Started Early, Took My Dog (28 page)

Julia, of all people, Julia, who had ‘given up acting to concentrate on being a mother and a wife’ (a declaration that no one, particularly not Jackson, believed), had recently been cast in
Collier
. Jackson had presumed she would be a corpse, or, at best, a bit-part barmaid, but it turned out that she was playing a forensic pathologist. (‘
A forensic pathologist?
’ He had been unable to disguise the disbelief in his voice.

‘Yes, Jackson,’ she said, with exaggerated forbearance. ‘I don’t actually have to have a medical degree or conduct post-mortems. It’s called
acting
.’

‘Even so . . .’ Jackson murmured.)

DS Charlie Lambert, an actress called Saskia Bligh, was Vince Collier’s glamorous (tough but fair, sexy but professional) sidekick. She argued, bullied, cajoled, sprinted and karate-kicked her way through the episode. She was a thin blonde with big, slightly weepy eyes and cheekbones that you could have hung washing on (as his mother would have said). Not Jackson’s type. (He had a type? What? The woman from last night? Surely not.) Saskia Bligh looked as if she bruised easily. Jackson liked his women to be robust.

Collier and Lambert. There were just the two of them, Morse and Lewis, Holmes and Watson, a double-handed duo that could solve every murder in the district with only a smidgeon of background help from semi-anonymous techies and uniforms. Jackson would like to see the pair of them work a case in the real world. Julia, in the shape of her character, existed to provide ‘a foil for their relationship’. ‘It’s not about crime, you have to understand,’ Julia said. ‘It’s about them as
people
.’

‘They’re not real,’ Jackson pointed out.

‘I know that. Art
renders
reality.’

‘Art?’ Jackson repeated incredulously. ‘You call
Collier
“art”? I thought
rendering
was what you did to dripping.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Julia was replacing a previous pathologist, a man. The actor playing him had been caught with child pornography on his computer and had been quietly transformed into a nonce in a prison somewhere. Ironic justice, a form of jurisprudence that Jackson felt a particular fondness for. Cosmic justice was all well and good but generally its wheels took longer to grind.

Vince Collier had recently acquired a mother from nowhere (caring but nagging, sensible but anxious). One of those old actresses who had been around for ever. (‘To humanize him,’ Julia explained.) Jackson didn’t think having a mother ‘humanized’ (whatever that meant) anyone. Everyone had a mother – murderers, rapists, Hitler, Pol Pot, Margaret Thatcher. (‘Well, fiction’s stranger than truth,’ Julia said.)

The face of Vince Collier’s mother was familiar. Jackson tried to remember why but the tiny people who resentfully ran his memory these days (fetching and carrying folders, checking the contents against index cards, filing them away in boxes that were then placed on endless rows of grey metal Dexion shelving never to be found again) had, in an all too frequent occurrence, mislaid that particular piece of information. This sketchy blueprint for the neurological workings of his brain had been laid down in Jackson’s childhood by the Numskulls in his
Beezer
comic and he had never really developed a more sophisticated model.

Jackson supposed that other people’s small brain-dwelling inhabitants ran their operations rather like air-traffic controllers, always aware of the location of everything they were responsible for, never sloping off for tea breaks or loitering in the shadowy recesses of rarely accessed shelves, where they smoked fly cigarettes and kvetched about their poor working conditions. One day they would simply lay down tools and walk off, of course.

Vince Collier’s mother had apparently been misfiled somewhere on the endless Dexion.

Ten-take Tilly
, Julia had called her. Jackson had visited her on set, dropped in unexpectedly when he realized he was driving past the place where they filmed
Collier
. ‘Poor old thing, her memory’s shot to pieces,’ Julia said. ‘They should have realized that before they took her on. She’s going to be killed off soon.’

‘Killed off?’ Jackson said.

‘In the programme.’

They were drinking coffee, sitting in what seemed to be a cowshed, a chilly adjunct to the catering truck, where trestle tables were set up.

‘It’s not a cowshed, it’s a barn,’ Julia said.

‘Is it real or part of the set?’

