Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  Jackson explained to the sergeant on the duty desk that he was a private detective working for a solicitor. An aunt of Tracy Waterhouse had left a small legacy in a will but the family had lost touch (‘You know how it is with families’), all they knew was that she had been a constable with the West Yorkshire Police in 1975. Lies were best kept simple (It wasn’t me) and this one was complicated so he was half expecting to be found wanting, but the desk sergeant simply said, ‘1975? God, you’re going back a long way.’

  A man who looked like a washed-up boxer came out of a room at the back and, dropping a file on the desk, said, ‘What’s that?’

  The desk sergeant said, ‘This bloke’s looking for a WPC Tracy – what was it?’ he said, turning to Jackson.

  ‘Waterhouse.’

  ‘Waterhouse,’ the desk sergeant repeated to the beat-up boxer, as if he was translating from a foreign language. ‘Uniformed constable with us in . . .?’

  ‘1975,’ Jackson supplied.

  ‘1975.’

  ‘Tracy Waterhouse?’ the beat-up boxer said and laughed. ‘Trace? You know Big Tracy, Bill,’ he said. ‘Detective Superintendent Waterhouse, recently of this parish.’

  ‘Does that mean she’s dead?’ Jackson puzzled.

  ‘God, no, Tracy’s indestructible. Detective Inspector Craig Peters, by the way,’ he said, holding out his hand to Jackson.

  ‘Jackson Brodie,’ Jackson said, returning the handshake. He didn’t recollect the West Yorkshire Police Force being so affable during his misspent teenage years.

  ‘Tracy retired at the back end of last year,’ the inspector said. ‘Went to the Merrion Centre as head of security.’

  ‘Oh, Tracy Waterhouse,’ the desk sergeant said as if he’d finally managed to interpret the language.

  A door further down the corridor burst open and a grizzled old copper came barrelling out. They didn’t make them like that any more, which was probably a good thing. He glared around the reception area and Peters said to Jackson, ‘DS Crawford and Tracy go way back.’To Crawford himself, stomping towards them, he raised his voice and said, ‘Barry – this bloke’s asking after Tracy.’

  ‘Tracy?’ Crawford echoed, coming to a stop and glaring suspiciously at Jackson. Jackson supposed after a lifetime in the force you began to look at everyone suspiciously. Although he had his regrets, Jackson was glad he had got out when he had. ‘Jackson Brodie,’ he said, holding out his hand. Crawford shook it reluctantly. Jackson repeated the story about the will and long-lost cousin Tracy. He sensed he might be on shaky ground, he couldn’t know for sure that Tracy actually had any cousins, but Crawford said, ‘Oh yeah, I seem to remember her mother had a sister in Salford. They weren’t close, I seem to recollect.’

  ‘That’s right, Salford,’ Jackson said, relieved that he’d mined the correct seam.

  DI Peters said, ‘I was saying to him, Tracy works at the Merrion Centre now,’ and it was his turn to be glared at by Crawford.

  ‘What?’ Peters shrugged. ‘It’s not a state secret.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Crawford said to Jackson, all bluff and bluster, ‘don’t go bothering her at work. And I’m not giving you a home address so don’t even ask. She’s going on holiday, in fact she might already have gone. I’ll give her a ring and tell her you were asking for her.’

  ‘Well, thanks,’ Jackson said. ‘Tell her I’m staying at the Best Western. Hang on, I’ll give you my card.’ He handed over one of his Jackson Brodie – Private Investigator cards to Crawford, who thrust it carelessly into his pocket and said, ‘Unlike you, I’m a proper detective so if you don’t mind you can bugger off, pleasure to meet you, et cetera.’

  Charmed I’m sure, Jackson thought. What an old curmudgeon. As Julia would have said. An old curmudgeon who had been around for a long time. Jackson wondered if there was a way of introducing Carol Braithwaite’s name without it seeming odd. He decided there wasn’t but went for it anyway.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said casually. Crawford was already halfway along the corridor. He stopped and turned, hackles raised. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What?’

  ‘I just wondered – does the name Carol Braithwaite ring any bells with you?’

  Crawford stared at him. ‘Who?’

  ‘Carol Braithwaite,’ Jackson repeated.

  ‘Never heard of her.’

