Started Early, Took My Dog Page 12

  ‘Pissing like a horse,’ he said proudly. He zipped up again, ignored sink, soap and water and, patting Ray on the back, said, ‘Good to go again, lad?’

  God knows how much later. 1975 already eaten into, lost time never to be found again. Back in the Gents, leaning against a stall, trying to remain conscious. Wondered if he was going to end up in the hospital with alcoholic poisoning. He imagined how disappointed his mother would be if she could see him now.

  Somehow he found himself in the kitchen. The kitchen staff were having their own kind of celebration. They were all foreign, he could hear Spanish, he’d taken Margaret to Benidorm last year. They hadn’t liked it much.

  A man in chef’s whites set fire to a bowl of alcohol and the whole bowl became one great blue flame, ethereal, like a sacrifice to ancient gods. Then the man took a ladle and started lifting it from the bowl, leaving a trail of blue flame behind. He kept doing it again and again, higher and higher. It was hypnotic. Stairway to heaven.

  He’d fallen. He’d had an affair with a girl in clerical – Anthea, a snappy modern sort, always going on about women’s rights. She knew her own mind, he would give her that. She didn’t really want anything from him but sex and it was a relief to be with someone who wasn’t in permanent mourning for an empty womb. ‘Fun,’ she said, ‘life’s supposed to be fun, Ray.’ He’d never thought of life like that before.

  They went at it anywhere and everywhere, cars, woods, back alleys, the thin-walled bedroom in the flat she shared with a friend. It had nothing in common with what he and Margaret did in bed, where he always felt he was imposing an indignity on her and she was trying to pretend he wasn’t. Anthea did things that Ray had never even heard of. It was certainly an education. Len Lomax covered for him all the time. Lying came to Len as easily as breathing. The education was over now, Anthea said she didn’t believe in long-term relationships, was worried that he would ‘become emotionally dependent’ on her. Part of him was relieved beyond measure, he’d lived in terror that Margaret would find out, but another part of him ached for the simplicity of it all. ‘Ah, the uncomplicated fuck,’ Len said appreciatively. ‘Right,’ Ray said, although he hated the crudity of such a word being applied to his own life. ‘You’re an old woman, really, Ray,’ Len laughed.

  Ray thought maybe he’d passed out on his feet because the next moment the kitchen staff were all fighting, yelling God knows what at each other. One of them threw a huge cooking pot across the kitchen that made a terrific clatter when it landed.

  Staggered out, back into the bar. Bumped into Rex Marshall. ‘Fucking hell, Strickland,’ Marshall said, ‘you look far gone. Have a drink.’

  If he put a match to himself he would catch fire. Burn with a blue flame. He put his head down on the bar. He wondered where Len Lomax was.

  ‘Have to go home,’ he whispered when Walter Eastman came over to him. ‘Before I die. Get me a taxi, will you?’ Eastman said, ‘Don’t waste money on a fucking taxi. Call the police!’ Raucous laughter from the bar. Eastman used the phone on the bar top to make a call and some time later – it could have been ten minutes, it could have been ten years, Ray had no relationship to the normal world any more – a young constable entered the bar and said, ‘Sir?’ to Eastman.

  Those were the days.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Tracy said.

  ‘Chauffeur for the night,’ Barry Crawford said. ‘Eastman asked me to pick up a legless DC, take him home.’

  ‘You’re a real brown-nose.’

  ‘Yeah, well, beats staying in with me mam and watching New Year crap on TV.’ He was leaning casually on the car, smoking. It was freezing out here. She should have put a thermal vest on. Every time someone came out of the Metropole they brought a wash of noise and light out with them. ‘It’s like a Roman orgy in there,’ Barry said.

  ‘You think?’ Tracy wondered what Barry knew about either Romans or orgies. Precious little, she suspected. They’d been through police training college together and from that she’d gathered that he was both ambitious and lazy so he would probably do well. He ‘fancied’ a girl called Barbara, a nippy girl who teased her hair into a big old-fashioned beehive and worked on a cosmetics counter in Schofields, but he was too scared to ask her out.

  ‘What about you?’ Barry said to Tracy.

