"Started Early, Took My Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atkinson Kate)

Sacrifice

Saturday

The next thing he knew was best described as nothing. Jackson was in the pitch dark, he was paralysed and the air around him was as noxious as the netherworld. He had already died once in his life but it hadn’t resembled this at all. The first time round, after the train crash, it had been the classic white corridor scenario, complete with his dead sister and a sense of euphoria. He had gone, briefly, to a heaven, a heaven which had almost undoubtedly manifested itself as a result of oxygen deprivation to his brain. This time round he had apparently taken the staircase that went down the other way.

He drifted off, came to again, and realized that he wasn’t in fact paralysed but was trussed, not so much a turkey as an Egyptian mummy. His ankles were tightly bound, his hands were tied behind his back and his mouth was taped up. To begin with it was painful, then it was excruciatingly painful and then after a time the pain was replaced with a numbness which was worse, somehow. His head hurt but no more than you would expect if you had been kicked and punched in it, that is to say, a lot. He would be lucky to escape without brain damage.

Perhaps he would be lucky to escape at all. He wriggled, awkwardly, like a particularly incompetent worm, until his head butted up against a hard surface. Slowly, he manoeuvred his way round what turned out to be a disturbingly claustrophobic space, not much bigger than a coffin. An oddly shaped sarcophagus filled with something stinking.

In the course of his squirming it eventually dawned on Jackson that he was sharing air with food refuse, an aroma of chop suey and the indefatigable scent of chips and fried fish. He was entombed in some kind of large, commercial waste bin along with the collective leftovers of several fat-based local restaurants. I heard a Fly buzz – when I died. That would be because there really was a fly in here with him, buzzing irritably with the knowledge that it, too, couldn’t get out.

There was a certain relief in the realization. At least he hadn’t gone mad, nor had he gone to hell or turned into a giant worm. He had simply been knocked on the head by a couple of hulking thugs and dumped in a garbage bin.

The relief didn’t last long. He couldn’t shout for help, he couldn’t move – writhing didn’t really count – and had no way of escaping. And where was the dog, it didn’t seem to be in here with him. Was it lying hurt or maimed somewhere? Dog in jeopardy.

Then something worse happened. Much worse. The heavy engine sound of an industrial vehicle. The snarling of slow gears, hydraulic arms rising and falling, the careless clattering and comradely exchanges that all signalled the arrival of an early morning bin lorry. He struggled furiously, trying to rock the bin, but to no avail at all. He tried kicking with his bound feet but could barely make an impact. Nothing more than a low, desperate moan escaped beyond the barrier of tape across his mouth.

There were other bins parked nearby, he heard them being wheeled away towards the lorry, heard them being lifted, emptied, returned. Two of them. His was about to be the third. He heard one binman say to another, ‘Did you see Top Gear last night?’ and the other one replying, ‘No, the wife watches Collier. I need to get Sky Plus. Collier’s crap.’

Jackson could hear them, clear as a bell. He was inches away from them but incapable of attracting their attention. He had survived the Gulf, he had survived Northern Ireland and a devastating train crash and he was going to die like trash (exactly like trash, in fact), by being crushed to death in a bin lorry.

The wheelie-bin was suddenly jolted and he found himself being bumped and rumbled along towards his nemesis. Jackson in jeopardy.

This was it then.

The end.

Jackson caught the sound of a dog barking. Not just barking, yapping furiously, the kind of noise that drove people crazy if there was no let-up to it. There was no let-up. On and on, the dog barked. Yap, yap, yap. There was something familiar about it.

‘What is it?’ he heard one of the binmen say. ‘What are you trying to tell me, eh?’

‘What’s that you say, Skippy?’ another said, in a bad Australian accent. ‘Someone’s in trouble, d’you say?’

‘Me!’ Jackson roared silently.

Someone laughed and said, ‘Skippy’s a kangaroo, not a dog. It should be Lassie.’

‘This one’s a Laddie by the looks of him.’

He was going to die while all around him people were discussing the gender of a dog?

Daylight suddenly. So sharp it dazzled him. And fresh sea air. Light and air, all a man needed when you got right down to basics. And a faithful friend who wasn’t going to let you go to the great boneyard in the sky without kicking up a hell of a fuss.

‘Leave no man behind, eh?’ Jackson said to the dog as he staggered back to Bella Vista.

Tilly made herself an early morning cup of tea. The nice weather had broken and the rain was lashing against the little window of the kitchen. The clocks said ten past five and although Tilly could no longer feel entirely certain about what that meant, she was pretty sure it was the morning because she could hear Saskia snoring behind her bedroom door. Saskia denied that she snored, she was always muttering about the noise that Tilly made, ‘Gosh, Tilly, you were like an express train in a tunnel last night,’ or (overheard saying to Padma – there, Padma, remembered her name, no problem) ‘I can’t stand it, I’m getting no sleep, you know, it’s like sharing a house with a giant hog.’ Padma saying, ‘Have you tried earplugs, Miss Bligh?’

Cap’n Bligh, yes, sir. Or rather, ‘no, sir’, Tilly supposed, given the mutiny. Did you call a naval captain ‘sir’? Or ‘captain’? HMS Pinafore not much help with that. Would Saskia’s Guards lieutenant know? Military was military after all. What was his name? Saskia was the lieutenant’s woman. Tilly had a small part in that film, a servant of some kind. Lyme Regis, lovely place, the young people were all wild to see Lyme. Her favourite Austen. Persuasion. Her brain was like lace, delicate and full of holes. Or a christening shawl. White wool on black skin. Coddling.

Rupert, that was his name! Like Rupert Bear. She used to love getting those annuals at Christmas. Rupert and his friends. Bill the Badger, Ping-Pong the Pekinese (was that racist in some way?). Couldn’t remember the others. One Boxing Day she had done something that angered Father – who knew what, so many little things made him angry – and he had taken her new Rupert annual and torn the pages out one by one. Oh, dear God, would someone put a stop to all this. The memories, the words. Too many of them.

The lieutenant was arriving tonight, wasn’t he? That would explain the shepherd’s pie that was sitting mysteriously in the middle of the kitchen table.

The rain sounded as if someone was throwing buckets of water against the window. There was a grumble of thunder, like a sound effect. On a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. She had played Miranda in an open-air production. Home Counties somewhere, couldn’t remember much about it, her heart hadn’t been in it the way it should have been because she was in love with Douglas. She’d been stuck in the wilds of Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, some Home Counties shire anyway, while Douglas was in London directing a play. He was fifteen years older than Tilly. She was only twenty, it was a lovely role – such sweet innocence – she hadn’t realized at the time that she would never play it again. She was Prospero now, poor old Tilly, breaking her staff, about to give it all up. The revels were ending. Sticky toffee pudding ending.

Of course, that was the summer that Phoebe stole Douglas. He was directing her in Major Barbara, you see. She was the youngest actress ever to play the role on the London stage. The brightest new star of her generation, critics said. The springboard for her glittering career. Tilly had never understood why Douglas hadn’t cast her in the role, she was just as good an actress as Phoebe, certainly no worse. Too late to ask him now. After that Phoebe got all the juicy roles, of course, Cleopatra, Duchess of Malfi, Nora Helmer.

When Tilly looked again she saw that it wasn’t raining, wasn’t wet outside at all. The rain was inside her head? A tempest in her brain. O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer.

The shepherd’s pie on the table was defrosting beneath its suffocating cling-film. Miniature green trees of broccoli were all chopped and washed in a colander. Tonight’s dinner on the table at six in the morning. Of course, the lieutenant in the Guards was arriving tonight. Saskia was doing her domestic act. She hadn’t actually made the shepherd’s pie, nice man in catering had done it for her. ‘Make it look authentic,’ Saskia had told him, ‘home-made. As if I’m a good cook, but not cordon bleu.’ Silly girl.

In a café with Douglas. Near the British Museum. He bought her a rum baba, her favourite, and then put his hand over hers and said, ‘Sorry, Matilda dearest’ – that was how he spoke, he had been brought up on matinee idols. His mother had been a Bluebell Girl before she had him. (And here was Tilly in Bluebell Cottage. Funny that.) No father in the picture for Douglas, his mother was the racy sort, that kind of background was bound to turn a boy’s head. Inhaled greasepaint with his first breath. Made her terribly sad to think of Douglas as a little baby, he had been so racked at the end, nothing more than a skeleton. Aids, of course. Took off a lot of those poor boys. Tilly’s baby had been a boy. Sluiced away. Black. Black as night. She hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. First time she played Juliet was at school. An all-girls school, her Romeo was a girl called Eileen. Wonder what happened to Eileen. Could be dead.

There was a shepherd’s pie sitting on the table. It seemed strange. She should pop it in the oven. Vince and his boyfriend were coming round tonight, ‘to cheer her up’. They said they would bring food – had they already brought it? Were they already here? Where? Her brain was doing that swimmy thing again, like a television gone wrong. Maybe she was having little strokes, one after the other, that would explain how the weather had got inside her.

They had made shepherd’s pie in ‘housecraft’ at school. Housecraft classes taught you all the things you would need to run a house, be a good wife-

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Tilly! What are you doing? You’re cooking the fucking shepherd’s pie, it’s fucking six o’clock in the morning. You stupid fucking senile bitch!’

Tilly flapped her hands helplessly in the air. She wanted to say, ‘Don’t shout at me,’ she did so hate being shouted at, made her shrink inside. The great maw of Father’s mouth, the smell of dead fish he carried on his skin. She couldn’t say anything, the words wouldn’t come out properly. Ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar.

They breakfasted on toast and Marmite, sitting at an oak refectory table made by Robert Thompson, the Mouseman. Tracy had read a leaflet and pointed out the Mouseman’s signature to Courtney, the little carved mouse climbing up the table leg. A set of ten matching chairs ringed the table. Courtney crawled around on hands and knees and counted all the mice on the chair legs.

