Started Early, Took My Dog (10 page)

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that. I’m not entirely ignorant.’

‘Really?’ she said, absent-mindedly rather than ironically. Her attention was all on the boy, none on the man. Jackson had, in fact, learned a great deal about the shock and awe of the Reformation in the course of his wanderings around the abbeys of Yorkshire but there was no point in being didactic with Julia, she was always going to know more about everything than him. She was the product of a sound education and a good memory, while, let’s face it, Jackson was in possession of neither.

Jackson ignored Julia in turn, gazing meditatively (some – mostly women – might say mindlessly) at the amphitheatre, nature’s heavenly bowl, that contained Rievaulx. Even in ruins the abbey was matchless, celestial. Awesome.
Awesome
, his daughter Marlee’s blasé teenage voice sounded in his head. By the time Nathan was a teenager Jackson would be into his sixties. His diamond years.

‘Cheer up, sweetie,’ Julia said, ‘it may never happen.’

‘It already has,’ Jackson said gloomily.

*

Jackson had occasionally to remind himself that there was a third purpose to his leisurely Byzantine progress around the country. Everything came (and went) in threes, as far as he could see. Three Fates, three Furies, three Graces, three Kings, three monkeys, a threepersoned God.

‘Three-headed dogs,’ Julia added. ‘To the Pythagoreans, three was the first real number, because they saw it as having a beginning, a middle and an end.’

Jackson was working on behalf of a client. Despite the fact that he was no longer a private detective, despite the fact that he no longer
had
clients, that he no longer dabbled in the soul-destroying tedium of divorce cases and debt chasing and missing pets, despite all that, he had somehow acquired a woman called Hope McMaster who lived as far away from Yorkshire as you could get without getting closer again. New Zealand, in other words.

He should have said no, in fact, he was pretty sure he did say no when Hope McMaster sent him a long email (too long, a life story) out of the blue at the end of the previous year.
I was adopted and I wondered if you could find out some information about my biological parents?
How uncomplicated that sounded to his ears now.

Exactly how Hope McMaster had got hold of a contact address for him was unclear but somewhere along the line – as was so often the case – it seemed to involve Julia (‘a friend of a friend of a friend’). Nowhere in the world was safe. Julia probably had friends on the moon (or friends of friends of friends, ad infinitum). And somehow six degrees of separation from Julia always ended up at Jackson.

In the course of his lackadaisical odyssey around the country Jackson had been able to dovetail neatly the stalking of his thieving false wife with the pursuit of Hope McMaster’s case. Cornwall, Gwynedd, Doncaster, Harrogate were all locations where he had tried unsuccessfully to hunt down Hope McMaster’s mysterious identity. ‘So,’ Julia said, as they left Rievaulx Terraces behind them and headed towards the comforting arms of the Black Swan in Helmsley, ‘you’re basically looking for two women, your wife and Hope McMaster, and you have no idea who either of them really are.’

‘Yes,’ Jackson said. ‘Exactly so.’

On the outskirts of Leeds, he had netted Kirkstall Abbey. It was the first abbey he had come across whose stones were incongruously blackened with industrial soot from the days when all the golden fleeces were turned into bolts of cloth. Tomorrow he had an appointment with a woman called Linda Pallister, an adoption counsellor with Social Services who Hope McMaster had already been in contact with. Hope’s lawyer in Christchurch had drawn up a power of attorney, instructing Jackson to act on her behalf. Jackson had hopes for Leeds. Leeds was the place where it had all started for Hope McMaster and he very much hoped it would be the place where it would all finish.

Linda Pallister failed to keep the appointment. ‘Linda’s had to go home, I’m afraid. A family emergency,’ a woman on reception at Social Services told him. ‘But she said to reschedule for tomorrow.’

After Linda Pallister had failed to keep her appointment with him, Jackson had spent what was left of the afternoon wandering around – a
boulevardier
– in Briggate, the Calls, the Arcades. The Corn Exchange, the town hall (that great monument to municipal clout), the Merrion Centre, Roundhay Park – all constituted a city that seemed both familiar and at the same time utterly strange. He felt as though he was looking for something that he would only recognize when he found it. His lost youth, perhaps. Or the lost youth that he himself had been. The dirty old town he remembered had been overlaid by something new and shiny. It didn’t mean the dirty old town wasn’t still there, of course.