‘Everything is real,’ Julia said. ‘On the other hand, of course, you could argue that nothing is real.’

Jackson banged his head on the wooden table. But not in a real way.

Julia was dressed for her part, in blue scrubs, her hair strained into a bun. ‘You’ve always been attracted to women in uniform,’ she said.

‘Maybe, but I’ve never had a thing for people who cut up corpses.’

‘Never say never,’ Julia said.

Jackson wondered where their son was. Neither of them had mentioned him. ‘Is Jonathan looking after Nathan?’ he asked eventually and Julia shrugged in a non-committal way.

‘He either is or he isn’t. And don’t tell me that he could be doing both at the same time. We’re not talking parallel universes here.’

She sighed heavily and said, ‘Isn’t. I’ve got a nanny, a local girl. And it’s a bit late to worry about the welfare of your son.’

‘Well, I haven’t worried earlier because you told me he wasn’t my son,’ Jackson said reasonably.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an autopsy at three o’clock.’

It came to him suddenly. ‘Well I never,’ Jackson said to the dog. The dog looked at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence. Vince Collier’s mother was none other than the confused old woman in the Merrion Centre. ‘I knew I’d seen her before. It was the wig that threw me.’

He watched
Collier
to the bitter end. Julia appeared twice (‘Dr Beatrice Butler’, maternal but savvy, sexy but intellectual – a sketchy version of Julia’s own complexity). The first time she was on screen she was attending a murder scene where she estimated the time of death of a mutilated prostitute and then a short time later she was in the mortuary, where she was pretending to cut open the body of the victim. Jackson preferred nature programmes, even at their most bloodthirsty they were preferable to this crap. ‘It’s very popular,’ Julia said. ‘Great viewing figures.’

Real murder was disgusting. And smelly and messy and usually heartbreaking, invariably meaningless, occasionally tedious, but not this neat sanitized narrative. And the victims were often prostitutes, dispensable as tissues, both in reality and in fiction.

‘Art, my arse,’ Jackson muttered to the dog.

He waited for Vince Collier’s mother’s name to come up on the credits. Marjorie Collier, played by Matilda Squires. ‘See, I was right,’ he said to the dog.
Ten-take Tilly
. The dog sneezed suddenly, three times in a row, little
chew-chew-chew
sounds that Jackson found oddly (and inexplicably) touching.

He turned the television off and went back to his old friend Google, typing the name ‘Marilyn Nettles’ into the phone. All he ever did was search for women. He was about to give up when he found something on a site ‘dedicated to Yorkshire writers’.
Marilyn Nettles writes under the pen name of Stephanie Dawson. Nettles is a former crime reporter with the
Yorkshire Post a
nd lives in the historic town of Whitby
. Jackson celebrated with a cup of tea from the hospitality tray. Since this morning everything had been replenished by the chambermaid and he broke open another packet of biscuits and rationed them out between himself and the dog.

‘We’re in luck,’ he said to the dog, tossing it a custard cream. ‘Marilyn Nettles, here I come.’

He was just thinking about taking the dog out for his last walk of the day and then turning in early when there was a knock at the door. The dog’s ears went on to high alert. ‘Room service,’ a voice said loudly from the other side of the door.

‘I haven’t ordered anything on room service,’ Jackson said to the dog. He might perhaps have recalled several scenes in films he had watched over the years where a waiter pushes a trolley, cloaked in white linen, into the room, a trolley which turns out to be hiding in its innards anything from a machine-gun to a voluptuous blonde. But Jackson didn’t recall any of this, so he opened the door.

‘Jesus,’ he said when he saw what was on the trolley.

‘For me? You shouldn’t have.’

The trolley was laden with a silver ice-bucket containing a bottle of Bollinger that was sweating attractively with cold. It all seemed very upmarket for a Best Western. The trolley was in the room before Jackson had the chance to point out the unlikelihood of it being for him. Perhaps a woman was trying to woo him. Not any of the women he’d encountered recently, that was for sure. The waiter – thinning grey hair, crumpled grey skin – looked more like an old fashioned, mild-mannered serial killer than your usual room-service staff. He spotted the dog on the bed and began to make a tremendous fuss of it. ‘Had one of these myself when I was a lad,’ he grinned at Jackson. ‘Border terrier. Brilliant little dogs. Cheeky little chappies.’

