Started Early, Took My Dog (25 page)

Jackson retrieved the Saab from the multi-storey car park at the Merrion Centre where it had been corralled since he arrived in Leeds yesterday. He wasn’t sure of the protocol of dogs in cars. You saw them all the time staring out of the back or hanging out of the passenger window, their ears fluttering in the slipstream, but an unsecured dog was an accident waiting to happen. When he was in the force there had been a woman killed in a traffic accident. She braked suddenly at a red light, and her Dalmatian in the seat behind her carried on travelling. Broke her neck. Stupid way to die.

The dog had hopped on to the back seat as if this were its accustomed place but Alpha Dog, Jackson, said, ‘No,’ sternly. The dog was unsure but eager to please, studying Jackson’s face for a clue. ‘There,’ Jackson said, pointing at the front seat passenger footwell, and the dog jumped in and settled down. ‘OK,’ he said when he was finally satisfied that the dog wasn’t going to be hurled through the car like a missile. ‘Let’s go and find us some women.’ He put Kendel Carson’s ‘Cowboy Boots’ on the car stereo, a song that wasn’t as redneck as the title suggested.

He started the engine and adjusted the rear-view mirror. Catching sight of himself in it he was surprised anew by his military buzz-cut.

Linda Pallister lived in a traditional semi near Roundhay Park. The curtains were drawn even though it was the afternoon. It had the air of a house in mourning. Jackson rang the bell and knocked hard but there was no answer. He tried the back door with the same result. The mysteriously absent Linda Pallister remained just that, mysteriously absent.

Jackson knocked on the door of the neighbouring house. He struck lucky with the woman (‘Mrs Potter’) who answered the door. He knew the type – they were usually watching reruns of
Midsomer
Murders
or
Poirot
behind the net curtains in the middle of the afternoon, pot of tea and a plate of chocolate digestives to hand. They made invaluable witnesses because they were always on watch.

‘She had a visitor last night,’ Mrs Potter duly reported. ‘A man,’ she added with relish.

‘Have you seen her today?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t spend all my time watching the neighbourhood goings-on, I don’t know why people would think that.’

‘Of course not, Mrs Potter,’ Jackson said, feigning empathy. It was never a tactic that worked well for him (especially with women) but that didn’t stop him trying. ‘Look,’ he took one of his cards out of his wallet and handed it to the woman, ‘if she comes back, could you give her this and ask her to give me a ring.’

‘Private detective?’ she said, reading the card. He needn’t have bothered with empathy, the idea of a private detective was intriguing enough for her to say, ‘Call me Janice.’ She dropped her voice as if Linda Pallister might be eavesdropping on them. ‘Can you tell me why you’re interested in Linda?’

‘I could but then I’d have to kill you,’ Jackson said. For a moment, the woman looked as if she believed him. Jackson smiled. Yep, willing to give a woman a cheap thrill at the drop of a hat these days.

There was more life inside Tracy Waterhouse’s house down the road in Headingley, although unfortunately not coming from Tracy herself. The front door was open and a man was packing tools away in a van. Tracy, he informed Jackson in an East European accent (your classic Polish builder, Jackson supposed), had gone out this morning and he didn’t know when she would be back. ‘But I hope she will be,’ he said and laughed. ‘She owes me money.’

Despite Jackson’s claim to be Tracy’s long-lost cousin the workman wouldn’t give him Tracy’s mobile number. ‘She’s a very private person,’ he said.

Instead of collecting Cistercian abbeys, now it seemed Jackson was collecting women who were missing in action.

He sat in his car in the car park and dialled Tracy’s mobile. It went to voicemail and he left a message. Barry’s car smelled of freesias, Amy’s favourite flower. Why hadn’t she had them in her wedding bouquet instead of those stupid orange daisy things? There was no flower that meant anything to her now. All Ivan’s fault. Blame him for everything. He was coming out on Saturday, a pal of Barry’s in the prison service had given him the date and time. Barry would be there to greet him.

He was taking the freesias to Sam’s small grave. He went more often than he ever told Barbara. They visited the grave separately. Barbara left things that turned his stomach – teddy bears and toy trucks. He always left freesias.

Barry raked through his pocket for the card that the Jackson bloke had given him but couldn’t find it anywhere. He phoned Tracy’s number in the Merrion Centre and a prize pillock answered and said she was off sick. He phoned her home number and there was just a generic answer-machine message. Finally he phoned her mobile and left a message. Phoned again and left a second message. Remembered something else, left a third message.

Something was up, but what exactly? Tracy didn’t have any cousins. Didn’t have any family at all, she was the only child of only children. She had nobody in Salford, that was for sure. He had to warn her if someone dodgy was after her. Linda Pallister had mentioned a private detective named ‘Jackson’ snooping around and now here was this clot turning up at Millgarth looking for Tracy.
Does the name Carol Braithwaite ring any bells?
he said. One bloody great bell tolling for the dead, waking the living. Ring out the bells, bring out the dead.

Before Amy’s accident he used to feel sorry for Tracy, one of those women who’d sacrificed motherhood to the job. They reached the menopause and realized that they hadn’t had kids, that their DNA was going to die with them and nobody was ever going to love them the way a kid would. Sad, really. But after Amy’s accident Barry envied Tracy. She didn’t have to feel unbearable pain every living second of every living day.

He started the engine and drove to the cemetery, breathing in the scent of freesias all the way.

‘Are we going home?’ Courtney asked when Tracy strapped her back in the car seat outside Toys ‘R’ Us. The boot was full of stuff, most of it plastic. All those tiny ancient marine life forms falling to the ocean floor to come back to life one day as a Disney Fairies Tea Set.