Imagine a life too where you ate your breakfast every morning sitting at an oak table, in a Victorian Gothic house, looking out of a window at a herd of deer. The wand rested next to the Marmite jar. Broken now, Courtney had retained the top half with the star, more like a hatchet than a wand. When she finished her toast Courtney hauled out the faithful pink backpack and arranged her swag on the Mouseman table. After three days of witnessing this ritual Tracy thought she knew the catalogue by heart but every time Courtney seemed to have added something new. The current inventory was:

the tarnished silver thimble

the Chinese coin with a hole in the middle

the purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it

the snow globe containing a crude model of the Houses of Parliament

the shell like a cream horn

the shell shaped like a coolie hat

the pine cone

Dorothy Waterhouse’s engagement ring

the filigree leaf from the wood

a few links from a cheap gold chain

The gold chain was new. Kid was a magpie. She had an obsession with finding, collecting, arranging. She was self-contained. Did it foretell a scientist patiently collating data, an artist absorbed by creation, or was there something autistic about it?

Tracy cleared the plates away, took them through to the kitchen that was next to the dining room. A minute or two later she heard a noise coming from the other room. It was so unexpected that it took her a moment or two to understand that the sound was that of Courtney singing. ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. The first verse. Tracy peered into the room. Courtney sang the first verse again (Who knew the second verse? No one). On the word ‘star’ she closed her fists and then opened them and made starfish hands. A damaged child that could still sing could be rescued, couldn’t she? Could be taken to pantomimes and circuses, zoos and petting farms and Disneyland. Wasn’t going to end up hanging around Sweet Street West looking for business. Chevaunne. She could have been rescued once. They could all have been rescued, all the Chevaunnes, all the Michael Braithwaites, all the starved and beaten and neglected. If there’d been enough people to rescue them.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Courtney. ‘But we have to leave this nice place.’

She phoned Harry Reynolds. She could hear the sound of ice cubes tinkling in a glass. Seemed early for alcohol. Maybe it was his morning orange juice. She imagined him standing by the phone in his expensive house, wearing his expensive slippers, looking at his expensive fish. The ice made her think of diamonds. Diamonds and cockroaches. The end of the world. He answered cautiously. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m coming in,’ she said. She sounded like a Cold War spy.

Long straight drive took you to the gates, took you to the road to Ripon. Kicked out of paradise, heading east of Eden, driving a stolen car. In possession of a stolen child.

Before they reached the gates, a car appeared coming from the opposite direction. Grey, nondescript, it travelled slowly towards them. Something about its dismal aura made Tracy’s heart sink. The driver flashed his lights and raised a hand like a traffic cop. The Avensis.

Tracy had met her nemesis, she felt it in her bones. She was going to have to find out what he wanted sooner or later, she supposed.

The Avensis drew level with the Saab and the driver gave Tracy a little salute, like an old-fashioned AA man, and rolled down his window. Tracy rolled down hers.

‘What?’ she said, forgoing pleasantries.

‘Tracy, mind if I call you that?’ he said. Very chummy. Who the hell was he? ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said.

‘I’m very popular at the moment,’ Tracy said. ‘Particularly with men, or morons as they’re sometimes called. Why are you following me?’

‘Depends on your perspective, doesn’t it? Some might say that you’re following me.’

‘That’s bullshit.’

He laughed and said, ‘You’re a wag, Tracy.’

‘A wag?’ Tracy puzzled. Where did this joker come from, out of a box on a shelf somewhere marked Essex geezer, circa 1943? He proceeded to get out of his car and walk round the front of the Saab. Tracy considered running him over. Like a deer, leaving his carcase on the road for the tourists to find. No CCTV here. Or was there? The National Trust probably had cameras camouflaged in bird boxes. He had reached the passenger side of the Saab before Tracy could decide whether or not to flatten him. He opened the car door and she reached for the Maglite.

‘No need for that,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I’m not the person you should be worried about.’ He sat in the passenger seat and sighed as if he’d just settled into a warm bath. ‘Name’s Brian Jackson, by the way.’ He took a thin card from his pocket and handed it to her. Private Investigations it said, and a mobile phone number. You could get cards like that from machines in railway stations. There’s been a bloke down the station looking for you, Barry said. Says his name’s Jackson something or other. Claims to be a private detective.

‘It’s lovely here, isn’t it?’ he said conversationally. ‘It’s as if time has stood still. Have you had an opportunity to visit the abbey? It’s a World Heritage site, you know.’

She stared at him until he put his hands in the air and said, ‘Just making conversation. I’ve been looking for you all week. I found everyone else but you’ve been elusive.’

‘Everyone else?’

‘Every time I catch up with you, you shoot off. You nearly gave me a heart attack when you whacked into that deer. Could have been nasty. Was for the deer, obviously.’

‘That was you chasing me?’

‘Following, not chasing,’ he said in a hurt voice. ‘I don’t know why you ran off into the wood like that.’ He opened the glove compartment and rustled around inside and then came up with some kind of small electronic gadget. ‘I’d never have found you without this,’ he said. ‘Tracking device.’ He held it up for her inspection. ‘I had it on your friend, wanted to make sure I could keep up with him. We’re both after the same thing, bit of a tag-team thing going on. Nice coincidence, although I always say that a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Very handy the way it led me to you. Your friend’s very cross about his car, by the way.’

‘No friend of mine,’ Tracy said.

‘He could be.’

A sense of defeat fell on her, a leaden cloak. What was the point? She couldn’t run, she couldn’t hide, there was always going to be someone looking for them. Someone sticking tracker devices on them. Satellites up in the stratosphere turned on their every move. Cameras aimed in their direction. Eyes in the sky and camera drones playing I-Spy – someone beginning with ‘T’. The Pentagon and the Kremlin probably had an eye on them too. Aliens had them in an invisible tractor beam. No escape, no way out. Wondered if she could just lay her head down on the steering wheel and go to sleep and when she woke up everything would be different. Maybe the forest would grow around them, a cage of thorns and briars. Should have thought about that before, got the kid to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and they’d be safe. Asleep but safe, like Amy Crawford.

The man was still rifling through the glove compartment. This time he came up with what looked like a black-and-white humbug. ‘Everton mint,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen one of those in a long time.’ He took out a handkerchief and cleaned the mint up a little and then handed it to Courtney, who received it with the solemn devotion of one accepting a communion wafer.

The sweet was a cartoon bulge in the kid’s cheek. Tracy imagined her swallowing it, choking on it. ‘Chew on that,’ she warned, ‘don’t suck it.’ She turned to Brian Jackson, still grubbing through the glove compartment, and said, ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Nothing, just wondered what he had in here. Can’t help but be curious, he’s like – what’s the fancy term, alter ego, yeah, this geezer’s like my alter ego.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Looking good here, all the best, N.’ he read out from an old postcard that he found. ‘Nice place, Cheltenham,’ he said. ‘Ever been there?’ He flicked through the CDs. ‘Country music,’ he said. ‘Good lord, who’d have thought it.’

‘You’re here about the kid,’ Tracy said.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Bang to rights. I’m here about the kid. Not this one though, as interesting as I find her.’ He turned round and stared at Courtney. She stared back.

‘Don’t bother,’ Tracy said. ‘She won’t look away first. What do you mean, you’re not interested in her?’ Her spirits rose. She felt incredibly chuffed. ‘You mean you haven’t come to get her back?’

‘Nah. I’m here about a different kid.’

‘Different kid?’ Tracy said.

‘Not a kid any more. Used to be a kid.’

‘We all used to be kids.’

‘Not me.’

A group of fawns sauntered across the road in front of the car. ‘Look,’ Courtney said.

‘I see them, pet,’ Tracy said, keeping her eyes on Brian Jackson.

‘Why don’t we all hop in my car,Tracy?’ Brian Jackson said. ‘A lot safer for you than this one. This one’s been reported stolen. Mine’s not stolen – thief’s honour. I’ll give you a lift to wherever you’re going – Leeds, is it? And we can have a little chat along the way.’

‘Not until you tell me what this is about.’ She suddenly felt incredibly irritated, the leaden cloak of defeat, now no more than a poor metaphor, dropped from her shoulders. Tracy had her mojo back. ‘I am very busy at the moment and I do not have time for your mucking me about, so start talking.’

‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘Keep you hair on.’ Courtney made a noise indicating surprise and Tracy said, ‘Not literally,’ to her, without turning round.

‘I’m waiting,’ Tracy said.

‘Michael Braithwaite,’ he said. ‘Name mean anything to you?’

‘Michael Braithwaite?’

‘Yeah, thought it might. I’ve got a couple of questions. Need to fill in some blanks. You’re a key witness, as you might say. What do you reckon – shall we get going?’

‘You said that you weren’t the person I should be worried about,’ Tracy said. ‘Who is the person I should be worried about?’

He sat in the dining room of Bella Vista and ate his ‘full Yorkshire breakfast’ as if the only thing that had happened to him between closing his eyes last night and opening them again this morning had been an untroubled sleep in Valerie’s flowery bower.

The baffled (one might say traumatized) binmen had wanted to phone emergency services but somehow or other Jackson had managed to persuade them that he had ended up in the bin as a result of a dangerous prank on the part of his friends. ‘A joke that went wrong.’

‘Some joke,’ one of them said.

They had had to tilt the bin to free him and he had rolled out with the rubbish, like a legless bug. One of them produced a Stanley knife and cut the duct tape that was binding his ankles and wrists. It took some time for his limbs to come back to life but he managed to rip off the duct tape gag himself and to stumble off down the road, aware of the dubious glances at his back. He passed a shop window full of clocks. All the hands of the clocks were stretched out vertically. Six o’clock. He thought he had been in the bin for hours but it was less than two. Not a wheelie-bin but a Tardis.

The dog scampered by his side all the way back to Bella Vista in a state of near-delirium. At the site of the train crash two years ago Jackson’s life had been saved by a girl administering CPR. Now he had been saved by the loyalty of a dog. The less innocent he was, the more innocent his saviours became. There was some kind of exchange at work in the universe that he didn’t understand.

