Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  Barry called her back almost straight away. Nada, nothing, no chicks fallen out of any nests. She caught the sound of a siren in the background, lots of semi-audible police chatter. Bloody hell but she missed it. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the incident van. Dead woman in a skip in Mabgate,’ Barry said. ‘Working girl.’

  ‘We’re all working girls, Barry. What are you doing there?’

  ‘Just having a shufti. I happened to be on call and caught it.’

  ‘Who’s the SIO?’

  ‘I’ve put Andy Miller on it,’ Barry said. ‘New to you. Fast-track graduate. Very shiny.’ Nothing shiny about Barry at all. Jurassic. Like Tracy. Educated in the school of hard knocks before graduating from the university of life. ‘I’ve got a new girl, one of yours methinks,’ he said. ‘Come over from Drugs and Organized Crime. Gemma something.’

  ‘Gemma Holroyd. She made inspector a couple of months ago. Why don’t you make her the SIO? It would be her first.’

  ‘A virgin, no thanks.’

  ‘She’s good and she’s not a girl, Barry. They’re called women.’

  ‘Thought she was a lezzy?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re women too.’ Why even bother? Barry was as unreconstructed as they got and was going to retire and die that way, completely out of step with the way things were these days. You could have popped him back into the seventies and he would have fitted in perfectly. Gene Hunt without the charisma, Jack Regan without the hard moral centre.

  ‘So, who are you thinking for it?’ Tracy asked. ‘A punter, I presume?’

  ‘Who else?’ Barry probably thought prostitutes had it coming to them. In fact she knew he did. ‘Whores,’ Barry always said, couldn’t get him out of the habit no matter what you said to him. (‘Political correctness? About whores? Do me a favour.’)

  Tracy had a sudden, unexpected memory of the endless, thankless task of indexing cards during the Ripper investigation. The police had people out taking down registrations of cars in the red-light district, spotting ones that turned up regularly, triple sightings in Bradford, Leeds and Manchester. Sutcliffe was one of those, of course – interviewed nine times, exonerated. So many mistakes. Tracy was still naïve, no idea how many men used prostitutes, thousands from all walks of life. She could hardly believe it. Gambling, drinking, whoring – the three pillars of western civilization.

  Tracy could still remember the first time she saw a prostitute. She was twelve years old, in Leeds town centre on a Saturday with a schoolfriend, Pauline Barratt. A burger in Wimpy was the height of sophistication for them and the surreptitious application of Miners eyeliner in the toilets in Schofields felt downright audacious. They got into a matinee of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in the old Leeds Odeon and afterwards in a side street somewhere near the station, looming out of the drab fog of a winter twilight, there had been a startling woman. She was lounging in a doorway, Myra Hindley hair and a short skirt that revealed her dimpled thighs, blue with cold and bruises. Her glittering green eye-shadow made Tracy think of a snake. ‘Prozzie,’ Pauline hissed, and they ran away in terror.

  She was the least attractive woman Tracy had ever seen, deepening even further the mystery of what boys wanted from girls. If she thought about her mother, repressed and conventional, or her own unprepossessing twelve-year-old self, Tracy understood that there was no competition with the green-eyed woman of the night.

  ‘I won’t miss all this,’ Barry said. ‘Standing around in the cold looking at dead whores.’

  ‘Standing around? I thought you were in the incident van.’

  Barry sighed heavily and said, apropos of nothing as far as Tracy could tell, ‘It’s a different world now, Trace.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s a better one, Barry. What’s going on, suffering from existential dread for the first time in your life?’ Probably the wrong thing to say to a man who’d lost a grandson, whose daughter was a vegetable. (‘Persistent vegetative state,’ Barbara corrected.) Some mornings Tracy woke up, especially if she’d been on the Beck’s, and wondered if she was in a persistent vegetative state herself. Stagnant.

  ‘I miss the good old days.’

  ‘They weren’t good, Barry. They were rubbish.’ The Good Old Days. She had a sudden vision of the Cookridge madam, dead in her plush velvet seat at the City Varieties. Barry might remember her name, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction though. ‘How long now before you’re retired, Barry?’ Barry had stayed in the force even longer than Tracy had.

  ‘Two weeks. Going on a cruise. The Caribbean. Barbara’s idea. God knows why. I bet you were glad to get out, weren’t you,Trace?’

