Started Early, Took My Dog (35 page)

Outside the Slug and Lettuce on Park Row there was a big builder’s skip. Barry tossed the third tape from the Merrion Centre into it.

What was it they said – discretion was the better part of valour?

1975: 12 April
‘What do
you
think, Barry?’

‘What?’

‘What do you think, Barry?’

They’d come from Elland Road, where a good-natured match had got bumpy at the end. They’d brought the horses in. Tracy didn’t think horses should be used for crowd control, it was like sending them into battle. Barry was with them, trying to avoid buying a round.

It wasn’t that Tracy valued Barry’s opinion particularly but no one seemed to want to talk about it. Carol Braithwaite was being swept under the carpet like a bit of rubbish. ‘She was somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter. We don’t even know the cause of death.’

‘Strangled,’ Barry said.

‘How come you know?’ Tracy asked. Barry shrugged. ‘No one seems to be doing much, case just seems to be disappearing,’ Tracy said. Three days since Arkwright had put in that door in Lovell Park but it was as if it had never happened. Tiny piece in the paper by that Marilyn Nettles woman and that was it. ‘It doesn’t even feel as if anyone’s looking,’Tracy said. ‘And you,’ she added, turning accusingly to Barry, ‘what were you doing there anyway?’

‘What are you getting at?’

Tracy thought of Lomax and Strickland in Lovell Park, both looking shifty, behaving like Special Branch, knowing more than they were saying.

‘Have they spoken to you at all?’ she asked Barry. He shrugged. ‘You’re doing a lot of shrugging, Barry.’

‘Ah, the mysteries of CID,’ Arkwright said. ‘Ours not to reason why. It seems pretty straightforward to me. The poor lass picked up a punter, took him back to her flat and he turned out to be a wrong ’un. It happens.’

‘The oldest profession,’ Barry said, as if he was a man of the world. ‘Ever since there’ve been whores there’s been people killing them. They’re not going to stop now.’

‘And that makes it OK, does it, Barry? The whole door-locked from-the-outside thing, what about that?’

‘What’s your point?’ Barry said. ‘You think a couple of CID blokes knocked off a prozzie and then covered it up? That’s nuts.’

Sounded almost reasonable to Tracy’s ears.

‘You’re talking through your hat, Tracy,’ Barry said. ‘You’d better not spread rumours like that, you’ll be out on your arse quicker than you can say “Eastman”.’

‘They had a witness,’ Tracy said. ‘He was four – so what? He said to me, he told me, his father killed his mother. Shouldn’t they at least be trying to find out who his father is?’

‘I’m sure they are,’ Barry said. ‘But it’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Barry’s right,’ Arkwright said. ‘It’s an ongoing investigation. They’re not going to come running to you every time they get a bit of information, lass.’

‘Thought I’d go and see Linda Pallister, that social worker,’Tracy said to Arkwright once Barry had left.

‘That hippy bird?’ Arkwright said.

‘She lives in a commune.’

‘Filthy nutters,’ Arkwright said. ‘Do yourself a favour, Trace. Call off the attack poodles, eh?’

An ‘urban commune’, according to Linda. Fancy term for what was really just a squat, a dilapidated old house in Headingley that was due for demolition. The residents kept chickens in the back garden. Muddy parsnips and leeks grew stunted and misshapen where once there had been a small parterre.

Tracy had just come off shift and was still in uniform. ‘Pig,’ she heard one of the blokes who lived in the house mutter as she passed him in the hallway. Someone else made a grunting noise. Tracy felt like arresting them, marching them out of there in handcuffs. Wouldn’t have needed much of an excuse, the sweet sickly stink of marijuana drifted from the living room.

Linda, mother hen, queen bee, was wearing sensible hiker’s sandals beneath her long patchwork cotton skirt. Her droopy hair was pulled back in a ponytail so you could see the whole of her disgustingly healthy face. She was part of some wholefood cooperative, ate brown rice and grew ‘sprouts’, not the type that came from Brussels, and made ‘cultures’ for stuff like yoghurt and bread. Linda was attending an evening class in beekeeping. All these facts conveyed righteously over a cup of tea that she reluctantly offered. They sat in the kitchen, within the circle of warmth coming from a big, ancient Aga.

