Started Early, Took My Dog (29 page)

‘Yeah,’ Tracy said. She produced a twenty-pound note like a lure and said, ‘Different kind of business.’

‘Tracy?’ Barry said. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I didn’t say but this Jackson bloke, whoever he is, asked about Carol Braithwaite.’

‘Carol Braithwaite? Look, I’ve got to go, Barry. I’ll phone you later.’ She snapped the phone shut and shouted, ‘Hang on,’ to the girl who had taken the money and was about to scarper. She returned reluctantly to the car and was joined by the older woman who, catching sight of Tracy, said, ‘Trace, ’ow yer doing?’

‘Bloody brilliant,’ Tracy said. ‘Quiet tonight, isn’t it?’

‘Recession. And we’re being undercut all the time by crackwhores. There’s girls offering full strip and sex for ten quid. It’s a different world, Tracy.’ It was what Barry had said, what Harry Reynolds had said. Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different.

‘Yeah, terrible,’ Tracy said. ‘Everything discounted. I’m actually looking for Kelly Cross.’

‘Me mam?’ the younger one said.

Jesus, Tracy thought. Would the circle never be broken? She was acutely aware of Courtney in the back. Was this her half-sister? Was this the fate Courtney would have been destined for if Tracy hadn’t rescued her? The older woman – Liz, if Tracy’s memory served her – peered into the back of the car.

‘Yours?’ she asked Tracy, sucking thoughtfully on her cigarette.

‘Not exactly,’ Tracy said. Not much reason for dissembling with this pair, what were they going to do – stagger off to the nearest police officer and grass her up?

‘Nice outfit, pet,’ Liz said to Courtney, who in reply made a papal kind of gesture with her silver wand.

‘Do you recognize her?’Tracy asked. All three of them scrutinized the kid in the back seat. She was halfway through an apple and paused mid-bite. Rosy red, eaten by Snow White. The apple and the wand, the orb and sceptre of her sovereign regalia.

‘No, sorry,’ Liz said.

‘Nah,’ the younger one said, to Tracy’s relief.

‘Have you got a name?’ Tracy said to her.

‘Nah.’

Tracy looked at the girl. A
fille de joie
who was forty times more likely to die a violent death than the fellow members of her sex. What could you do? Nothing.

‘No, go on really,’ Tracy said, ‘what’s your name?’

‘Chevaunne. C-h-e-v-a-u-n-n-e, I have to spell it every time, it’s a fucking pain. It’s Irish.’ At least the girl could spell, even if it was only her own misspelled name. Kelly Cross was so thick she couldn’t even spell ‘Siobhan’. Kelly’s mother had been Irish. Fionnula. Tracy had been around so long that she’d seen three generations of prostitutes pass her by. ‘A right Gyppo,’ Barry used to say. Gypsies and Irish were interchangeable as far as Barry was concerned, both equally bad.

Tracy turned her attention to Liz. ‘Can you give me an address for Kelly?’

‘She
was
in Hunslet.’

‘Harehills,’ Chevaunne butted in. ‘But it’ll cost you.’

Tracy handed over another twenty-pound note in exchange for Kelly Cross’s address. ‘Now fuck off, the pair of you,’ she said.

A grey Avensis turned into Bath Road, pulled off the road in front of them and parked on the forecourt of an abandoned warehouse of some kind, a blighted piece of real estate. Seemed a mite coincidental. Tracy looked for the pink rabbit but the car was too far away for her to see.

‘Ey up,’ Liz said and the
belles de jour
teetered off again, towards the Avensis.

‘
That
’s a grey car,’ Courtney said helpfully.

‘Yeah, I see it, pet.’

Tracy parked in the alley that ran along the back of the street. Killed the engine, climbed out of the car and unstrapped Courtney. The last place she wanted to take the kid was Kelly Cross’s house but what choice did she have – she could hardly leave her alone in the back of a car in a seedy alley. From the first moment she saw Kelly Cross in the Merrion Centre yesterday it seemed Tracy had done nothing but make choices, an endless series of forks in the road. Sooner or later she was going to hit a dead end. If she hadn’t already.