They had re-entered Valerie the same way that they had left, via the fire escape. The smell of bacon was already seeping under the door, fighting with the scent of air freshener trapped in the soft furnishings.

He squeezed himself into Valerie’s small ensuite bathroom and had the best shower of his life, despite the postage-stamp size of the towel and the wafer of soap that soon melted into nothing. A near-death experience proved to be just the thing to work up a man’s appetite and once he was presentable again he left the dog – immediately forlorn at this ungrateful desertion – and exited Valerie in the conventional way to investigate Mrs Reid’s ‘full Yorkshire breakfast’.

Nothing discernibly Yorkshire about the breakfast at all. Jackson didn’t know what he’d expected – Yorkshire pudding, a symbolic white rose cut into the toast perhaps – but instead there was the usual fry-up consisting of flabby slices of bacon, a pale, glassy egg, mushrooms like slugs and a sausage that inevitably reminded him of a dog turd. Worst of all was the (predictable) disappointment afforded by the coffee, which was weak and acidic and left Jackson feeling slightly queasy.

Only one other table in the dining room was occupied, by a middle-aged couple. Apart from the occasional inaudible remark of the ‘pass-the-salt’ kind the twosome breakfasted in a glum silence, bordering on the hostile.

The lack of marital conversation gave Jackson peace to digest the night’s events. The ‘message’ in the early hours – Leave Carol Braithwaite alone. What did that mean – that he had got too close to an inconvenient truth? Yet he didn’t feel as if he had found out anything at all about Carol Braithwaite’s death. Quite the opposite. Who was warning him off and why? Was it because of something Marilyn Nettles had told him yesterday, something she had said? Or perhaps something she hadn’t said? She had been economical with her answers.

Something had been nagging away at him as he fell asleep last night, before his encounter with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He had been thinking about Jennifer, the girl he and Steve had snatched in Munich, trying to remember the name of her brother and then – it came to Jackson suddenly – he hadn’t asked Marilyn Nettles the right question. It was such a simple question as well.

The breakfasts were being served by a young girl. She looked familiar and it was only when she refilled his cup, caffeine was caffeine, after all, no matter how bad, that he recognized her as the female half of the Goth couple in St Mary’s Church yesterday. Now her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was devoid of make-up. All her piercings, or at least the ones that were visible, had been removed. A truculent teenager rather than a wannabe vampire.

‘Lovely morning,’ Jackson said conversationally to her and was rewarded with a surly look.

‘If you’re not being made to work,’ she said.

‘Are you?’ he said. ‘Being made to?’ She didn’t look as if she could be made to do anything.

‘White slave trade.’

It seemed unlikely. In Whitby.

She shambled out of the dining room, carelessly dripping coffee from the pot as she went. He heard the door to the kitchen being pushed open aggressively and the sound of something crashing and breaking. Mrs Reid’s militant response was countered by the girl’s voice whining, ‘Oh, Mum!’ in exactly the same mardy tone that Marlee adopted nowadays.

The girl barged out of the kitchen again and stomped up the stairs.

‘You just can’t get the staff these days, can you?’ Jackson said cheerfully to his gloomy fellow breakfasters, neither of whom felt it necessary to come back with witty repartee, or indeed any repartee at all.

He rewarded the dog with the turd-like sausage, purloined from the Yorkshire breakfast, only regretting that everything that went in one end had to come out at the other.

Jackson stripped the bed, bundled up the sheets and left them on the mattress. On top of the sheets he placed twenty-five pounds in payment for the night. No tip, as there had been no discernible service worth rewarding. Easy money for Mrs Reid. He could have checked out in the normal way, of course, it just felt better like this. Saved a lot of unnecessary talking.

‘Won’t be long,’ he said to the dog, tying it to a railing in Marilyn Nettles’s yard.

There was no sign of life in her cottage. He was surprised, she hardly seemed the type to be an early riser. The house had the same abandoned feeling as Linda Pallister’s. Where on earth were all these women disappearing to? Was there a black hole somewhere that was sucking in middle-aged women – Tracy Waterhouse, Linda Pallister and now Marilyn Nettles. And all somehow connected to Hope McMaster.

Or was it some kind of conspiracy – Brian Jackson, Tracy Waterhouse, Marilyn Nettles, Linda Pallister – the whole lot of them involved in it. Jackson didn’t know what ‘it’ was, but that was the point, wasn’t it? That was what solving something was about, it was hunting the ‘it’ down, pinning its arms above its head and making it spill the beans. It was like being in a game, a game where you didn’t know the rules or the identity of the other players and where you were unsure of the goal. Was he a pawn or a player? Was he becoming paranoid? (Becoming? he heard Julia say.)

He got down on his hands and knees and peered through the cat flap. Dead air. ‘You’ll never fit through there,’ a voice said.

Marilyn Nettles shuffled into the yard, laden with Somerfield plastic bags. Jackson heard the clink of glass on glass. Not a black hole then, nor a woman in jeopardy, just a raddled old alcoholic out doing her daily shop.

‘What is it now?’ she asked.

‘How many children did Carol Braithwaite have?’

They left Whitby. On a bus.

Jackson sat on the top deck and admired the scenery. The dog lay at his feet. They were going back to Leeds. The place it all started. The place it would all end, if Jackson had anything to do with it. In Scarborough they exchanged the bus for a train. Jackson didn’t like trains. He still had flashbacks to the crash, unpleasant sensory hallucinations – the smell of burning oil and electrical fires, the screech of metal on metal. He hadn’t been back on a train since.

A woman had lost control of her car, the car had gone over the bridge, fallen on the track, derailed the train. Fifteen people dead. The woman had a brain tumour that had caused a seizure. One small cluster of rogue cells personal to the owner, that was all it took to kill and maim en masse. For want of a nail.

Jackson really didn’t like trains.

He had eaten breakfast at home. Barry hadn’t done that for a while, usually downed a quick cup of coffee and left for Millgarth. Barbara used to fret when he did that, you need a breakfast inside you, everyone knows it’s the most important meal, yackety-yak. Not any more.

‘I fancy bacon and eggs,’ he said.

When she set it down in front of him he said, ‘Aren’t you going to have any?’ and she said, ‘Not hungry,’ but she sat opposite him and had her usual breakfast of Valium and tea. She was dressed in a smart two-piece, her hair teased and backcombed.

‘Thanks, love,’ he said when he’d wiped the plate clean with a piece of bread. He stood up and drained his coffee down and then said, ‘Well, I’ll be off then.’

‘He gets out today,’ she said in an emotionless voice.

‘I know,’ he said. He attempted to kiss Barbara goodbye, something else he hadn’t done for a long time, but she successfully feinted the move and instead he ended up patting her on the shoulder. ‘Bye then,’ he said.

It was two years since Barbara had invited Amy and Ivan to dinner, spent all day making complicated Delia recipes and then Barry had spent all evening telling Ivan what a waster he was. He was losing his business, going to be declared a bankrupt, the man who had promised to protect and support his daughter.

‘Barry? How’s it going?’ he said when Barry opened the front door to them. He hated the way Ivan called him ‘Barry’, as if they were mates down the pub, as if they were equals. ‘You can’t expect him to call you Mr Crawford,’ Barbara said. ‘He’s your son-in-law, for heaven’s sake.’ In fact, Barry thought, he would have preferred it if Ivan called him Superintendent.

‘A little aperitif?’ Barbara said when she’d taken their coats and they’d parked Sam in the cot upstairs. Barbara had bought duplicates of everything – cot, car seat, high chair, buggy – for their own house, imagining a lifetime of babysitting.

‘Lovely, Barbara,’ Ivan said, rubbing his hands, ‘I’ll have a white wine.’ Barry knew he made him nervous but he didn’t care. Before Barbara had even got as far as taking the Chardonnay out of the fridge Barry had started muttering sarcastic comments under his breath. ‘Dad. Don’t,’ Amy said, touching his arm.

Ivan looked apprehensively at Amy over Delia’s chocolate ricotta cheesecake. He had the look of a man about to jump off a cliff. Cleared his throat, said, ‘We were wondering, Barry – Amy and I – about a loan, ten thousand pounds, to help get us back on our feet?’

Barry wanted to belt him one right there at the table. ‘I’ve worked hard all my life,’ he said, all patriarchal bluster, ‘and you want me to hand over my money to you because you’re a useless tosser. Why not just cut out the middle man and piss it straight down the drain?’

Amy jumping up from the table, ‘I’m not staying to hear my husband insulted, Dad,’ running up the stairs to get Sam out of his cot.

Before Barry knew it she was outside, strapping his grandson into his car seat. ‘Honestly, Dad, sometimes you are such a shit.’

Barbara standing on the doorstep, face set in concrete, staring after the car. ‘He’s over the limit,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a car. This is all your fault, Barry. As usual.’

He would have given his daughter anything and he had baulked at a measly ten-thousand-quid loan. He could have said yes, they could have opened a bottle of something fizzy to celebrate and eaten the chocolate ricotta cheesecake. Barbara could have said, ‘Oh, you can’t drive like that, the beds are all made up, you’d better stay over,’ and Barry could have gone upstairs and kissed his sleeping grandson goodnight. Didn’t happen like that, did it?

When he walked into Millgarth he nearly fell over Chloe Pallister, as agitated as a disturbed anthill. ‘My mum’s gone missing,’ she said.

‘Missing?’ Barry said.

‘Since Wednesday night. I went round to her house, no sign of her, she hasn’t been into work, no one’s seen her.’

Barry remembered how Amy had tossed her bouquet, aimed it directly at her best friend, but Chloe managed to fall over her own orange-satin feet and a more competitive girl caught the flowers.

‘Did you notice if anything was missing?’ he asked.

‘Her passport.’

‘Her passport,’ he said. ‘Well, if her passport’s missing she’s most likely run away.’

‘Run away? My mother?’

It did sound unlikely, Linda wasn’t the kind to run away, still he persisted with this easy explanation. ‘Given up this crap life and gone to live on a beach in Greece,’ he said. ‘At this moment she’s probably sitting in a taverna somewhere, making eyes at a waiter, hoping for a bit of Shirley Valentine.’

