Started Early, Took My Dog Read online

  Synopsis

  A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn.

  Witnesses to Tracy's Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie, who has returned to his home county in search of someone else's roots. All three characters learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished.

  Kate Atkinson dovetails and counterpoints her plots with Dickensian brilliance in a tale peopled with unlikely heroes and villains . Started Early, Took My Dog is freighted with wit, wisdom and a fierce moral intelligence. It confirms Kate Atkinson’s position as one of the great writers of our time.

  STARTED EARLY,

  TOOK MY DOG

  Kate Atkinson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Kate Atkinson

  Treasure

  Jeopardy

  Arcadia

  Sacrifice

  Treasure

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409095422

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  A Random House Group Company

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain

  in 2010 by Doubleday

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Kate Atkinson 2010

  Kate Atkinson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBNs 9780385608022 (cased) 9780385616997 (tpb)

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

  For my father

  Also by Kate Atkinson

  Behind the Scenes at the Museum

  Human Croquet

  Emotionally Weird

  Not the End of the World (short stories)

  Case Histories

  One Good Turn

  When Will There Be Good News?

  All mistakes are mine, some deliberate. I have not necessarily kept to the truth.

  My thanks are due to:

  Russell Equi, as usual; Malcolm Graham, Detective Chief Superintendent, Lothian and Borders Police; Malcolm R. Dickson, former Assistant Inspector of Constabulary for Scotland; David Mattock and Maureen Lenehan, for revisiting Leeds and the seventies with me.

  For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

  For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

  For want of a horse the rider was lost.

  For want of a rider the battle was lost.

  For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

  Traditional

  ‘I was just cleaning up the place a bit.’

  Peter Sutcliffe

  Treasure

  1975: 9 April

  Leeds: ‘Motorway City of the Seventies’. A proud slogan. No irony intended. Gaslight still flickering on some streets. Life in a northern town.

  The Bay City Rollers at number one. IRA bombs all over the country. Margaret Thatcher is the new leader of the Conservative Party. At the beginning of the month, in Albuquerque, Bill Gates founds what will become Microsoft. At the end of the month Saigon falls to the North Vietnamese army. The Black and White Minstrel Show is still on television, John Poulson is still in jail. Bye Bye Baby, Baby Goodbye. In the middle of it all, Tracy Waterhouse was only concerned with the hole in one of the toes of her tights. It was growing bigger with every step she took. They were new on this morning as well.

  They had been told that it was on the fifteenth floor of the flats in Lovell Park and – of course – the lifts were broken. The two PCs huffed and puffed their way up the stairs. By the time they neared the top they were resting at every turn of the stair. WPC Tracy Waterhouse, a big, graceless girl only just off probation, and PC Ken Arkwright, a stout white Yorkshireman with a heart of lard. Climbing Everest.

  They would both see the beginning of the Ripper’s killing spree but Arkwright would be retired long before the end of it. Donald Neilson, the Black Panther from Bradford, hadn’t been captured yet and Harold Shipman had probably already started killing patients unlucky enough to be under his care in Pontefract General Infirmary. West Yorkshire in 1975, awash with serial killers.

  Tracy Waterhouse was still wet behind the ears, although she wouldn’t admit to it. Ken Arkwright had seen more than most but remained avuncular and sanguine, a good copper for a green girl to be beneath the wing of. There were bad apples in the barrel – the dark cloud of David Oluwale’s death still cast a long shadow on police in the West Riding, but Arkwright wasn’t under it. He could be violent when necessary, sometimes when not, but he didn’t discriminate on the grounds of colour when it came to reward and punishment. And women were often slappers and scrubbers but he’d helped out a few street girls with fags and cash, and he loved his wife and daughters.

  Despite pleas from her teachers to stay on and ‘make something of herself’, Tracy had left school at fifteen to do a shorthand and typing course and went straight into Montague Burton’s offices as a junior, eager to get on with her adult life. ‘You’re a bright girl,’ the man in personnel said, offering her a cigarette. ‘You could go far. You never know, PA to the MD one day.’ She didn’t know what ‘MD’ meant. Wasn’t too sure about ‘PA’ either. The man’s eyes were all over her.

  Sixteen, never been kissed by a boy, never drunk wine, not even Blue Nun. Never eaten an avocado or seen an aubergine, never been on an aeroplane. It was different in those days.

  She bought a tweed maxi coat from Etam and a new umbrella. Ready for anything. Or as ready as she would ever be. Two years later she was in the police. Nothing could have prepared her for that. Bye Bye,Baby.