  ‘On shift. Obviously,’ she said, indicating her uniform. ‘Been called to a disturbance. Some kind of brawl in the kitchen. I think they just found out they weren’t getting overtime for working after midnight or something.’ How had Barry got his hands on a panda car? Tracy had applied to do the driver’s course and heard nothing.

  ‘You on your own?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’m with Ken Arkwright. He’s off to the toilets. Who’s this DC you’re driving then?’

  ‘Strickland.’

  ‘Speak of the devil, Barry, here comes your fare for the night. Jesus, look at the state of him. You’re going to be spending the first day of 1975 cleaning up vomit.’ Ray Strickland was being manhandled out of the Metropole, supported by a couple of burly CID blokes.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Barry said amiably to Tracy, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out with his foot.

  Ken Arkwright shambled up. ‘Ey up,’ he said to Tracy, ‘Third World War’s breaking out in there. These Mediterranean types, they don’t half know how to get worked up. We’d better get in there and call a truce before they kill each other.’

  ‘Well,’Tracy said to Barry, ‘you carry on being a taxi service, Barry, and we’ll get on with some real policing.’

  ‘Sod off.’

  ‘Same to you,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Happy New Year.’

  ‘Yes, Happy New Year, lad,’ Arkwright said.

  When Tracy looked back over her shoulder she saw DCS Eastman lean in to the driver’s window and heard him give Strickland’s address to Barry. Then he slipped him something else, Tracy couldn’t see what, money or drink probably.

  ‘What a twat,’ Arkwright said.

  ‘Barry Crawford?’

  ‘No. Ray Strickland.’

  ‘Home then, boss?’ Barry said.

  ‘No,’ Ray said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ Strickland leaned forward and slurred an address in Lovell Park and Barry said, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’ Strickland fell back against the seat and closed his eyes.

  When they arrived in Lovell Park he almost fell out of the car. Barry watched him weave his way unsteadily towards the front doors. You had to hope for the poor bastard’s sake that the lifts were working.

  Halfway there, Strickland turned and held a half-bottle of Scotch aloft as if in triumph. ‘Happy New Year!’ he shouted. He stumbled on another few yards and then turned again and shouted, louder this time, ‘What was your name?’

  ‘Crawford,’ Barry shouted back. ‘PC Barry Crawford. Happy New Year, sir.’

  Jeopardy

  Thursday

  Tracy was woken by a cry, an inchoate sound in the dark. Half comatose, she thought it was the foxes who visited the garden most nights and who made mating sound like murder. She heard the cry again and it took several seconds before she remembered that she was not alone in the house.

  Courtney!

  Clambering out of bed, she stumbled drowsily to the spare bedroom where she found the kid sound asleep on her back, breathing heavily, her mouth slack. As Tracy turned to go Courtney cried out again, a cawing noise that seemed to indicate distress. She flailed an arm suddenly as if she was trying to ward off an attack but the next second she was so deeply asleep that she could have been a corpse. Tracy felt compelled to give her a little poke and was relieved when she twitched, making a whimpering noise, like a dog dreaming.

  Tracy sat on the bed, waiting to see if the kid was going to wake again. No wonder Courtney’s sleep was disturbed – she didn’t know where she was, who she was with. Tracy felt a pang of guilt at having subtracted her from her natural habitat, but then she recalled t
he murderous expression on Kelly Cross’s face as she dragged Courtney through the Merrion Centre. Tracy had seen enough bashed-up, beat-up kids that social workers had kept in families you wouldn’t give a dog to. Families weren’t always such great places to be, especially for kids.

  *

  She must have fallen asleep because the next time she woke up Tracy found herself sprawled uncomfortably across the foot of the narrow bed while daylight washed the ugly woodchip. Of Courtney, there was no sign and Tracy experienced an unexpected moment of panic as if a giant hand had clutched at her heart. Perhaps the kid’s rightful mother had appeared under the cloak of night and stolen her back. Or perhaps a stranger had climbed in through the window and spirited her away. Although what were the odds against a kid being abducted twice in twenty-four hours? Probably not as long as you imagined.

  When a bleary-eyed Tracy blundered into the kitchen, however, she found the kid sitting at the table spooning her way stoically through a bowl of dry cereal.

