Started Early, Took My Dog Page 11

  And then an invisible hand lifted the candlestick and moved it away from the window. Shadows flared and loomed on the wall and then the room fell back into darkness.

  Suddenly she was awake again. She had been running after a little girl, running and running, down endless corridors, up and down staircases, but she couldn’t catch up with her. And then she was the little girl and she was holding the paw of a small rabbit. They were running for their lives, hand in paw, while being chased by a giant cod. The cod was swimming through the air, sinuous and powerful, whipping its silver body around corners. Ridiculous, it really made you wonder where dreams came from. The rabbit let out a terrible cry as the big ugly lips of the cod closed on its tail. The rabbit was her baby, she understood. The one she had lost all those years ago. She woke up when she heard a voice say, Someone should do something, Matilda. Was it the cod who spoke? It was a very posh accent, you didn’t think of cod speaking with a posh accent. Well, of course, you didn’t think of them speaking at all. It was only when she was drifting off to sleep again that Tilly realized it was the voice of her old drama teacher, Franny Anderson.

  Tracy retrieved the Viennese truffles from her bag. It was in another life that she had bought them in Thornton’s. A different life. Before Courtney. BC.

  She switched on the TV. The truffles had melted and fused together. Tasted the same though, if you didn’t look at them. Britain’s Got Talent was long finished. She looked for a film on cable and all she could find that was watchable was an unseasonable Elf. She recorded it on Sky Plus for Courtney. Pressing the red record button felt like a commitment to the future. Not that they were going to hang around here to watch it but it was the thought that counted.

  If Carol Braithwaite’s life hadn’t been interrupted so abruptly she might be sitting down on her sofa now, feet up, glass and fag in hand, searching through six hundred channels and finding nothing worth watching. In the intervening years she probably wouldn’t have lived a life of much consequence but then who did? But she was long gone. You would think she had disappeared for ever but her name remained, it seemed. The cupboard door was open, the box was off the shelf, the lid was up. Why did Linda Pallister want to talk to her about Carol Braithwaite?

  Linda had worked in Child Services all her life, she must have seen the worst that people could offer. Tracy had seen the worst and then some. She felt soiled by everything she had witnessed. Filth, pure and simple. Massage parlours and lap-dancing clubs at the soft end and at the other end the hardcore DVDs of people doing repugnant things to each other. The unclassified stuff that scrambled your synapses with its depravity. The young girls trading their souls along with their bodies, the bargain-basement brothels and saunas, sleaziness beyond belief, girls on crack who would do anything for a tenner. Anything. Arresting girls for soliciting and seeing them go straight back on the streets; foreign girls who thought they were coming to work as waitresses and nannies and found themselves locked in sordid rooms, servicing one man after another all day; students working in ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ (ha!) to pay their fees. Free speech, liberal do-gooders, the rights of the individual – as long as it’s not harming anyone else. Blah, blah, blah. This was where it got you. Rome under Nero.

  No end to evil really. What could you do? You could start with one small kid.

  1974: New Year’s Eve

  A black-tie dinner-dance in the Metropole. It was in aid of some charity for kiddies – the sick or the deaf or the blind. Ray Strickland hadn’t taken much notice, just knew it was expensive. ‘Charity begins at home,’ his wife, Margaret, said. Ray wasn’t entirely sure he knew what that meant. His wife was a kind person. ‘Daughter of the manse,’ she said. ‘I was brought up to believe that you have a duty to help the less fortunate.’ ‘That would be me then,’ Ray joked.

  Margaret was from Aberdeen originally. They had met one night ten years ago, in the A and E, when Ray was still in uniform, interviewing a drunk who’d been in a fight. She had come down to do her nurse’s training at St James’s, wanting ‘to see England’. Ray told her that there was more to England than Leeds although at the time he hadn’t been further afield than Manchester. Before she met him Margaret had had plans to become a missionary in some farflung dark corner of the world. Then they became engaged and that was it, he became her mission, her own dark corner of the world.

  When they were courting, he used to meet her off her shift and they would pop across the road to the old Cemetery Tavern and have a drink. Long time now since that was pulled down. Half of Tetley’s mild for Ray, lemonade shandy for Margaret, daring for her at the time – she’d been raised in abstinence. So had Ray, of course, a West Yorkshire Wesleyan, signed the pledge and everything when he was younger. The pledge broken long ago.

