finished his phone call and made a beckoning gesture to Jackson with his admirably articulate finger.
‘Can I help you with something, sir?’ he asked when Jackson approached the desk.
Jackson hesitated. It was theft pure and simple. His car had been taken without his permission. The woman had not only stolen the Saab but she was on the run with her kid, being chased by two pretty nasty men. That was quite a list of possible police matters. ‘
‘Sir?’
If he reported the Saab as stolen, the police would be after a woman who was in a bad place but claimed to be on the side of good. And Jackson’s instincts tended towards the renegade.
On the other hand…
She had taken his
He thought of the kid, solemnly waving her wand. He thought of the woman using her body as a shield for the kid to stop a possible bullet. He sensed the balance was tipping in the woman’s favour.
Still.
His car.
‘Sir?’
‘It’s nothing,’ Jackson said. ‘A mistake. Sorry to bother you.’ Of course, there was one person who could find his car for him. The person whose tracking device was in the glove compartment. But then he’d be employing Brian Jackson at
‘Business before pleasure,’ he said to the dog. A small map that he had picked up from a Tourist Information office near the harbour led Jackson to his destination – a cottage that was hiding down a narrow passage, in a yard. The address that Jackson was looking for, courtesy of 192.com, was the end-stop, shouldering all the weight of three other cottages that lurched dramatically, due to some ancient subsidence.
When Marilyn Nettles finally shuffled to the door, Jackson held up one of his business cards to prove his credentials. He caught a whiff of an old-fashioned scent – lavender and gin. The beginnings of a dowager’s hump and a mouth that looked as if it had spent a lifetime clamped around a cigarette. She took the card from him as if it might be smeared with something infectious and, peering at it, said dismissively, ‘
‘Well, what it means,’ Jackson said helpfully, ‘is that I’m investigating something private. Carol Braithwaite,’ he added.
Marilyn Nettles gave a grunt of recognition at the name and said, ‘Well, come in, come in,’ suddenly impatient, even though she had been keeping him on the doorstep before.
Jackson had to duck to get through the door. The place was tiny, the front door opening directly into what an estate agent would have called ‘a living-kitchen’. An open stairway led up to the next storey. The house was simply one room stacked on top of another. Walking across the floor he felt its incline, like a funhouse. There was a wash of nicotine over the walls.
‘Sit down,’ she said, indicating a two-seater sofa, one half of which was occupied by what Jackson first took to be a cushion, then a piece of feline taxidermy and just as the question
As if reading his mind, Marilyn Nettles said, ‘Have you been with a dog?’ in much the same tone of voice a jealous wife would have used to ask him if he had been with another woman. ‘He hates dogs, can smell them at a hundred paces.’ Jackson sat down gingerly next to the cat, which had now settled grumpily back into its impersonation of a cushion. Jackson wondered if it suffered from the effects of passive smoking.
A little carriage-clock on the mantelpiece struck a tinny-sounding hour and Marilyn Nettles flinched like a woman who had just realized how long it was since she’d had a drink.
‘Coffee, Mr Jackson?’
‘It’s Brodie, actually. Jackson Brodie.’
‘Hmm,’ she said as if that seemed unlikely and wavered her way to the back of the room where some basic and pretty elderly appliances lined one wall. She flicked the switch on an electric kettle and spooned instant coffee into mugs before adding a slug of gin to one of them, which explained her unexpected hospitality, Jackson supposed.
The place was shabby, cat fur and dust floating on sunbeams. Nothing had been papered or painted, or indeed washed, for a long time. Something uncomfortably hard behind the cushion at his back turned out to be an empty bottle of Beefeater. There were clothes draped on the sofa. Jackson didn’t like to look too closely in case they proved to be Marilyn Nettles’s undergarments. He got the impression that she slept, ate and worked in this one room.
An old Olivetti Lettera sat on a table by the window, surrounded by piles of paper. Jackson got up from the sofa and investigated the manuscript. He started to read the unfinished page in the typewriter -
‘Mr Jackson?’
‘Sorry,’ Jackson said, flinching. He hadn’t heard Marilyn Nettles’s approaching tread on the biscuit-crumbed carpet. ‘Couldn’t help taking a peek at your latest oeuvre. It’s “Brodie”, by the way.’
‘It’s crap,’ she said flatly, nodding her head at the Olivetti. ‘But it pays the bills.’
She nodded in the direction of a bookcase where a series of books displayed their titles on their spines –
‘
‘You do,’ he agreed. The mug looked as if it was some time since it had made the acquaintance of any washing-up liquid. Oiled by her alcohol-infused Nescafé, Marilyn Nettles seemed more inclined to talk, albeit reluctantly. She lit a cigarette without offering one to Jackson and said, ‘So what do you want?’
‘What can you tell me about Carol Braithwaite?’
‘Not a lot. Not much more than was in that original newspaper report. Why? What’s your interest in her?’
‘I’m working on behalf of a client,’ Jackson said. ‘Someone who I think may have some connection to Carol Braithwaite.’
‘Who?’
‘That’s confidential information, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re not a sodding priest. We’re not talking secrets of the confessional.’
Jackson pressed on. ‘There was your piece in the newspaper and then the whole case seems to disappear. Did you interview anyone at the time, did you find out anything about Carol Braithwaite?’
She stared quizzically at the tip of her cigarette as if it was going to provide the answers. ‘So many questions and such a long time ago,’ she murmured.
‘But you must remember,’ Jackson said.
‘Must I?’
‘Have you ever heard the names Linda Pallister or Tracy Waterhouse? A social worker and a policewoman, in 1975? Ring a bell?’ A little flicker of something in Marilyn Nettles’s eyes. ‘Hope McMaster? Dr Ian Winfield? Kitty Winfield?’ Jackson persisted.
‘For heaven’s sake, all these names,’ she said irritably. ‘I knew next to nothing. I was
‘Warned off?’
‘Yes, warned off. I didn’t believe that they were idle threats either. No more articles, don’t report the inquest, forget it happened.’
‘So someone threatened you?’ Jackson said. ‘Who?’
‘Oh, names, names,’ Marilyn Nettles said dismissively. ‘Everyone always wanting to name names. It doesn’t matter now. Most of us are dead anyway, even the ones that are alive.’ She seemed to drift off to some place in her head. She came back after a while and tapped the manuscript on the table in front of her. ‘I went down to London, wanted to make it big on the broadsheets, but it never really happened. Ended up back here, covering local stories for the
‘Well,’ Jackson said, ‘none of us end up where we expect to.’