The tea was horrible, not proper tea. ‘Rooibos,’ Linda said. Rubbish more like, Tracy thought. The tea was in big, clumsy mugs that ‘someone we know’ had made. ‘We bartered eggs for mugs,’ Linda said smugly. ‘One day,’ she added earnestly, ‘there’ll be no money.’ Well, turned out she was right about that.

Like Tracy, Linda Pallister was still on probation. Unlike Tracy, she had a kid, having got knocked up in the middle of whatever worthy degree it was that she had done, social admin, politics, sociology. She spent the rest of her degree hauling the kiddy around on the back of her bike to nurseries and child-minders.

The boy was wandering around the kitchen half-naked, his rubbery little penis bouncing about. Tracy felt shocked.

‘Jacob,’ Linda said. He peed on the floor right in front of Tracy and Linda didn’t seem bothered. ‘Children should be free to do what they want,’ she said. ‘We shouldn’t impose our rigid, artificial structures on them. He’s very happy,’ she added as if Tracy had said something that indicated otherwise.

Linda mopped up Jacob’s pee and, without washing her hands, cut slices from a brown cake that she’d made. ‘Banana bread?’ she offered Tracy. Tracy politely declined. ‘Watching my figure,’ she said. ‘Someone has to.’

‘What do you want?’ Linda said. ‘You didn’t come here to talk about self-sufficiency and poultry.’

‘No, I didn’t. I just wondered how Michael was doing.’

‘Michael?’ Linda said vaguely, suddenly very preoccupied with wiping Jacob’s nose.

‘The Braithwaite kiddy,’ Tracy said. ‘Is he with foster parents now, because he’s not in the hospital?’

‘He’s in a different hospital now.’

‘Where? Why?’

Linda stared at the unpalatable-looking piece of banana bread on her plate and said, ‘’Fraid I can’t say. Against policy.’

‘So no chance I could go and visit him?’

‘Why would you want to do that?’ Linda asked.

‘To see how he’s doing.’ Because I held him in my arms and it broke my heart, Tracy thought, but she wasn’t about to show any weakness to Linda Pallister.

‘I told you, he’s fine,’ Linda said, suddenly as snappy as a crocodile. When Linda found God a few years later her personality would improve a lot. One of the few arguments Tracy could muster in favour of Christianity.

‘I don’t see how he can be “fine”,’Tracy protested. ‘He was locked in a flat with the rotting corpse of his mother for nearly three weeks.’

‘Well, “fine” is perhaps the wrong word,’ Linda conceded. ‘But he’s getting all the help he needs. You should just leave it alone.’ She pulled her own kiddy close and put a protective arm around him and said again, ‘Just leave it alone.’

‘So I definitely can’t visit him?’ Tracy persisted.

‘No,’ Linda sighed. ‘No visitors. It’s a directive from above.’

For a mad second Tracy thought Linda Pallister meant heaven.

It was ridiculous but Tracy had half formed the notion that if no one wanted Michael Braithwaite she could foster or even adopt him herself. Of course, Tracy knew nothing about children and she was still living at home. She could just imagine the look on her mother’s face if she brought home a neglected, traumatized little boy.

‘He’ll be adopted by someone who will love him,’ Linda Pallister said. ‘He’ll forget what happened to him, he’s too young to remember. Children are very resilient.’

Tracy asked Len Lomax herself, didn’t intend to but she bumped into him the next day. He was coming out of Brotherton House as she was going in.

‘Sir, do you mind me asking what’s happening in the Carol Braithwaite murder case?’

‘What’s happening?’

‘Any suspects?’

‘Not as yet.’

‘You haven’t found the key?’

‘Key?’ He flinched. He definitely flinched. ‘What key?’