  ‘You’re here,’ Tracy said.

  Courtney glanced at her briefly. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘I am here.’ She returned to spooning in cereal.

  ‘Do you want milk with that?’ Tracy said, pointing at the cereal bowl. The kid nodded extravagantly and kept on nodding until Tracy advised her to stop.

  Tracy wasn’t sure which was more disturbing, losing the kid or finding her.

  Tracy had slept in a washed-out Winnie-the-Pooh nightshirt from British Home Stores that barely reached the top of her thunderous thighs and her hair was sticking out in all the wrong places. She had hastily pulled on a pair of old tracksuit bottoms to complete the ensemble. She looked dismal, probably not a million miles from how Kelly Cross looked first thing in the morning, just a lot bigger. Still, she could have been wearing a bin-liner and Courtney wouldn’t have noticed. Kids weren’t interested in what you were like on the outside. There was something definitely cheering about being with a small, non-judgemental person.

  Courtney, on the other hand, had made more of an effort, dressing herself from a selection of yesterday’s new clothes. Some of them were on backwards but she had got the general idea right. Tracy’s efforts at hairdressing the previous evening weren’t entirely successful. In the cruel light of day the kid looked hand-made. She had finished her cereal and was staring, Oliver Twist-like, at the empty bowl.

  ‘Toast?’ Tracy offered. The kid gave her a thumbs-up.

  Tracy cut the toast into triangles and arranged them on the plate. If it had just been for her she would have slapped a doorstep on to a piece of kitchen roll and been done with it. It was different having someone to do things for. Made you more careful. ‘Mindful’, a Buddhist would have said. She only knew that because a long time ago she had dated a Buddhist for a few weeks. He was a wimpy bloke from Wrexham who ran a second-hand bookshop. She was hoping for enlightenment, ended up with glandular fever. Put her off spirituality for life.

  Tracy parked Courtney on the sofa in front of the television, where she sat mesmerized by a noisily incomprehensible cartoon, weird and Japanese. Obviously the kid should be doing something more mentally stimulating – playing with Lego or learning the alphabet or whatever it was that four-, maybe three-year-olds were supposed to do.

  Tracy switched on her laptop and waited for it to get up a head of steam before beginning to scroll through the wares being offered by several estate agents. Everything nice in a pleasant location – the Dales, the Lakes – cost more than twice as much as she would get for her house in Leeds. Abroad seemed a better option for all kinds of reasons. They could lose themselves in rural France or hectic urban Barcelona, somewhere where no one would think twice about their relocation.

  Spain, you couldn’t give away property in Spain these days, Brits leaving in droves. Bring the kid up in the sun. Costa del Gangster. Enough career criminals did it, why not the people who’d failed to catch them? Mi casa es mi casa. Not the kind of property you could buy online. They’d have to fly out there. Not come back. Once she’d got a passport for the kid, of course. Somewhere further? New Zealand, Australia, Canada. Leslie could give her some gen on Canada. Plenty of wilderness there to get lost in. How far did you have to run before you couldn’t be caught? Siberia? The moon?

  When the cartoon finished Tracy switched over to GMTV, looking for the news. Nothing on the national or the local, still nobody missing a kid. You would notice straight away if you lost one. (Wouldn’t you?) Kelly Cross was Courtney’s mother. Had to be. No doubt about it. None at all.

  They had another day to kill until Tracy could get the key to the holiday place. She wondered what they should do. There was a kids’ film showing at the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley. Or there was a Wacky Warehouse in Leeds – a play area attached to a pub, the ultimate dream of the Useless Parenting classes, and she had often passed something called Diggerland near Castleford where, apparently, kids got to drive construction machinery. Bob the Builder had a lot to answer for.

  Tracy fired off an email to Leslie at the Merrion Centre (not Grant, a police cadet reject. Somewhere there was a village missing an idiot) saying that she would see them after her holiday and that she wouldn’t be in today, ‘still got a bit of a bug, wouldn’t want to hand it on to you’. That would surprise them, Tracy was as fit as a butcher’s dog normally. Constitution of an ox. She was a Taurean, born under the sign of the bull. Not that she believed in any of that stuff. Didn’t believe in anything that she couldn’t touch. ‘Ah, an empiricist,’ a man she had met at the singles social club said. He was a prof at the university, full of hot air and cold calculation. Took her to the Grand to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers ‘based on the – largely legendary – incident of the “Rape of the Sabine Women”,’ he said. ‘Although, as in the musical itself, “rape”, raptio, is really abduction or kidnapping. The interior of the theatre, of course, is said to be based on La Scala in Milan.’ And so on, and so on. And so on.

