Started Early, Took My Dog (18 page)

When a bleary-eyed Tracy blundered into the kitchen, however, she found the kid sitting at the table spooning her way stoically through a bowl of dry cereal.

‘You’re here,’ Tracy said.

Courtney glanced at her briefly. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘I am here.’ She returned to spooning in cereal.

‘Do you want milk with that?’ Tracy said, pointing at the cereal bowl. The kid nodded extravagantly and kept on nodding until Tracy advised her to stop.

Tracy wasn’t sure which was more disturbing, losing the kid or finding her.

Tracy had slept in a washed-out Winnie-the-Pooh nightshirt from British Home Stores that barely reached the top of her thunderous thighs and her hair was sticking out in all the wrong places. She had hastily pulled on a pair of old tracksuit bottoms to complete the ensemble. She looked dismal, probably not a million miles from how Kelly Cross looked first thing in the morning, just a lot bigger. Still, she could have been wearing a bin-liner and Courtney wouldn’t have noticed. Kids weren’t interested in what you were like on the outside. There was something definitely cheering about being with a small, non-judgemental person.

Courtney, on the other hand, had made more of an effort, dressing herself from a selection of yesterday’s new clothes. Some of them were on backwards but she had got the general idea right. Tracy’s efforts at hairdressing the previous evening weren’t entirely successful. In the cruel light of day the kid looked hand-made. She had finished her cereal and was staring, Oliver Twist-like, at the empty bowl.

‘Toast?’ Tracy offered. The kid gave her a thumbs-up.

Tracy cut the toast into triangles and arranged them on the plate. If it had just been for her she would have slapped a doorstep on to a piece of kitchen roll and been done with it. It was different having someone to do things for. Made you more careful. ‘Mindful’, a Buddhist would have said. She only knew that because a long time ago she had dated a Buddhist for a few weeks. He was a wimpy bloke from Wrexham who ran a second-hand bookshop. She was hoping for enlightenment, ended up with glandular fever. Put her off spirituality for life.

Tracy parked Courtney on the sofa in front of the television, where she sat mesmerized by a noisily incomprehensible cartoon, weird and Japanese. Obviously the kid should be doing something more mentally stimulating – playing with Lego or learning the alphabet or whatever it was that four-, maybe three-year-olds were supposed to do.

Tracy switched on her laptop and waited for it to get up a head of steam before beginning to scroll through the wares being offered by several estate agents. Everything nice in a pleasant location – the Dales, the Lakes – cost more than twice as much as she would get for her house in Leeds. Abroad seemed a better option for all kinds of reasons. They could lose themselves in rural France or hectic urban Barcelona, somewhere where no one would think twice about their relocation.

Spain, you couldn’t give away property in Spain these days, Brits leaving in droves. Bring the kid up in the sun. Costa del Gangster. Enough career criminals did it, why not the people who’d failed to catch them?
Mi casa es mi casa
. Not the kind of property you could buy online. They’d have to fly out there. Not come back. Once she’d got a passport for the kid, of course. Somewhere further? New Zealand, Australia, Canada. Leslie could give her some gen on Canada. Plenty of wilderness there to get lost in. How far did you have to run before you couldn’t be caught? Siberia? The moon?

When the cartoon finished Tracy switched over to GMTV, looking for the news. Nothing on the national or the local, still nobody missing a kid. You would notice straight away if you lost one. (Wouldn’t you?) Kelly Cross was Courtney’s mother. Had to be. No doubt about it. None at all.

They had another day to kill until Tracy could get the key to the holiday place. She wondered what they should do. There was a kids’ film showing at the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley. Or there was a Wacky Warehouse in Leeds – a play area attached to a pub, the ultimate dream of the Useless Parenting classes, and she had often passed something called Diggerland near Castleford where, apparently, kids got to drive construction machinery. Bob the Builder had a lot to answer for.

