They had re-entered Valerie the same way that they had left, via the fire escape. The smell of bacon was already seeping under the door, fighting with the scent of air freshener trapped in the soft furnishings.
He squeezed himself into Valerie’s small ensuite bathroom and had the best shower of his life, despite the postage-stamp size of the towel and the wafer of soap that soon melted into nothing. A near-death experience proved to be just the thing to work up a man’s appetite and once he was presentable again he left the dog – immediately forlorn at this ungrateful desertion – and exited Valerie in the conventional way to investigate Mrs Reid’s ‘full Yorkshire breakfast’.
Nothing discernibly Yorkshire about the breakfast at all. Jackson didn’t know what he’d expected – Yorkshire pudding, a symbolic white rose cut into the toast perhaps – but instead there was the usual fry-up consisting of flabby slices of bacon, a pale, glassy egg, mushrooms like slugs and a sausage that inevitably reminded him of a dog turd. Worst of all was the (predictable) disappointment afforded by the coffee, which was weak and acidic and left Jackson feeling slightly queasy.
Only one other table in the dining room was occupied, by a middle-aged couple. Apart from the occasional inaudible remark of the ‘pass-the-salt’ kind the twosome breakfasted in a glum silence, bordering on the hostile.
The lack of marital conversation gave Jackson peace to digest the night’s events. The ‘message’ in the early hours – Leave Carol Braithwaite alone. What did that mean – that he had got too close to an inconvenient truth? Yet he didn’t feel as if he had found out anything at all about Carol Braithwaite’s death. Quite the opposite. Who was warning him off and why? Was it because of something Marilyn Nettles had told him yesterday, something she had said? Or perhaps something she hadn’t said? She had been economical with her answers.
Something had been nagging away at him as he fell asleep last night, before his encounter with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He had been thinking about Jennifer, the girl he and Steve had snatched in Munich, trying to remember the name of her brother and then – it came to Jackson suddenly – he hadn’t asked Marilyn Nettles the right question. It was such a simple question as well.
The breakfasts were being served by a young girl. She looked familiar and it was only when she refilled his cup, caffeine was caffeine, after all, no matter how bad, that he recognized her as the female half of the Goth couple in St Mary’s Church yesterday. Now her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was devoid of make-up. All her piercings, or at least the ones that were visible, had been removed. A truculent teenager rather than a wannabe vampire.
‘Lovely morning,’ Jackson said conversationally to her and was rewarded with a surly look.
‘If you’re not being made to work,’ she said.
‘Are you?’ he said. ‘Being made to?’ She didn’t look as if she could be made to do anything.
‘White slave trade.’
It seemed unlikely. In Whitby.
She shambled out of the dining room, carelessly dripping coffee from the pot as she went. He heard the door to the kitchen being pushed open aggressively and the sound of something crashing and breaking. Mrs Reid’s militant response was countered by the girl’s voice whining, ‘Oh, Mum!’ in exactly the same mardy tone that Marlee adopted nowadays.
The girl barged out of the kitchen again and stomped up the stairs.
‘You just can’t get the staff these days, can you?’ Jackson said cheerfully to his gloomy fellow breakfasters, neither of whom felt it necessary to come back with witty repartee, or indeed any repartee at all.
He rewarded the dog with the turd-like sausage, purloined from the Yorkshire breakfast, only regretting that everything that went in one end had to come out at the other.
Jackson stripped the bed, bundled up the sheets and left them on the mattress. On top of the sheets he placed twenty-five pounds in payment for the night. No tip, as there had been no discernible service worth rewarding. Easy money for Mrs Reid. He could have checked out in the normal way, of course, it just felt better like this. Saved a lot of unnecessary talking.
‘Won’t be long,’ he said to the dog, tying it to a railing in Marilyn Nettles’s yard.
There was no sign of life in her cottage. He was surprised, she hardly seemed the type to be an early riser. The house had the same abandoned feeling as Linda Pallister’s. Where on earth were all these women disappearing to? Was there a black hole somewhere that was sucking in middle-aged women – Tracy Waterhouse, Linda Pallister and now Marilyn Nettles. And all somehow connected to Hope McMaster.
