Started Early, Took My Dog (14 page)

She should have done something about the bedrooms before she started on the downstairs. Tracy had been pleased when she decorated the living room, having toiled her way through
The World of Interiors
and
House & Garden
for weeks, but when it was finished and she looked around she realized it looked more like a public space in a corporate hotel than a comfortable nest. Her own bedroom had been decorated by the previous owner with a wallpaper patterned with big purple flowers that had a vaguely obscene look to them.

The little spare room, papered in boring woodchip, seemed to have been used as a study. Flimsy plastic Venetian blinds hung at the window and the floor was covered in cheap beige contract carpeting. Tracy wished that she had thought ahead, bought cheerful curtains and a nice soft rug and painted the room in pleasant pastel colours. Or white. Pure and unsullied, the colour of swans and birthday cake icing. A woman with foresight would have anticipated kidnapping a kid.

Hot milk? Or cocoa? Tracy was trying to invent a childhood she had never had herself, her own self-absorbed parents having expected Tracy to bring herself up somehow. They had never taken much interest in her and it was only when they died that she realized they never would. Better parents (loving parents) and she might have turned out differently – confident and popular, with the ability to charm the opposite sex into bed and into love so that now she would have a child of her own rather than a second-hand one.

Hot chocolate, she decided, her own idea of a treat. When she came back with a mug for each of them she found Courtney sitting up in bed with the contents of her little pink backpack spread out on the thin Ikea duvet. It seemed she had a collection of totemic objects, their significance known only to their small owner:

a tarnished silver thimble

a Chinese coin with a hole in the middle

a purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it

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

a shell shaped like a cream horn

a shell shaped like a coolie hat

a whole nutmeg

‘Quite a treasure trove,’ Tracy said. The kid looked up from her wampum and stared inscrutably at her and then, for the first time since Tracy bought her, Courtney smiled. A beatific sunbeam of a smile. Tracy beamed back, a bubble-burst of mixed emotion – ecstasy and agony in equal, confusing measure inside her – rising in her chest. Jesus. How did parents manage with this kind of stuff on a daily basis? She found herself blinking back tears. ‘I haven’t got a bedtime book, I’m afraid,’ she said quickly.

Tracy herself liked to read big fat Jackie Collins books. She would never have told anyone, they were like a secret vice, an unspeakable pleasure like pornography (or Disney). Hardly suitable for a kid so instead she made up a bespoke fairy tale about a poor little princess called Courtney who had a wicked mother and was rescued by a very good stepmother. She threw in a lot of mythic paraphernalia – spinning wheels and dwarves – and by the time the glass slipper was being tried for size on Princess Courtney’s little foot, the kid was asleep.

Tracy kissed her tentatively on the cheek. The kid smelled of soap and new cotton. Tracy didn’t remember ever kissing a child before and a small, primitive part of her felt as if she had trespassed, broken some natural law. She half expected something momentous to happen – for the sky to crack open like an egg or an angel to appear – and when neither of these things occurred Tracy breathed a sigh of relief. She felt as if she’d achieved something, although she wasn’t sure what.

When she came back downstairs the answer machine was blinking even though she hadn’t heard the phone ringing. She played the message back, worried that it might be announcing her downfall.
Can you confirm that you are harbouring a child who belongs to someone else?
Children were possessions, people didn’t like it when you stole their stuff. For years it had been her job to see that they didn’t. Sleep, eat, protect, repeat.

She was relieved that it was only Linda Pallister, although why Linda should be getting in touch out of the blue was a puzzle. There was something spooky about the way Tracy had been thinking about contacting Linda and now Linda was contacting her. When had Linda Pallister ever phoned her at home? Never, as far as Tracy could remember. Her message was even more puzzling.
Tracy? Tracy? I didn’t know who to call. I have to talk to you. I think I’m in . . . trouble
. How could Linda Pallister be in trouble? And what was it to do with Tracy? There was a long silence and then Linda started up again, hardly more than a mumble.
It’s about Carol Braithwaite. Do you remember Carol Braithwaite, Tracy? Someone’s been asking me about her. Phone me back when you get this message, will you? Please
.

