Started Early, Took My Dog (50 page)

Everyone in the crematorium seemed to have lost their appetite for death. Barry watched as a couple of women in designer black picked their way from the chapel like gazelle that had suddenly found they had strayed into the lions’ enclosure. Then they all began to melt away. All the great and the good.

The vicar hovered like a nervous waiter and asked Barry if he could get him anything. ‘No, lad,’ Barry said, ‘but thanks for asking.’

‘Last men standing,’ Barry said to Ray.

‘Thirty-five years ago, Barry,’ Ray said. ‘It’s history, water under the bridge.’

‘I don’t understand,’ a soft voice said. Margaret, Ray’s wife. If he’d been in a kind mood Barry would have said, ‘Get your husband to explain,’ but he wasn’t in a kind mood, and so he said, ‘Your husband fathered a child on a prostitute called Carol Braithwaite and after he had murdered Carol Braithwaite he took that child – his daughter – and gave her away to your bosom friend, Kitty Winfield.’ The truth was going to come out anyway, might as well be Barry who told it.
Speaking truth to power
. That was what the Quakers said, he’d had to arrest a few in the eighties, peaceniks, yakking on about ‘direct action’ and Cruise missiles. For people who worshipped in silence they seemed to talk a lot.

‘Ray?’ Margaret said.

‘It wasn’t me,’ Ray said again, this time to Margaret. ‘It really wasn’t.’ He turned back to Barry and said, ‘You only saw half the story, Barry.’

‘Tell it to the judge, Ray.’

A lone uniformed constable arrived, could have been Barry thirty-five years ago. You’d do anything a superior officer told you to. Turn a blind eye? Yes, boss. Keep your mouth shut. Yes, boss. Three bags full, boss. A dogsbody.

‘Boss?’

‘Take this gentleman into custody, officer. He’s been charged with murder. I’m not coming. When you get to the station, go to my office. There’s a letter on my desk. I want you to give it to DI Gemma Holroyd and she’ll take it from there.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good lad.’

He drove to the moors above Ilkley, all the way to Upper Barden Reservoir. There wasn’t a soul around. The sky marbled with clouds, all tinged with opal. Like a painting, lovely. Barry imagined Carol Braithwaite rising. The Assumption. Carol Braithwaite hand in hand with Amy. Carol and Amy, one to the head, one to the heart.

Pair of buzzards circled overhead, waiting for him.

1975: October
Wilma McCann’s body was found on the eve of Halloween on a typical foggy Leeds morning on the Prince Philip Playing Fields in Chapeltown. Two head wounds, fifteen stab wounds. Convictions for drunkenness, disorderly conduct and theft. Her four children left alone in a filthy house. Another good-time girl.

Wilma McCann’s was just one of several sordid deaths, nothing to write home about, yet three months later 137 police officers had clocked up 53,000 hours, taken 538 statements and accumulated 3,300 index card references. All leading to nothing. Everyone still gloriously innocent of the fact that it was Sutcliffe’s first official kill. There wouldn’t be another one until January of the following year. Carol Braithwaite, on the other hand, seemed to clock up hardly any police hours at all.

Tracy took no part in the investigation into Wilma McCann’s murder. She was still in uniform, another working girl, walking the streets.

‘It’s different anyway,’ Barry said. ‘Your woman—’

‘My woman?’

‘The Braithwaite woman was killed in her own home. Strangled, not hit on the head and stabbed.’

‘You’re talking like you’re in CID already, Barry. All that brownnosing paying off, is it?’

‘Piss off.’

Leeds, Manchester, Huddersfield, Bradford. Emily Jackson in January of the following year. The roll-call went on and on. Not just prostitutes any more, any woman would do. The last two in 1980. In the wrong place at the right time. Marilyn Moore’s photofit early on was one of the best they had. The Jason King beard, the mean little eyes. Over five million vehicles logged. He was the devil and he couldn’t be caught.

The past was a dark place, a man’s world. There was a time when the male officers escorted the WPCs and the female office staff across to the car park. She heard one of the blokes say, ‘I wouldn’t worry about Tracy Waterhouse. Pity t’Ripper if he tackles her.’

