Started Early, Took My Dog (33 page)

The wood seemed to enfold itself around them. Tracy thought of Sleeping Beauty. They could die here and turn into leaf mould before they were found. A crack broke the silence, startling them both, and Tracy wrapped her arms round Courtney and clung on to her. Nerves screwed tight as piano wires.

‘Are there wolves in the wood?’ the kid whispered.

‘Not as such,’ Tracy said.

She understood she was on the edge of everything now, the abyss ahead, behind the darkness, desperation the only way forward. Kid smelled of last night’s shampoo, and something green and sappy. A woodland nymph.

‘Come on, let’s keep moving.’ She hauled herself to her feet, picked up the kid. She was too small to keep running. Wasn’t that what had made Tracy take notice of her in the first place? Tracy had assumed that Kelly Cross was running with the kid because she was late or impatient or just plain bad but perhaps she hadn’t been running
towards
something, perhaps Kelly had also been running
away
. What if, in her own fashion, she too had been trying to save the kid? Was that why she was dead? Had she been punished for finding the kid or for losing her?

Was the Avensis driver trying to get the kid back, was she someone’s property, a paedo ring maybe? The Avensis driver looked like he might be harbouring a pervert inside his grey skin. Was he this so called private detective, the Jackson bloke?

‘Where are we going?’ Courtney asked.

‘Good question,’ Tracy puffed. ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea.’

The trees started to thin and there was light ahead. Go towards the light, that was what they said, wasn’t it?

They crashed out of the wood. And nearly got run over.

Said he used to be a policeman. Anyone could say that.

He had woken dead on five thirty as usual. When he switched on the bedside light in his bedroom in the Best Western the first thing that Jackson saw was the dog standing next to the bed, staring intently into his face as if it had been willing him to wake. Jackson growled a greeting and the dog wagged its tail enthusiastically in response.

He drank a poor man’s cup of instant coffee in the room and gave the dog its breakfast. It wolfed its food down in seconds. Jackson was beginning to see that the dog always ate as if it was starving. He understood because it was the same way he ate. First rule of life, acquired in the army, reinforced in the police – if you see food, eat it because you don’t know when you’ll see it again. And eat anything that’s put in front of you. Jackson had no qualms where meat was concerned, he could eat his way from snout to tail without any queasiness. He suspected that the dog was equally omnivorous.

Half an hour later and he was checked out and ready to hit the road. Marilyn Nettles was going to have two unexpected visitors. One man and his dog. He’d been planning to go to Whitby anyway so, clearly, fate was talking to him. In a difficult foreign language, like Finnish, it was true, but you couldn’t have everything.

He informed SatNav Jane that he was heading for the coast on the scenic route and then, like Lot before him, he left the city behind without a backward glance.

The tracking device that the room-service waiter had attached to the dog’s collar was currently in the Saab’s glove compartment. Jackson had considered placing it on a long-distance lorry, imagining with some satisfaction the misdirection caused by an Eddie Stobart eighteen-wheeler pulling up in Ullapool or Pwllheli, but then he might not discover who wanted to keep tabs on him. Pursuit was a two-way enterprise, quarry and hunter united in the quest, not so much a duel as a duet.

The tracking device was a nice bit of kit. Jackson had no idea they made them so small these days. It was a while since he’d had reason to purchase anything from a spyware site. He would like to buy something similar for Marlee, a gadget so tiny that she would fail to notice it because she would never (‘
No way!
’) agree to carry anything that implied parental supervision or control. If he could, Jackson would have his daughter chipped, like a dog. Nathan as well, of course. He had two children, he reminded himself, it was just that one didn’t seem to count quite as much as the other.

Was the dog chipped? ‘Colin’ hadn’t looked the type to care enough about a dog to chip it but then Colin didn’t look the type to own a dog that didn’t exactly advertise his machismo. He was a pit bull man, right down to his St George’s tattoo and his shaved head. Did the dog, in reality, belong to a wife, a mother, a child? Was someone waking up each morning and feeling a lurch of sorrow for their missing pet?
Going to put you down, should have done it the minute that
bitch left
, Colin had yelled at the dog in Roundhay Park. Jackson experienced a pinch of annoyance at the woman who had escaped Colin’s clutches but had left her dog behind to suffer.

What had been a light veil of mist in Leeds had grown thicker as he drove. It held the promise, although not the certainty, of a glorious day later, but in the early hours it had made driving perilous. He regretted now not having cashed in the prescription for spectacles that an optician had given him.

‘Things seem a bit blurry,’ he had said to the impossibly young girl testing his eyes. He wanted to ask if she was qualified but felt oddly vulnerable in the dark as she stared into his eye with a torch, so close that he could smell the mint on her breath.

‘Yes,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘The lenses in your eyes are growing harder. It happens at your age.’ Some things grew harder with age, some things grew softer.

On the road less travelled all kinds of wildlife were gambling recklessly with their lives on the unforgiving tarmac. A narrow miss with a badger a few miles back had tuned his reflexes up a notch. Jackson liked to think of himself as a knight of the road. It would be a shame to tarnish his shining armour with the blood of the innocent. He flicked the switch on the light-up Virgin Mary on the dashboard. The Mother of God might not have the candle wattage of the Saab’s full beam in her belly but perhaps she had a different kind of protective power. A sanctified figurehead leading him through the valley of darkness.

A sudden dip took Jackson, the Saab and the Holy Mother into a denser pocket of fog. It was like flying through a cloud and Jackson almost expected the Saab to buck with turbulence. In the cottonwool heart of the dip he saw a flash of silver and
Split the lark
came unwonted into his brain, the little men running his memory lazily reaching, in their morning lethargy, for the nearest thing to hand.
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled
. The argent blaze heralded a new kind of hazard – a woman. A woman who suddenly hurtled out from the trees at the side of the road.