‘I don’t know why the woman can’t be left dead and buried, I don’t know why everyone’s so intent on digging her up.’
‘Everyone?’
‘There was a man here earlier. He said he was a private detective as well. The pair of you look like brush salesmen if you ask me.’
‘Did he give you a card?’
Marilyn Nettles rooted around amongst the pages of
Marilyn Nettles sighed, seemed to gather herself and continued, ‘And anyway a lot of what happened had to be kept out of the public domain, had to be censored “to protect the innocent”, as they say. Restraining orders all over the place. I was allowed to write hardly anything about Carol Braithwaite and nothing whatsoever about the child.’
‘The child?’ Jackson said, almost leaping off the dusty sofa with eagerness. This had to be Hope McMaster, surely? ‘You didn’t say anything about a child.’
‘You didn’t ask. He was called Michael,’ Marilyn Nettles said. ‘A boy, four years old.’
Jackson sagged back on to the sofa, deflated by disappointment. ‘Carol Braithwaite had a son?’
‘Yes. They said they were protecting him from the press, from public curiosity. It was a sensationalist kind of story.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, he was locked inside the flat with the body of his dead mother. They estimated it was about three weeks. But you know, he witnessed a murder… and then he disappeared.’
‘Do you think someone killed him?’
‘As good as. He disappeared into the system, wretched life in care, et cetera,’ she said wearily. ‘I’m growing tired of this interrogation, I have work to do,’ Marilyn Nettles said. ‘It’s time you went.’ She stood up suddenly and swayed a little and hung on to the table for support and Jackson jumped up from the sofa, intending to shore her up if necessary. In doing so he dislodged the manuscript on her desk, sending the pages of
Exit Jackson stage right, pursued by a cat.
Escaped by a whisker. He threw the dog a dog treat, casting the tiny bone high in the air. The dog jumped and caught it neatly.
Perhaps, after all, then, the girl in the photograph was not Hope McMaster. But it did rather beg the question, if this Brian Jackson bloke was mining the same mysterious seam as Jackson himself – Linda Pallister, Marilyn Nettles, Tracy Waterhouse – then what – or who – was
 |
As soon as he pulled up outside Linda Pallister’s house Barry could sense the lace curtains twitching all around. Nosy neighbours, a policeman’s best friend. Barry climbed out of the car and tried the doorbell but it didn’t look like a house where anyone was home. The curtains were closed and it had an abandoned air. He banged loudly on the door and shouted ‘Linda!’ through the letterbox.
A Hyacinth Bucket type, one-woman Neighbourhood Watch, popped up out of nowhere as if she’d been crouched behind the privet ready to spring.
‘Janice Potter,’ she said. ‘I live next door. Can I help you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Barry said. ‘Have you got a runner for the three thirty at Lingfield Park?’ He flourished his warrant card and said, ‘I’m looking for Mrs Pallister, Linda Pallister?’
‘Someone else was looking for her yesterday. He said he was a private detective.’
‘Can you tell me when you last saw Linda?’ Barry asked.
‘Last night,’ she said promptly. ‘Just after
‘What kind of car?’Who needed CCTV, Barry thought, when you had twitchers?
‘A four-door saloon,’ she said. ‘Grey.’
‘All cars are grey at night,’ Barry said.
This Jackson bloke was the ruddy Scarlet Pimpernel, here there and everywhere, always one step ahead of Barry. And everywhere he went, women were disappearing.
‘OK,’ Barry said to himself as he climbed back in the car. He talked to his car quite a lot these days. It didn’t talk back, didn’t have any expectations of him. ‘Let’s say, for argument’s sake, this Jackson character is investigating on behalf of Carol Braithwaite’s kid, all grown up now, what – in his late thirties?’ All that ‘finding out more about myself’ shit that people went in for these days. Not Barry, Barry would happily know less about himself. ‘And so, on Michael Braithwaite’s behalf, he contacts Linda Pallister.’
Michael Braithwaite had woken his mother from her endless sleep. And now she was rising, a dust storm, looking for justice, looking for vengeance. A revenge tragedy.
 |
Jackson and the dog strolled along the pier, a pair of flâneurs by the sea. Jackson could feel the warmth of the sun on his scalp. He had been to Whitby as a boy. He didn’t know where the money had come from for a holiday, there was never money for decent clothes and food, let alone for ice creams or pantomimes, certainly not holidays. Jackson must have been five or six when they came here, half his sister’s age and still young enough to be her pet. Francis, their brother, was already a teenager slouching moodily around the arcades in the evening. There was no photographic proof of their furlough as none of them had ever owned a camera. The rich had always commissioned portraits of themselves but the poor moved invisibly through history.
Jackson couldn’t explain this primitive past to his daughter, let alone his son, born into a science-fiction future where every breathing second of his life was being digitally recorded, usually by Mr Metrosexual, Jonathan Carr. (Julia was being unusually shifty, even for her, about Jonathan. Was it over between them?)
He could remember very little about their family holiday here in that faraway time, only impressionistic memories of sounds and smells. They had stayed in a guest house where a gong was rung at dinnertime and meals were served that were astonishingly different from the potato and bread-laden fare of home and even now his most vivid memory of the holiday was of a stewed chicken dish and a lemon pudding, both of which had prompted his mother to sniff and say, ‘Huh, very fancy,’ as if the food were a criticism of her rather than something to be enjoyed.
There had been milk and arrowroot biscuits for the children in the evening – unheard-of luxuries at home, where a vicious rub on the face with a flannel by his mother had been the only herald of bedtime.
He suddenly recalled something long ago tucked away in a forgotten corner by the little men running his brain. His mother had bought him a set of paper sandcastle flags – in his mind’s eye he could still see a red lion on a yellow background. And his father wearing his cheap suit to sit on the beach, his trouser legs rolled up to reveal his pale, hairy, Scottish shins. It had been a poor sort of childhood, in every way. Belonged in a museum.
Not one as interesting as the RNLI museum on the prom where recorded tales of heroism and disaster brought an uncomfortable lump to Jackson’s throat.
He carried on, passing shops that sold shells, shops devoted to vampires (no getting away from them), to jet, to scented candles the smell of which made him retch, and endless cheap and nasty souvenirs. He crossed the swing bridge to the old town and visited the Captain Cook Memorial Museum to pay homage to the great navigator himself.