Or was it some kind of conspiracy – Brian Jackson, Tracy Waterhouse, Marilyn Nettles, Linda Pallister – the whole lot of them involved in it. Jackson didn’t know what ‘it’ was, but that was the point, wasn’t it? That was what solving something was about, it was hunting the ‘it’ down, pinning its arms above its head and making it spill the beans. It was like being in a game, a game where you didn’t know the rules or the identity of the other players and where you were unsure of the goal. Was he a pawn or a player? Was he becoming paranoid? (Becoming? he heard Julia say.)
He got down on his hands and knees and peered through the cat flap. Dead air. ‘You’ll never fit through there,’ a voice said.
Marilyn Nettles shuffled into the yard, laden with Somerfield plastic bags. Jackson heard the clink of glass on glass. Not a black hole then, nor a woman in jeopardy, just a raddled old alcoholic out doing her daily shop.
‘What is it now?’ she asked.
‘How many children did Carol Braithwaite have?’
They left Whitby. On a bus.
Jackson sat on the top deck and admired the scenery. The dog lay at his feet. They were going back to Leeds. The place it all started. The place it would all end, if Jackson had anything to do with it. In Scarborough they exchanged the bus for a train. Jackson didn’t like trains. He still had flashbacks to the crash, unpleasant sensory hallucinations – the smell of burning oil and electrical fires, the screech of metal on metal. He hadn’t been back on a train since.
A woman had lost control of her car, the car had gone over the bridge, fallen on the track, derailed the train. Fifteen people dead. The woman had a brain tumour that had caused a seizure. One small cluster of rogue cells personal to the owner, that was all it took to kill and maim en masse. For want of a nail.
Jackson really didn’t like trains.
He had eaten breakfast at home. Barry hadn’t done that for a while, usually downed a quick cup of coffee and left for Millgarth. Barbara used to fret when he did that, you need a breakfast inside you, everyone knows it’s the most important meal, yackety-yak. Not any more.
‘I fancy bacon and eggs,’ he said.
When she set it down in front of him he said, ‘Aren’t you going to have any?’ and she said, ‘Not hungry,’ but she sat opposite him and had her usual breakfast of Valium and tea. She was dressed in a smart two-piece, her hair teased and backcombed.
‘Thanks, love,’ he said when he’d wiped the plate clean with a piece of bread. He stood up and drained his coffee down and then said, ‘Well, I’ll be off then.’
‘He gets out today,’ she said in an emotionless voice.
‘I know,’ he said. He attempted to kiss Barbara goodbye, something else he hadn’t done for a long time, but she successfully feinted the move and instead he ended up patting her on the shoulder. ‘Bye then,’ he said.
It was two years since Barbara had invited Amy and Ivan to dinner, spent all day making complicated Delia recipes and then Barry had spent all evening telling Ivan what a waster he was. He was losing his business, going to be declared a bankrupt, the man who had promised to protect and support his daughter.
‘Barry? How’s it going?’ he said when Barry opened the front door to them. He hated the way Ivan called him ‘Barry’, as if they were mates down the pub, as if they were equals. ‘You can’t expect him to call you Mr Crawford,’ Barbara said. ‘He’s your son-in-law, for heaven’s sake.�
� In fact, Barry thought, he would have preferred it if Ivan called him Superintendent.
‘A little aperitif?’ Barbara said when she’d taken their coats and they’d parked Sam in the cot upstairs. Barbara had bought duplicates of everything – cot, car seat, high chair, buggy – for their own house, imagining a lifetime of babysitting.
‘Lovely, Barbara,’ Ivan said, rubbing his hands, ‘I’ll have a white wine.’ Barry knew he made him nervous but he didn’t care. Before Barbara had even got as far as taking the Chardonnay out of the fridge Barry had started muttering sarcastic comments under his breath. ‘Dad. Don’t,’ Amy said, touching his arm.
Ivan looked apprehensively at Amy over Delia’s chocolate ricotta cheesecake. He had the look of a man about to jump off a cliff. Cleared his throat, said, ‘We were wondering, Barry – Amy and I – about a loan, ten thousand pounds, to help get us back on our feet?’
Barry wanted to belt him one right there at the table. ‘I’ve worked hard all my life,’ he said, all patriarchal bluster, ‘and you want me to hand over my money to you because you’re a useless tosser. Why not just cut out the middle man and piss it straight down the drain?’