‘The key to Carol Braithwaite’s flat. It was locked from the outside.’

‘I think you might have made a mistake there, WPC Waterhouse. Fancy yourself as a detective now, do you?’

He stalked off righteously, climbed into a red Vauxhall Victor that Tracy recognized from somewhere. She tried to get a look at the driver, caught a glimpse of a razor-sharp bob and a beaky nose that liked to poke itself where it shouldn’t. Why was Len Lomax getting into a car with Marilyn Nettles? And why had he flinched when she asked about the key?

‘He knew about that key,’ she said to Barry.

‘That’s crap,’ Barry said. Barry got nervy every time she mentioned Carol Braithwaite’s name, why was that? (‘Because you never stop fucking mentioning her, that’s why.’) He drained his pint in one go and said, ‘Got to be off, got a date. That Barbara’s agreed to go to the pictures with me.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
at the Tower.’

‘Monty Python? Oh, very romantic, Barry,’ Tracy said.

Took Tracy years to get out of uniform and into CID. You had to wonder, was it because she was a woman, or because she was a woman who asked the wrong questions? Or the right questions. Barry’s star, on the other hand, rose quickly. It wasn’t long before he was drinking pals with Lomax, Strickland, Marshall, even Eastman, a scrum of beer-swilling, fag-smoking blokes. Thick as thieves, all of them. The good old days.

She was like a terrier with the scent of a rabbit in its nose. Wouldn’t let it go.

‘And what’s her name?’ Ray Strickland said, frowning into his pint.

‘Tracy Waterhouse. She’s all right, Tracy,’ Barry said hastily, ‘but she just keeps going on about how the kiddy said his father did it. Won’t let it drop.’

A week later, Len Lomax took Barry to one side and told him that they’d lifted a bloke in Chapeltown who confessed to being Carol Braithwaite’s killer. ‘Said he was the boy’s father,’ Lomax said.

‘So, he’s been arrested, there’ll be a trial?’ Barry said and Lomax said, ‘Unfortunately not, bloke got into a fight in Armley while he was on remand, someone stuck him with a knife.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yeah, dead. In the light of everything, the kiddy, what happened to him, the whole thing will probably be dropped.’

It was only much later that Barry wondered if what Lomax had told him was true. He could just have made it up. Barry never asked questions, always took what Lomax and Strickland said as gospel. God knows why.

‘Let your lady friend know,’ Lomax said.

‘My lady friend?’ Barry puzzled. He had had one not entirely successful date with Barbara. Turned out she didn’t like Monty Python. (
But they’re just idiots, what’s funny about that?
) Morecambe and Wise was more her thing.

‘Your WPC,’ Lomax said.

‘Tracy? OK.’ Barry wondered when he had become Strickland and Lomax’s dogsbody.

‘Remember, Crawford, discretion’s the better part of valour.’ Barry had no idea what he was talking about.

The lights of a petrol station loomed out of the fog and the woman said, ‘Can we have a pit-stop, please?’ Jackson pulled the Saab on to the forecourt and she led the kid by the hand to the toilets round the back.

‘Just be a sec,’ she said. The kid looked back over her shoulder at Jackson. She was gazing at him as if she was wondering whether he was about to leg it and leave them in the lurch. She hadn’t said a word so far. Jackson wondered if she was mute, or perhaps just traumatized. He gave her his reassuring Queen Mother wave and she semaphored slowly back with her silver wand.

He supposed it might be a good idea to stock up on supplies. The garage wasn’t big but it still managed to sell everything from bunches of flowers and bags of smokeless fuel to foodstuffs and top-shelf magazines. Eight o’clock in the morning and the place was deserted, just one young, very bored girl at the counter, watched over by a couple of CCTV monitors that allowed her to keep an eye on the pumps. She was chewing on a piece of her long, stringy hair, as if it were liquorice. The girl was small and slim and Jackson wondered if she should be out here all on her own. It would be too easy to overpower her and force her to open the till, or worse.