Afterwards, he bought some fudge in Justin’s Fudge Shop and noticed a house on Henrietta Street that was for sale, but he saw that the whole street was subsiding and the kipper smokehouse at the end was atmospheric in all the wrong ways.
The place was heaving with visitors. May Bank Holiday weekend, used to be Whitsuntide, when did that change? He ran up the 199 steps to the abbey and was pleased at how fit he still was. Everywhere people were puffing and panting their way up the steps. He had never seen so many fat people in one place at the same time. He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.
He left the dog in the porch when he went into St Mary’s Church. He took a seat in a box pew marked in old lettering,
He sat for a while on a bench in the graveyard of St Mary’s. The headstones all leaned like trees in the wind, the names on them erased by the salted air. ‘
He walked back down into town on the cobbled donkey road rather than the 199 steps, finishing off Justin’s fudge as he went.
‘Come on,’ he said to the dog. ‘I’ll race you.’
He hit the beach running. Jackson couldn’t remember when he had last run on a beach.
When they reached Sandsend the dog investigated the rock pools, finding a small dead squid like a deflated condom that it worried for a while until it disintegrated. A large brackish piece of seaweed kept it entertained for several minutes more. Jackson sat on a rock and contemplated the horizon. What was out there? Holland? Germany? The edge of the world? Why had someone tried to bury Carol Braithwaite’s murder? And how was it relevant, if at all, to Hope McMaster? And other questions that he didn’t know the answer to, in fact, the more questions he asked, the more they multiplied. It had started with one,
He spent some time drilling his new recruit on the beach –
An elderly man in the company of an equally elderly Labrador ambled by. The man tipped his cap in Jackson’s direction and said, ‘Th’should be in circus, lad.’ Jackson wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the dog or himself. Or both. Jackson and the Amazing Talking Dog.
The dog and Jackson played at throw and fetch for a while and then, unfortunately, the dog blithely deposited one of its antisocial brown wreaths on the sand and a guilty Jackson had to use the driftwood stick as a makeshift shovel to bury it, the plastic bags having been stolen along with his car.
It seemed a good moment for two naughty boys to turn around and run away.
He bought fish and chips – northern soul food – and sat on a bench on the pier while watching the tide come in. He shared his fish supper with the dog, wafting pieces of fish in the air to cool them down before handing them on, just as he had once done for Marlee. The tide had turned, the sea crawling up the beach now. Further along, the waves had more power and Jackson watched as they
It was growing dark and the dark brought the cold with it, the warmth of the afternoon now an unlikely memory. The wind skating off the North Sea was an icy blade that cut through to the bone, so he threw the fish and chip paper in the bin and headed for the bed and breakfast he had booked over the phone last night. Twenty-five pounds a night for ‘Complimentary toiletries, hospitality tray and a full Yorkshire breakfast’. Jackson wondered what made it a Yorkshire breakfast as opposed to any other kind.
‘Bella Vista’ – what else. It was in the middle of a street of similar houses, five storeys from basement to attic. Most of Bella Vista’s neighbours were also guest houses – Dolphin, Marine View, The Haven. Jackson wondered if any of these guest houses had been around in his childhood, if perhaps it was the hallway of Marine View or The Haven where a copper gong had been beaten to announce dinnertime, perhaps was still being beaten.
Bella Vista seemed a misnomer, there was no sign of the sea at all. Perhaps if you stood on a chair at an attic window. NO DOGS, NO SMOKING, NO GROUPS, a sign announced on one of the pillars at the door. In smaller cursive script underneath were the words
‘It’s late,’ Mrs Reid said, by way of greeting. Jackson checked his watch, it was eight o’clock. Was that late?
‘Better than never,’ he said affably. He wondered if Bella Vista got many returning guests. Mrs Reid was a hardened blonde, a woman of a certain age, the only kind that Jackson seemed to meet these days. She led him into a big square hall where a table displayed a pile of leaflets about local tourist attractions and an honesty box for the phone in the shape of a small, old-fashioned red telephone box. Opening off the hall were a guest lounge and a breakfast room, their function announced by little china plaques affixed to the doors.
In the breakfast room he could see tables set for the morning with small pots of jams and marmalade, tiny tablets of foil-wrapped butter. It was strange, this miniaturization of everything, every expense spared. Jackson thought that if he was running a guest house (a big leap of imagination required) he would be generous with his portions – big bowls of jam, a dish with a fat yellow block of butter, giant pots of coffee.
He was led up three flights of stairs to an attic room at the back where servants would once have been crammed like sardines in a tin.
The ‘hospitality tray’ sat on the chest of drawers – an electric kettle, a small stainless-steel teapot, sachets of tea, coffee and sugar, tiny tubs of UHTmilk, a cellophane packet containing two oatmeal biscuits, everything again parcelled out into the smallest quantities. The room also harboured an assortment of completely unnecessary clutter – crocheted mats, little dishes of pot pourri and a troop of ringletted, porcelain-faced dolls sitting to attention on top of the wardrobe. In the small, cast-iron fireplace there was a vase of dried flowers, which, as far as Jackson was concerned, were simply dead flowers by another name. Jackson wondered if there was a Mr Reid. The house felt as if it had long ago been released from the sober, restraining hand of a man. Divorcee or widow? Widow, Jackson guessed, she had the look of someone who had successfully out-survived a sparring partner. Some women were destined for widowhood, marriage was just the obstacle in their way.
On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said
Mrs Reid looked around the room doubtfully. It was pretty obvious that Jackson wasn’t the kind of person who belonged in a room like this. She was probably thinking about amending her notice: NO DOGS, NO SMOKING, NO GROUPS, NO SCRUFFY MEN IN BLACK COMBATS AND BOOTS WITH NO APPARENT REASON TO BE HERE. The air in
‘Business or pleasure, Mr Brodie?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Are you here on business or pleasure?’
Jackson thought about the answer a little longer than seemed necessary to either of them. ‘Bit of both really,’ he said finally. A soft whine came from his bag.
‘Thank you,’ Jackson said to Mrs Reid and closed the door.
He pulled up the sash window to let some real air into the room and discovered that there was a fixed metal fire escape outside the window. Jackson liked the idea that he could make a quick getaway from
An uncharacteristically brief email from Hope McMaster pinged its way through the ether to him.