At Courtney’s request Tracy had also bought a dressing-up costume, a pink fairy outfit, complete with wings, wand and tiara. Courtney had insisted on getting changed into it in the car and she was now sitting stiffly in the back of the car in a pose that reminded Tracy of the Queen at her coronation.

‘Are we going home?’Tracy repeated thoughtfully as if it wasn’t so much a question as a philosophical conundrum. What did Courtney mean by ‘home’? Tracy wondered. Where was it? Kelly’s undoubtedly squalid pad, or somewhere else?

There was stuff you did with kids and stuff you didn’t. For all of her working life Tracy had witnessed the stuff you weren’t supposed to do with them. Building sandcastles on a beach, feeding bread to ducks, eating a picnic sitting on a plaid blanket in the park – these were things you did with kids. Stealing them was one of the things you didn’t do. Bottom line. She had taken a child that wasn’t hers.

‘Actually,’ Tracy said, ‘we’re not. Not going home just yet. Couple of errands to run.’

It took half an hour in the bank to empty her account of its savings. Kid got through a banana and an apple. Tracy had brought her passport with her, knew the drill on fraud prevention, didn’t stop the teller behaving as if she were robbing the place. Security cameras everywhere and thirty thousand in cash in her handbag. Hard not to look guilty.

After that they went to see her solicitor and Tracy gave him instructions to sell her house. Solicitors were slow-moving animals, you couldn’t get out of their offices in under two bananas. Could you overdose on bananas? She could hear her mother’s voice, ‘You’ll turn into a cheese and onion crisp if you carry on eating them like that.’ (She hadn’t.) And the bananas were small, ‘fun-sized’, according to the supermarket label. Tracy ate one in the car, wondered what people did before bananas. She didn’t understand what ‘fun-sized’ meant in the context of a banana. She’d arrested a guy once peddling kiddy porn,
Fun-sized Treats
one of the videos was called. Nothing innocent. Anywhere.

‘Are we going home
now
?’ Courtney asked when they were back in the car. Kid was used to being moved around like a billiard ball. Kids had no power over where they went, who they went with.

‘Soon. First we’re going to see a man.’ In the rear-view mirror she caught the frown pinching Courtney’s face and added, ‘A nice man.’

Nice-ish, anyway, if her memory served her. On the surface. He was also a conman, a thief and a fixer but Tracy didn’t mention that to the kid. He lived in an impressive house in Alwoodley, bought, no doubt, with the proceeds of a life in crime, and was commendably pokerfaced when he opened his front door to find Tracy and a small pink fairy standing in front of him.

‘Superintendent,’ he said genially, ‘and a friend. What a pleasant surprise.’

‘I’m retired,’ Tracy said.

‘Me too,’ Harry Reynolds murmured. ‘Do come in.’

He was a dapper little bloke – cravat, crease in his beige twill trousers, the kind of smart slippers that could pass for shoes – and had picked up his bus pass quite some time ago, although Tracy doubted somehow that Harry Reynolds travelled on public transport, especially as there was a Bentley parked on his driveway.

He led them into a knocked-through living room – high-quality patio doors and a koi carp pond almost directly outside, as if Harry Reynolds wanted to view the expensive fish without having to leave the airlock of his house.

Inside, the walls were covered with framed school photographs of two children, a boy and a girl. Tracy recognized the uniform of a feepaying prep school with a name she never knew how to pronounce.

‘The grandkids,’ Harry Reynolds said proudly. ‘Brett’s ten, Ashley’s eight.’Tracy presumed that Brett was the boy and Ashley the girl but you could never be sure any more. The rest of the décor was hideous, big glass vases that might have been regarded as ‘art’ in the seventies, sentimental china ornaments of clowns with balloons or sad-faced children with dogs. A big brass sunburst clock adorned one wall and on another a football match was being played out on the biggest TV screen that Tracy had ever seen. Crime pays. There was a surprising smell of baking wafting through the house.

‘Don’t want to interrupt the game,’ Tracy said politely, although years in uniform policing dirty Leeds United home matches meant that she would have happily put a sledgehammer into the screen.

‘No, no,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘It’s a shit game, excuse my French, pet,’ he added in Courtney’s direction. ‘Anyway, it’s on Sky Plus, not live, I can catch up later.’ He had the kind of Yorkshire accent that Tracy thought of as ‘aspirational’. Dorothy Waterhouse’s accent.

Harry Reynolds switched the TV off and settled the pair of them on puffy sofas, as big as barges, that were upholstered in an outmoded mauve leather. It seemed an undignified end for a cow. He excused himself and went to fetch ‘refreshments’. The sun was shining hotly on the garden but the windows and doors were all closed, the whole house hermetically sealed against the outside world. Tracy felt her blouse sticking to her back. The waistband of her big pants was cutting her in half. She always swelled during the course of the day. How did that happen? she wondered.

Courtney sat silently, staring out of the window. Maybe Kelly had drugged her. Nothing new there, think of the gallons of laudanum mothers used to ply their kids with to keep them quiet. These days more kids were being slipped tranquillizers and sleeping pills than people realized. If it had been up to Tracy she would have sterilized a lot of parents. You couldn’t say that, of course, made you sound like a Nazi. Didn’t take away from the truth of it though.

Tracy’s phone rang.
Für Elise
. She raked it out of her bag, expecting it to be her silent caller. She frowned at the screen. ‘Barry’, it said. Fear washed through her, had he found out something about Courtney? She let it go to voicemail.

Harry Reynolds came back into the room, carrying a tea-tray.
Für Elise
again. Barry again. Voicemail again.