No chance of Carol Braithwaite being remembered once Sutcliffe’s reign of terror was in full swing. Carol Braithwaite pretty much fitted the victim profile. But they didn’t really do victim profiles in those days. Tracy would wonder for years to come if Carol Braithwaite hadn’t been one of Sutcliffe’s first.

Tracy ended 1975 in style by buying a five-year-old Datsun Sunny. At the end of the year Kirkgate Market burned down and she used her warrant card to get past the safety barriers and have a better look at the conflagration. It seemed a good way to say goodbye to the year, everything going up in flames.

1977 was a busy year for the Ripper. Barry moved on and up, made plainclothes in 1980. Tracy had a new boyfriend. A twenty-eight-year-old sharp-suited, degree-toting medical instruments salesman. Not a great degree that he toted, just a third in ‘business management’ from a new concrete university, but a degree more than Tracy was in possession of.

He had taken her as far afield as Durham and Flamborough Head in the lime-green Ford Capri that he drove like a maniacal test pilot. Tracy never squashed herself awkwardly into the passenger seat without thinking that she might die before journey’s end. That was part of the attraction of it, probably.

They drank in beer gardens throughout the north-east, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, with Wood’s Old Navy rum chasers, for him, pints of snakebite for Tracy. Then they would go back to his flat and eat Indian takeaways and he would light up a big spliff and say, ‘Are you going to handcuff me, officer?’ Same ‘joke’ every time. Tracy never partook, preferred her mind to be altered by alcohol, not drugs. The sex was quite good, although she only had Dennis the driving instructor as a comparison, but that must have been what kept her because the bloke was, let’s face it, a complete wanker. When he dumped her for a more streamlined model, she phoned him in anonymously to the Drug Squad. Never heard if anything came of it. He died in a car smash in 1985, wrapped his TVR coupé round a disobliging tree.

Lime-green Capri – same car as the Ripper was driving in ’75. She should have phoned him in for that as well. Tracy had never seriously considered him for it. He was too self-obsessed to be bothered to kill anyone. Still, she notched up her first broken heart. She was, slowly but surely, passing the landmarks of life.

Linda Pallister hooked up with some bloke from the Labour Party and moved to a house near Roundhay, a traditional between-the wars semi, not Linda’s style at all. She gave birth to Chloe in the same year that Barry’s Amy was born. In lieu of a christening, Barry and Barbara threw ‘a little party’ to welcome the baby. Sausage rolls, pork pie, cake made by Barbara’s mother and a crate of Asti Spumante. Tracy wasn’t invited.

Linda Pallister threw a party for her new baby as well. Tracy not invited to that one either. No pork pie for Linda. Rumour had it that she dished up the baby’s placenta. Raw or cooked? Tracy wondered.

Ray Strickland was never promoted above the rank of DCI. Said he was happy with that, didn’t want to spend his time driving a desk. Lomax, on the other hand, went to the top of the tree, took all the laurels going.

Life went on. Before Tracy knew it she had clocked up thirty years and was getting pissed at her own leaving do.

Treasure

June
‘And you saw it happen? You saw poor old Tilly go under the train? What on earth were you doing there?’

‘It had nothing to do with me,’ Jackson said.

‘The inquest ruled it was an accident,’ Julia said. ‘Which I was glad about because I really don’t think Tilly was the suicidal type. She was in the early stages of dementia though, poor old thing, so I suppose you don’t know what was going through her mind, do you? I went to the funeral, in St Paul’s in Covent Garden. It was a lovely service actually, lots of people saying nice things about dear old Till. Her friend Dame Phoebe March gave the eulogy, chewed up the scenery, of course, but it was good, really moving – all sorts of anecdotes about Tilly when she was young.’

You just had to wind Julia up and let her go.

Jackson was picking her up from the set of
Collier
and giving her a lift to the airport. She had a couple of weeks off. Her pathologist character, Beatrice Butler, was spending the time in a coma after being attacked by the crazed relative of a – oh, as if Jackson cared.

Julia was amusing herself with the dog, crouching down and running her hand along its spine, like a masseuse. ‘Roll over and die for queen and country,’ she commanded and the dog spun over on to its back with its legs in the air.