The guy was scratching and tickling the dog to within an inch of its life. The dog looked surprised. It seemed to have a wide range of facial expressions. Its repertoire was probably greater than Jackson’s own. He waited to see if the waiter would point out that dogs weren’t allowed in the hotel but he didn’t, eventually tearing himself away from the dog, saying, ‘Would you like me to open this for you, Mr King?’

‘Ah,’ Jackson said. ‘I’m not Mr King, think you’ve got the wrong room. Nearly got away with that,’ he said and laughed. Ha, ha.

‘I wouldn’t have said anything,’ the waiter said. He grinned and tapped the side of his nose, a gesture that Jackson didn’t think he had ever seen outside of an Ealing comedy. ‘What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’

‘I would be inclined to say the opposite was true,’ Jackson said.

‘What you
don’t
know
can
hurt you.’ They both laughed. Hardly enough space in the room for so much affability. LOL.

‘Get you anything else, squire?’ the waiter asked, backing the trolley out of the room.

‘No. Thank you,’ Jackson said. When he had gone Jackson looked at the dog. The dog looked at Jackson. Jackson sighed and sat on the bed next to it. The dog wagged its tail but Jackson said, ‘Keep still, there’s a good boy,’ and ran his finger round the inside of the dog’s collar until he found the tracking device. He showed it to the dog. ‘Amateurs,’ he explained.

One of the things that you definitely didn’t do with kids was to drive with them in the back of a car through red-light districts at night, looking for a prostitute. In the badlands, near the junction of Water Lane and Bridge Road, an unmarked squad car from vice prowling for kerb-crawlers cruised past them in the opposite direction. Did they recognize her? Tracy drove sedately on, wondering if they had noticed the kid in the back.

Kelly Cross wanted more money. No surprise there then. The puzzle was how she had got hold of Tracy’s mobile number. (
Listen, you fat fucking cow, you had no right to take that kiddy. If you want to keep her you’re going to have to fork out a lot more
.) Well, there you go, Tracy thought, wasn’t she paying the price of having bought the kid at a discount, as in her heart she’d always known she would have to? And how long would this kind of extortion go on for? Until Courtney was grown up and had kids of her own? Would Kelly last that long? She didn’t really belong to a demographic that boasted of longevity. It would be much better if Kelly Cross died – a bad batch of heroin, a psycho punter – who would miss her, after all?
That kiddy
, Kelly Cross said. Not
my kiddy
. Although mothers like Kelly were pretty uninterested in their kids. Weren’t they?

All the lovely places. Bridge End, Sweet Street West, Bath Road. A wasteland. Literally. No one to hear you scream. A couple of prostitutes on the swing shift, huddled up against a wall. Offhand, smoking fags like connoisseurs. One was raddled by life, the other one looked underage, shivering, glassy skin, coming down off something.
Pretty Woman
it ain’t, Tracy thought. Tracy wondered if they were mother and daughter. They were on the job, she wasn’t any more, she reminded herself.

As Tracy brought the car to a halt her phone rang. Barry. Oh, for God’s sake. The only way to stop him was to speak to him.

‘Where
are
you?’ he asked when she answered, sounding unnecessarily peeved, like a husband.

‘Bath Road,’ she said, watching as the younger of the two women began tottering towards her car. Thigh-high boots with hooker heels, short denim cut-offs, little strappy vest, nasty jacket.

‘What are you doing there?’ Barry puzzled.

‘Looking for someone. What do you want?’

‘Did you get my messages about this Jackson bloke?’

‘Yes, I’ve got no idea who he is,’ Tracy said.

‘Want me to do something about it?’ Barry asked. The echo of Harry Reynolds’s words to her earlier. She rolled down the car window and the young prostitute, more child than woman, looked confused at the sight of her. ‘You looking for business?’ she asked doubtfully.