  The dog looked uneasy, when Jackson collected it outside Millgarth. It was very small in the grand order of things and must, he supposed, feel vulnerable most of the time. ‘Sorry about that,’ Jackson said. They were turning into Wallace and Gromit, he could feel it. Soon he’d be calling the dog ‘lad’ and sharing cheese and crackers with it. There were worse things, he supposed.

  ‘I’m looking for Tracy Waterhouse,’ Jackson said to the man, more youth than man, who eventually appeared from behind a nondescript grey door in the Merrion Centre. Ravaged by acne, if you knew Braille you could probably have read his face, he had a name badge that announced him to be Grant Leyburn. He looked like he was swimming in a very small gene pool. Jackson felt a twitch of disappointment that the pleasant Canadian girl wasn’t available.

  ‘Tracy Waterhouse. Is she here?’ Jackson asked.

  ‘No,’ Grant Leyburn said sullenly. ‘She isn’t.’

  ‘Do you know where I might find her?’ Jackson persisted.

  ‘She’s on holiday from tomorrow. Not back for a week.’

  ‘What about today?’

  ‘Sick.’

  ‘You can’t give me a phone number, I don’t suppose?’ Jackson said. ‘Or any other contact details?’ he added hopefully.

  Grant raised an overgrown eyebrow and said, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m guessing no?’

  ‘Got it in one.’

  Jackson fished out a card and handed it over. ‘Maybe you could give this to her when she’s back?’

  ‘A private detective?’ he said with a sneer. ‘Another one. She’s very popular.’

  ‘Another one?’ Jackson puzzled.

  ‘Yeah, someone here earlier.’ He glanced up suddenly at a big round security camera suspended from a ceiling. It looked like a small spaceship. He frowned and said, ‘Someone’s always watching.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Jackson said.

  He placed the photograph of the girl with the cock-eyed bunches on a chair near the bedroom window where the best light was. He took a photograph of it with his phone. It had a slight ghostly aura, the photograph of a photograph, twice removed from life. Virtual reality.

  He flicked through the photographs on his phone’s camera roll until he came across the one taken on Hope McMaster’s arrival in New Zealand. If not the same child as the one shivering on a British beach then an identical twin. In both photographs the little girl was grinning from ear to ear, already a child with exclamation marks in her brain. If it was a photo of Hope McMaster then it confirmed one thing, she had not appeared fully formed out of nowhere. She had a past. She had once stood, shivering and grinning, on a windswept beach and someone had taken a photo of her. Who?

  It would be the middle of the night in the topsy-turvy world that Hope McMaster inhabited. Do you think this is you? he wrote and then thought that sounded prejudicial and erased the sentence and retyped, Do you recognize the girl in this photograph? She would wake up in her tomorrow to either surprise or disappointment.

  Jackson googled ‘Carol Braithwaite’ on his phone and came up with nothing. Any combination of Carol Braithwaite/murder/ Leeds/1975, plus any other word he could throw in the mix, came up with nothing. Carol Braithwaite was an adult in 1975 so she couldn’t be Hope McMaster, but she could be Hope’s mother. He had found no mention in the newspaper report of any children but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Was the girl in the photograph Carol Braithwaite’s daughter? Linda Pallister dealt with children nobody wanted, had she dealt with Carol Braithwaite’s? Finessed an under-the-counter adoption? An act of goodwill perhaps, giving a small child a good home and saving it from festering in
the system.

  The only record he could find online of any girl being abducted in 1975 was the Black Panther’s victim Lesley Whittle. The kidnapping of a small girl would have been news headlines and if she was never found it would reverberate through the media for years. In his time Jackson had looked for plenty of children who were missing, he had never looked for a child who wasn’t missing. Even the most careless parent was unlikely to lose a child and not mention it, unless they had intended to misplace it, of course.

  It was more likely that Hope McMaster had been unwanted and simply been given away. That would explain why there was no record. When Jackson was a child a lot of unofficial ‘adoptions’ took place, leaving no paper trail behind them. Illegitimate kids taken in by their grandparents, growing up thinking their mother was their sister. Barren sisters taking in a surplus nephew or niece, raising them as a prized only child. Jackson’s own mother had an elder brother she had never met. He had been given away to a childless aunt and uncle in Dublin before Jackson’s mother was born and he was ‘spoilt’, according to Jackson’s jealous mother. ‘Spoilt’, in his mother’s vocabulary, meant that he had an education, went to Trinity College, became a barrister, married well and died in bourgeois comfort many years later.