Kelly was the only thing that linked Tracy to Courtney. Get rid of Kelly and you broke the chain of evidence leading back to Tracy. Then it would just be Imogen and her little girl Lucy. No need for Tracy to look over her shoulder for the rest of her life. Kill Kelly Cross. Even the alliteration was alluring. Her heart started to thud uncomfortably in her chest. Get rid of the link between Kelly and the kid, between Kelly and herself. Forge a new terrible bond but get rid of Kelly Cross’s claims on them. Who was better placed to commit a murder properly than the police?

The door to Kelly’s back yard was open. The yard was small and claustrophobically full of rubbish – an old washing machine, a filthy armchair, black bin bags containing God knows what. The windows of the house were filthy, cracked, full of powdery, fly-filled cobwebs. There was a piece of paper sellotaped on to the peeling paintwork of the back door that spelled out ‘Cross’ in a semi-literate hand. The door itself looked as if it had been kicked in a few times. Tracy sighed. She had spent a working lifetime knocking on doors like this.

And getting no answer.

She knocked again, louder this time, a police knock. Nothing. She gave the door a tentative push and it swung open. This was always an ominous moment in TV thrillers – nothing good was ever discovered behind the open door – but in Tracy’s experience all it usually meant was that someone had forgotten to lock up.

The door opened straight into the kitchen. She took a cautious step inside and said, ‘Kelly?’ She was half expecting Kelly to fly out of nowhere screaming like a banshee. She took another couple of steps and realized that Courtney was on her heels as if they were playing a game of statues. ‘Stay there, pet, OK?’Tracy said. Tracy took another couple of steps into the kitchen, the kid still following. Tracy pulled a chair out from the table and said, ‘Sit down. Don’t touch anything.’

Tracy put the light on. No one ever switched the light on either in TV crime thrillers. For the atmosphere, Tracy supposed. She could live without atmosphere. The whole kitchen was a health hazard. The flickering fluorescent light illuminated foil takeaway cartons, dirty pots and pans, rotten food, sour milk, a top note of alcohol and fags.

‘Kelly?’ Tracy said again, advancing into the hallway. Tracy switched on lights as she went. It was twilight outside but the house contained a deeper kind of dusk.

A small room at the back. Completely full of boxes, their insides spilling out, mostly clothes that looked only fit for shoddy. The second room was a living room, if you could call it that. About as bad as a room could get. Old fag packets, dirty plates and more takeaway cartons. Empty bottles and cans, a syringe poking out from beneath the sofa cushion, everything soiled and unsanitary. Tracy had read reports about Leeds from the nineteenth century, the poverty, the awful conditions of the industrial poor. Knee-deep in ordure. Not much different here.

No sign of a child in the house, Tracy noted, no clothes or toys or DVDs. Reluctantly, she made her way up the steep, narrow staircase. There were three doors to choose from, all of them closed. Like a fairy story. Or a nightmare. Tracy had a flashback to Lovell Park again, Ken Arkwright putting in the door with his shoulder. The smell that was released, the flies . . .

The bathroom was disgusting. Surely Kelly couldn’t bring her clients back here? Even the least discerning of punters might jib at entering this den of iniquity.

The second door led to a small bedroom. Completely empty. Nothing, just fluff, dust, scraps of foil, stray polystyrene chips like albino Quavers on the bare boards.

Only one door remained. Tracy hesitated, recoiling from the possibility of interrupting Kelly in the middle of providing services for one of her less selective patrons. She rapped loudly on the door and said, ‘Kelly? Kelly, it’s Tracy. Tracy Waterhouse.’ When there was no answer she warily pushed the door open.

The offal and sewage smell of death was everywhere. Even Tracy’s tough police ticker missed a beat. Kelly Cross was sprawled on the bed, her head mashed in, her belly slashed open. She looked as if she was in her work uniform, a tiny black skirt and a silver-sequinned halter top. Some of the sequins were scattered on the bed, glinting like fish scales in the harsh overhead light.

Tracy put two fingers against Kelly Cross’s neck. No pulse. She didn’t know why she was checking, as it was glaringly obvious that Kelly was dead. She was still warm. Tracy preferred her dead bodies to be cold.

Kelly Cross was dead. Tracy had got what she had wished for. It suggested a dark magic at work if Tracy’s thoughts could be translated so fast. Tracy didn’t believe in magic. She believed in darkness though.