To look at it, anyone would think the dog had a crush on Julia. Julia herself, of course, was in love with every dog on the planet. Unfortunately every dog on the planet made her sneeze.

‘This used to be a woman’s dog,’ Julia said.

‘Well, he’s a man’s dog now,’ Jackson said defiantly.

He was in the middle of fitting the booster seat that he had finally bought for Nathan. (‘About time,’ Julia said.) Jackson had managed to rescue a grateful Saab – mysteriously denuded of the light-up Virgin Mary – from a police pound just before it was sent to auction, thanks to Brian Jackson’s tracker. It had been found abandoned in the grounds of Fountains Abbey, a location that baffled Jackson. It was as if Jane had known where he wanted to go and had tried to make her way there ahead of him. ‘That’s ludicrous,’ Julia said.

Nathan was following him around, telling him about dinosaurs, barely stumbling over the names, ‘Velociraptor, Avaceratops, Diplodocus.’ Jackson wasn’t sure if his son knew they were extinct, didn’t want to ask him in case he spoiled some kind of mystery, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Jackson didn’t know that four-year-old boys could pronounce words like ‘Avaceratops’. He could barely remember Marlee at that age, her current sullen incarnation had begun to dominate earlier, sunnier versions of his daughter. Of course, there were a lot of things he didn’t know about four-year-old boys. He thought of his son as a baby and it was disturbing to see how far along the road to manhood he had already walked. One day that boy would outrun him, overtake him in the relay race of existence. And so it would go on and on until the sun cooled, or the meteor hit, or that bloody great volcano beneath Yellowstone grumbled its way back into life.

‘Well, everything dies,’ Julia said, absorbed in scratching the dog’s belly and staving off a sneeze. ‘That’s the way it goes.
Omnia mors aequat
. The great leveller.’

‘From darkness we come and to darkness shall we return,’ Jackson said. Darkly.

‘I think it’s dust, not darkness,’ Julia said. ‘And I choose to think that we come from the light and return to the light.’

‘What a glass-half-full kind of person you are.’

‘One of us has to be,’ Julia said. ‘Or the glass would be entirely empty.’
One of us
, as if they were a couple. Yet she was going to Italy on holiday, ‘with a friend’.

‘Who?’ Jackson asked and she shrugged and said, ‘Just a friend.’

‘Could you be any vaguer?’

This despite the fact that Jackson had suggested to her that perhaps the three of them might take a holiday together during her time off. A step towards reconciliation, perhaps towards reunion.

‘Like a family holiday?’ she said and Jackson thought about it and said, ‘Yes, I suppose that is what I mean.’ Julia wrinkled her nose and said, ‘No, sweetie, I don’t think so.’

He was surprised at how disappointed he felt. But then women were full of surprises. Every one of them, every which way, every day.

‘Where is Jonathan anyway?’ he asked.

Julia put up a hand as if stopping traffic, as if stopping an enormous towering truck. ‘I’m not speaking about Jonathan. OK?’

‘Happy never to mention his name again, I’m sure.’

‘That poor boy,’ she said, putting her arms protectively around her own boy. Their boy.

‘Michael?’

‘He went through so much.’

‘He’s OK now.’

‘In the same way that you and I are?’ Julia said. ‘After what happened to us when we were children?’

‘Yeah. That way.’

Michael Braithwaite was on his way to New Zealand even as they were speaking. A brother and sister reunion. He was a nice bloke, top-to-toe denim, overweight, unhealthy, cheerful. He liked nothing more than a barbecue with his wife and kids next to his swimming pool. He’d made a fortune in scrap. Some people lived their life against all the odds.

‘You and me too, sweetie,’ Julia said, patting him on the hand.

Linda Pallister had returned to Leeds and was set to appear before a tribunal and be made to answer for her actions. (‘Ah, the whirligig of time,’ Julia said.) She had helped a four-year-old witness to disappear. Put him in a care home in Roundhay run by nuns, changed his name. And never mentioned his sister to anyone. Told the nuns he was a liar, lied all the time, about having a sister, about his dad killing his mum. When Michael was eighteen he was handed his birth certificate and found out his name, but Linda Pallister never came forward and told him the truth about his mother, or his sister. ‘She was coerced,’ Michael Braithwaite said, ‘her own kid threatened.’