  Linda Pallister was the key, all he had to do was talk to her, something she seemed to be going out of her way to avoid.

  Neither Tracy Waterhouse nor Linda Pallister were in the phone book but that was no surprise. Police and social workers kept a low profile in public otherwise every nutter and ex-con would be hammering on their door at midnight. Jackson went on to 192.com, friend of snoops and investigators who had no access to official records.

  There he found one ‘Linda Pallister’ and four ‘T. Waterhouse’s, one of those a ‘Tracy’. He had plenty of credits with 192.com and was able to get addresses for both women. They knew enough to go exdirectory but weren’t savvy enough to remove themselves from the electoral register, which was how 192.com had got hold of their details. It shouldn’t be allowed, but it was, thank goodness.

  Jackson retrieved the Saab from the multi-storey car park at the Merrion Centre where it had been corralled since he arrived in Leeds yesterday. He wasn’t sure of the protocol of dogs in cars. You saw them all the time staring out of the back or hanging out of the passenger window, their ears fluttering in the slipstream, but an unsecured dog was an accident waiting to happen. When he was in the force there had been a woman killed in a traffic accident. She braked suddenly at a red light, and her Dalmatian in the seat behind her carried on travelling. Broke her neck. Stupid way to die.

  The dog had hopped on to the back seat as if this were its accustomed place but Alpha Dog, Jackson, said, ‘No,’ sternly. The dog was unsure but eager to please, studying Jackson’s face for a clue. ‘There,’ Jackson said, pointing at the front seat passenger footwell, and the dog jumped in and settled down. ‘OK,’ he said when he was finally satisfied that the dog wasn’t going to be hurled through the car like a missile. ‘Let’s go and find us some women.’ He put Kendel Carson’s ‘Cowboy Boots’ on the car stereo, a song that wasn’t as redneck as the title suggested.

  He started the engine and adjusted the rear-view mirror. Catching sight of himself in it he was surprised anew by his military buzz-cut.

  Linda Pallister lived in a traditional semi near Roundhay Park. The curtains were drawn even though it was the afternoon. It had the air of a house in mourning. Jackson rang the bell and knocked hard but there was no answer. He tried the back door with the same result. The mysteriously absent Linda Pallister remained just that, mysteriously absent.

  Jackson knocked on the door of the neighbouring house. He struck lucky with the woman (‘Mrs Potter’) who answered the door. He knew the type – they were usually watching reruns of Midsomer Murders or Poirot behind the net curtains in the middle of the afternoon, pot of tea and a plate of chocolate digestives to hand. They made invaluable witnesses because they were always on watch.

  ‘She had a visitor last night,’ Mrs Potter duly reported. ‘A man,’ she added with relish.

  ‘Have you seen her today?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t spend all my time watching the neighbourhood goings-on, I don’t know why people would think that.’

  ‘Of course not, Mrs Potter,’ Jackson said, feigning empathy. It was never a tactic that worked well for him (especially with women) but that didn’t stop him trying. ‘Look,’ he took one of his cards out of his wallet and handed it to the woman, ‘if she comes back, could you give her this and ask her to give me a ring.’

  ‘Private detective?’ she said, reading the card. He needn’t have bothered with empathy, the idea of a private detective was intriguing enough for her to say, ‘Call me Janice.’ She dropped her voice as if Linda Pallister might be eavesdropping on them. ‘Can you tell me why you’re interested in Linda?’

  ‘I could but then I’d have to kill you,’ Jackson said. For a moment, the woman looked as if she believed him. Jackson smiled. Yep, willing to give a woman a cheap thrill at the drop of a hat these days.

  There was more life inside Tracy Waterhouse’s house down the road in Headingley, although unfortunately not coming from Tracy herself. The front door was open and a man was packing tools away in a van. Tracy, he informed Jackson in an East European accent (your classic Polish builder, Jackson supposed), had gone out this morning and he didn’t know when she would be back. ‘But I hope she will be,’ he said and laughed. ‘She owes me money.’

  Despite Jackson’s claim to be Tracy’s long-lost cousin the workman wouldn’t give him Tracy’s mobile number. ‘She’s a very private person,’ he said.