Always looking, the sheepdog returning the lost lambs. In London he’d met a guy called Mitch, South African, tough Boer type, politics somewhere to the right of Thatcher, if that was possible, but with his heart bang, slam in the centre of his being. Jackson didn’t know the whole story, just that a long time ago Mitch had had a small son who was abducted and of whom not a scrap was ever found. Now, many times divorced and not short of a bob or two, he ran an investigative outfit that looked for missing kids worldwide. It didn’t advertise itself. Hundreds of kids around the world disappeared every day, here one moment, gone the next. Some of the people they left behind found their way to Mitch.
Mitch had a dossier, a huge file, depressing in its size, full of runaways and abductions of all kinds. He knew more about some of the kids in that dossier than Interpol. All those photographs broke Jackson’s heart. Holiday snaps, birthdays and Christmases, all the highlights of family life. Jackson found photographs unsettling enough at the best of times. There was a lie at the heart of the camera, it implied the past was tangible when the very opposite was true.
Jackson himself always made sure that in the course of taking snaps of Marlee there was, every year, one good, clear head-and-shoulders shot, facing the camera. That was usually the one that if he showed it to Josie she would say, ‘That’s a great likeness,’ and he never told her that it was in case their daughter went missing. Children changed by the day, if you stared at them long enough you could see them grow. When he was on the force he had seen too many poor portraits (holidays, birthdays, Christmases) over the years (‘She doesn’t really look like that now’). This was what happened to you when you were a policeman, even on a sunny day in a
A child who is lost was the worst thing in the world. The ones who came back from the dead, the Nataschas, the Jaycee Lees, were the decimal-point percentage of the statistic, offering futile hope.
Mitch’s dossier charted height, eye colour, hair colour. Distinguishing marks, left arm broken at age five, small scar on left knee, birthmark the shape of Africa on forearm, little finger broken, two teeth missing, allergies, illnesses, missing appendices and adenoids and tonsils, X-rays, a scar like a crescent moon, DNA. Desperate little signs. Those missing kids were never coming back, that was the truth. All of them dead or ruined by now.
There were other kinds of missing kids, of course. The ones that stayed below the radar. Parental abductions. The black ops. Of course it was better to have your kid taken away by a disgruntled possessive ex than for the same disgruntled possessive ex to stick the kids in the car and run an exhaust into it or stab them in their hearts while they slept over on an access visit, but that didn’t mean that you could just ignore custody orders and run off to somewhere without extradition. Or somewhere that didn’t care. Or somewhere that thought it was OK to take a kid away from its mother. Someone had to bring them back, might as well be Jackson. Better than being a real mercenary, all those private security firms in Iraq he’d been approached by, or running security for diamond mines in Sierra Leone, frontier living where you took your life in your hands every time you stepped out of the door.
He had looked for kids in Japan, Singapore, Dubai. Munich. It was surprising. Jennifer, the girl in Munich, had a brother who had been taken to live with relatives somewhere else. Jackson didn’t know if anyone had ever found him. Neither kid had ever been away from their mother before their Egyptian father took them on a court arranged holiday. He lived and worked in Germany, he simply changed the girl’s name, enrolled her in school, said her mother was dead. By the time the girl learned enough German to explain her situation to someone she’d probably have forgotten her mother. Kids forget easily, it’s a protection thing. Jackson caught up with them a lot quicker than the slow wheels of German bureaucracy were likely to. Six hours after he and Steve took her from that gingerbread house she was back home in Tring with her mother. Mother and child reunion.
Something was nagging at him but he didn’t know what. From his wallet, Jackson took the photo that he had stolen in Linda Pallister’s office. A little girl on a beach. One good head-and-shoulders shot. In his heart Jackson felt sure that it was Hope McMaster. He sighed and put the photograph away again.
It was barely half past nine when Jackson took to his bed. It was a single bed, and the dog had already claimed a considerable part of it. When Jackson climbed between the thin sheets, the dog stirred, raised its head and looked at him blankly, like a sleepwalker, and then settled down again. Jackson lay in bed for a long time beneath the unblinking watch of the dead-eyed dolls.
 |
He found the invitation to the golf club dinner-dance at the back of a drawer in his office. Barry sneered at the command to ‘Dress to impress – black tie.’ There was, the invitation promised, a live band until midnight, followed by a seventies disco, a raffle with ‘fantastic prizes’ – a mini-break for two to the Isle of Wight ‘(including ferry crossings)’, a signed DVD boxed set of
‘Dress to impress, it says, Barry,’ Len Lomax laughed when he caught sight of him. Unlike Barry, he was in a tux, smoking a cigar, expansive, polished. He was a big bloke who hadn’t shrunk with age yet, looked in much better shape than Barry. How old was he – seventy, seventy-two? Pensioners didn’t behave like pensioners any more, they all thought they were ruddy Sean Connery.
‘I can get you a plate of something if you like?’ Ray Strickland’s wife offered. Margaret. Scots. Barbara said she had some kind of women’s cancer but she looked the same as ever, all gristle, no meat. Soft on the outside, hard on the inside. Barbara had never liked Margaret Strickland – that didn’t say much though, there were a lot of people Barbara didn’t like, Barry included. ‘I’m sure the kitchen has food left,’ Margaret said. There was a menu propped up on the table,
‘That’s roast lamb and mashed potatoes to thee and me,’ Ray Strickland said. Strickland didn’t look in quite as good nick as Len Lomax but he still had that same nervous power running through him. Barry always used to think that you never quite knew which way he was going to go, nice or nasty. Just a little bit unstable. Barry wished he could go back, wished his younger self had had the nerve to tell Strickland and Lomax to bugger off and leave him alone.
‘Or some dessert?’ Margaret offered. ‘There’s tiramisu.’
The great and good had all finished their tiramisu, judging by the smears of what looked like shit on their plates.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Barry said. ‘Thanks all the same.’
‘We never see you here, Barry,’ Margaret Strickland said.
‘That’s because I don’t play golf,’ Barry said.
‘You drink though,’ Lomax said, pouring him a glass of whisky. The band was tuning up and Alma, Len’s wife, said, ‘Will you have a dance, Barry?’ She’d aged badly, too many holidays in cheap foreign sunshine. Over seventy and still in stilettos and full slap. They made Alma and Barbara and then they broke the mould. Thank God.
Ray Strickland made a little gesture with his head, indicating that he wanted Barry to go outside with him. Barry patted Alma on the shoulder and said, ‘Maybe later, pet.’ When hell froze. He followed Ray Strickland outside. The cool night air felt like medicine.
‘Thought we might not get a chance to have a chat at Rex’s funeral tomorrow,’ Strickland said.
‘Oh aye?’ Barry said.
‘I don’t know how to put this exactly,’ Strickland said. He looked down at his polished shoes and frowned.