Amy jumping up from the table, ‘I’m not staying to hear my husband insulted, Dad,’ running up the stairs to get Sam out of his cot.
Before Barry knew it she was outside, strapping his grandson into his car seat. ‘Honestly, Dad, sometimes you are such a shit.’
Barbara standing on the doorstep, face set in concrete, staring after the car. ‘He’s over the limit,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a car. This is all your fault, Barry. As usual.’
He would have given his daughter anything and he had baulked at a measly ten-thousand-quid loan. He could have said yes, they could have opened a bottle of something fizzy to celebrate and eaten the chocolate ricotta cheesecake. Barbara could have said, ‘Oh, you can’t drive like that, the beds are all made up, you’d better stay over,’ and Barry could have gone upstairs and kissed his sleeping grandson goodnight. Didn’t happen like that, did it?
When he walked into Millgarth he nearly fell over Chloe Pallister, as agitated as a disturbed anthill. ‘My mum’s gone missing,’ she said.
‘Missing?’ Barry said.
‘Since Wednesday night. I went round to her house, no sign of her, she hasn’t been into work, no one’s seen her.’
Barry remembered how Amy had tossed her bouquet, aimed it directly at her best friend, but Chloe managed to fall over her own orange-satin feet and a more competitive girl caught the flowers.
‘Did you notice if anything was missing?’ he asked.
‘Her passport.’
‘Her passport,’ he said. ‘Well, if her passport’s missing she’s most likely run away.’
‘Run away? My mother?’
It did sound unlikely, Linda wasn’t the kind to run away, still he persisted with this easy explanation. ‘Given up this crap life and gone to live on a beach in Greece,’ he said. ‘At this moment she’s probably sitting in a taverna somewhere, making eyes at a waiter, hoping for a bit of Shirley Valentine.’
‘Not my mum,’ Chloe said stoutly.
‘Well, we can all surprise ourselves sometimes, pet,’ he said. His head felt woolly. Didn’t have the energy for this. Had things to do. Take no prisoners, leave no bodies. Led Chloe Pallister into an interview room and said someone would come and take a statement. Left her there and forgot to tell anyone.
Gemma Holroyd put her head round the door to his office and said, ‘Fyi, boss, the lab matched the DNA at Kelly Cross’s murder scene to what they found on the Mabgate whore.’ Fyi, Barry thought, how he hated words like that. Not even a word. ‘What about this third one?’ he asked. ‘The Cottage Road Cinema one.’
‘Results aren’t back yet.’
He went to his office, sat at his desk, turned his computer on and began to write his last testament.
Just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s when there was a knock on the door. It opened before he had time to say, ‘Come in.’
‘You,’ Barry said. ‘I’d like to know what your game is. What do you want exactly?’
‘The truth?’ Jackson Brodie said.
‘Superintendent. Come in.’
Harry Reynolds held the door open, a tea towel in his hand, the picture of contented domesticity.
The greenhouse heat of his house hit you as you walked through the door. And the aroma of coffee, overlaid by the smell of apples and sugar. ‘Making an apple pie for Sunday lunch tomorrow,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘What happened to your face?’ he asked Tracy.
‘Got into a fight with an airbag.’
Glancing down at Courtney, a tattered and torn fairy, he said, ‘Hello, poppet, you look a bit the worse for wear as well. Magic not working too well? Your “mummy” will have to buy you a new wand, won’t you, Mummy?’ he said, raising a sarcastic eyebrow at Tracy. Then in a different tone of voice he said to her, ‘You can’t travel looking the way you do, “hedge” and “backwards” come to mind. You and the ugly duckling need some decent clothes. You don’t want to attract attention.’ She could imagine, only too easily, what it would be like to get on the wrong side of Harry Reynolds. Frightening. Tracy was way beyond being frightened.
Ugly duckling, how dare he. Should have decked him, right there in his overstuffed, overheated living room. Stuck him in his expensive koi pond, let Harry Reynolds swim with the fishes. Instead she said, ‘Yeah, thanks for the advice, Harry. Unfortunately I had to leave my Louis Vuitton luggage behind and all my Gucci gowns were in it.’
