Started Early, Took My Dog (39 page)

Michael Braithwaite had woken his mother from her endless sleep. And now she was rising, a dust storm, looking for justice, looking for vengeance. A revenge tragedy.

Jackson and the dog strolled along the pier, a pair of flâneurs by the sea. Jackson could feel the warmth of the sun on his scalp. He had been to Whitby as a boy. He didn’t know where the money had come from for a holiday, there was never money for decent clothes and food, let alone for ice creams or pantomimes, certainly not holidays. Jackson must have been five or six when they came here, half his sister’s age and still young enough to be her pet. Francis, their brother, was already a teenager slouching moodily around the arcades in the evening. There was no photographic proof of their furlough as none of them had ever owned a camera. The rich had always commissioned portraits of themselves but the poor moved invisibly through history.

Jackson couldn’t explain this primitive past to his daughter, let alone his son, born into a science-fiction future where every breathing second of his life was being digitally recorded, usually by Mr Metrosexual, Jonathan Carr. ( Julia was being unusually shifty, even for her, about Jonathan. Was it over between them?)

He could remember very little about their family holiday here in that faraway time, only impressionistic memories of sounds and smells. They had stayed in a guest house where a gong was rung at dinnertime and meals were served that were astonishingly different from the potato and bread-laden fare of home and even now his most vivid memory of the holiday was of a stewed chicken dish and a lemon pudding, both of which had prompted his mother to sniff and say, ‘Huh, very fancy,’ as if the food were a criticism of her rather than something to be enjoyed.

There had been milk and arrowroot biscuits for the children in the evening – unheard-of luxuries at home, where a vicious rub on the face with a flannel by his mother had been the only herald of bedtime.

He suddenly recalled something long ago tucked away in a forgotten corner by the little men running his brain. His mother had bought him a set of paper sandcastle flags – in his mind’s eye he could still see a red lion on a yellow background. And his father wearing his cheap suit to sit on the beach, his trouser legs rolled up to reveal his pale, hairy, Scottish shins. It had been a poor sort of childhood, in every way. Belonged in a museum.

Not one as interesting as the RNLI museum on the prom where recorded tales of heroism and disaster brought an uncomfortable lump to Jackson’s throat.
We have to go out, but we don’t have to come back
, the motto of the US Coastguard, the watchword of all rescuers. Sacrifice, like stoicism, not a fashionable word. Jackson stuffed a twenty-pound note into the miniature lifeboat collecting-box at the door.

He carried on, passing shops that sold shells, shops devoted to vampires (no getting away from them), to jet, to scented candles the smell of which made him retch, and endless cheap and nasty souvenirs. He crossed the swing bridge to the old town and visited the Captain Cook Memorial Museum to pay homage to the great navigator himself.

Afterwards, he bought some fudge in Justin’s Fudge Shop and noticed a house on Henrietta Street that was for sale, but he saw that the whole street was subsiding and the kipper smokehouse at the end was atmospheric in all the wrong ways.

The place was heaving with visitors. May Bank Holiday weekend, used to be Whitsuntide, when did that change? He ran up the 199 steps to the abbey and was pleased at how fit he still was. Everywhere people were puffing and panting their way up the steps. He had never seen so many fat people in one place at the same time. He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.

He left the dog in the porch when he went into St Mary’s Church. He took a seat in a box pew marked in old lettering,
For Strangers Only
. It seemed appropriate. These days he was always the stranger in town. He contemplated the interior of the church, fashioned long ago by shipwrights. The only other people there were a young – very young – Goth couple, black clothes, black lipstick and piercings everywhere, who were messing about in the pews. The boy said something to the girl and she sniggered. Vampire freaks.

He sat for a while on a bench in the graveyard of St Mary’s. The headstones all leaned like trees in the wind, the names on them erased by the salted air. ‘
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
,’ he murmured to the dog. The dog cocked its head inquisitively as if it were making an effort to understand what he was saying. Seagulls were squabbling yobbishly overhead. The sun winked on the sea like diamonds. Jackson was long enough in the tooth to know that it was over when you started reaching for clichés. He stood up and said out loud, ‘Time to go,’ to the dead beneath his feet, but the meek members of the resurrection made no effort to stir themselves and only the dog obeyed his call.

He walked back down into town on the cobbled donkey road rather than the 199 steps, finishing off Justin’s fudge as he went.

‘Come on,’ he said to the dog. ‘I’ll race you.’

He hit the beach running. Jackson couldn’t remember when he had last run on a beach.

When they reached Sandsend the dog investigated the rock pools, finding a small dead squid like a deflated condom that it worried for a while until it disintegrated. A large brackish piece of seaweed kept it entertained for several minutes more. Jackson sat on a rock and contemplated the horizon. What was out there? Holland? Germany? The edge of the world? Why had someone tried to bury Carol Braithwaite’s murder? And how was it relevant, if at all, to Hope McMaster? And other questions that he didn’t know the answer to, in fact, the more questions he asked, the more they multiplied. It had started with one,
I wondered if you could find out some information about my biological parents?
and had exploded exponentially from there.

He spent some time drilling his new recruit on the beach –
sit
,
stay
,
heel
,
come
. The dog was pretty good. At
sit
its haunches dropped as if its back legs had been taken from beneath it. When Jackson said
stay
and walked away the dog might as well have been glued to the sand, its whole body quivering with the effort of not hurtling after Jackson. And when Jackson found a stick of driftwood and held it above the dog’s head, the dog not only stood on its hind legs but even walked a few steps. What next? Talking?

An elderly man in the company of an equally elderly Labrador ambled by. The man tipped his cap in Jackson’s direction and said, ‘Th’should be in circus, lad.’ Jackson wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the dog or himself. Or both. Jackson and the Amazing Talking Dog.