‘Someone’s nosing around asking questions about Carol Braithwaite?’ Barry offered helpfully.
‘Yes,’ Strickland said, relief all over his face.
‘Do you want me to do something about it?’ Barry asked.
‘Could you?’ Ray Strickland asked uncertainly.
‘Oh yeah,’ Barry said. ‘I can do something.’
As he climbed wearily back into his car, Barry wondered if the great and the good would be raising a glass to Rex Marshall before the night was over. Maybe before the ‘seventies disco’ started.
They’d all been there at that New Year do in the Metropole, Eastman in his pomp, Rex Marshall, Len and Alma Lomax, Ray Strickland and his odd little wife, Margaret, the Winfields.
Ian Winfield might still be alive. Barry didn’t know if anyone had heard from the Winfields after they decamped to New Zealand. He hadn’t thought about the Winfields in a long time. Kitty Winfield. Ian Winfield. He found himself falling down a long black tunnel and came out in the past. C
Carol Braithwaite rising. Rising, rising.
 |
Barry lit up a fag. He was sitting in his car outside the Winfields’ house. Very nice house. Barry couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to live in a house like this, to live in Harrogate, the capital of northern posh. He should bring Barbara to Harrogate. If he could ever pluck up the courage to ask her out. He was going to ask her to go to the flicks with him. Barbara was very sophisticated compared to most of the girls he knew, always immaculately turned out. ‘She’ll spend all your money, a girl like that,’ his mother said.
He had no idea what Strickland was playing at. Rambling on about how his car was in the garage for its MOT so he didn’t have any wheels, could Barry pick him up? Barry didn’t see what was stopping him getting a taxi. Barry was off duty, just sat down to a big fry-up his mother had cooked for him. Wished Ray Strickland didn’t have his home phone number. ‘Not a squad car,’ Strickland said.
Strickland was waiting outside the flats in Lovell Park when Barry drew up in his old Ford Cortina. The Mark 2. A car Barry still remembered with affection over thirty years later.
Strickland was carrying a kiddy, asleep, wrapped in a blanket in his arms. He looked shaky, really shaky. He seemed to be in some kind of stupor. Alcohol, Barry assumed. Everyone knew that Strickland couldn’t hold his drink. Barry opened the back door of the Cortina for him. ‘Boss?’ he said, hoping for an explanation.
‘Just drive, Crawford,’ he said wearily, ‘Harrogate, the Winfields.’ Barry knew who the Winfield couple were. She was glamorous, used to be a model. Barry would give her one any time.
Strickland roused himself as they turned into the Winfields’ street. ‘It’s good of you to do this,’ he said as they came to a stop outside the house. ‘I’d really appreciate it if you kept this between the two of us.’
‘Your secret’s safe with me, boss,’ Barry said. No idea what the secret was, mind you.
‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ Strickland said to Barry as he climbed out of the car, kiddy still asleep in his arms. Again, Barry had no idea what it looked like. Barry watched him walk up the path, ring the doorbell.
He waited ten, fifteen minutes. The front door opened and Ian Winfield came out. Barry rolled down the Cortina’s window and Winfield said, ‘Can I get you anything, Constable? Barry, isn’t it?’ Smooth bedside manner.
Barry wondered what kind of thing was on offer. ‘No, thanks,’ he said.
‘Detective Constable Strickland will be out in a minute,’ Winfield said in the soothing tone you would use to a restless child.
Five minutes later and Strickland was back in the car, even shakier than before. ‘Take me home, Crawford,’ he said. ‘My wife’ll be wondering where I am.’
That was three weeks before they discovered Carol Braithwaite’s body in Lovell Park. They said she’d been lying dead for three weeks. Even Barry could do the maths. Strickland had killed her and taken the kiddy.
 |
(
Who are you? What are you doing here?
We’re looking for Vincent, where is he?
I don’t know, I don’t know where he is.
Do you think we’re stupid, love?
You can’t just barge in here like this. Get out!
Not until we see Vince, sweetheart.
I suggest you get your blue-eyed boy
on the blower right now and tell him
his old mum’s going to be taking a trip
down the boneyard if he doesn’t get
back here double-quick.
I will do no such thing.
I didn’t fight Hitler just to give in
to schoolyard bullies like you.
(
Game old bird, isn’t she?
Stupid old bag, more like.
You don’t frighten me.
(
Not with a bang but a whimper. Director had handed her the script personally, features arranged sympathetically. A notice of execution. Poor old Marjorie Collier was coming to a sticky end. Sticky toffee pudding end.
‘Watch out, Till,’ Julia said as he approached. ‘It looks like he’s bringing you your invitation to board the death ship.’
‘Well, this is it, Tilly darling,’ the director said. ‘The end.’
Now it was Saskia who was treating her like an invalid. She had brought her up a mug of warm milk with honey in it and a plate of digestives, along with her own pashmina which she tucked around Tilly’s shoulders.
‘It’s a bit of a shock, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I know when I was killed in that awful car crash in
Thank goodness Saskia finally ran out of steam and, making a vague gesture towards Tilly propped up on pillows, said, ‘Well, night then.’
‘Night,’ Tilly said, relieved to be able to remove her wig at last.
Saskia couldn’t hide her happiness at the thought of Tilly leaving, she’d already had a guarantee from the production staff that she would never have to share digs with anyone again, although there were rumours that she would be leaving soon anyway. Apparently she was ‘off to LA’ to try her luck. ‘Little fish, big pond,’ Julia said. ‘She’ll drown.’
‘Well, not
Of course, Saskia was so cheerful because her boyfriend was arriving tomorrow night. Not the rugby player, apparently he was yesterday’s news (literally). The new one was ‘a civilian’, which was confusing because he was actually in the army, a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards.
‘Don’t you love a man in uniform?’ Saskia said to Tilly.
The closest Tilly had ever got to a man in uniform was in a production of
She sighed and put her specs back on and returned to reading the script. What did they mean when they said Marjorie Collier ‘fought Hitler’? She was supposed to be sixty-eight – not exactly old unless you were a pre-pubescent script editor only interested in bringing in a younger audience. Joanna Lumley was in her mid-sixties, for heaven’s sake, no one expected her to wear carpet slippers and knit in front of the fire. Tilly had met her at a charity do. ‘Come with me,’ Phoebe had said, ‘I need you there.’ Phoebe was rickety, she’d had her knees replaced, her hips replaced, she’d even had her thumb joints replaced. They were talking about her shoulders next. Tilly had no idea they could replace shoulders. Shame they couldn’t replace her heart. Still, Joanna Lumley was very nice, although the seafood canapés had given Tilly a gippy tummy for days. Funny word, ‘gippy’, came from ‘Egyptian’, didn’t it, was it racist? Better be careful not to say it in front of Paddy what’s-her name.