Carol Braithwaite? Tracy puzzled. After all these years? Linda Pallister was phoning her about
Carol Braithwaite
? Tracy had put Carol Braithwaite away in a box, put the box on a shelf at the back of a cupboard, shut the door of the cupboard and hadn’t opened it for more than thirty years. And now here was Linda Pallister wanting to talk about her. Linda Pallister, the whited sepulchre. Linda Pallister who had made a small child disappear into thin air.
Poof
.

The past was the past, Tracy counselled herself, and the past was dead or lost but the present was alive and well and asleep in the back bedroom. On the other hand . . . if she returned Linda’s call she could casually slip something into the conversation,
Kelly Cross, Linda, are all her kids in care, do you know?
But when she dialled Linda’s number it rang out. Tracy was relieved, she had enough problems of her own without having to shoulder Linda Pallister’s burdens. But still . . . Carol Braithwaite. Tracy hadn’t gone there in a long time. That awful day. That poor little kid.

She retrieved a can of Beck’s from the fridge. She popped the top and dialled her former colleague Barry Crawford’s number. He sounded tetchy but then that was his default mode.

‘Just wondered if you’d run into Kelly Cross recently, Barry?’

‘What, the original good-time girl? Nah, I’m too far up the food chain to come across a bottom-feeder like her. Why? Missing the streets, are you?’

‘No, no, it’s nothing. There’ve been no kids reported going astray, have there?’

‘Kids? I can ask about. I don’t know if you’re too ga-ga to remember but you retired a few months back.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Barry called her back almost straight away. Nada, nothing, no chicks fallen out of any nests. She caught the sound of a siren in the background, lots of semi-audible police chatter. Bloody hell but she missed it. ‘Where are you?’

‘In the incident van. Dead woman in a skip in Mabgate,’ Barry said. ‘Working girl.’

‘We’re all working girls, Barry. What are you doing there?’

‘Just having a shufti. I happened to be on call and caught it.’

‘Who’s the SIO?’

‘I’ve put Andy Miller on it,’ Barry said. ‘New to you. Fast-track graduate. Very shiny.’ Nothing shiny about Barry at all.
Jurassic
. Like Tracy. Educated in the school of hard knocks before graduating from the university of life. ‘I’ve got a new girl, one of yours methinks,’ he said. ‘Come over from Drugs and Organized Crime. Gemma something.’

‘Gemma Holroyd. She made inspector a couple of months ago. Why don’t you make her the SIO? It would be her first.’

‘A virgin, no thanks.’

‘She’s good and she’s not a girl, Barry. They’re called women.’

‘Thought she was a lezzy?’

‘Yeah, they’re women too.’ Why even bother? Barry was as unreconstructed as they got and was going to retire and die that way, completely out of step with the way things were these days. You could have popped him back into the seventies and he would have fitted in perfectly. Gene Hunt without the charisma, Jack Regan without the hard moral centre.

‘So, who are you thinking for it?’ Tracy asked. ‘A punter, I presume?’

‘Who else?’ Barry probably thought prostitutes had it coming to them. In fact she knew he did. ‘Whores,’ Barry always said, couldn’t get him out of the habit no matter what you said to him. (‘Political correctness? About whores? Do me a favour.’)

Tracy had a sudden, unexpected memory of the endless, thankless task of indexing cards during the Ripper investigation. The police had people out taking down registrations of cars in the red-light district, spotting ones that turned up regularly, triple sightings in Bradford, Leeds and Manchester. Sutcliffe was one of those, of course – interviewed nine times, exonerated. So many mistakes. Tracy was still naïve, no idea how many men used prostitutes, thousands from all walks of life. She could hardly believe it. Gambling, drinking, whoring – the three pillars of western civilization.

Tracy could still remember the first time she saw a prostitute. She was twelve years old, in Leeds town centre on a Saturday with a schoolfriend, Pauline Barratt. A burger in Wimpy was the height of sophistication for them and the surreptitious application of Miners eyeliner in the toilets in Schofields felt downright audacious. They got into a matinee of
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
in the old Leeds Odeon and afterwards in a side street somewhere near the station, looming out of the drab fog of a winter twilight, there had been a startling woman. She was lounging in a doorway, Myra Hindley hair and a short skirt that revealed her dimpled thighs, blue with cold and bruises. Her glittering green eye-shadow made Tracy think of a snake. ‘Prozzie,’ Pauline hissed, and they ran away in terror.