‘Not my mum,’ Chloe said stoutly.

‘Well, we can all surprise ourselves sometimes, pet,’ he said. His head felt woolly. Didn’t have the energy for this. Had things to do. Take no prisoners, leave no bodies. Led Chloe Pallister into an interview room and said someone would come and take a statement. Left her there and forgot to tell anyone.

Gemma Holroyd put her head round the door to his office and said, ‘Fyi, boss, the lab matched the DNA at Kelly Cross’s murder scene to what they found on the Mabgate whore.’ Fyi, Barry thought, how he hated words like that. Not even a word. ‘What about this third one?’ he asked. ‘The Cottage Road Cinema one.’

‘Results aren’t back yet.’

He went to his office, sat at his desk, turned his computer on and began to write his last testament.

Just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s when there was a knock on the door. It opened before he had time to say, ‘Come in.’

‘You,’ Barry said. ‘I’d like to know what your game is. What do you want exactly?’

‘The truth?’ Jackson Brodie said.

‘Superintendent. Come in.’

Harry Reynolds held the door open, a tea towel in his hand, the picture of contented domesticity.

The greenhouse heat of his house hit you as you walked through the door. And the aroma of coffee, overlaid by the smell of apples and sugar. ‘Making an apple pie for Sunday lunch tomorrow,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘What happened to your face?’ he asked Tracy.

‘Got into a fight with an airbag.’

Glancing down at Courtney, a tattered and torn fairy, he said, ‘Hello, poppet, you look a bit the worse for wear as well. Magic not working too well? Your “mummy” will have to buy you a new wand, won’t you, Mummy?’ he said, raising a sarcastic eyebrow at Tracy. Then in a different tone of voice he said to her, ‘You can’t travel looking the way you do, “hedge” and “backwards” come to mind. You and the ugly duckling need some decent clothes. You don’t want to attract attention.’ She could imagine, only too easily, what it would be like to get on the wrong side of Harry Reynolds. Frightening. Tracy was way beyond being frightened.

Ugly duckling, how dare he. Should have decked him, right there in his overstuffed, overheated living room. Stuck him in his expensive koi pond, let Harry Reynolds swim with the fishes. Instead she said, ‘Yeah, thanks for the advice, Harry. Unfortunately I had to leave my Louis Vuitton luggage behind and all my Gucci gowns were in it.’

‘Are you in trouble, Superintendent? More than before? If that’s humanly possible. I don’t want trouble at my door, make sure you keep it away from me.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘Just friendly advice.’ He looked at the ugly sunburst clock on the wall and said, ‘Susan’ll be here soon with Brett and Ashley. They’re popping in on their way to Alton Towers.’ Stated as a fact, meant as a warning. No offer of scones this time. Strictly business. ‘And I’ve got a funeral to go to,’ he added.

He took a large, stout manila envelope from his sixties G Plan sideboard. ‘Everything’s here. New passports, birth certificates. An address in Ilkley – no point in pretending you’re not from Yorkshire, open your mouth and you’ll betray yourself – utility bills to that address, you’ll be able to set up a new bank account wherever it is you’re going. France is it? You should go somewhere that doesn’t extradite. New national insurance number as well, and as a little extra, you’ve got a profile on Facebook and you’ll be pleased to hear that you have seventeen friends already. Welcome to the brave new world, Imogen Brown.’

Tracy handed over an envelope bursting with notes. ‘Expensive business,’ she said. Second envelope this week, this one containing a lot more money than the first. She had definitely joined the cash economy.

‘You’re not in a position to bargain, Superintendent.’

‘Just saying.’

‘Did you instruct your solicitor to get a move on with the sale of your house?’

‘Yes.’

He sighed the sigh of a put-upon entrepreneur. ‘It takes bloody weeks to buy or sell a house, all those searches and surveys. Ridiculous amount of bureaucracy. A man’s money and his word should be enough. And don’t get me started on the money laundering regulations. Gone are the good old days when you could just go out and buy a nice little piece of real estate with the cash in your pocket.’

‘Yeah, those good old days,’ Tracy said. ‘Everybody misses them. Especially the criminals.’

‘You’re in no position to throw stones, Superintendent. Anyway, don’t worry, I can get it pushed through. Expedited is the word, I believe. Nice word. Stay in touch with your solicitor. Solicitor sells the house to me, I’ll take my finder’s fee, as it were, and put the rest into the new bank account you’re going to set up.’

‘I threw my phone away.’

‘Wise move. They can find you anywhere these days if you’ve got a phone. Hang on,’ he said and disappeared out of the room. Tracy could hear him moving about upstairs. Courtney had her face glued to the patio doors, watching the fish pond. Tracy caught sight of a big blue-and-white-marbled fish gliding by like a cruising submarine.

Harry Reynolds came back in the room with a carrier bag of clothes. ‘Some stuff in here of Ashley’s and my wife’s. She was a big woman, they should fit. I should have cleared her things out before now, given them to charity or whatever. Susan’s always on to me. Doesn’t like seeing her mum’s things around the house when she comes.’ He drooped, suddenly an old man without a wife. He noticed Courtney’s grubby face-print on the glass of the patio doors and absent-mindedly took out a handkerchief and polished the imprint away.

‘Here,’ he said, putting his hand into the bag of clothes and coming out with a couple of mobile phones that he handed over to Tracy, saying, ‘Throw them away when you’ve used them once. They’re pre-paid.’

‘Of course they are,’ Tracy said. An old age pensioner with a wardrobe full of burner phones, what was there to be surprised at in that?

The doorbell rang and Harry Reynolds hurried off to answer it.

‘That’ll be Brett and Ashley then,’Tracy said, raising an eyebrow at Courtney. She raised an eyebrow back, an enigmatic response.

Harry Reynolds’s grandchildren rushed into the house and were brought up short by the sight of Courtney, a scruffy cuckoo usurping their place in the nest. They were dressed in mufti, Brett in a Leeds United football strip, Ashley in jeans and a pink velour High School Musical hoodie. Courtney stared open-mouthed at this unattainable vision of pre-pubescent chic.

Their mother blustered into the room behind them and said, ‘What’s all this then?’

‘Nothing, Susan,’ Harry Reynolds said, placatory, slightly cowed. ‘An old friend, passing by. Dropped in.’

Tracy wondered if Harry Reynolds’s daughter knew what kind of ‘old friends’ her father used to have, or did she think all this – the roast beef, the school fees, the koi – was the just rewards for clean living and hard work? ‘Don’t worry, we’re just going,’ Tracy said.

‘I’ll escort you to the door, shall I?’ Harry said, sounding like a policeman.

The Avensis was parked outside. Brian Jackson was leaning against the bonnet, smoking. He raised a cigarette in mute greeting when he saw them.

‘Who’s this?’ Harry Reynolds muttered to Tracy when he saw him.

‘Nobody,’ Tracy said.

‘Well, have a nice life, Superintendent,’ Harry Reynolds said.

‘Try my best,’ Tracy said.

1975: 21 March

A toddler! Darling little thing, in her pyjamas, fast asleep, wrapped in a dirty old blanket. Had there been an accident of some kind? Ray Strickland was white, he looked as if he’d just witnessed something dreadful.

‘Come in, it’s freezing out there,’ Ian said. He led Ray into the living room, sat him down, poured him a huge tumbler of whisky. Ray’s hand was shaking so much that he couldn’t get it to his lips.

‘What happened, Strickland?’ Ian asked. He was kneeling beside him, checking the girl to see if she was injured in some way. Kitty felt a rush of pride in her husband’s expertise. ‘Who is she, Ray?’ Ian asked but Ray just shook his head.

‘Is she all right?’ Ray asked and Ian nodded and said, ‘As far as I can make out.’ Kitty took the little girl from Ray and wrapped her up in a clean blanket. ‘There, snug as a bug in a rug,’ she said, holding her in her arms. The girl didn’t stir. The solid weight of the child felt so lovely. Imagine if she was yours to keep, to hold like this every day. Kitty Winfield brushed her sleeping daughter’s hair from her face.

‘Will you take her?’ Ray said.

‘Take her?’ Kitty echoed. ‘For the night?’

‘For good.’

‘Mine? To keep? For ever?’ Kitty said.

‘Ours,’ Ian said.

A couple of weeks later, over a nice candlelit dinner at home, Ian poured her a glass of wine and said, ‘I’ve been offered a job in New Zealand, I thought it best if I take it.’

‘Oh God, yes, darling,’ Kitty said. ‘That’s perfect. We can leave everything behind, start again where no one knows anything about us. You are clever.’

A plague upon this howling! The wild waters roaring in her head. Tilly had run out of Bluebell Cottage, abuse from Saskia echoing in her ears, got into her car and driven off. She wanted to go home. She needed a train, trains were in stations, the station was in Leeds. Something horrible had happened to Tilly in Leeds but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was exactly. Something to do with a child. A child, a poor, poor child. A little black thing in the snow. Her little black baby.

When she had kissed her lovely Nigerian man at Leicester Square tube station, he said to her, ‘Shall I call for you tonight, perhaps you’d like to go to the cinema, perhaps some supper afterwards?’

‘That would be wonderful,’ Tilly said.

‘I’ll call for you,’ he said. ‘About seven.’

She spent the whole day thinking about him, wondering what to wear, how to do her hair. She was absolutely useless in rehearsal but she didn’t care, her heart was skipping. She got home at six, got ready in a terrific rush and then stood at the window looking down at the street, waiting for a glimpse of her handsome new man.

Was still standing there at eight, at nine. At ten she knew he wasn’t coming. Understood he would never come.

It was only much later that she learned that he had got lost. He had never written down her address, thought he could easily find his way back to her flat but once he was in Soho he realized he had mistaken her street. He had wandered up and down and all around the houses, looking for some familiar landmark, some reminder of where he had been the night before. He had even tried doors and got short shrift because of his colour, except from some of the ladies who had cards above their doorbells. Nearly midnight when he gave up and went home.