For a split second Jackson thought she was a deer – a mile or two back there’d been a barely visible road sign displaying a stag that looked as if it was running for its life. The woman looked that way too. No bears and wolves any more, the only predators women ran from nowadays were men. She wasn’t alone, she was dragging a child by the hand, a small one, wearing a red duffel coat. The coat was a dark flare in the fog.

Jackson absorbed all of this in the nanosecond between spotting the woman and child and slamming on the brakes in an effort to avoid making roadkill out of the pair of them. The dog, startled awake by the Saab’s emergency stop, remained safely lodged in the footwell of the car and gave him an unreadable look. ‘Sorry,’ Jackson said.

When he got out of the car he found the woman down on all fours like a cat, gasping for breath. Jackson was sure the Saab hadn’t come into contact with her. And she was a big woman, maybe not as much of a buffer as a deer but he would have noticed the dunt, surely? ‘Did I hit you?’ he puzzled. She shook her head and, sitting back on her heels, managed to wheeze, ‘I’m out of breath, that’s all.’ She nodded in the direction of the child standing impassively by, and said, ‘I was carrying her. She’s heavier than she looks. Good brakes,’ she added, glancing at the Saab, inches away from her.

‘Good driver,’ Jackson said.

The child’s red duffel coat was open, revealing a gauzy pink dressing-up costume beneath. A fairy, an angel, a princess, they were all pretty much cut from the same cloth as far as Jackson was concerned. It was an area of retail Marlee had familiarized him with, somewhat against his will. A battered star-topped silver wand indicated ‘fairy’. Was this the flash of silver he had seen in the fog? The girl was clutching the wand, two-handed like a battleaxe, as if her life depended on it. Jackson wouldn’t have liked to be the one who tried to wrestle it off her, she might be small but she was a punchy-looking kid.

The rest of her ensemble was also the worse for wear. There was a rip in the skirt and bits of twig and leaf were caught in the cheap fabric. It reminded Jackson of a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that Julia had taken him to see. The fairies in the play had been filthy, mud-stained creatures who looked as though they had crawled out of a bog. At fourteen, Julia had played Puck in a school production of the play. At the same age, his own daughter had aspirations to be a vampire. ‘It’s a phase,’ Josie said. ‘Well, I should hope so,’ Jackson said.

He helped the woman struggle to her feet. She was wearing a tracksuit that only served to emphasize how broad in the beam she was, built like a collier, Jackson thought. She had a big, practical handbag strapped across her front.

Jackson wondered if she shouldn’t be even a little wary of the fact that she was stepping into the vehicle of a complete stranger in the middle of nowhere and, for all she knew, was walking into a worse nightmare than the one she had left behind. Who was to say that the Saab driver wasn’t a murderous psycho, combing the countryside for prey?

‘I used to be a policeman,’ he said, for reassurance. Although, of course, that was exactly what you would say if you were hoping to trick someone into getting into a car with you. (Perhaps it was himself he was trying to reassure, perhaps it was the woman who was a psycho.)

‘Yeah, me too,’ she muttered and laughed a grim kind of laugh.

‘Really?’ he said but she ignored him. ‘Is someone after you?’ he asked. The woman and the child both turned instinctively to look towards the wood. Jackson tried to imagine something flying out from trees that he didn’t feel up to dealing with and, short of an armoured tank (or a small wand-wielding girl), came up a blank. Instead of answering the question the woman said, ‘We need a lift.’

Jackson, also not one to waste words, said, ‘You’d better get in the car then.’

He adjusted the mirror to try to look at the woman in the back seat. He couldn’t see her face, however, as she had twisted herself round awkwardly in order to keep watch out of the rear window of the car. It wasn’t worth the effort. If anyone was behind them there would be little chance of spotting them in this fog. Or vice versa. He adjusted the mirror so that he could inspect the small girl sitting next to the woman. The girl raised her eyebrows at him, an inscrutable gesture.

Eventually, the woman turned round to face the windscreen and stared straight ahead. She had bruises blooming on her face and dried blood on her hands.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘You’ve got blood on you.’

‘It’s not mine.’

‘That’s all right then,’ Jackson said drily. Both his new passengers had the same slightly stunned look that he had seen many times on survivors. They looked like refugees from a disaster – a fire or an earthquake – people who had abandoned their home in the clothes they stood up in. Domestic abuse, he supposed. War on the home front – what else would a woman and child be running from?

Minutes passed before the woman said to him, ‘My car broke down,’ as if that explained the state of the pair of them. Sighing wearily, she added, more to herself than to him, ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘It’s only half seven in the morning,’ Jackson puzzled.

‘Exactly.’

When he glanced in the mirror again he saw that the woman had strapped the child in. The seat-belt was much too big and looked as if it might strangle her if he braked too quickly. It was a long time since he’d had a child-seat in a car. If he ever drove Nathan he had to borrow one from Julia, something which annoyed her out of all proportion, in Jackson’s opinion anyway.

Although he might not have admitted it, he felt slightly unsettled – the fog, the woods, the
Midwich Cuckoos
kid, not to mention the sense of fear the woman had brought into the car with her – it was all more like an episode of
The Twilight Zone
than a comedy by Shakespeare.

She didn’t seem to care where they were heading, anywhere except where she had been seemed to be a good direction. Jackson was no longer sure it mattered which way you went, you never ended up where you expected. Every day a surprise, you caught the wrong train, the right bus. A girl opens a box and gets more than she bargained for.

‘Don’t you want to know where I’m going?’ he asked after what seemed like an eternity of silence.

‘Not particularly,’ she said.