  Tracy was worried that she might never leave home. She spent her nights in front of the television with her mother while her father drank – modestly – in the local Conservative club. Together, Tracy and her mother, Dorothy, watched The Dick Emery Show or Steptoe and Son or Mike Yarwood doing an impression of Steptoe and his son. Or Edward Heath, his shoulders heaving up and down. Must have been a sad day for Mike Yarwood when Margaret Thatcher took over the leadership. Sad day for everyone. Tracy had never understood the attraction of impressionists.

  Her stomach
rumbled like a train. She’d been on the cottage cheese and grapefruit diet for a week. Wondered if you could starve to death while you were still overweight.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ Arkwright gasped, bending over and resting his hands on his knees when they finally achieved the fifteenth floor. ‘I used to be a rugby wing forward, believe it or not.’

  ‘Ay, well, you’re just an old, fat bloke now,’ Tracy said. ‘What number?’

  ‘Twenty-five. It’s at the end.’

  A neighbour had phoned in anonymously about a bad smell (‘a right stink’) coming from the flat.

  ‘Dead rats, probably,’ Arkwright said. ‘Or a cat. Remember those two dogs in that house in Chapeltown? Oh no, before your time, lass.’

  ‘I heard about it. Bloke went off and left them without any food. They ate each other in the end.’

  ‘They didn’t eat each other,’ Arkwright said. ‘One of them ate the other one.’

  ‘You’re a bloody pedant, Arkwright.’

  ‘A what? Cheeky so-and-so. Ey up, here we go. Fuck a duck, Trace, you can smell it from here.’

  Tracy Waterhouse pressed her thumb on the doorbell and kept it there. Glanced down at her ugly police-issue regulation black lace-ups and wiggled her toes inside her ugly police-issue regulation black tights. Her big toe had gone right through the hole in the tights now and a ladder was climbing up towards one of her big footballer’s knees. ‘It’ll be some old bloke who’s been lying here for weeks,’ she said. ‘I bloody hate them.’

  ‘I hate train jumpers.’

  ‘Dead kiddies.’

  ‘Yeah. They’re the worst,’ Arkwright agreed. Dead children were trumps, every time.

  Tracy took her thumb off the doorbell and tried turning the door handle. Locked. ‘Ah, Jesus, Arkwright, it’s humming in there. Something that’s not about to get up and walk away, that’s for sure.’

  Arkwright banged on the door and shouted, ‘Hello, it’s the police here, is anyone in there? Shit, Tracy, can you hear that?’

  ‘Flies?’

  Ken Arkwright bent down and looked through the letterbox. ‘Oh, Christ—’ He recoiled from the letterbox so quickly that Tracy’s first thought was that someone had squirted something into his eyes. It had happened to a sergeant a few weeks ago, a nutter with a Squeezy washing-up bottle full of bleach. It had put everyone off looking through letterboxes. Arkwright, however, immediately squatted down and pushed open the letterbox again and started talking soothingly, the way you would to a nervy dog. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, everything’s OK now. Is Mummy there? Or your daddy? We’re going to help you. It’s OK.’ He stood and got ready to shoulder the door. Pawed the ground, blew air out of his mouth and said to Tracy, ‘Prepare yourself, lass, it’s not going to be pretty.’

  Six months ago

  The suburban outskirts of Munich on a cold afternoon. Large, lazy flakes of snow fluttering down like white confetti, falling on the bonnet of their anonymous-looking German-made car.

  ‘Nice house,’ Steve said. He was a cocky little sod who talked too much. It was doubtful that Steve was his real name. ‘Big house,’ he added.

  ‘Yeah, nice big house,’ he agreed, more to shut Steve up than anything else. Nice and big and surrounded, unfortunately, by other nice big houses, on the kind of street that had vigilant neighbours and burglar alarms dotted like bright carbuncles on the walls. A couple of the very nicest, biggest houses had security gates and cameras attached to their walls.

  The first time you recce, the second time you pay attention to detail, the third time you do the job. This was the third time. ‘Bit Germanic for my liking, of course,’ Steve said, as if the entire portfolio of European real estate was at his disposal.

  ‘Maybe that’s something to do with the fact that we’re in Germany,’ he said.

  Steve said, ‘I’ve got nothing against the Germans. Had a couple in the Deuxième. Good lads. Good beer,’ he added after several seconds’ contemplation. ‘Good sausages too.’

  Steve said he’d been in the Paras, came out and found he couldn’t handle civilian life, joined the French Foreign Legion. You think you’re hard and then you find out what hard really means.

  Right. How many times had he heard that? He’d met a few guys from the legion in his time – ex-military guys escaping the flatline of civilian life, deserters from divorces and paternity suits, fugitives from boredom. All of them were running from something, none of them quite the outlaws they imagined themselves to be. Certainly not Steve. This was the first time they’d done a job together. The guy was a bit of a gung-ho wanker but he was OK, he paid attention. He didn’t smoke in the car, he didn’t want to listen to crap radio stations.