She was the least attractive woman Tracy had ever seen, deepening even further the mystery of what boys wanted from girls. If she thought about her mother, repressed and conventional, or her own unprepossessing twelve-year-old self, Tracy understood that there was no competition with the green-eyed woman of the night.

‘I won’t miss all this,’ Barry said. ‘Standing around in the cold looking at dead whores.’

‘Standing around? I thought you were in the incident van.’

Barry sighed heavily and said, apropos of nothing as far as Tracy could tell, ‘It’s a different world now, Trace.’

‘Yeah. It’s a better one, Barry. What’s going on, suffering from existential dread for the first time in your life?’ Probably the wrong thing to say to a man who’d lost a grandson, whose daughter was a vegetable. (‘Persistent vegetative state,’ Barbara corrected.) Some mornings Tracy woke up, especially if she’d been on the Beck’s, and wondered if she was in a persistent vegetative state herself. Stagnant.

‘I miss the good old days.’

‘They weren’t good, Barry. They were rubbish.’
The Good Old Days
. She had a sudden vision of the Cookridge madam, dead in her plush velvet seat at the City Varieties. Barry might remember her name, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction though. ‘How long now before you’re retired, Barry?’ Barry had stayed in the force even longer than Tracy had.

‘Two weeks. Going on a cruise. The Caribbean. Barbara’s idea. God knows why. I bet you were glad to get out, weren’t you,Trace?’

‘Is the Pope a Nazi?’ Tracy forced a laugh. ‘Would have got out years ago if I’d known.’ Liar, she thought to herself.

‘You heard about Rex Marshall?’ Barry asked.

‘Dropped dead on the golf course. Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

‘Yes, well, he wasn’t a bad boss,’ Barry said defensively.

‘To you maybe,’ Tracy said.

‘You won’t be going to the funeral on Saturday then?’

‘Not unless you pay me . . . Barry? There’s something else.’

‘There’s always something else,Trace. And then you die and there’s nothing else. Of course it turns out you don’t even need to be dead for that,’ he said glumly.

‘Linda Pallister left a message on my answer machine,’ Tracy said.

‘Linda Pallister? That mad bat?’ Barry couldn’t stop the snort of laughter that escaped him. The laugh turned into a tremendous sigh of dissatisfaction. Tracy knew how it went for Barry – Linda Pallister made him think of Chloe Pallister, Chloe Pallister made him think of Amy, thinking of Amy pulled him down into a dark place.

‘What about?’ he asked. ‘What was the message about?’

‘She said she was in trouble. She mentioned Carol Braithwaite’s name.’

‘Carol Braithwaite?’ Barry said, as if he’d never heard the name before. Barry was a bad liar, always had been.

‘Yeah, Barry, Carol Braithwaite. The Lovell Park murder. You remember, don’t pretend you don’t.’

‘Oh,
that
Carol Braithwaite,’ he said, all studied nonchalance. ‘What about her?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tracy said. ‘Linda didn’t say. I tried to phone her back but there was no answer. Has she been in touch with you?’

‘Carol Braithwaite?’

‘No, Barry,’ Tracy said patiently, ‘not unless she’s risen from the grave. Linda
Pallister
, has Linda phoned you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, if she does, try and find out what she was on about, will you? Maybe she’s going to come clean.’

‘Come clean?’ he said.

‘About what happened to the kid.’

Tracy didn’t know why she was bothering. She had bigger fish to fry. And it was nothing to do with her any more. She was starting a new life.
She’s leaving home
. ‘Well, anyway, cheers for the info, Barry,’ she said, suddenly brisk. ‘See you around.’

‘Not if I see you first, you old mare.’

‘I’m on holiday actually, from Friday.’

‘Well, make sure you’re back in time for my leaving do.’

‘What leaving do?’

‘Ha, ha. Piss off.’

Would this day never end? Apparently not.

Just before midnight the phone rang. Who called at this time? Trouble, that was who. A spasm of fear grabbed Tracy’s heart. She’d been found out, someone wanted the kid back. She thought of that helpless little thing upstairs in the spare bedroom and her heart cramped further.

She took a deep breath and picked up the receiver, let it just be mad-as-a-bag-of-cats Linda Pallister, she prayed. Tracy was relieved that it was just the mystery caller. They listened to each other for a minute or so. The silence was almost soothing.