(
Honestly, what a lot of rot. She’d have to stretch out her death scene as long as possible. She wasn’t going that quickly. Put some real feeling into it so that a few tears would be shed at her passing.
She thought she’d better get on with running her lines but she had hardly got past the first one before she fell asleep. Some time later Saskia must have come in and removed her specs and turned off the light because when she woke up in the middle of the night, after the usual hectic dreams, it was dark and she couldn’t see anything. A little rehearsal for the real thing.
 |
Four o’clock in the morning, if the old clock radio on the bedside table was correct. The dead time. Something had woken him, but he didn’t know what. The dog was awake as well.
Jackson slipped out of bed and padded across the dark room to the little attic window. He looked down into the deserted yard below and, beyond, into a narrow lane that ran behind the yard. Not much of a
Common sense dictated that he should leave it alone. Leave it alone and climb back into a warm bed and go for a harmless adventure in the Land of Nod, rather than throwing on his clothes and climbing out of the window on to the fire escape in order to participate in a nightmare in the land of the living.
‘
Jackson unlatched the yard gate with exaggerated delicacy. He didn’t want to incur the wrath of his hostess for the night by waking her from her beauty sleep. She needed all she could get.
When he stepped into the lane it was deserted. He thought of his mutinous hitchhiker and her handy Maglite-in-a-bag combo and wished he had something similar on his person. His Swiss Army knife was the nearest thing he had to a weapon and that was in his rucksack in his room.
He walked the length of the lane and came out on to another street of houses identical to Bella Vista. The dog stuck cautiously to his side, apparently not enjoying their escapade.
A figure sprang up ahead. Ill met by moonlight. One of the Land Cruiser guys. By their jackets shall ye know them. The hairs on Jackson’s scruff rose and he spun round to see what was behind him. Yep, they came as a pair, leather jackets, leather gloves, big leather boots, Jackson the filling in the cow sandwich. The one behind flexed his knuckles, an action that reminded Jackson of Marilyn Nettles’s cat trying to put the frighteners on him.
The dog’s hackles rose and it growled, a surprisingly threatening sound coming from something so small. Yeah, Jackson thought, come on then, take me on, me and my tiny dog, we’re ready for you. He positioned himself on the pavement so that he could see both of the Land Cruiser guys at once. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
‘We were just coming up to see you,’ one of them said. ‘Nice room, is it? Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.’ He sounded disconcertingly like Jackson’s brother, same rough accent, same cynical undertone. Jackson’s own accent had been sanded down over the years and he wondered sometimes if he would have recognized his younger self if he heard him now.
‘Who
‘The what. We came for the what bit,’ the other one said. ‘But we’ll probably do the beating-up bit as well.’ Jokers, always the worst types.
‘Gentlemen, I think we’re at cross-purposes here,’ Jackson said. ‘You’re looking for that woman, the one you were after at the garage. I don’t know where she is.’
‘Do you think we’re stupid?’ the one who sounded like his brother said.
‘Well…’
‘It’s you we’re after.’
‘Me? What did I do?’
‘You’ve been sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong,’ Tweedledee said. ‘Asking questions all over the place.’
‘Someone’s got a message for you,’ Tweedledum said.
‘What, you’re a greeting cards firm now?’ Jackson said. Some people might think that when the odds seem stacked against you it’s a good idea to simply walk away rather than poke the enemy in the face with a big stick. Jackson got his big stick out and poked. ‘Don’t tell me, you’re a strippergram,’ he said to Tweedledum, who bent his knees, ready for battle. Tweedledee did his knuckle-flexing thing again. Cry havoc, Jackson thought.
Tweedledum suddenly launched himself at Jackson, barrelling into him at full tilt, knocking him like a top, and before he could even respond to this sudden joust, Tweedledee punched him hard on the side of his head. Jackson reeled round but at least he managed to land a punch on Tweedledum’s nose. ‘Touché,’ he managed to say before Tweedledee started pummelling him in the stomach.
Jackson found himself on the ground, all he could hear was the dog barking furiously. He wanted to tell it to stop before it got hurt, these guys probably wouldn’t think twice about kicking it into touch.
Then the one who sounded like his dead brother spoke, startlingly close to his ear. ‘The message, you southern smart-arse, is to leave Carol Braithwaite alone. And if you don’t, then this is just going to keep on happening.’ Jackson wanted to protest, worse than being punched to the ground was the idea that the confrères of his native county couldn’t recognize him as one of their own. Unfortunately, before he could say anything one of those confrères kicked him in the head and darkness fell for a second time that night for Jackson.
 |
If they were to stay here for the full week they would be rattling around like two peas in an enormous pod. As it was, they were camping out for one night in the living room. Tracy didn’t want to get stuck up in the bedrooms, didn’t want to be batting blokes down staircases with her Maglite. Ground floor, quick escape out the back. The Saab was tucked away safely out of sight behind the house. No one would be looking for it here.
When they first arrived, earlier this afternoon, they had walked down a hill from the house to the man-made lake. There was a café overlooking the water and they sat outside and ate ice creams. They saved the ends of the cornets and fed them to a greedy goose. Tracy had had a Ladybird book called
When they finished their ice creams they walked through the water gardens, all the way to Fountains Abbey. Eighteenth-century landscaping, cascades and lakes and follies, nothing wrong with improving on nature in Tracy’s opinion. Gangs of tadpoles congregated at the edges of ponds, here and there the flicker of a little fish. Tracy thought about Harry Reynolds’s koi. Big expensive fish. Tracy couldn’t imagine buying a fish if you weren’t going to eat it.
Kid was a good walker, one foot in front of the other kind of walker. Utilitarian. When they got to Fountains itself there was some kind of medieval fair taking place. Or ‘fayre’ probably. Re-enactors in costume – cooking over an open fire, showing people how to weave with flax, shoot an arrow into a target. A whole hog roasting.
They left before the dancing started. ‘Always know when to make an exit,’ Tracy said.