The next day he tried to track her down again. He had done the rounds of the theatres asking about her and in one someone directed him to Phoebe, about to go into a matinee performance of Pygmalion. He recognized her from the party at the embassy. She told him that yes, she knew Tilly, in fact Tilly was her best friend and had told her all about the previous night’s ‘tryst’, and ‘I am afraid I am the bearer of bad news,’ she said, her hand sincerely on her heart, or where her heart would have been if she had had one. Phoebe went on to inform him that Tilly had realized, in the cold light of day, that she did not want to see him again. It had been a mistake, she had been carried away. ‘You understand?’ Phoebe said. He did. ‘So sorry,’ Phoebe said, ‘that’s the beginners’ call, I must go.’

‘I was looking out for your interests,’ Phoebe said, sitting by her bedside in hospital after she had lost the baby. ‘Sometimes you can be rather foolish.’ Silly Tilly. ‘It would only have ended in disaster, Tilly.’

It had already ended in disaster.

When she felt stronger she paid a visit to the Nigerian embassy, she had to apologize to him, explain about her treacherous friend. There was a man on reception but what could she say to him? ‘You have someone called John who works here?’ The man on reception looked at her with something like contempt, rather like the nurses on the maternity ward, and said, ‘We have several people working here with that name. I would have to know his surname.’

What could she do? O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! She trudged home in the rain, defeated. Perhaps both of them gave up too easily. She had always thought that of Princess Margaret and Captain Townsend. Duty over love. What nonsense. Love should always come first. It wasn’t as if Princess Margaret had been necessary to the country in any way. Quite the opposite.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have lost her baby if she hadn’t lost his father. Perhaps it was the stress she was under. She had started to buy things, mittens and bootees. She kept one of the little mittens for years, at the bottom of her bag, until it disintegrated. Silly really.

It was hair-raising on Leeds station, so many people rushing backwards and forwards, their faces grim, everyone running for trains, impatient with each other, with themselves. Jolting and jostling. No manners!

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces. It was all make believe, wasn’t it? Reality itself was nothing. Words, everything was made out of words, once you lost the words you lost the world. The howling tempest all around her. At sea in a high wind. The men on the trawlers, their bodies spiralling through the cold icy waters, after their brave little ships were torpedoed. Down, down, down, to the seabed. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Treasure in the deep.

She had that funny feeling of darkness again, of the curtain of Northern Lights before her eyes. She was on a ship ploughing through the dark waters. All about her was desperation. The spars breaking, the mainmast cracking, the sails hanging in rags. The figurehead of the ship was a naked baby howling in the wind. There were babies everywhere, hanging on to the rigging for dear life, clinging to the sides of the ship as it began to sink into the icy, oily sea. Tilly must save them, she must save them all, but she can’t, she is going down with the ship. Mercy on us! We split, we split!

And then suddenly there she was, like a ray of light, a port in a storm – the little ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ girl. On the station platform. Her wings crushed, a poor little butterfly, a bedraggled fairy, flitting amongst the crowd ahead on the walkway above the platforms. Tilly had been given a second opportunity to save her. Someone should do something. Tilly should do something. Be bold, Tilly! Be a bold girl!

Courtney. The name came unbidden. (Would you just shut the fuck up, Courtney, you’re getting on my tits!) ‘Courtney,’ Tilly whispered, her voice suddenly hoarse. The girl turned her head and looked at her. ‘Courtney,’ Tilly repeated more confidently this time. She smiled and held out her hand. Courtney walked towards her, put her little hand in Tilly’s old one as if she were obeying invisible instructions. Tilly remembered her dream, the feel of the velvety rabbit’s paw in her hand as they flew. ‘Come with me, darling,’ Tilly said.

Tracy was clad in Harry Reynolds’s dead wife’s clothes. Marks amp; Spencer trousers with an elasticated waist and a tunic top decorated with a jungle design that would have allowed her to step into the rainforest and become invisible. No rainforests in Leeds. Courtney, trundling along beside her, had got the better end of the deal, but only just – sporting Ashley’s cast-off denim pedal-pushers and a Peppa Pig top. On top of them she insisted on wearing the rags of her fairy dress. So much for Harry Reynolds’s idea of ‘decent clothes’, they looked like homeless people, but that was OK, no one was interested in homeless people.

There was an announcement about a ‘through train’, telling people to stand back from the edge of the platform. The platform was swarming – Bank Holiday weekend, Tracy supposed – and she hung on to Courtney’s hand as if the kid was about to be carried off to Kansas. Tracy had once attended an incident where someone had been pushed off a crowded platform beneath a train. Bloke who did it – ordinary bloke, looked a bit like Les Dennis – said he couldn’t help himself. The more he told himself not to shove the bloke standing in front of him, the more he felt impelled to do it. Seemed to think that was a reason, didn’t even plead temporary insanity. Caught on camera, got life, would be out in five years. ‘Keep back from the edge,’ Tracy said to Courtney.

No idea how it happened. There was a surge in the crowd – maybe they thought that the train was pulling into the station, not pushing its way through, but one second she had hold of the kid, the next she’d slipped from her grasp. Panic clenched Tracy’s chest as she spun round looking for Courtney and came up almost jaw to jaw with Len Lomax.

It was years since she’d last seen him. Three-piece silk suit, black funeral tie, specs that belonged on a younger man. He must be pushing seventy if he was a day but he looked good on it considering he’d spent the best part of his life smoking and drinking and who knew what else.

‘Tracy, long time no see,’ he said as if they were at a garden party.

‘Not now, boss,’ she said, scanning the crowded platform for the kid. Over fifteen years since he’d been her boss but the subordination came naturally.

She spotted Courtney further along the platform, being led away by an old woman. Kid would probably go with anyone. A dog would have more sense. An old woman was a safe pair of hands, wasn’t she? Old women found kids and took them to Lost Property and pressed a sixpence into their hand. (This had happened to an infant Tracy once on York station. She had rather hoped the old woman in question would take her home.) Unless they were evil witches, of course, in which case they took the kid home and fattened it up before putting it in the oven.

She lost sight of the old woman in the crush, started to hyperventilate. Keep calm. Stay in control. Saw the old woman again and began shoving her way through the crowd but something was tugging at her arm, pulling her back. Not something, someone. Len Lomax again. What was he playing at? He reached out and grabbed hold of her upper arm and she felt the surprising strength of his grip on her bicep. He wouldn’t let go, he was an anchor, dragging her away from the kid, saying, ‘You’re a hard woman to get hold of,Tracy. You and I need to have a little chat.’ Who is the person I should be worried about? she’d asked Brian Jackson. ‘Strickland and his sidekick Lomax,’ he said. Funny but Tracy had always thought of Strickland as Lomax’s sidekick rather than the other way round. ‘They’re trying to keep the lid on the past,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘But the truth will always out.’

‘Fuck off and let go of me.’ She tried to twist away but Lomax was holding on hard. ‘Sorry, boss,’ she said and kneed him in the groin.

‘Bitch!’ she heard him shout as she dashed off. She had got within breathing distance of the kid when one of the Land Cruiser blokes from the garage suddenly stepped in front of her like a wall. She started to put two and two together, it was a sum that had been a long time coming. The leather-jacket thugs were Lomax’s men. Excons whose path had crossed with his at some point. ‘Key witness,’ Brian Jackson said to her on the drive from Fountains to Leeds. ‘You were there when they broke down that door.’Witness to nothing, she was the last person who was key.

Tracy didn’t break stride, just punched the Land Cruiser bloke hard in the face and steamed on towards the kid. She caught sight of the other hulking leather-jacket – no surprise there – weaving his way through the throng towards her. Wolves everywhere, closing in. This one was expecting her to dodge out of his reach but instead Taurean Tracy charged straight at him and rammed the hulk out of the way.

The crowd shrank back from her, nothing like a mad cow on the rampage to clear a space. Courtney spotted Tracy and let go of the old woman’s hand and ran towards her. Tracy snatched her up and clutched her tightly in her arms. Save the kid, save the world. Kid was the world. The world, the whole world and nothing but the world. ‘Can’t breathe,’ Courtney murmured.

‘Sorry,’ Tracy said, loosening her grip, looking round for the escalator. No way out, too many people. And here was bloody Len Lomax again, what was wrong with the stupid old bastard? He was spitting mad, he never did like to be thwarted, especially by a woman. ‘I want to fucking talk to you, OK?’ he said.

He darted forward and tried to seize the kid, started pulling her away from Tracy. Courtney, clamped on to Tracy like a baby koala, screamed her head off and started bashing him with her wand. Like hitting an elephant with a stalk of grass.

The old woman, wig askew, made a sudden, unexpected lunge at Lomax, more like falling than lunging, and grasped him round the waist. Lomax twisted round so that he was face to face in the old woman’s embrace and for a second they looked like a pair of grappling pensioners at a particularly fraught tea-dance.

The old woman had sent Len Lomax off balance and the two of them wobbled perilously as he tried to regain equilibrium. There was another, more urgent platform announcement about the through train and a rush of air and noise signalling its approach. There was a collective gasp of horror from those members of the crowd who were close enough to the bumbling old waltzers to see the imminent danger in their dance. People started to yell and shout and a couple of blokes leaped forward and tried, and failed, to pull them back.

There was a quantum second of silence, counting for nothing in one dimension and stretching to infinity in another. In the balance between triumph and disaster Tracy sensed the inevitability of the outcome.

Sound returned with a vengeance as the train roared into the station and Tracy watched in disbelief as Len Lomax and the old biddy, still clasped in each other’s arms, both lost their footing and toppled over the edge into the engine’s unforgiving path. Tracy slapped her hand over the kid’s eyes but it was all over in a second. The noise of the train’s shrieking brakes outdid the screams and cries from the people on the platform. It was no longer a through train, it was a stopping one now.

Turning away, Tracy caught a glimpse of the leather-jackets, resuscitated like a pair of cartoon villains, scrambling away up the escalator. The puppet-master was gone, no need for the puppets to hang around.