  The following week he took her to see Dial M for Murder. ‘That should be right up your street,’ he said.

  Courtney turned to look at Tracy and said plaintively, ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The kid was an eater, there was no doubt about that. Maybe she was making up for something.

  ‘Courtney?’ Tracy said tentatively. ‘You know how you’re called Courtney?’ The kid nodded. She seemed bored, although her expressions tended to be unreadable at the best of times. ‘Well, I was thinking, now that you’ve got a new home –’ she saw Courtney’s eyes skim the anodyne living room – ‘how about a new name to go with that?’ Courtney gazed at her indifferently. Tracy wondered if the kid had been given a new identity before, that Courtney wasn’t even her name. Was that the reason no one was looking for her, were they looking for a completely different kind of kid – a Grace, a Lily, a Poppy? (A Lucy, perhaps.) Something like acid bile rose in Tracy’s gorge. It came, she supposed, from the well of terror that had opened up in her stomach. What had she done? She closed her eyes in an effort to blank out the guilt – futile – and when she opened them the kid was standing in front of her, looking interested. ‘What name?’ she asked.

  She should get some fresh air into the kid, Tracy thought. She looked peaky, as if she’d been grown in a cellar all her life. ‘Come on,’ Tracy said when more toast had been eaten – turned out the kid liked Marmite – ‘why don’t we go out, get some fresh air? I’ll change.’ Courtney looked at her with interest and Tracy added, ‘Into different clothes.’

  Tracy slipped into something less comfortable and when she returned to the living room the kid had got down from the table and fetched her pink backpack. She was as biddable as a dog although without a dog’s tail-wagging enthusiasm.

  Before they could leave the house they heard a key turning in the front-door lock. Tracy had a mental blank, couldn’t think of any reason why someone would have her front-door key, why anyone would be coming into her house. For a mad moment she thought i
t might be her anonymous phone caller. For an even madder moment she thought it might be Kelly Cross and did a quick recce of the hallway to see what she could use as a weapon. The door opened.

  Janek! Tracy had forgotten all about him.

  He looked bemused by her surprise and then he spotted Courtney lingering in the doorway of the kitchen and he smiled in delight.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. Courtney stared blankly back at him. ‘My niece,’ Tracy said. ‘My sister’s much younger than me,’ she added, embarrassed suddenly by how old she must seem to Janek. Of course he had kids of his own, didn’t he? Poles probably really liked kids. Most foreigners liked kids more than the British did.

  ‘We’re on our way out,’ she said hastily before she got involved in anything more complicated about the kid’s origins.

  ‘Help yourself to biscuits,’ she added. What a difference a day made.

  He woke up with no idea where he was or how he had got there. That was alcohol for you.

  Jackson wasn’t alone. There was a woman lying next to him, her face pressed into the pillow, her features partly hidden by a messedup nest of hair. He never ceased to be amazed by how many round-heeled women there were in the world. In a sudden moment of paranoia he reached over and checked the woman’s breathing and was relieved to find it sour and regular. Her skin had the bruised and waxy look of a corpse but, on inspection, Jackson realized that it was just her make-up from the previous evening, smeared and blotchy. Close up, even in the street-lit gloom of the bedroom, he could see that she was older than he had first thought. Early forties, Jackson reckoned, maybe a little younger. Maybe a little older. She was that kind of woman.

  A digital clock by the bed told him it was five thirty. In the morning, he assumed. Winter or summer it was the time he woke at, thanks to his body’s own internal alarm clock, set a long time ago by the army. Up with the lark. Jackson didn’t think that he’d ever seen a lark. Or heard one for that matter. Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music, / Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled. What kind of a woman came up with an image like that? Jackson felt pretty sure that Emily Dickinson didn’t wake up hungover, with a strange man in her bed.