They ate a makeshift supper of beans and cheese on toast and then they went walkabout again, wandering around in the balmy evening air. Kind of place made you want to use words like ‘balmy’. Twilight, the witching hour. May, the magic month. All the visitors had gone home for the day and they had the whole place to themselves, just Tracy and the kid, the deer and the trees. None of the usual bestial sounds of the country, the lowing and bleating and crowing that ultimately signified the abattoir and slaughter. Here it was just birdsong, grass growing and being eaten, trees inching towards the clouds.
There were hundreds of deer in the park. Lots of baby deer. ‘Bambis,’ Courtney said. Alive, thank God, all of them. Tracy wondered if they could tell that she had recently slaughtered one of their own. She was seriously considering becoming a vegetarian.
These deer were almost tame. If you got too close they just raised their noses, gave a little twitch of the tail, moved off a few yards and went back to hoovering up the grass. Kid looked astonished, other than a rabid dog she’d probably never seen an animal close up. Tracy would have to add farms and zoos to the list of things that she needed to be introduced to.
And then, miraculously, as the day finally headed towards the dusk, a white stag, a young one, appeared out of the twilight, out of some medieval past. Not a re-enactor but the real thing. A white hart. It stood stock still and stared at Tracy. You would never get a man who looked as handsome. It knew it owned the place, it was her superior in every way. A prince among men.
Bloody hell, she thought, this was special. It had to be a good sign. Didn’t it?
The place was full of ancient trees, oaks that must have been alive in Shakespeare’s time. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years living, three hundred years dying. That’s what it said in another book from the cottage bookshelf. She was reading her way through the night. Coal on the fire, Courtney asleep, wrapped in a blanket on one of the enormous sofas. Tracy had her feet up on the other one. She was keeping a vigil, Maglite to hand, learning all about oak forests, deer parks, medieval abbeys. It was one way to get an education – stay awake all night in case any mad bastards happened to stop by to say hello.
First the Avensis driver, then the leather-jackets, Tracy had never had so many men after her in her life. Shame their intentions were all so dishonourable. Not to mention the ‘private detective’ looking for her to ask about Carol Braithwaite. Who the hell were they all? Had they been sent to retrieve the kid or exact vengeance on Tracy for taking her? Both, probably. Was one of them responsible for Kelly Cross’s death? Probably. Could Courtney be so valuable that someone would go to so much effort?
There was a phone in the house and she decided to give Barry a call, see if he knew anything about who killed Kelly Cross, see if he knew anything about anything. He sounded even more morose than usual. He must have been drinking.
‘Barry? You know this private detective that’s been asking questions? Is he driving a grey Avensis?’
‘Dunno.’
‘And he was asking about Carol Braithwaite?’
‘Asking all sorts of questions about all sorts of people apparently. You, Linda, the Winfields. He’s like some bloody virus that’s got in the system.’
‘Back up,’Tracy said. ‘The Winfields? The bloke who was a doctor, married to that model?’
‘They adopted a kiddy not long after Carol Braithwaite’s murder, then they emigrated sharpish to New Zealand.’
‘Oh my God,’ Tracy murmured. That was why Michael disappeared, the Winfields took him. She remembered Ian Winfield from her visit to the hospital, how protective he’d been of Michael.
‘I’ve said too much,’ Barry said.
‘You haven’t said enough.’
‘It’s all going to come out eventually.’
‘What’s going to come out, Barry? What’s going on?’
Barry sighed heavily. The sigh was followed by a long silence.
‘Still there, Barry?’
‘Haven’t gone anywhere. Tracy? I’ve seen you on tape with Kelly Cross, at the Merrion Centre.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, shit. Exactly. And they found your fingerprint in Kelly’s house. What’s going on?’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘I never thought you did,’ Barry said.
‘I bought the kid off her,’ Tracy said.
‘Shit.’
Dark outside. The darkest dark she’d ever known. If she went outside and walked down the short path to the gate, which she did every hour or so to make a perimeter check, Tracy could sense the vastness of the black sky, a scattering of stars, disappearing as the mist fell again. Tracy imagined that out there somewhere in the darkness she could hear the deer breathing.
 |
Tracy had finally managed to dispense with the awkward burden of her virginity. She’d started to take driving lessons, fed up with waiting to get on the police driving course. Her instructor was a one-man business, Dennis, separated from his wife, in his forties.
After the first lesson he suggested to Tracy that they go for a drink and he took her to a place off the Harrogate Road and bought her a brandy and Babycham without asking her what she would like. It was ‘a lady’s tipple’ apparently. Wondered what Arkwright would say if she told him that, next time he plonked a pint glass of Theakston’s in front of her. Same thing after the next lesson (‘You’ve got a good sense of where you are on the road, Tracy’). After the third lesson (‘You’ve got to watch that speedometer, Tracy’), they drove up beyond Heptonstall and they did it in the back of his car on a forestry trail somewhere. He wasn’t what you’d call a catch, but then Tracy wasn’t looking to keep him.
‘Where’ve you been?’ her mother said when Tracy came back from her tryst. Her antennae were twitching, they could have used Dorothy Waterhouse in the war. Wouldn’t have needed to bother with Bletchley Park. ‘You look different,’ she said accusingly.
‘I am different,’ Tracy said boldly. ‘I’m a woman.’
She was grateful to Dennis for the matter-of-fact nature of the act but he was more grateful to her for being twenty and ‘well upholstered’ so it was a reasonably well-balanced exchange. She cancelled her next lesson, told him she was emigrating. Signed up with BSM and passed her test after eight lessons. It seemed an unfriendly thing to do but it was no more than he expected. He phoned the house once afterwards and, Sod’s Law, her mother answered. ‘Someone by the name of Dennis called for you,’ she reported when Tracy came in from work. ‘He wanted to know where your disembarkation port was. I told him not to be filthy.’
Things continued to look up for Tracy. Not long after she passed her driving test she signed the rental lease on a place of her own.
Tracy’s new home was a boxy little bedsit with an Ascot water heater and filthy carpets. A two-bar electric heater that smelled dangerous and a hot-water bottle to embrace at night as she huddled in her sofa-bed. The bedsit was unfurnished and Tracy had bought everything second-hand, keeping stuff in her father’s shed until she’d accumulated enough goods and chattels for the bachelorette life. When she got the key Arkwright and Barry helped her move it all in. When they finished they had tea and biscuits, sitting on the sofabed. ‘You won’t be here long, love,’ Arkwright said. ‘Some bloke’ll come along soon and snap you up.’ He patted the sofa-bed as if this would be the location of a future marriage proposal.
Barry smirked and choked on his Blue Riband.