  Instead of collecting Cistercian abbeys, now it seemed Jackson was collecting women who were missing in action.

  He sat in his car in the car park and dialled Tracy’s mobile. It went to voicemail and he left a message. Barry’s car smelled of freesias, Amy’s favourite flower. Why hadn’t she had them in her wedding bouquet instead of those stupid orange daisy things? There was no flower that meant anything to her now. All Ivan’s fault. Blame him for everything. He was coming out on Saturday, a pal of Barry’s in the prison service had given him the date and time. Barry would be there to greet him.

  He was taking the freesias to Sam’s small grave. He went more often than he ever told Barbara. They visited the grave separately. Barbara left things that turned his stomach – teddy bears and toy trucks. He always left freesias.

  Barry raked through his pocket for the card that the Jackson bloke had given him but couldn’t find it anywhere. He phoned Tracy’s number in the Merrion Centre and a prize pillock answered and said she was off sick. He phoned her home number and there was just a generic answer-machine message. Finally he phoned her mobile and left a message. Phoned again and left a second message. Remembered something else, left a third message.

  Something was up, but what exactly? Tracy didn’t have any cousins. Didn’t have any family at all, she was the only child of only children. She had nobody in Salford, that was for sure. He had to warn her if someone dodgy was after her. Linda Pallister had mentioned a private detective named ‘Jackson’ snooping around and now here was this clot turning up at Millgarth looking for Tracy. Does the name Carol Braithwaite ring any bells? he said. One bloody great bell tolling for the dead, waking the living. Ring out the bells, bring out the dead.

  Before Amy’s accident he used to feel sorry for Tracy, one of those women who’d sacrificed motherhood to the job. They reached the menopause and realized that they hadn’t had kids, that their DNA was going to die with them and nobody was ever going to love them the way a kid would. Sad, really. But after Amy’s accident Barry envied Tracy. She didn’t have to feel unbearable pain every living second of every living day.

  He started the engine and drove to the cemetery, breathing in the scent of freesias all the way.

  ‘Are we going home?’ Courtney asked when Tracy strapped her back in the car seat outside Toys ‘R’ U
s. The boot was full of stuff, most of it plastic. All those tiny ancient marine life forms falling to the ocean floor to come back to life one day as a Disney Fairies Tea Set.

  At Courtney’s request Tracy had also bought a dressing-up costume, a pink fairy outfit, complete with wings, wand and tiara. Courtney had insisted on getting changed into it in the car and she was now sitting stiffly in the back of the car in a pose that reminded Tracy of the Queen at her coronation.

  ‘Are we going home?’Tracy repeated thoughtfully as if it wasn’t so much a question as a philosophical conundrum. What did Courtney mean by ‘home’? Tracy wondered. Where was it? Kelly’s undoubtedly squalid pad, or somewhere else?

  There was stuff you did with kids and stuff you didn’t. For all of her working life Tracy had witnessed the stuff you weren’t supposed to do with them. Building sandcastles on a beach, feeding bread to ducks, eating a picnic sitting on a plaid blanket in the park – these were things you did with kids. Stealing them was one of the things you didn’t do. Bottom line. She had taken a child that wasn’t hers.

  ‘Actually,’ Tracy said, ‘we’re not. Not going home just yet. Couple of errands to run.’

  It took half an hour in the bank to empty her account of its savings. Kid got through a banana and an apple. Tracy had brought her passport with her, knew the drill on fraud prevention, didn’t stop the teller behaving as if she were robbing the place. Security cameras everywhere and thirty thousand in cash in her handbag. Hard not to look guilty.

  After that they went to see her solicitor and Tracy gave him instructions to sell her house. Solicitors were slow-moving animals, you couldn’t get out of their offices in under two bananas. Could you overdose on bananas? She could hear her mother’s voice, ‘You’ll turn into a cheese and onion crisp if you carry on eating them like that.’ (She hadn’t.) And the bananas were small, ‘fun-sized’, according to the supermarket label. Tracy ate one in the car, wondered what people did before bananas. She didn’t understand what ‘fun-sized’ meant in the context of a banana. She’d arrested a guy once peddling kiddy porn, Fun-sized Treats one of the videos was called. Nothing innocent. Anywhere.