The dog and Jackson played at throw and fetch for a while and then, unfortunately, the dog blithely deposited one of its antisocial brown wreaths on the sand and a guilty Jackson had to use the driftwood stick as a makeshift shovel to bury it, the plastic bags having been stolen along with his car.

It seemed a good moment for two naughty boys to turn around and run away.

He bought fish and chips – northern soul food – and sat on a bench on the pier while watching the tide come in. He shared his fish supper with the dog, wafting pieces of fish in the air to cool them down before handing them on, just as he had once done for Marlee. The tide had turned, the sea crawling up the beach now. Further along, the waves had more power and Jackson watched as they
voomphed
against the stanchions of the pier.

It was growing dark and the dark brought the cold with it, the warmth of the afternoon now an unlikely memory. The wind skating off the North Sea was an icy blade that cut through to the bone, so he threw the fish and chip paper in the bin and headed for the bed and breakfast he had booked over the phone last night. Twenty-five pounds a night for ‘Complimentary toiletries, hospitality tray and a full Yorkshire breakfast’. Jackson wondered what made it a Yorkshire breakfast as opposed to any other kind.

‘Bella Vista’ – what else. It was in the middle of a street of similar houses, five storeys from basement to attic. Most of Bella Vista’s neighbours were also guest houses – Dolphin, Marine View, The Haven. Jackson wondered if any of these guest houses had been around in his childhood, if perhaps it was the hallway of Marine View or The Haven where a copper gong had been beaten to announce dinnertime, perhaps was still being beaten.

Bella Vista seemed a misnomer, there was no sign of the sea at all. Perhaps if you stood on a chair at an attic window.
NO DOGS, NO SMOKING, NO GROUPS
, a sign announced on one of the pillars at the door. In smaller cursive script underneath were the words
Mrs B. Reid, Proprietress
.

‘It’s late,’ Mrs Reid said, by way of greeting. Jackson checked his watch, it was eight o’clock. Was that late?

‘Better than never,’ he said affably. He wondered if Bella Vista got many returning guests. Mrs Reid was a hardened blonde, a woman of a certain age, the only kind that Jackson seemed to meet these days. She led him into a big square hall where a table displayed a pile of leaflets about local tourist attractions and an honesty box for the phone in the shape of a small, old-fashioned red telephone box. Opening off the hall were a guest lounge and a breakfast room, their function announced by little china plaques affixed to the doors.

In the breakfast room he could see tables set for the morning with small pots of jams and marmalade, tiny tablets of foil-wrapped butter. It was strange, this miniaturization of everything, every expense spared. Jackson thought that if he was running a guest house (a big leap of imagination required) he would be generous with his portions – big bowls of jam, a dish with a fat yellow block of butter, giant pots of coffee.

He was led up three flights of stairs to an attic room at the back where servants would once have been crammed like sardines in a tin.

The ‘hospitality tray’ sat on the chest of drawers – an electric kettle, a small stainless-steel teapot, sachets of tea, coffee and sugar, tiny tubs of UHTmilk, a cellophane packet containing two oatmeal biscuits, everything again parcelled out into the smallest quantities. The room also harboured an assortment of completely unnecessary clutter – crocheted mats, little dishes of pot pourri and a troop of ringletted, porcelain-faced dolls sitting to attention on top of the wardrobe. In the small, cast-iron fireplace there was a vase of dried flowers, which, as far as Jackson was concerned, were simply dead flowers by another name. Jackson wondered if there was a Mr Reid. The house felt as if it had long ago been released from the sober, restraining hand of a man. Divorcee or widow? Widow, Jackson guessed, she had the look of someone who had successfully out-survived a sparring partner. Some women were destined for widowhood, marriage was just the obstacle in their way.

On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said
Valerie
. On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names –
Eleanor
,
Lucy
,
Anna
,
Charlotte
. They seemed like the names the dolls would have. Jackson wondered how you decided on a name for a room. Or a doll. Or a child, for that matter. The naming of dogs seemed even more perplexing.

Mrs Reid looked around the room doubtfully. It was pretty obvious that Jackson wasn’t the kind of person who belonged in a room like this. She was probably thinking about amending her notice:
NO DOGS, NO SMOKING, NO GROUPS, NO SCRUFFY MEN IN BLACK COMBATS AND BOOTS WITH NO APPARENT REASON TO BE HERE
. The air in
Valerie
smelled cloying and chemical, as if the room had just been vigorously sprayed with air freshener.

‘Business or pleasure, Mr Brodie?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Are you here on business or pleasure?’

Jackson thought about the answer a little longer than seemed necessary to either of them. ‘Bit of both really,’ he said finally. A soft whine came from his bag.

‘Thank you,’ Jackson said to Mrs Reid and closed the door.

He pulled up the sash window to let some real air into the room and discovered that there was a fixed metal fire escape outside the window. Jackson liked the idea that he could make a quick getaway from
Valerie
if necessary.

An uncharacteristically brief email from Hope McMaster pinged its way through the ether to him.
Anything?
she asked.
Nothing
, he replied.
I thought I’d found you but you turned out to be a boy called Michael
.

Always looking, the sheepdog returning the lost lambs. In London he’d met a guy called Mitch, South African, tough Boer type, politics somewhere to the right of Thatcher, if that was possible, but with his heart bang, slam in the centre of his being. Jackson didn’t know the whole story, just that a long time ago Mitch had had a small son who was abducted and of whom not a scrap was ever found. Now, many times divorced and not short of a bob or two, he ran an investigative outfit that looked for missing kids worldwide. It didn’t advertise itself. Hundreds of kids around the world disappeared every day, here one moment, gone the next. Some of the people they left behind found their way to Mitch.