  In another life Margaret would have been a saint or a martyr. Not in a bad way, not in the way that other men he knew said of their wives, ‘Thinks she’s a bloody saint, she does.’ Or, ‘She’s a martyr to the housework.’ Ray valued her goodness. Hoped in some way it would rub off on him. He came to the end of every day feeling as if he had failed somehow. ‘Don’t be silly,’ Margaret said. ‘You make the world a better place, even if it’s only in a small way.’ Her faith in him was faulty. He lived his life in a state of guilt, every day waiting to be found out. He wasn’t even sure what it was he had done.

  He looked around the room for Margaret and couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Bigwigs. Magistrates, businessmen, solicitors, councillors, doctors, police, lots of police. The great and the good out in force to say farewell to the old year. The air was soupy – cigars, cigarettes, alcohol, perfume, all mixed with the smell of the remains of the buffet. Seafood cocktail, plates of ham and chicken and curried eggs, potato salad, bowls of trifle. It was making him feel sick. His chief superintendent, Walter Eastman, had been plying him with malts. They were all hard drinkers – Eastman, Rex Marshall, Len Lomax. ‘You’re one of us, lad,’ Eastman said, ‘so ruddy well drink like one of us.’ Ray wasn’t sure who ‘us’ was. Freemasons, police, members of the golf club? Perhaps he just meant men as opposed to women.

  ‘You’re on the up, Strickland,’ Eastman said. ‘DC now but you’ll be an inspector before you know it.’

  Lots of bigwigs here in the room, of course. That was why Ray – selfconscious in the penguin suit that he’d had to hire from Moss Bros – was here. Eastman had persuaded him to buy the tickets. ‘It’ll be good for you, lad, t’rub shoulders with your elders and betters.’ Eastman, he was Eastman’s protégé. ‘That’s good,’ Margaret said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  The women were all dressed up to the nines, satin and rhinestones – cajoling husbands and fiancés out on to the dance floor, where they grumbled their way around, doing inept foxtrots and stumbling quicksteps, desperate to get back to their fags and pints. Eastman was proud of his waltz, he was light on his feet for such a heavy bloke. He had insisted on taking Margaret ‘for a turn’ round the dance floor.

  ‘Your wife’s a nice woman,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ Ray followed Eastman’s gaze and caught a glimpse of Margaret at the far side of the room. She was wearing her midnightblue lace and her soft hair was freshly set in concrete curls. She was thirty but the sixties had never happened for her. She looked very demure compared to some of the flesh on show, mutton dressed as lamb. Margaret was the other way round, lamb dressed as mutton. Ray admired modesty in a woman. His mother was his ideal wife but she would never have married someone as movable as Ray. No fixed foot, that was his trouble. ‘Stop doing yourself down, Ray,’ Margaret said, spooning his cold, worried back in the barren acreage of the marriage bed.

  She was sitting at a table with Kitty Winfield, their heads close together as if they were sharing secrets. They made an odd pair. Kitty Winfield in black velvet, pearls around her neck, long hair sculpted up into a sophisticated do. The only woman in the room who knew that less was more. Everyone aware she used to be a model. Kitty Gillespie, as she had been in those days. T
hey all presumed she had a racy past, she had dated famous people, she had been in the papers, she was one of the first to wear a miniskirt, but now she was pure class. Women wanted to be her friend, men held her in awe, beyond reproach, almost beyond lust. If Margaret was a saint, Kitty Winfield was a goddess. ‘She walks in beauty,’ Eastman murmured at Ray’s side. Eastman was a big golfing pal of Kitty Winfield’s husband, Ian. Margaret worked alongside Ian Winfield at the hospital. Margaret looked like a different species sitting next to Kitty. A dowdy pigeon next to a swan. ‘Kitty,’ Eastman said. ‘So fragile.’ Ray understood that was a polite word for neurotic.

  Ray knew what bonded Margaret and Kitty Winfield. Fertility. Or lack of it. Kitty Winfield couldn’t conceive a baby, Margaret couldn’t keep one inside. Margaret had endured three miscarriages, one premature stillbirth. Last year the doctors told her that she couldn’t try for any more, something wrong inside her. Sobbing all the way home from the hospital.