‘I can’t see,’ Courtney said.

‘Sorry,’ Tracy said, removing her hand from the kid’s eyes.

A pair of railway police were sprinting down the other escalator and into the pandemonium on the platform. Two platforms over, another train was standing patiently. ‘Come on,’Tracy said to the kid. The guard was already blowing the whistle to signal that the doors were about to shut. They stepped on to the train just before its jaws hissed and closed.

They walked to the far end of the train, took their seats sedately, like any passengers. All the kid had left of the wand was the silver star. She put it in the backpack.

Tracy found an old freckled banana nestling next to the Maglite in the bottom of her bag. Kid gave the thumbs-up. Made starfish hands out the window.

For a hallucinogenic moment Tracy thought she saw the Saab driver standing next to Brian Jackson on the platform.

Goodbye to Leeds. Good riddance to bad rubbish, Tracy thought. She was never coming back. She was finished with the past. She was an astronaut who’d travelled too far. No return to earth for Tracy. She wasn’t Tracy any more anyway. She was Imogen Brown. She had seventeen friends on Facebook and cash in the bank. And she had the kid to look after. Sleep, eat, protect. Repeat.

Poor old Tilly with her shaky knees and her dicky hip dancing her last waltz in the arms of a man. A brief encounter on a railway platform. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. She’d played Laura Jesson once, a pretty dreadful repertory production – the Wolsey in Ipswich, or maybe it was the Theatre Royal in Windsor. It didn’t matter now. At the time she was too young to understand the notion of sacrifice, of what love demanded of a person.

A bad man who wanted to hurt the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ child. For a second she thought she saw her father in his face.

And then she was rolling, rolling through the air and she thought it will be all right, it’s not far to fall to the tracks, but then the train got in the way. Silly Tilly.

Our little life is rounded with a sleep. She thought her wig might have fallen off. You didn’t want to be undignified at the end. If only it was somebody else’s story and not mine. Coiling down into the cold water, the big silver fish shoaling around her, escorting her, protecting her, as she sank slowly down on to the seabed. Be not afeard. Her bones already coral. Her eyes as blind as pearls. The rest is silence.

A Wounded Deer – leaps highest. Crossing on the glassed-in bridge over the tracks, he saw the whole drama play out. He recognized the bizarre cast of players – Vince Collier’s mother, the woman who had stolen his Saab, the little girl, Tweedledum and Tweedledee – in this strange impromptu performance. The only new actor was the old man who fell beneath the train with Vince Collier’s mother. From up here it looked as if she might have pushed him. What was the title of that Mary Gauthier song? ‘Mercy Now’?

Jackson really didn’t like trains. He really didn’t.

He should go down, take charge, do something, help someone. He scooped up the dog, it was only too easy to imagine it being trampled underfoot in this mêlée, and scooted down the escalator and got stuck in the clamour jamming up the platform. He caught sight of his thieving hitchhiker, little girl in tow. She was getting on to another train, leaving more chaos in her wake. He ran towards them but the train was already leaving the platform. He caught sight of the little girl, waving goodbye to him, making hands like stars, until she was out of sight.

An arresting hand on his shoulder made him jump. Brian Jackson. The false Jackson, as he had begun to think of him. Somehow Jackson – the real Jackson – wasn’t surprised.

‘She’s a slippery fish, that Tracy Waterhouse.’

‘Say again?’ Jackson said, wheels spinning in his brain. ‘That was Tracy Waterhouse?’

‘Call yourself a detective.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Jackson said. He didn’t know why he didn’t just get that sentence tattooed on his forehead.

‘I think we’re both after the same thing,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘It’s just that we’ve been coming at it from different starting points.’ Police and paramedics had begun to arrive on the scene now. ‘What a mess,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘Let’s go.’

Jackson hesitated. Shouldn’t he be helping, at the very least giving a statement about what he’d seen?

‘Innocent bystanders,’ Brian Jackson said, encouraging him in the direction of the escalator, like a sheepdog rounding up an obstinate ewe. ‘Come on, I’ve got someone you’d like to meet. Someone who’d like to meet you.’

‘Who?’

‘My client. A man called Michael Braithwaite. We’d both like to know who it is that you’re working for.’

‘You’re phoning me,’ she said.

‘I am,’ Jackson agreed.

‘You’re not emailing or texting,’ Hope McMaster said. ‘You’re speaking. You’ve got news. What’s happened?’ All exclamation marks suppressed beneath the breathless weight of expectation. Hope in the balance.

‘Well,’ Jackson said cautiously, ‘it goes like this. Good, bad, good. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘First of all, the good news is that I’ve found out who your real mother is. The bad news is that she was a prostitute who was murdered by your father.’

‘OK,’ Hope said. ‘I’ll digest that later. And the other good news?’

‘You have a brother.’

Hope McMaster. Michael Braithwaite. The two sides of a jigsaw. A perfect fit.

Hope McMaster was Nicola Braithwaite, Michael’s sister.

(‘Why didn’t you say that?’ Jackson had asked Marilyn Nettles this morning.

‘You didn’t ask,’ she said.)

Nicola Braithwaite, two years old. There had been no gagging orders about her, no injunctions, no need to ‘protect’ her because she didn’t exist. She didn’t go to school, she’d never been to the doctor’s, Carol Braithwaite had avoided health visitors and district nurses. She moved house all the time. Neighbours hadn’t even noticed her.

‘Disappeared,’ according to Marilyn Nettles. ‘She wasn’t in the flat when they broke down the door, so they didn’t know about her. Well, of course, some people knew about her… I had to dig deep to find out, but I never told anyone. Did she have a good life?’

‘Yes,’ Jackson said. ‘I suppose she did.’

‘Oh, it’s such a lovely story,’ Julia said, tears in her eyes.

‘Well, only the ending’s lovely,’ Jackson said, ‘not the story itself.’

‘A child who is found,’ Julia said. ‘Isn’t that the best thing in the world?’

‘What was left in the box,’ Jackson said.

1975: 21 March

She’d been in one of her moods when he arrived at the flat in Lovell Park. You never knew which way it would go, sometimes she was as high as a kite, other times she was sunk in self-pity and low spirits. It was so quick that sometimes you could see it happening, see her face changing. It didn’t help that tonight she’d been drinking – she was a mean drunk – and waved a bottle of cheap wine in his face as a greeting when he came in the door.

‘Kiddies are asleep,’ she said.

Only Michael was in bed – presumably, because there was no sign of him. Nicola was on the couch where she must have fallen asleep. Her face and hands were grubby, her pyjamas unwashed. What hope did the kid have?

‘I brought the money round.’ He handed her a five-pound note. Like a punter. He hadn’t slept with her for two years but some mistakes you paid for all your life. She didn’t know who the boy’s father was. No doubt about the girl though, she said. The girl could have been fathered by anyone, he said, but he knew in his heart she was his. And if he denied it she’d go to his wife. She was always threatening.

‘We have to talk,’ she said, lighting up a cigarette.

‘Do we?’ he said.

The photographs were fanned out on her cheap glass coffee table. ‘Look at that,’ she said, pointing at a photograph of all four of them together, ‘like a real family.’

‘Not really,’ he said. She’d hauled a youth working in a chip shop outside and asked him to take the picture ‘of us all together’.

She had been nagging since Christmas about wanting a day out and they’d ended up in Scarborough in a gale force wind. The place was deserted. At least it meant that the chances of him seeing anyone he knew would be nil.

She’d run down to the sea and taken her shoes and tights off and left them lying on the sand. Her tights looked as if a snake had shed its skin. She ran into the water and danced around in the waves. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s fucking freezing!’ she yelled at him. ‘Come on in, the water’s lovely.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said.

‘Coward! Your daddy’s a cowardy custard!’ she said to the boy when she ran back on to the beach.

‘Don’t call me that,’ he said irritably, ‘I’m not his father.’ He had taken the boy to one side and said, ‘Don’t call me Daddy. Or Dad. Don’t. OK? I’m not your father. I don’t know who your father is. If your mother doesn’t then why the fuck should I?’

She had been unpredictable, embarrassing to be out with in public, he had realized. ‘Larger than life, me,’ she said, but it was more than that. He thought that perhaps she had some kind of mental illness.

She’d brought a camera with her, a cheap second-hand thing, and insisted on taking photographs all the time. He’d tried to avoid her snapping him but had finally agreed to one to shut her up.

‘Let’s see if we can find somewhere that’s open for ice creams.’ It was early March, out of season and freezing, nobody ate ice cream by the sea in winter. ‘Or chips!’ she said, getting excited. ‘Let’s all have chips!’

He was holding the girl in his arms, trying to protect her from the wind. ‘Come on, I’ll race you!’ she shouted at the boy but he was intent on digging a sandcastle in the wet, muddy sand. Carol ran off towards the pier. The wind seemed to bowl her along. He wished it would take her away altogether.

‘Like a real family,’ she said, running her hands over the photos, squinting at them through her cigarette smoke. She had begun to talk about them being ‘a proper family’, hinting that he could leave his wife. She was completely deluded.

It seemed to go on from there. She said she would go round and see his wife and take the kids with her and shame him on his own doorstep. He said, ‘Be quiet, you’ll wake the whole neighbourhood.’ She began to hit him, flailing at him with her fists. He hit her back hard, an open-handed slap to the face, he thought that would be enough to stop her but instead she became hysterical, screaming her head off. She had her claws out and the next thing he knew he was chasing her into the bedroom and had his hands round her throat. And if he was honest it felt good. Just to shut her up for once. To stop her.

It was over in seconds. She was such a force of nature that he hadn’t expected she would suddenly go limp like that. He knelt down and felt for a pulse and didn’t believe it when he couldn’t find one. He hadn’t meant to kill her. He glanced up and saw the boy standing in the hallway, staring at him, but all he could think of was getting out of that place. He ran down the stairs, couldn’t wait for the lift, got into his car, drove into town and sat in a pub where he downed a double malt. His hands were shaking. His whole life in ruins before him. He would lose his job, his marriage, his reputation.