  ‘Is the Pope a Nazi?’ Tracy forced a laugh. ‘Would have got out years ago if I’d known.’ Liar, she thought to herself.

  ‘You heard about Rex Marshall?’ Barry asked.

  ‘Dropped dead on the golf course. Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  ‘Yes, well, he wasn’t a bad boss,’ Barry said defensively.

  ‘To you maybe,’ Tracy said.

  ‘You won’t be going to the funeral on Saturday then?’

  ‘Not unless you pay me . . . Barry? There’s something else.’

  ‘There’s always something else,Trace. And then you die and there’s nothing else. Of course it turns out you don’t even need to be dead for that,’ he said glumly.

  ‘Linda Pallister left a message on my answer machine,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Linda Pallister? That mad bat?’ Barry couldn’t stop the snort of laughter that escaped him. The laugh turned into a tremendous sigh of dissatisfaction. Tracy knew how it went for Barry – Linda Pallister made him think of Chloe Pallister, Chloe Pallister made him think of Amy, thinking of Amy pulled him down into a dark place.

  ‘What about?’ he asked. ‘What was the message about?’

  ‘She said she was in trouble. She mentioned Carol Braithwaite’s name.’

  ‘Carol Braithwaite?’ Barry said, as if he’d never heard the name before. Barry was a bad liar, always had been.

  ‘Yeah, Barry, Carol Braithwaite. The Lovell Park murder. You remember, don’t pretend you don’t.’

  ‘Oh, that Carol Braithwaite,’ he said, all studied nonchalance. ‘What about her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tracy said. ‘Linda didn’t say. I tried to phone her back but there was no answer. Has she been in touch with you?’

  ‘Carol Braithwaite?’

  ‘No, Barry,’ Tracy said patiently, ‘not unless she’s risen from the grave. Linda Pallister, has Linda phoned you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, if she does, try and find out what she was on about, will you? Maybe she’s going to come clean.’

  ‘Come clean?’ he said.

  ‘About what happened to the kid.’

  Tracy didn’t know why she was bothering. She had bigger fish to fry. And it was nothing to do with her any more. She was starting a new life. She’s leaving home. ‘Well, anyway, cheers for the info, Barry,’ she said, suddenly brisk. ‘See you around.’

  ‘Not if I see you first, you old mare.’

  ‘I’m on holiday actually, from Friday.’

  ‘Well, make sure you’re back in time for my leaving do.’

  ‘What leaving do?’

  ‘Ha, ha. Piss off.’

  Would this day never end? Apparently not.

  Just before midnight the phone rang. Who called at this time? Trouble, that was who. A spasm of fear grabbed Tracy’s heart. She’d been found out, someone wanted the kid back. She thought of that helpless little thing upstairs in the spare bedroom and her heart cramped further.

  She took a deep breath and picked up the receiver, let it just be mad-as-a-bag-of-cats Linda Pallister, she prayed. Tracy was relieved that it was just the mystery caller. They listened to each other for a minute or so. The silence was almost soothing.

  ‘Not if I see you first, you old mare.’ Nearest he could get to affection. What was all that about? There’ve been no kids reported going astray, have there? It ha
d always been the kids that got to Tracy. Well, they got to everyone, but Tracy had this thing about kids. Started with Lovell Park.

  Carol Braithwaite wasn’t a name that Barry had ever expected to hear again and then that mad cow Linda Pallister phoned earlier, babbling on about being in trouble. He hadn’t spoken to her since Sam’s funeral. Chloe had been Amy’s chief bridesmaid. He couldn’t go to that place, couldn’t think about that day, walking her down the aisle. He shouldn’t have given her away, he should have kept her. Safe.

  ‘Mr Crawford,’ Linda had said, ‘Barry? Do you remember Lovell Park?’

  ‘No, Linda,’ Barry said. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

  ‘Someone’s asking questions,’ she said.

  ‘Someone’s always asking questions,’ Barry said. ‘That’s because there’s never enough answers to go round.’

  ‘A private detective called Jackson came to see me this morning,’ Linda Pallister said. ‘He was asking questions about Carol Braithwaite. I didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘I’d keep on keeping my mouth shut if I were you,’ Barry said. ‘You’ve managed it for thirty-five years.’

