Started Early, Took My Dog (15 page)

‘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 had 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
.

And then an invisible hand lifted the candlestick and moved it away from the window. Shadows flared and loomed on the wall and then the room fell back into darkness.

Suddenly she was awake again. She had been running after a little girl, running and running, down endless corridors, up and down staircases, but she couldn’t catch up with her. And then
she
was the little girl and she was holding the paw of a small rabbit. They were running for their lives, hand in paw, while being chased by a giant cod. The cod was swimming through the air, sinuous and powerful, whipping its silver body around corners. Ridiculous, it really made you wonder where dreams came from. The rabbit let out a terrible cry as the big ugly lips of the cod closed on its tail. The rabbit was her baby, she understood. The one she had lost all those years ago. She woke up when she heard a voice say,
Someone should do something, Matilda
. Was it the cod who spoke? It was a very posh accent, you didn’t think of cod speaking with a posh accent. Well, of course, you didn’t think of them speaking at all. It was only when she was drifting off to sleep again that Tilly realized it was the voice of her old drama teacher, Franny Anderson.