  She had spent years doing all this knitting, little lacy things in pastel colours. ‘Have to have something on the needles,’ she said. Cupboards full of baby clothes. Sad. Now she knitted for ‘babies in Africa’. Ray wasn’t sure that African kiddies would appreciate wearing wool but didn’t say anything.

  ‘We can adopt,’ he had said on that last dreadful car journey home from the hospital. That made her cry even more.

  He excused himself to Eastman and made his way round the dance floor to where Margaret and Kitty Winfield were sitting. Tragedy of it was, of course, that Margaret was a nurse on the kiddies’ ward, spent all day with other women’s children. And – an irony this as well – Kitty Winfield’s husband was a kiddy doctor. Paediatrician at St James’s.

  Until recently they hadn’t mixed in the same social circles. The Winfields were part of a cocktail crowd, big house in Harrogate. ‘Cosmopolitan,’ Margaret said. ‘Big word,’ Ray said. Now it was all different. Margaret always ‘popping over’ to see Kitty Winfield. ‘She understands what it feels like not to be able to have a baby,’ Margaret said.

  ‘I understand,’ Ray said.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Why don’t we adopt?’ Ray tried again. Margaret was more amenable to the idea this time. A nurse and a policeman, churchgoers, fit as fleas, surely they would be the ideal couple in an adoption agency’s eyes?

  ‘Maybe,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Not African kiddies, mind,’ Ray said. ‘No need to go that far.’

  Before Christmas they had been invited to a party at the Winfields’ Harrogate house. Margaret had fussed about what to wear, in the end decided on the midnight-blue lace again. ‘For God’s sake,’ Ray said, ‘buy yourself something new.’

  ‘But this is perfectly good,’ she said, so he was surprised when she came downstairs wearing a black sleeveless dress. ‘Little black dress,’ she said. ‘Kitty gave it to me. We’re the same size.’ You would never have thought that to look at them, not in a million years.

  ‘Do I look all right?’ she asked doubtfully. He’d never seen her wearing anything that suited her less than Kitty Winfield’s cocktail dress.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘You look lovely.’

  Ray felt out of his depth with the Winfields. Ian Winfield was all jovial friendship, ‘Detective Constable, come to arrest us?’ he said when he opened his holly-wreathed front door, full glass in hand.

  ‘Why? Up to something, are you?’ Ray said. Hardly witty repartee, was it? Kitty Winfield had caught him beneath the mistletoe in the hallway and he had felt himself blush when she kissed him. It was delicate, on the cheek, not like some of the women when it felt like you were being snogged by a salmon, all lips and tongues – any opportunity to get their hands on a man who wasn’t their husband. Kitty Winfield smelled like Ray imagined French women smelled. And she was drinking champagne. Ray had never met anyone who drank champagne. ‘Won’t you have a glass?’ she said, but he nursed a small whisky all evening. The Winfields’ Harrogate house wasn’t the kind of venue where you got drunk and disorderly. Margaret liked a Dubonnet and gin these days. ‘Just a small one.’

  The band in the Metropole finished up a clumsily danced cha-cha and a singer came on, looked like he’d been left over from the war. If they weren’t careful he’d start on ‘Danny Boy’ but he surprised Ray by launching into ‘Seasons in the Sun’, leading to some rebellion on the dance floor. ‘Give us something bloody cheerful,’ Len Lomax muttered. Detective Sergeant Len Lomax, a womanizing hard drinker. A rugby player. A bastard. Ray’s friend. His wife, Alma, was a hard-nosed bitch, worked as a buyer for a clothes factory. No kids, by choice, liked their ‘lifestyle’ too much. Alma was the only person Ray could think of that Margaret disliked. If Ray thought about his own ‘lifestyle’ (whatever that was) he felt an iron band tighten around his forehead.

  ‘Ray!’ Kitty Winfield said when he advanced upon her and Margaret. She smiled at him as if he were a camera. ‘I’m sorry, I’m monopolizing your wife.’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ Ray said awkwardly. He lit her cigarette for her, she was close enough for him to smell that French perfume again. Wondered what it was. Margaret smelled of nothing more than soap.