  And now here was Tracy phoning him, asking if Linda had been in touch about Carol Braithwaite. He had lied, of course. What was that, Barry thought, a cock crowing? Risen from the grave, Tracy had said. A bloody great rooster. One, two, three.

  Tracy used to bang on about Linda Pallister and Carol Braithwaite, claiming Linda had made the kid ‘disappear’. At the time he’d told her she was talking through her hat. But of course she was right, everyone had known more about Lovell Park than they let on, everyone except Tracy. She’d been like a bloodhound, trying to find out. It was a long time ago. All those blokes, DCS Walter Eastman, Ray Strickland, Rex Marshall, Len Lomax, one law for themselves, one law for everyone else. Eastman long dead and now Rex Marshall had played his last round of golf too, lying in an undertaker’s somewhere with his arteries furred up like old lead pipes. Falling like skittles. Only Strickland and Lomax left. And Barry. Who’d be the last man standing?

  Barry should have said something, done something, but at the time one dead prostitute hadn’t seemed very important in the greater scheme of things. When you got older you realized that every single thing counted. Especially the dead.

  He turned his collar up against the cold. All the warmth of the day had disappeared. Why didn’t men his age wear hats any more? When did that stop? His father used to wear a flat cap. Tweed. He quite fancied one himself but Barbara wouldn’t allow it. She controlled his wardrobe. He would rather be out here in the cold looking at the body of a dead whore in a skip than at home with his wife. Barbara would be sitting on the sofa, all prim and proper, not a hair out of place, watching some shit on the telly, quietly seething beneath the make-up. She’d spent thirty years trying to change him, she wasn’t going to give up on the challenge now. It was a woman’s job to try and improve a man. It was a man’s job to resist improvement. That was the way the world worked, always had, always would.

  Before, before his grandson died, before Amy, his lovely daughter, was reduced to an empty shell, he hadn’t minded what state his relationship with her was in. It was a traditional, old-fashioned marriage, all the trimmings – he went out to work, Barbara stayed home and nagged. He spent half his life in the doghouse for one domestic misdemeanour or another. Didn’t bother him, he just went down the pub.

  After the accident there was no point to anything. All hope gone. But still he shuffled on, one foot in front of the other. Mr Plod the Policeman. Doing his job. Because when he stopped he was going to have to stay at home with Barbara every day. Face up to the futility of everything. Bloody Caribbean cruise, as if that would make things better.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘The SOCOs say we can move the body.’

  ‘Not my case, lad, talk to DI Miller. I’m just an innocent bystander.’

  Ten o’clock. A long, lonely night stretched ahead of him.

  Jackson thought about phoning Julia, last resort of the insomniac, a woman who abhorred the vacuum of a silence. She could talk anyone to sleep, could give a flock of sheep a run for their money any day, leave a donkey completely legless. Then he remembered how annoyed she had been last time he had called her late at night (‘I have to be on set at six. Is this important?’) and he decided not to risk her indignation.

  Boredom drove him to read the folder of hotel information from cover to cover, the fire escape plans on the back of the door, a copy of Yorkshire Life, anything that wasn’t nailed down. He considered, and rejected, the idea of playing a mindless game on his phone and was eventually driven to look for a Gideon Bible in the bedside drawers but when he found one he realized he wasn’t that desperate yet. A yellow Post-it note fluttered out of the Bible. In pencil, someone had written, ‘The treasure here is you.’ Jackson stuck the Post-it note on his forehead and died of boredom.

  He came back from the dead after ten minutes, a Lazarus licked to life by a canine redeemer. The dog looked worried. Could a dog look worried? Jackson yawned. The dog yawned. There had to be more to life than this. He folded the Post-it note and put it in his wallet in case he pitched up dead and the people who found him doubted his true worth.

  ‘Well, the sun’s long past the yardarm,’ he said. ‘Time to raid the minibar.’ Did he used to speak out loud? Before he had the dog? He was pretty sure that he hadn’t. Ergo, as Julia would have said, he was talking to the dog. Was that a bad sign? The dog looked at him as if it was interested in what he was saying. Jackson suspected that he was assigning emotions to the dog that it wasn’t actually experiencing.