She had seen worse in the past, although that didn’t make the foul tableau in front of her eyes any less repugnant. No time to be shocked, however. Think like the police or think like a criminal? Tracy wondered. Turned out, as she had previously expected, that it was pretty much the same, but in reverse. She rooted in her bag for a tissue and wiped all the door handles and jambs. Shame she hadn’t got round to buying the Wet Wipes yet. She had probably left trace evidence behind, a hair, a flake of skin, a scale of fish. A trace of Tracy.

Had the kid touched anything? Courtney was still waiting dutifully in the kitchen. Did she suspect anything? Her expression was, as usual, unreadable.

‘Come on, pet,’ Tracy said, her voice cracking with the effort of sounding inanely cheerful. ‘Time to go home.’

The kid dipped the wand, a magisterial blessing on the house of the dead. She slipped off the chair and Tracy shepherded her out of the house. ‘Let’s get back in the car, Courtney.’

‘It’s Lucy,’ the kid reminded her.

Courtney was asleep by the time Tracy pulled up in the lane at the back of her house. No tarmac, just a cinder-type covering, felt almost rural. It led to a row of rented lock-ups that served as handy garages for some of the car owners in the street. Tracy yanked open the door on her own lock-up and reversed into the empty space like a precision driver, killed the engine, rested her forehead on the steering wheel. She thought she might throw up.

Courtney woke with a start and said, ‘What happened?’

‘You fell asleep,’ Tracy said. ‘Nothing happened while you were asleep. We moved on a little in space and time, that’s all. We’re home. Have another apple.’ Bananas were all gone now.

The kid gave the eating of the apple a lot of attention, as if she was studying to become a professional apple eater. The thought of ingesting anything made Tracy feel queasy. She couldn’t wait to step in the shower and scrub off the smell of death that had followed her from Harehills and lingered like a foul aura.

‘Come on then.’ She sighed and opened the car door.

Courtney went to bed still wearing the pink fairy costume, refused to take it off. Tracy didn’t care, she hadn’t been in a maternal role long enough to have acquired any rules.

The kid’s treasure was laid out on the bed and she began to pack it away. When she got to the fortune cookie she stared at it for a while as if it was going to crack open on its own.

‘You have to break it,’ Tracy said. The kid stared at her. ‘Trust me,’ Tracy said. The kid smashed it with her fist.

‘Yeah, that’ll do it,’ Tracy said.

The kid removed the slip of paper from the debris of crumbs and handed it silently to Tracy to read.

‘
The treasure here is you
,’ Tracy read out loud.

The kid reached over and patted Tracy’s hand. ‘And you,’ she said, sympathetic to Tracy’s exclusion from good fortune.

‘I don’t think so somehow,’ Tracy said.

‘You have it,’ Courtney said and Tracy tucked the slip of paper in her bra, a good luck charm. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said and went downstairs. She came back with Dorothy Waterhouse’s engagement ring which she’d shoved to the back of the dresser drawer. ‘Real treasure,’ she said, adding it to the contents of the backpack.

‘Yes,’ Courtney said. ‘Real treasure.’

Princess Courtney went on another adventure, a rather dauntless one involving wolves and axes and porridge-eating bears. ‘I don’t like wolves,’ Courtney said.

‘Me neither,’ Tracy said. ‘But we’re all right, they’ve been banned from Leeds.’ If only.

Once Courtney was asleep, Tracy rummaged suitcases out of the hall cupboard, hauled them into her bedroom and stuffed them with Courtney’s new Gap wardrobe and anything of her own that came to hand. Added another bag of toys. Took the supermarket bags out of the boot of the Audi and replaced them with the suitcases, put the supermarket bags in the back of the car. She’d sort them out when she got there. Everything probably inedible by now. ‘There,’ she said to herself. ‘All ready for the off, first thing.’ She sounded deranged. She sounded like her mother getting ready for the annual holiday in Bridlington.

Tracy checked on Courtney. The kid was fast asleep, snoring gently. A piglet, a kitten.

There was no Beck’s left – how did that happen? So Tracy made do with half a bottle of Chardonnay she found in the fridge, left over from who knew when. The wine looked like urine and didn’t taste much better. She could feel it roiling like acid in her stomach. Found half a packet of crisps hiding at the back of the cupboard and munched her way through them without tasting them.

When she turned on the TV the end credits for
Collier
were just scrolling.