  They had been on the same table, the Winfields, the Eastmans, Len and Alma Lomax and some councillor called Hargreaves who was on the transport committee. Len Lomax had leaned across Margaret and in an undertone had said to Ray, ‘You know that the woman with Hargreaves isn’t his wife?’ Margaret made a point of pretending he was invisible. The woman in question – more grey than scarlet – was self-consciously staring at her empty plate.

  ‘He’s very rude, your friend,’ Kitty Winfield said reprovingly to Ray, inhaling deeply on her cigarette. ‘I felt for that poor woman. So what if they’re not married? It’s 1975 for heaven’s sake, not the Dark Ages.’

  ‘Well, technically it’s still 1974,’ Ray said, looking at his watch. Oh God, Ray, he thought to himself. Lighten up. Kitty Winfield made him into a dullard.

  Everything a mess now at the table, the cloth stained with food and wine, dirty plates that the waitresses were still clearing. A lone pink prawn curled like an embryo on the cloth. It turned his stomach again.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Margaret asked. ‘You look pale.’

  ‘Call a doctor,’ Kitty Winfield laughed. ‘You haven’t seen him, have you?’ she asked Ray.

  ‘Who?’ He had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘My husband. I haven’t seen him for yonks. I think I’ll go looksee. You two should dance,’ she said, rising gracefully from the ruins of the table.

  ‘Should we?’ Margaret said when Kitty Winfield had disappeared into the mêlée. ‘Dance?’

  ‘I’m feeling a bit queasy, to be honest,’ he admitted. ‘Too much of the old firewater.’

  Then Eastman came over again and said, ‘Ray, there’s some people I want to introduce you to.’ Turning to Margaret, he said, ‘You don’t mind if I borrow your husband, do you?’ and she said, ‘As long as you bring him back in one piece.’

  He went to the Gents and then got lost in a corridor somewhere. He hadn’t realized how drunk he was. He kept bouncing off the walls as if he was in a ship ploughing a choppy sea. He had to stop a couple of times and lean on the wall, once he found himself slumped on the floor, just trying to concentrate on breathing. Buzzing, everything buzzing, he wondered if someone had slipped him a Mickey Finn. Waiting staff going up and down the corridor ignored him. When he finally got back to the ballroom Margaret grabbed hold of him and said, ‘There you are, I thought you’d been kidnapped. You’re just in time for the bells.’

  The singer from earlier was counting down, ‘. . . five, four, three, two, one – Happy New Year, everyone!’The room erupted. Margaret kissed and hugged him and said, ‘Happy New Year, Ray.’ The band broke into ‘Auld Lang Syne’, no one knew the words beyond the first two lines, except for Margaret and a couple of drunk, mouthy Scots. Then Eastman and some of his pals came over and pumped his hand up and down.


  ‘Here’s to 1975,’ Rex Marshall said. ‘May all your troubles be little ones,’ and out of the corner of his eye Ray caught Margaret flinching. Stupid bugger.

  The men all kissed Margaret and he could see her trying not to shrink away from their stinking breath. The Winfields reappeared, Kitty had managed to find her husband apparently, although he looked even more the worse for wear than Ray felt. There was more shaking of hands and kissing, Kitty offering her lovely pale cheek in a way that made them all want to behave better. But not for long.

  ‘Gentlemen, to the bar!’ Len Lomax shouted, holding his arm out in front of him as if he were about to lead them in the charge of the Light Brigade.

  Both Ray and Ian Winfield demurred but Kitty Winfield laughed and said, ‘Oh, shoo, go on, shoo,’ pushing her husband away. She hooked her arm through Margaret’s and said, ‘Come on, Maggie, these men are here for the duration. I’m calling a taxi, I’ll give you a lift.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Margaret said affably. ‘You have a good time,’ she said to Ray, patting him affectionately on the cheek.

  ‘Boys will be boys,’ he heard Kitty Winfield murmur as the two women walked away.

  Men didn’t deserve women.

  ‘We don’t deserve them,’ he said to Ian Winfield as they rolled their way to the bar.

  ‘Oh God, no,’ he said. ‘They’re far superior to us. Wouldn’t want to be one though.’

  Ray had to dodge and weave his way back to the Gents where he threw up every last bit of prawn, chicken and trifle. Eastman came bustling in like a man in a hurry and took up a stance at a urinal. He unzipped himself in an expansive manner as if he was about to release something that would be admired.