  He drank down a doll’s house-sized bottle of whisky and chased it with another. Leeds was famed for its nightlife, Jackson thought, why not go out and sample some of it? Just because he was in his golden years didn’t mean he couldn’t kick up his heels a little, make contact with his inner shining silver youth. Better surely than sitting in a hotel room, talking to a dog.

  His sister used to go dancing in Leeds on Saturday nights with her friends. He could still conjure up Saturday evenings – Francis bolting his tea so he could get out and drink and pick up girls and Niamh in a cloud of hairspray and perfume, fretting about missing the bus. She always came home on the last bus. Until the day she never came home at all.

  Later, before Peter Sutcliffe was caught and confessed, when he was still the nameless Ripper and had a large back catalogue of murders to his name, Jackson sometimes wondered if it wasn’t possible that Niamh had fallen within his evil ken. His first victim wasn’t until 1975 but he had started attacking women before that, as early as 1969 he had been found with a hammer and charged with ‘going equipped for stealing’ and only with hindsight could you see what the hammer was for. Manchester, Keighley, Huddersfield, Halifax, Leeds, Bradford his hunting ground, only a short drive from Jackson’s home town. Niamh was strangled, Sutcliffe’s victims were hit on the head and then stabbed as a rule. But who knew what mistakes a man committed when he was still new to the job.

  Why did men kill women? After all these years Jackson still didn’t know the answer to that question. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to.

  He had a quick shower and attempted to spruce himself up before taking the dog out to perform its evening toilette, going through the whole palaver with the rucksack again. He wondered about buying something smaller, a terrier-sized bag, he was pretty sure that Paws for Thought would sell them. He had tried zipping the dog inside his jacket but it made him look as if he was pregnant. Never a good look. Not on a man anyway.

  Jackson felt bad about the steaming brown coil the dog left behind and he had to retrieve an old newspaper from a bin to wrap it in. This was not a problem he had considered before, now he realized that he would have to buy something to pick up crap with. It was the first real drawback he’d encountered to having the dog.

  He took the dog back to the room and left it lying Sphinx-like on the bed, watching
him sadly. He felt its tragic abandoned eyes on him all the way down in the lift, through reception, and into the street. Perhaps he should have left the television on for it.

  When he hit the street he realized that he was starving. He’d had nothing since a coffee and sandwich in the café at Kirkstall Abbey much earlier in the day. He went in search of food and ended up in an Italian restaurant that felt like a garden centre where he drank a half-carafe of Chianti and ate an indifferent bowl of pasta before heading off to look for the bright lights. After that it was all a bit of a blur. Unfortunately.

  She woke in the dark, no idea how long she’d been asleep. Thought she was back at home in her own bed. Took her a long time to remember she was in Bluebell Cottage. Tilly missed the noise of London, she needed it to sleep. It was dark here. Too dark. Dark and quiet. Unnatural.

  Tilly sat up in bed and listened but the silence was profound. Sometimes when she listened in the middle of the night she could hear all kinds of tiny rustlings and squeaks and squeals as if mysterious wildlife was cavorting around the cottage. She was occasionally woken by a dreadful high-pitched keening which she suspected was some small creature having its life snuffed out by a fox. She always imagined foxes dressed in checked waistcoats and breeches, a hat with a feather. A legacy, she supposed, of some book from her childhood. As a child she had seen a diorama somewhere of stuffed rabbits dressed up as humans. Does in frocks and pelisses, bucks dressed like dandies and squires, a musical quartet, complete with miniature instruments. Rabbits posing as servants in mob caps, in aprons. A heartbreaking row of tiny baby rabbits tucked up in bed, fast asleep for ever. It was repellent and fascinating at the same time and it haunted Tilly’s imagination for years afterwards.

  But tonight there were no rabbit hoedowns or mice quadrilles, cunning Mr Fox wasn’t seducing the henhouse, there was just a silence so deep and dark that it was like the sounds of a different dimension rather than the absence of noise.

  Tilly clambered awkwardly out of bed, went over to the open window. When she drew back the curtains she was surprised to see a candle burning steadily in a bedroom window in the cottage across the way. Jesus bids us shine with a pure, clear light. Someone keeping a vigil or sending a signal? Late to bed or early to rise? The candle seemed to have a meaning beyond itself but she couldn’t imagine what it might be. Like a little candle burning in the night.