‘Are you in trouble, Superintendent? More than before? If that’s humanly possible. I don’t want trouble at my door, make sure you keep it away from me.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘Just friendly advice.’ He looked at the ugly sunburst clock on the wall and said, ‘Susan’ll be here soon with Brett and Ashley. They’re popping in on their way to Alton Towers.’ Stated as a fact, meant as a warning. No offer of scones this time. Strictly business. ‘And I’ve got a funeral to go to,’ he added.
He took a large, stout manila envelope from his sixties G Plan sideboard. ‘Everything’s here. New passports, birth certificates. An address in Ilkley – no point in pretending you’re not from Yorkshire, open your mouth and you’ll betray yourself – utility bills to that address, you’ll be able to set up a new bank account wherever it is you’re going. France is it? You should go somewhere that doesn’t extradite. New national insurance number as well, and as a little extra, you’ve got a profile on Facebook and you’ll be pleased to hear that you have seventeen friends already. Welcome to the brave new world, Imogen Brown.’
Tracy handed over an envelope bursting with notes. ‘Expensive business,’ she said. Second envelope this week, this one containing a lot more money than the first. She had definitely joined the cash economy.
‘You’re not in a position to bargain, Superintendent.’
‘Just saying.’
‘Did you instruct your solicitor to get a move on with the sale of your house?’
‘Yes.’
He sighed the sigh of a put-upon entrepreneur. ‘It takes bloody weeks to buy or sell a house, all those searches and surveys. Ridiculous amount of bureaucracy. A man’s money and his word should be enough. And don’t get me started on the money laundering regulations. Gone are the good old days when you could just go out and buy a nice little piece of real estate with the cash in your pocket.’
‘Yeah, those good old days,’ Tracy said. ‘Everybody misses them. Especially the criminals.’
‘You’re in no position to throw stones, Superintendent. Anyway, don’t worry, I can get it pushed through. Expedited is the word, I believe. Nice word. Stay in touch with your solicitor. Solicitor sells the house to me, I’ll take my finder’s fee, as it were, and put the rest into the new bank account you’re going to set up.’
‘I threw my phone away.’
‘Wise move. They can find you
anywhere these days if you’ve got a phone. Hang on,’ he said and disappeared out of the room. Tracy could hear him moving about upstairs. Courtney had her face glued to the patio doors, watching the fish pond. Tracy caught sight of a big blue-and-white-marbled fish gliding by like a cruising submarine.
Harry Reynolds came back in the room with a carrier bag of clothes. ‘Some stuff in here of Ashley’s and my wife’s. She was a big woman, they should fit. I should have cleared her things out before now, given them to charity or whatever. Susan’s always on to me. Doesn’t like seeing her mum’s things around the house when she comes.’ He drooped, suddenly an old man without a wife. He noticed Courtney’s grubby face-print on the glass of the patio doors and absent-mindedly took out a handkerchief and polished the imprint away.
‘Here,’ he said, putting his hand into the bag of clothes and coming out with a couple of mobile phones that he handed over to Tracy, saying, ‘Throw them away when you’ve used them once. They’re pre-paid.’
‘Of course they are,’ Tracy said. An old age pensioner with a wardrobe full of burner phones, what was there to be surprised at in that?
The doorbell rang and Harry Reynolds hurried off to answer it.
‘That’ll be Brett and Ashley then,’Tracy said, raising an eyebrow at Courtney. She raised an eyebrow back, an enigmatic response.
Harry Reynolds’s grandchildren rushed into the house and were brought up short by the sight of Courtney, a scruffy cuckoo usurping their place in the nest. They were dressed in mufti, Brett in a Leeds United football strip, Ashley in jeans and a pink velour High School Musical hoodie. Courtney stared open-mouthed at this unattainable vision of pre-pubescent chic.
Their mother blustered into the room behind them and said, ‘What’s all this then?’
‘Nothing, Susan,’ Harry Reynolds said, placatory, slightly cowed. ‘An old friend, passing by. Dropped in.’
Tracy wondered if Harry Reynolds’s daughter knew what kind of ‘old friends’ her father used to have, or did she think all this – the roast beef, the school fees, the koi – was the just rewards for clean living and hard work? ‘Don’t worry, we’re just going,’ Tracy said.
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