‘Something, lad?’ Arkwright said.
‘Nothing,’ Barry said.
Having a place of her own raised many questions for Tracy that she never really grappled with successfully. For example, should she buy four dinner plates or two? There was a stall on the market that sold Wedgwood seconds. It was a stupid question, she only needed one plate, she dined alone every night. Findus Crispy Frozen Pancakes, Vesta curries, Smash potato. The nearest she got to cooking was frying up a batch of potato scallops.
She had imagined a future of domesticity, of inviting people from work round for ‘a bite to eat’ and turning out a fish pie or a plate of spaghetti, bottle of cheap plonk and a block of Wall’s Cornish ice cream afterwards and everyone saying,
Coming out of the station, not long after the move, Tracy nearly jumped out of her skin when Marilyn Nettles stepped out of nowhere in front of her. There was definitely something of the night about the woman.
‘Can we have a word?’ she said. If she was looking for a story she’d come to the wrong person. ‘Maybe we can grab a coffee somewhere? I’m not looking for information,’ she added. ‘The opposite, in fact.
They drank sickly, milky coffees in a steamy café. It was drizzling outside, miserable summer rain. Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Tracy wondered what it would be like to live somewhere different. Marilyn Nettles took a pack of cigarettes from her handbag and said to Tracy, ‘Do you want a cancer stick?’
‘No thanks. No – wait, go on then.
‘So?’ Tracy said, drawing on the fag. She might lose some weight if she took up smoking. She stirred the foam on her coffee round and round. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’
‘The boy,’ Marilyn Nettles said.
Tracy stopped stirring. ‘What boy?’
‘The Braithwaite boy. Michael. Do you know where he is?’
‘He’s in foster care. Unless you know something different.’
‘I do. He was sent to an orphanage. Nuns.’ Marilyn Nettles shivered. ‘I hate nuns.’
‘An orphanage?’Tracy said. She had imagined Michael Braithwaite with experienced foster parents, the solid church-going type who’d seen hundreds of distressed kids pass through their hands, people who knew how to heal and comfort. But an orphanage? The very word sounded melancholic. Abandoned.
‘His name has been changed. There’s a restraining order in place,’ Marilyn Nettles said. ‘All kind of legalese. To protect him, supposedly. I’ve been warned off. From on high.’
Tracy heard Linda Pallister’s voice in her head,
‘He witnessed a murder,’ Marilyn Nettles said, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘And then he disappears. Pouf! Just like that. I would call that suspicious. I would say that perhaps someone
Barry had told Tracy that Len Lomax had told him ‘in confidence’ that ‘someone’, someone who claimed to be Michael’s father, had confessed to the murder and had promptly died in custody. It wasn’t something she could tell Marilyn Nettles, she’d be all over it like a rash and before she knew it Tracy would be reading about it in the papers. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked.
Marilyn Nettles shook her head as if trying to dislodge an insect from her hair. ‘I’ve said too much already.’ She glanced nervously round the café. ‘I just wanted to tell someone. It’s not that I’m big on little kids but you have to feel sorry for that one. What chance does he have?’
‘Which orphanage did they send him to?’
‘Doesn’t matter, he’s been moved around.’ She got up abruptly and left a handful of coins on the table. ‘For the coffee,’ she said, as if Tracy might have thought the money was for something else.
Tracy paid for the coffee and checked her watch. She groaned inwardly, perhaps outwardly too. She had a party to go to.
Tracy’s parents were taking a leap into the unknown, attempting something that had never been attempted before in the Waterhouse household. They were throwing a party. The bungalow in Bramley was humming with tension.
Only a few years off retirement her father had been given ‘a significant promotion’ and, quite aberrantly, her parents had decided to celebrate in public. The invitation list was problematic as her parents had no friends as such, only acquaintances and neighbours and a few work colleagues of her father. Somehow or other they managed to scrape together a quorum.
The next dilemma was how to phrase the handwritten invitations in a way that would ensure that people left promptly at the end.
She arrived early and speared toothpicks, charged with pineapple and cubed cheese, into the pale green skull of a cabbage. When the guests arrived Tracy wandered around like a waitress with platters of vol-au-vents her mother had spent all afternoon stuffing with prawns or shredded chicken. There weren’t enough to go round and when they ran out her mother hissed, ‘Get the cheese straws from the kitchen. Hurry!’ As if she was asking for weapons reinforcements.
Dorothy Waterhouse had hoped that they would be able to hold the whole thing outside, on the newly laid concrete slabs of the patio. Tracy’s mother lived in fear that their previously orderly acquaintances would be transformed into a rowdy crowd under the influence of Tracy’s father’s rum punch, the main ingredient of which was not rum but orange squash.
To her mother’s disgust it had rained of course and everyone was crushed, elbows like chicken wings, into the newly extended (but not enough) living room. The banality of the occasion was depressing (
She put the toilet lid down and had a seat, munching her way through the cheese straws while she watched the rain streaming down the raindrop glass of the bathroom window. Wondered about that, raindrops on raindrop glass, seemed an excess of water in an already wet town. Heard the hollow word ‘orphanage’ in her brain. She could have given that kiddy a home. She should have taken him from that hospital bed, run away with him, given him the love he needed.
Tracy sighed and crammed the last bit of cheese straw into her mouth, brushed the flakes off her clothes and washed her hands. She had a sudden image of the cold, poky bathroom in the Lovell Park flat. There had been make-up scattered messily on a shelf. A plastic submarine lay beached in the grubby bathtub. Were Carol’s last thoughts for her son? She must have been afraid that he’d be killed as well.
In the kitchen her mother was unmoulding a temperamental charlotte russe. ‘Have to go out, Mum,’Tracy shouted down the hallway. She unhooked her lightweight summer mac from the hallstand and accelerated out of the house, her mother’s faint cries of protest following her down the garden path.
She traipsed through the rain, visiting every orphanage and care home in the book. None of them had heard of Michael Braithwaite, but, of course not, his name had been changed, according to Marilyn Nettles. She tried describing him,
Linda Pallister had a Hillman Imp now, it seemed. Couldn’t drive it though because Tracy was standing in the road in front of it.
‘Tell me where he is, Linda. Tell me what he’s called.’
Linda rolled down the car window and said, ‘Go away, leave me alone or I’ll call the police.’
‘I am the police,’ Tracy said. ‘This uniform isn’t fancy-dress.’ Should have thumped her one. Should have pulled her fingernails out one by one until she told. But that was then.
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