Tracy fired off an email to Leslie at the Merrion Centre (not Grant, a police cadet reject. Somewhere there was a village missing an idiot) saying that she would see them after her holiday and that she wouldn’t be in today, ‘still got a bit of a bug, wouldn’t want to hand it on to you’. That would surprise them, Tracy was as fit as a butcher’s dog normally. Constitution of an ox. She was a Taurean, born under the sign of the bull. Not that she believed in any of that stuff. Didn’t believe in anything that she couldn’t touch. ‘Ah, an empiricist,’ a man she had met at the singles social club said. He was a prof at the university, full of hot air and cold calculation. Took her to the Grand to see
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
‘based on the – largely legendary – incident of the “Rape of the Sabine Women”,’ he said. ‘Although, as in the musical itself, “rape”,
raptio
, is really abduction or kidnapping. The interior of the theatre, of course, is said to be based on La Scala in Milan.’ And so on, and so on. And so on.

The following week he took her to see
Dial M for Murder
. ‘That should be right up your street,’ he said.

Courtney turned to look at Tracy and said plaintively, ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Again?’

‘Yes.’

The kid was an eater, there was no doubt about that. Maybe she was making up for something.

‘Courtney?’ Tracy said tentatively. ‘You know how you’re called Courtney?’ The kid nodded. She seemed bored, although her expressions tended to be unreadable at the best of times. ‘Well, I was thinking, now that you’ve got a new home –’ she saw Courtney’s eyes skim the anodyne living room – ‘how about a new name to go with that?’ Courtney gazed at her indifferently. Tracy wondered if the kid had been given a new identity before, that Courtney wasn’t even her name. Was that the reason no one was looking for her, were they looking for a completely different kind of kid – a Grace, a Lily, a Poppy? (A Lucy, perhaps.) Something like acid bile rose in Tracy’s gorge. It came, she supposed, from the well of terror that had opened up in her stomach. What had she done? She closed her eyes in an effort to blank out the guilt – futile – and when she opened them the kid was standing in front of her, looking interested. ‘What name?’ she asked.

She should get some fresh air into the kid, Tracy thought. She looked peaky, as if she’d been grown in a cellar all her life. ‘Come on,’ Tracy said when more toast had been eaten – turned out the kid liked Marmite – ‘why don’t we go out, get some fresh air? I’ll change.’ Courtney looked at her with interest and Tracy added, ‘Into different clothes.’

Tracy slipped into something less comfortable and when she returned to the living room the kid had got down from the table and fetched her pink backpack. She was as biddable as a dog although without a dog’s tail-wagging enthusiasm.

Before they could leave the house they heard a key turning in the front-door lock. Tracy had a mental blank, couldn’t think of any reason why someone would have her front-door key, why anyone would be coming into her house. For a mad moment she thought it might be her anonymous phone caller. For an even madder moment she thought it might be Kelly Cross and did a quick recce of the hallway to see what she could use as a weapon. The door opened.

Janek! Tracy had forgotten all about him.

He looked bemused by her surprise and then he spotted Courtney lingering in the doorway of the kitchen and he smiled in delight.

‘Hello,’ he said. Courtney stared blankly back at him. ‘My niece,’ Tracy said. ‘My sister’s much younger than me,’ she added, embarrassed suddenly by how old she must seem to Janek. Of course he had kids of his own, didn’t he? Poles probably really liked kids. Most foreigners liked kids more than the British did.

‘We’re on our way out,’ she said hastily before she got involved in anything more complicated about the kid’s origins.

‘Help yourself to biscuits,’ she added. What a difference a day made.

He woke up with no idea where he was or how he had got there. That was alcohol for you.

Jackson wasn’t alone. There was a woman lying next to him, her face pressed into the pillow, her features partly hidden by a messedup nest of hair. He never ceased to be amazed by how many round-heeled women there were in the world. In a sudden moment of paranoia he reached over and checked the woman’s breathing and was relieved to find it sour and regular. Her skin had the bruised and waxy look of a corpse but, on inspection, Jackson realized that it was just her make-up from the previous evening, smeared and blotchy. Close up, even in the street-lit gloom of the bedroom, he could see that she was older than he had first thought. Early forties, Jackson reckoned, maybe a little younger. Maybe a little older. She was that kind of woman.