He reckoned that the last time he was in Leeds must have been more than thirty years ago. He used to come here as a boy when it represented the height of metropolitan sophistication, not that ‘metropolitan’ was a word in his vocabulary in those days and ‘sophistication’ didn’t rise much above buying a packet of ten Embassy and sneaking into an X-rated film. Jackson remembered shoplifting in Woolworths in Leeds. Petty things – sweets, key rings, batteries. His father would have flayed him alive if he had found out but it had never really seemed like stealing, just a cheeky flouting of authority. Now Woolworths didn’t even exist any more. Who would have thought it? Perhaps it would still be going if kids hadn’t kept on nicking the sweets and key rings and batteries. Over the years all that ill-gotten loot probably added up to a fortune.

In the Merrion Centre he had come to the aid of a confused old woman that a security numpty was trying to haul away. ‘Are you OK?’ he had asked her. ‘Do you want some help?’ Jackson voiced his personal mantra, ‘I used to be a policeman,’ which seemed to act as a reassurance. There had been something familiar about her but he couldn’t put his finger on it. She was wearing a wig which had slipped to an unfortunately jaunty angle. Jackson hoped someone would put him down before he got to that stage. He supposed he would end up having to put himself down. He planned to go out on the ice (
I may be some time
), lie down with a bottle of something as old as himself and drift off into the big sleep. He hoped global warming didn’t scupper this plan.

His final stop had been Roundhay, a leisurely stroll, he thought, some sunshine and fresh air away from the urban crowds. He had not expected to walk away as a dog owner. The interrupted journey, the unexpected gift, the unforeseen encounter. Life had its plots.

Later, looking back, Jackson could see that his failed appointment with Linda Pallister was the moment when it all started to go wrong. If she had kept their rendezvous he would have spent a constructive hour or so, would have felt satisfied and purposeful, and might quite possibly have undergone another evening in a hotel, eating a roomservice meal and watching a bad pay-for-view movie, instead of spending a restless time, blacking out for large portions of it and having meaningless, promiscuous sex. For want of a nail. Blame Linda Pallister. In the end everyone else would.

Tracy phoned in sick to cover her tracks. ‘Bit of a tummy bug, I think, I’m just going to go home early,’ and Leslie said, ‘No problem, I hope you feel better soon.’ Then Tracy sneaked back into the car park to pick up her Audi A4 and drive with Courtney to a Mamas and Papas store in Birstall Shopping Park where she bought a car seat that cost an arm and a leg. She spent the entire drive to the retail park waiting to be arrested for lack of the said car seat and in a fit of paranoia had got the kid to lie down on the back seat, just like a proper kidnap victim. Tracy felt as if there were a neon sign on the roof of the car that screamed, ‘This isn’t the mother!’ She gave the kid the Greggs sausage roll to keep her occupied. There was a plaid blanket in the boot and Tracy wondered if the kid would freak out if she covered her with it. Probably. She decided against it.

An uneasy tour of the Mamas and Papas store revealed what Tracy had always suspected – children were mind-blowingly expensive. She should know, she’d just bought one, even if it was at a bargain price. Kids were all about retail. If you weren’t buying and selling the kids themselves, you were buying and selling on their behalf. Tracy felt a sudden twitch of anxiety. The two thousand pounds that remained in her bag weighed heavy. She should have handed over the full five thousand pounds to Kelly Cross. Buying the kid cheap felt like a mistake now.

Tracy left the car seat in the shop while she walked towards Gap, Courtney plodding along beside her like a doped-up dog. The kid had been pretty vocal in the Merrion Centre, yelling her head off, but now she was taking her cues from Helen Keller.

Tracy was acutely aware of all the security cameras. She imagined the pair of them on
Crimewatch
, Courtney’s face a blanked-out blur and her own magnified for a viewing public.
Have you seen this woman? She abducted a child from outside a shopping centre in Leeds
. She had stepped over the thin blue line, from the hunter to the hunted in one easy move.