He stayed there drinking. It took a lot to get him drunk. He lost count of the time.

‘One more for the road, detective?’ the barman said and he said, ‘No,’ and went to the Gents and threw up.

There was a phone box round the corner and he found refuge in its cold white light. He phoned the only person he could think of who might get him out of this mess, he phoned Eastman. ‘Sir?’ he said. ‘It’s Len Lomax here. I’ve got myself into a spot of bother.’ He didn’t mention the boy.

Ray handed him the photos the next day and said, ‘We’re even. Don’t ask for another favour ever, OK, Len?’

‘She was definitely dead, was she?’ Len asked. He had spent the rest of the night tossing and turning next to Alma, imagining Carol Braithwaite coming to, pointing an accusing finger at him.

‘Yes,’ Ray said. ‘She was dead.’ He looked disgusted. ‘I took the girl to the Winfields. They’re not going to question anything, trust me.’ Ray didn’t mention the boy because he didn’t know about him.

The Winfields had been Eastman’s idea. ‘I’ll get Strickland to take the kiddy round,’ he said. ‘You’re in no shape to do anything. Get yourself home to Alma. Do you have keys? To her flat?’

The next day Eastman invited Len for a game of golf. ‘You’re not a bad man, Len,’ he said, practising his swing. ‘A bad thing happened to you, that doesn’t mean that your life should be destroyed, not on account of one dead whore. And that kiddy of yours has gone to a wonderful home, think of everything she’ll have.’ Len still didn’t mention the boy.

He expected Carol to be found. That’s what happened, people died, other people found them. Then time went on and nothing happened. It began to seem unreal, it began to seem as if it had never happened at all. He’d had a cousin, Janet, still had her but nobody in the family talked about her much any more. Aged fourteen she gave birth in her bedroom at home. Nobody even knew she was pregnant, everybody just thought she was getting a bit fat. When her mother asked her why she hadn’t said anything, Janet said she’d hoped that if she ignored it, it would all just go away. That was how Len felt. He never thought about whether the boy was alive or dead, never really thought about the boy at all.

‘What are you brooding on?’ Alma asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said, gave her some flim-flam about stress at work.

When they got the call it was a shock, like a body blow, like some bugger running into him on the rugby field. ‘Woman’s body discovered in the Lovell Park flats, uniforms in attendance.’ Still no one mentioned the boy. Len wondered if he really had disappeared. Melted into thin air.

‘Jesus,’ Strickland said. ‘This is going to be difficult. Her body’s been there for weeks.’

Eastman caught them before they got in the car. ‘Now then, steady, lads, steady,’ he said. ‘Keep your heads.’

Len finally mentioned the boy.

‘You daft bastard,’ Eastman said. ‘You should have said something, I could have helped you clear up the mess a lot sooner.’

It never struck him that the boy might still be alive. He’d expected they would have two bodies on their hands. Couldn’t believe it when he saw the boy in that WPC’s arms.

The boy was a witness, of course. Eastman ‘had a word’ with the social worker. Neither Len nor Ray knew what he said. Threatened her with losing her own kiddy probably. He was a good man to have on your side but a very bad one to have against you. Ray followed up for him, caught her coming from the hospital and took her for a drink in the Cemetery Tavern. ‘She’s sound,’ he reported back to Len. ‘She’s terrified. Eastman said the Drug Squad would “find” hard drugs in her place.’

Eastman got a gagging order ‘to protect the boy’, his name was changed and he was put into a Catholic orphanage. Len never heard anything more about him. The Winfields got new papers for Nicola, that bad bastard Harry Reynolds organized it, and then they buggered off to New Zealand. New Zealand might as well have been Jupiter or Mars as far as Len was concerned. It had all been a nightmare, he told himself, a terrible nightmare. A hole that opened up in front of his feet and then closed over again.

Eastman phoned him, gave him his instructions. Pick up the girl from the Lovell Park flats, lock up behind you. Eastman gave him a set of keys. ‘Forget about what you see inside.’ He told Ray to take the girl to the Winfields. ‘We’re doing the right thing here, Ray,’ Eastman said. ‘It might not be the letter of the law, but it’s a moral imperative. Giving the kiddy a good home instead of her ending up who knows where. I phoned Ian Winfield, he knows what to expect but he’ll pretend to be surprised. For the wife’s sake, you know, she can get a bit overwrought.’

When they arrived at the Lovell Park flats three weeks later, Ray said to Len, ‘I can’t go in there again, Len. I can’t face what we’re going to find in there.’ They had argued before they had gone up in the lift. ‘Band of brothers,’ Len said, thumping him on the shoulder, more aggression than affection. ‘All for one, one for all.’ Eastman’s motto.

Len had known. He had known about that kiddy in the flat and left him there.

‘I thought he’d be found,’ Len said. ‘And then, I don’t know, it just became unreal.’ Attempted murder as far as Ray was concerned. He threw up his breakfast when he saw the state of the kid. If he had known he would never in a million years have left that kiddy behind in that place.

Ray had paid a visit to Carol Braithwaite at New Year. He’d been drunk, missing sex with Anthea, unwilling to go back to Margaret, sober and schoolmarmish in her cotton nightdresses. So he had gone to see Lomax’s whore. Never done that before, never been with a prostitute. ‘An uncomplicated fuck,’ he imagined Len saying.

Carol Braithwaite opened the door to him and said flatly, ‘I’m not doing business tonight, go and look somewhere else.’ She looked tired, old before her time. She was holding a little girl in her arms. It seemed wrong that women like her got to be mothers just by opening their legs to any man and his own wife couldn’t get a baby to save her life. He didn’t know at the time that the kiddy was Len’s. No sign of the boy.

‘Fuck off, why don’t you?’ Carol said.

He’d sent Barry Crawford home by then, of course. No hope of getting a taxi in the early hours of 1975. He’d walked all the way home, tail between his legs, and slipped into bed next to Margaret. Told her he loved her.

The worst thing wasn’t what happened to the boy, nor was it the fact that Len murdered Carol Braithwaite or that Eastman helped cover it up. The worst thing was that when Ray whisked the little girl away – stole her, really – and he was sitting in the back of Crawford’s Cortina he realized they were driving past his own house. There was a light on downstairs, Margaret waiting up for him probably, sitting there knitting, listening to the radio. She preferred the radio to the TV. He could have pulled into his own driveway, rung his own doorbell and given the best gift possible to his own wife. But he hadn’t done that, he’d given that little girl to Kitty Winfield instead. And the boy. He could have saved that little boy, brought him up as his own. Two chances, both lost.

Barry thought he would puke when he went into that flat. He hadn’t thought of anyone actually being dead in there, he just thought Strickland had taken the kid. But when he saw the little boy, he realized that he had been left behind that night. Imagined what his own mother would have to say about that. She loved kiddies, couldn’t wait for Barry to get wed and become a father. Eastman had called him. Told him to help clean up the mess. Didn’t say who had made the mess but it was pretty obvious to Barry that it was Ray Strickland.

She was sleeping peacefully. He watched the rise and fall of her chest. She was never going to wake up, never going to be Amy again. She would have hated to be here like this, would have begged Barry to put an end to it. The last thing you would ever wish for your child turned out to be the one thing you had to do. He took the pillow from beneath her head and held it over her face. ‘I love you, pet,’ Barry said. He tried to think of something else to say, something bigger and more important but there wasn’t anything, he’d said the only thing that mattered. He thought that she might struggle but she didn’t. The only difference when he took the pillow away was that her chest no longer rose and fell.

He felt empty of everything now. It was a good feeling. He checked his watch. Twelve o’clock. Ivan was getting out of Armley Jail at one. He’d better get a move on. Barry felt the heft of the gun in his pocket. He liked the feel of it, it put him in control. A Baikal. Gangland gun of choice. Modified in Lithuania, here you pay twenty times what you would for them there, apparently. He’d never actually seen one before. This one was courtesy of Harry Reynolds. All these old blokes who wouldn’t give up their thrones. Strickland, Lomax, Harry Reynolds.

He’d picked it up on his way over. Found Harry Reynolds fumbling with a black tie. ‘Arthritis in the thumbs,’ he said. ‘What do they say – old age doesn’t come by itself.’The house smelled of apple pie. Harry gave him the Baikal and Barry gave him an envelope. ‘Get that to Tracy, will you?’ he said.

‘You could have given it to her yourself if you’d been here earlier. She’s in the wind now.’

‘Good. How much do I owe you for the gun?’

‘Treat it as a gift, Superintendent Crawford. A thank-you for the neglect you’ve shown me over the years.’

He left Amy’s room and didn’t look back. How could you look back? You couldn’t. One to the head, one to the heart. Bang bang.

‘Ivan,’ he said. Ivan stared at him, deer in the headlights, for a moment Barry thought he was going to turn round and run away. Or thump on the door of the prison and beg the wardens to let him back in.

‘Barry,’ Ivan said.

There you go again, Barry thought, calling him Barry. He felt the gun in his pocket. Barry took his hand out of his pocket, stuck it out in front of him. Slowly and hesitantly, Ivan took the hand. Shook it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Barry said. ‘I was harsh. My daughter loved you, I should have thought about that more.’

‘You’re apologizing?’ Ivan said uncertainly.

‘That flash-drive you lost? Barbara found it down the back of the sofa after you and Amy had been round for lunch one Sunday. She had no idea what it was, of course, doesn’t know the first thing about computers. I knew it was yours, stuck it in a vase on the mantelpiece. I just thought… I don’t know what I thought, suppose that I’d mess you about. I didn’t know it had all your clients’ details on it, that it was important.

‘Barbara didn’t tell me what happened,’ he continued, ‘I just thought the business had gone down. She didn’t tell me why, thought I’d think you were even more of an incompetent pillock than I already did. Mind you, you are an incompetent pillock,’ Barry added. He wasn’t a man for unqualified grovelling. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you didn’t deserve what happened.’

‘None of us did,’ Ivan said.