A digital clock by the bed told him it was five thirty. In the morning, he assumed. Winter or summer it was the time he woke at, thanks to his body’s own internal alarm clock, set a long time ago by the army. Up with the lark. Jackson didn’t think that he’d ever seen a lark. Or heard one for that matter.
Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music, / Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled
. What kind of a woman came up with an image like that? Jackson felt pretty sure that Emily Dickinson didn’t wake up hungover, with a strange man in her bed.

Dawn was just cracking open the sky. It was good to get a march on the day. Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours. He had a feeling it was Thursday but he wouldn’t have sworn to it.

The nameless woman lying next to him muttered something unintelligible in her sleep. She turned her head and opened her eyes, they had the same blank quality as the dead. When she saw Jackson her eyes came to life a little and she murmured, ‘Christ, I bet I look rough.’

She did look a bit of a dog’s breakfast but Jackson bit down on his unfortunate compulsion for honesty and, smiling, said, ‘Not really.’ Jackson didn’t often smile these days (had he ever?) and it tended to take women by surprise. The woman in the bed (surely she must have told him her name at some point?) squirmed with pleasure and giggled and said, ‘Gonna make me a cuppa tea then, lover boy?’

He said, ‘Go back to sleep. It’s still early.’ Strangely obedient, the woman closed her eyes and within minutes was snoring gently. Jackson suspected that he might be punching below his weight.

He had a memory – vague at first but growing unfortunately clearer now – of dropping into a bar in the town centre, intent on casting off his golden years. He seemed to recollect that he had been looking for a
pastis
, a warm billet in a cold city, but the place turned out to be some kind of cocktail joint containing a job lot of clapped-out men who were easily outnumbered by the hordes of brash women. A gang of them had descended on him, feverish with alcohol and eager to pick him off from the herd of homely suits. The women seemed to have started drinking some time last century.

They were celebrating the divorce of one of their pack. Jackson thought that divorce was possibly an occasion for a wake rather than a knees-up but what did he know, he had a particularly poor track record where marriage was concerned. It surprised him to discover that the women all seemed to be teachers or social workers. Nothing more frightening than a middle-class woman when she lets her hair down. Who were those Greek women who tore men to pieces? Julia would know.

Despite it being midweek, the women were all drinking shooters with ridiculous names – Flaming Lamborghini, Squashed Frog, Red-Headed Slut – and Jackson felt faintly disturbed by the sickly contents of their glasses. God only knew what kind of faces they would have on them when they turned up for work the next morning.

‘I’m Mandy,’ one of the women said brightly.

‘Go on, love – fly her,’ another one said, her throat filthy with years of smoking.

‘This is how it goes,’ Mandy said, ignoring her friend. ‘I say, “My name is Mandy,” and you say . . .?’

‘Jackson,’ Jackson said, reluctantly.

‘What’s “Jackson”?’ one of them asked.’ A first name or a last name?’

‘Take your pick,’ Jackson said.

He liked to keep conversations simple. There wasn’t much you couldn’t convey with ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Do’ and ‘Don’t’, anything else was pretty much ornamental, although throwing in the occasional ‘please’ could get you a surprisingly long way and ‘thank you’ even further. His first wife had deplored his lack of small talk (‘Jesus, Jackson, would it kill you to have a meaningless conversation?’). This was the same wife who, at the beginning of their courtship, had admired him for being ‘the strong, silent type’.

Perhaps he should have found more words to give Josie. Then she might not have left him, and if she hadn’t left him he wouldn’t have taken up with Julia who drove him to distraction and then he certainly wouldn’t have met the false second wife, Tessa, who had fleeced him and robbed him blind. For want of a nail. ‘Good wife, bad wife,’ Julia said. ‘You know in your heart which one you really prefer, Jackson.’ Did he? Which? No one, not even Tessa, had ever messed with his mind the way Julia did. ‘The Black Widow,’ she said with relish. ‘You were lucky that she didn’t eat you.’