What would she say if she was stopped – ‘It’s OK, I bought the kid fair and square’? Yeah, that would go down well when they hauled her off to the nick. She was the Childcatcher, the Bogeywoman, every mother’s nightmare. But not Kelly’s. Kelly probably saw her as her saviour. Kelly certainly wasn’t the first mother to sell her own kid. But what if . . . what if Kelly wasn’t actually the kid’s mother? Tracy had lost track of how many kids Kelly had spawned. Were they all in care? What if she was minding Courtney for someone else? In that case, Tracy reasoned to herself – already working up arguments for the social workers, the police, the courts – whoever her mother was, she hadn’t cared enough about Courtney to put her in a safe pair of hands. Handing your kid over to Kelly Cross was like handing her over to a pit bull. Bottom line – the kid was at risk.

She remembered Kelly Cross standing on the bus platform before the doors closed, the puzzled look on her face as she said,
But she’s not
— Not what? Not my kid? Tracy closed the bus doors in her mind. Put big metal security shutters down. She hadn’t heard anything. Thought instead about that little warm hand slipping into hers.

She knew someone who could find out more for her. Linda Pallister. She was still in fostering and adoption, wasn’t she? If she hadn’t retired yet, she could find out the status of Kelly Cross’s kids.

Tracy couldn’t remember when she had last seen Linda Pallister. It must have been at Barry Crawford’s daughter’s wedding, three years ago. Detective Superintendent Barry Crawford,Tracy’s ex-colleague. Linda’s daughter, Chloe, was best friends with Barry’s daughter, Amy, and was the chief bridesmaid, a fright in burnt-orange satin. ‘I had “bronze” in my head for their dresses, you know,’ Amy Crawford said ruefully to Tracy. Nothing in the poor girl’s head but mush now that she inhabited the land of the living dead. Her own dress had been the usual overblown white garment, her bouquet made up of raffish orange and yellow flowers. The men’s buttonholes were a single orange gerbera, like something a clown would squirt water out of. (‘I wanted something a little bit different,’ Amy said.)

‘Very cheerful,’ Barbara Crawford, mother of the bride, had commented, wincing at the gaudiness of it all. Barbara herself tastefully overdressed in turquoise silk (‘Paule Vasseur,’ she murmured to Tracy as if it were a secret). It had been no parish tea affair for Barry and Barbara’s one and only, but a lavish case of overspend. Politely, no one mentioned that the bride’s belly was already straining at her wedding dress.

The bridesmaids’ shoes were burnt orange too, their pointy feet poking out from beneath jaundiced dresses that looked like the sunset at the end of the world. Their bouquets hung from their arms on ribbon-like handbags, big pomanders or perhaps colourful cannonballs. ‘I tried to suggest something different, I really did,’ Barbara Crawford said in the loudest
sotto voce
that Tracy had ever heard. ‘Amy was always so headstrong.’

Amy’s husband was called Ivan.
Ivan the Terrible
, Barry always called him, naturally. ‘Ivan? What kind of a name is that?’ he said to Tracy after Amy’s engagement was announced. ‘Bloody Russian.’

‘Actually, I think it’s because he had a Norwegian grandfather,’ Tracy said.

‘Norwegian?’ Barry said incredulously, as if she’d just announced that Ivan’s family came from the moon. Ivan was a financial adviser, Tracy had consulted him when she was wondering where to stash her annual ISA. ‘Pop in and have a chat, no charge for a friend of Barry’s,’ he said to her at the wedding. He seemed a nice enough chap, pretty harmless on the whole, which was about the best you could hope for from a human being, in Tracy’s opinion. Unfortunately, he went bankrupt shortly afterwards and lost the business. No one wanted financial advice from a man who couldn’t even keep his hands on his own money. Barry implied there was fraud involved but when Tracy went to see Ivan to retrieve some paperwork he explained that he had lost a flash drive with all his clients’ details on it. ‘Must have slipped out of my pocket,’ Ivan said miserably to Tracy. Most of his clients took away their business after that. ‘I would have done the same,’ Ivan said.