  Some of these places reminded him of gingerbread houses, right down to the icing-sugar snow that rimmed their roofs and gutters. He had seen a gingerbread house for sale in the Christkindl market where they had spent the previous evening, strolling around the Marienplatz, drinking Glühwein out of Christmas mugs, for all the world like regular tourists. They’d had to pay a deposit on the mugs and on that basis he had taken his back to the Platzl, where they were staying. A present for his daughter Marlee when he got home, even though she would probably turn her nose up at it, or, worse, thank him indifferently and never look at it again.

  ‘Did you do that job in Dubai?’ Steve asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I heard everything went tits up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  A car rounded the corner and they both instinctively checked their watches. It glided past. Wrong car. ‘It’s not them,’ Steve said, unnecessarily.

  On the plus side, they had a long driveway that curved away from the gate so that you couldn’t see the house from the road. And the driveway was bordered by a lot of bushes. No security lights, no motion-sensor lights. Darkness was the friend of covert ops. Not today, they were doing this in daylight. Neither broad nor bright, the fag end of the afternoon. The dimming of the day.

  Another car came round the corner, the right one this time. ‘Here comes the kid,’ Steve said softly. She was five years old, straight black hair, big brown eyes. She had no idea what was about to happen to her. The Paki kid, Steve called her.

  ‘Egyptian. Half,’ he corrected Steve. ‘She’s called Jennifer.’

  ‘I’m not racist.’

  But.

  The snow was still fluttering down, sticking to the windscreen for a second before melting. He had a sudden, unexpected memory of his sister coming into the house, laughing and shaking blossom off her clothes, out of her hair. He thought of the town they were brought up in as a place devoid of trees and yet here she was in his memory like a bride, a shower of petals like pink thumbprints on the dark veil of her hair.

  The car pulled into the driveway and disappeared from view. He turned to look at Steve. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Lock and load,’ Steve said, starting the engine.

  ‘Remember, don’t hurt the nanny.’

  ‘Unless I have to.’

  Wednesday

  ‘Watch out, the dragon’s about.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There. Just passing Greggs.’ Grant pointed at Tracy Waterhouse’s image on one of the monitors. The air in the security control room was always stale. Outside, it was beautiful May weather but in here the atmosphere was like that of a submarine that had been under too long. They were coming up to lunchtime, the busiest time of the day for shoplifters. The police were in and out all day, every day. A pair of them out there now, all tooled up, bulky waist-belts, knife-proof vests, short-sleeved shirts, ‘escorting’ a woman out of Peacocks, her bags stuffed with clothes she hadn’t paid for. Leslie got sleepy from peering at the monitors. Sometimes she turned a blind eye. Not everyone was, strictly speaking, a criminal. ‘What a week,’ Grant said, making a gurning face. ‘School half-term and a bank holiday. We’ll be going over the top. It’ll be carnage.’

  Grant was chewing Nicorette as if his life depended on it. He had a stain of something on hi
s tie. Leslie considered telling him about the stain. Decided not to. It looked like blood but it seemed more likely that it was ketchup. He had such bad acne that he looked radioactive. Leslie was pretty and petite and had a degree in chemical engineering from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and working in security in the Merrion Centre in Leeds was a short, not entirely unpleasurable dogleg in her life’s journey. She was on what her family called her ‘World Tour’. She’d done Athens, Rome, Florence, Nice, Paris. Not quite the world. She’d stopped off in Leeds to visit relatives, decided to stay for the summer after she hooked up with a philosophy post-grad called Dominic who worked in a bar. She had met his parents, been to their house for a meal. Dominic’s mother heated up an individual ‘Vegetarian Lasagne’ from Sainsbury’s for her while the rest of them ate chicken. His mother was defensive, worried that Leslie would carry her son off to a faraway continent and all her grandchildren would have accents and be vegetarians. Leslie wanted to reassure her, say, It’s only a holiday romance, but that probably wouldn’t go down well either.

  ‘Leslie with an “ie”,’ she had to tell everyone in England because they spelt it with a ‘y’. ‘Really?’ Dominic’s mother said, as if Leslie was herself a spelling mistake. Leslie tried to imagine taking Dominic home to her own family, introducing him to her parents, how unimpressed they’d be. She missed home, the Mason and Risch piano in the corner, her brother, Lloyd, her old golden retriever, Holly, and her cat, Mitten. Not necessarily in that order. Her family took a cottage on Lake Huron in the summer. She couldn’t even begin to explain this other life to Grant. Not that she would want to. Grant stared at her all the time when he thought she wasn’t looking. He was desperate to have sex with her. It was kind of funny really. She would rather stick knives in her eyes.