Barry got back in the car and drove away. Not interested in a dialogue. He didn’t tell Ivan that Amy had gone for good. Ivan could start again. Barry couldn’t. But first he had a funeral to attend.

Rex Marshall’s funeral was in the crematorium. The place was stuffed to the gunnels with the great and the good come to say goodbye to him. The coffin was the centrepiece, his gleaming police medals laid out on top of it. Wreaths and bouquets all lined up at the entrance to the chapel. Barry caught the scent of freesias, turned him funny for a second. He could see Ray Strickland standing at a lectern giving the eulogy – ‘… a senior policeman who never lost the common touch, a man of the people…’ Blah, blah, blah. The usual shit. Ray hesitated when he caught sight of Barry standing in the doorway.

Overweight men in expensive suits, underweight women in the kind of clothes Barbara would like to be able to afford, they all turned to look at what had made Ray stop mid-sentence. Barry caught sight of Harry Reynolds in the back row. Paying his respects. Making a point of not looking at Barry as he barged into the chapel and, marching up to the coffin, rapped on it hard with his knuckles. ‘Knock, knock,’ he said, ‘is there anybody there?’ A murmur of distress rose up from the people closest to the coffin.

‘Just checking,’ Barry said to a stout woman who was clutching a photocopied programme for the service. He grinned at her and she shrank from him in horror. He wrestled the programme from her hands. Order of events. It was cheap and flimsy, like something an amateur theatrical company would produce. On the cover there was a photograph of Rex Marshall in his prime. Barry tapped the photograph and said conversationally to the stout woman, ‘He was a right bastard. But then takes one to know one, that’s what they say, eh?’

All around him the great and the good began to protest, but in a muted way as no one likes to openly challenge someone who is clearly deranged. Out of the corner of his eye, Barry saw Harry Reynolds slink out of the chapel. No sign of Len Lomax anywhere. Barry was surprised he hadn’t been rugby-tackled by now but he carried on up the aisle, unimpeded. The grieving widow flinched as he approached and the – ridiculously young – vicar twitched as if he was considering confronting him. Barry grunted, ‘Don’t even think about it, lad.’

He reached the lectern and Ray, all conciliatory, hail fellow, well met, said, ‘Come on, Barry, be sensible. Take a pew and show some respect.’ Barry cocked his head to one side as if he might be weighing this up as an option but then he turned and looked out over the sea of the great and good and cleared his throat as if he was the toastmaster about to tell the assembled company to raise their glasses. He said, ‘Raymond James Strickland, I am arresting you for the murder of Carol Anne Braithwaite, the reckless endangerment of the life of Michael Braithwaite and the abduction of Nicola Jane Braithwaite. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

Ray didn’t even move, just stood there. Barry had half expected him to concertina down to the floor in shock, but he stayed where he was, eyes wide. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said.

Barry laughed. ‘They all say that. You should know that, Ray.’

Barry hadn’t thought much beyond this point. He had his handcuffs with him though – never without – and he slapped one cuff on Ray and the other on the brass rail that bordered the front of the lectern. Then he took his phone from his pocket and rang the station and asked for a couple of uniforms.

Everyone in the crematorium seemed to have lost their appetite for death. Barry watched as a couple of women in designer black picked their way from the chapel like gazelle that had suddenly found they had strayed into the lions’ enclosure. Then they all began to melt away. All the great and the good.

The vicar hovered like a nervous waiter and asked Barry if he could get him anything. ‘No, lad,’ Barry said, ‘but thanks for asking.’

‘Last men standing,’ Barry said to Ray.

‘Thirty-five years ago, Barry,’ Ray said. ‘It’s history, water under the bridge.’

‘I don’t understand,’ a soft voice said. Margaret, Ray’s wife. If he’d been in a kind mood Barry would have said, ‘Get your husband to explain,’ but he wasn’t in a kind mood, and so he said, ‘Your husband fathered a child on a prostitute called Carol Braithwaite and after he had murdered Carol Braithwaite he took that child – his daughter – and gave her away to your bosom friend, Kitty Winfield.’ The truth was going to come out anyway, might as well be Barry who told it. Speaking truth to power. That was what the Quakers said, he’d had to arrest a few in the eighties, peaceniks, yakking on about ‘direct action’ and Cruise missiles. For people who worshipped in silence they seemed to talk a lot.

‘Ray?’ Margaret said.

‘It wasn’t me,’ Ray said again, this time to Margaret. ‘It really wasn’t.’ He turned back to Barry and said, ‘You only saw half the story, Barry.’

‘Tell it to the judge, Ray.’

A lone uniformed constable arrived, could have been Barry thirty-five years ago. You’d do anything a superior officer told you to. Turn a blind eye? Yes, boss. Keep your mouth shut. Yes, boss. Three bags full, boss. A dogsbody.

‘Boss?’

‘Take this gentleman into custody, officer. He’s been charged with murder. I’m not coming. When you get to the station, go to my office. There’s a letter on my desk. I want you to give it to DI Gemma Holroyd and she’ll take it from there.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good lad.’

He drove to the moors above Ilkley, all the way to Upper Barden Reservoir. There wasn’t a soul around. The sky marbled with clouds, all tinged with opal. Like a painting, lovely. Barry imagined Carol Braithwaite rising. The Assumption. Carol Braithwaite hand in hand with Amy. Carol and Amy, one to the head, one to the heart.

Pair of buzzards circled overhead, waiting for him.

1975: October

Wilma McCann’s body was found on the eve of Halloween on a typical foggy Leeds morning on the Prince Philip Playing Fields in Chapeltown. Two head wounds, fifteen stab wounds. Convictions for drunkenness, disorderly conduct and theft. Her four children left alone in a filthy house. Another good-time girl.

Wilma McCann’s was just one of several sordid deaths, nothing to write home about, yet three months later 137 police officers had clocked up 53,000 hours, taken 538 statements and accumulated 3,300 index card references. All leading to nothing. Everyone still gloriously innocent of the fact that it was Sutcliffe’s first official kill. There wouldn’t be another one until January of the following year. Carol Braithwaite, on the other hand, seemed to clock up hardly any police hours at all.

Tracy took no part in the investigation into Wilma McCann’s murder. She was still in uniform, another working girl, walking the streets.

‘It’s different anyway,’ Barry said. ‘Your woman-’

‘My woman?’

‘The Braithwaite woman was killed in her own home. Strangled, not hit on the head and stabbed.’

‘You’re talking like you’re in CID already, Barry. All that brownnosing paying off, is it?’

‘Piss off.’

Leeds, Manchester, Huddersfield, Bradford. Emily Jackson in January of the following year. The roll-call went on and on. Not just prostitutes any more, any woman would do. The last two in 1980. In the wrong place at the right time. Marilyn Moore’s photofit early on was one of the best they had. The Jason King beard, the mean little eyes. Over five million vehicles logged. He was the devil and he couldn’t be caught.

The past was a dark place, a man’s world. There was a time when the male officers escorted the WPCs and the female office staff across to the car park. She heard one of the blokes say, ‘I wouldn’t worry about Tracy Waterhouse. Pity t’Ripper if he tackles her.’

No chance of Carol Braithwaite being remembered once Sutcliffe’s reign of terror was in full swing. Carol Braithwaite pretty much fitted the victim profile. But they didn’t really do victim profiles in those days. Tracy would wonder for years to come if Carol Braithwaite hadn’t been one of Sutcliffe’s first.

Tracy ended 1975 in style by buying a five-year-old Datsun Sunny. At the end of the year Kirkgate Market burned down and she used her warrant card to get past the safety barriers and have a better look at the conflagration. It seemed a good way to say goodbye to the year, everything going up in flames.

1977 was a busy year for the Ripper. Barry moved on and up, made plainclothes in 1980. Tracy had a new boyfriend. A twenty-eight-year-old sharp-suited, degree-toting medical instruments salesman. Not a great degree that he toted, just a third in ‘business management’ from a new concrete university, but a degree more than Tracy was in possession of.

He had taken her as far afield as Durham and Flamborough Head in the lime-green Ford Capri that he drove like a maniacal test pilot. Tracy never squashed herself awkwardly into the passenger seat without thinking that she might die before journey’s end. That was part of the attraction of it, probably.

They drank in beer gardens throughout the north-east, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, with Wood’s Old Navy rum chasers, for him, pints of snakebite for Tracy. Then they would go back to his flat and eat Indian takeaways and he would light up a big spliff and say, ‘Are you going to handcuff me, officer?’ Same ‘joke’ every time. Tracy never partook, preferred her mind to be altered by alcohol, not drugs. The sex was quite good, although she only had Dennis the driving instructor as a comparison, but that must have been what kept her because the bloke was, let’s face it, a complete wanker. When he dumped her for a more streamlined model, she phoned him in anonymously to the Drug Squad. Never heard if anything came of it. He died in a car smash in 1985, wrapped his TVR coupé round a disobliging tree.

Lime-green Capri – same car as the Ripper was driving in ’75. She should have phoned him in for that as well. Tracy had never seriously considered him for it. He was too self-obsessed to be bothered to kill anyone. Still, she notched up her first broken heart. She was, slowly but surely, passing the landmarks of life.

Linda Pallister hooked up with some bloke from the Labour Party and moved to a house near Roundhay, a traditional between-the wars semi, not Linda’s style at all. She gave birth to Chloe in the same year that Barry’s Amy was born. In lieu of a christening, Barry and Barbara threw ‘a little party’ to welcome the baby. Sausage rolls, pork pie, cake made by Barbara’s mother and a crate of Asti Spumante. Tracy wasn’t invited.

Linda Pallister threw a party for her new baby as well. Tracy not invited to that one either. No pork pie for Linda. Rumour had it that she dished up the baby’s placenta. Raw or cooked? Tracy wondered.

Ray Strickland was never promoted above the rank of DCI. Said he was happy with that, didn’t want to spend his time driving a desk. Lomax, on the other hand, went to the top of the tree, took all the laurels going.

Life went on. Before Tracy knew it she had clocked up thirty years and was getting pissed at her own leaving do.