Started Early, Took My Dog (45 page)

‘I’m waiting,’ Tracy said.

‘Michael Braithwaite,’ he said. ‘Name mean anything to you?’

‘Michael Braithwaite?’

‘Yeah, thought it might. I’ve got a couple of questions. Need to fill in some blanks. You’re a key witness, as you might say. What do you reckon – shall we get going?’

‘You said that you weren’t the person I should be worried about,’ Tracy said. ‘Who
is
the person I should be worried about?’

He sat in the dining room of Bella Vista and ate his ‘full Yorkshire breakfast’ as if the only thing that had happened to him between closing his eyes last night and opening them again this morning had been an untroubled sleep in
Valerie
’s flowery bower.

The baffled (one might say traumatized) binmen had wanted to phone emergency services but somehow or other Jackson had managed to persuade them that he had ended up in the bin as a result of a dangerous prank on the part of his friends. ‘A joke that went wrong.’

‘Some joke,’ one of them said.

They had had to tilt the bin to free him and he had rolled out with the rubbish, like a legless bug. One of them produced a Stanley knife and cut the duct tape that was binding his ankles and wrists. It took some time for his limbs to come back to life but he managed to rip off the duct tape gag himself and to stumble off down the road, aware of the dubious glances at his back. He passed a shop window full of clocks. All the hands of the clocks were stretched out vertically. Six o’clock. He thought he had been in the bin for hours but it was less than two. Not a wheelie-bin but a Tardis.

The dog scampered by his side all the way back to Bella Vista in a state of near-delirium. At the site of the train crash two years ago Jackson’s life had been saved by a girl administering CPR. Now he had been saved by the loyalty of a dog. The less innocent he was, the more innocent his saviours became. There was some kind of exchange at work in the universe that he didn’t understand.

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?