Big Sky Page 19

  Mrs. Holroyd’s daughter, in contrast to his own, seemed a placid, well-behaved sort of child. She was eating apple slices with one hand, and with the other was holding a soft toy that at first Jackson had taken for a white horse but on closer inspection turned out to be a unicorn, its horn a spiraling rainbow cornet. He thought of the girl on the Esplanade. Inevitably. He had a duty of care that he was failing to fulfill.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Brodie?”

  “Yes, yes, Mrs. Holroyd, thanks.”

  “Call me Crystal.”

  He ordered another pot of coffee and she ordered a mint tea. Jackson always felt slightly mistrustful of people who drank herbal tea. (Yes, he did know this was utterly irrational.) He was about to fold up the Yorkshire Post, ready to get down to business, when she put her hand on his arm and said, “Hang on.” She took the newspaper off him and read intently. Her lips moved when she read, he noticed. They were very nice lips, not apparently subjected to surgery like some other parts of her—not that he was necessarily an expert in these things. She wore pink lipstick. The lipstick matched her (very) high heels, a classic kind of court shoe that implied a woman, rather than a girl. You could tell a lot about a person by their shoes. The short, but not immodestly short, dress she was wearing showed off her great legs. (“Observational conclusions,” he said in his defense to Judge Julia in his head. She presided over the court of women.)

  “Wendy Ives. Murdered,” Crystal Holroyd murmured, shaking her head. “What the duck? I can’t believe it.”

  “Did you know her?” Jackson asked. He supposed it was a small town.

  “Yeah, a bit. Just socially. She’s married to Vince, he’s a friend of my husband. Nice bloke.”

  Vince hadn’t mentioned any friends last night, in fact he had seemed remarkably friendless to Jackson.

  “They were getting divorced,” she went on. “Wendy had started calling herself by her maiden name.” She frowned at the newspaper. “She wasn’t particularly nice, not that that’s a reason to kill someone.”

  “Sometimes it’s enough,” Jackson said.

  “Well, she certainly gave Vince the runaround.”

  “I met him by chance last night,” Jackson confessed.

  “Really? How? Where?”

  “On the cliffs. He was thinking of jumping.”

  “Fuck me,” she said and then clamped her hands over Snow White’s ears as if trying to beat the speed of sound and said to her, “You didn’t hear that, sweetheart.” Snow White carried on contentedly eating her apple—one slice for her, one slice for the unicorn. No poisoning ensued, no glass coffin required.

  It seemed Crystal Holroyd suspected that she was being followed and she wanted him to find out by who.

  “Do you think it could be your husband? Does he think you might be cheating on him?” Jackson sighed inwardly at finding himself on familiar turf. Yet another suspicious spouse. But—to his surprise—this didn’t seem to be the case.

  “Could be Tommy, I suppose,” she said. “It seems unlikely, though.”

  “Are you?” Jackson asked. “Cheating on your husband? Just so we’re clear.”

  “No,” she said. “I am not.”

  “Who else would have a reason to follow you, do you suppose?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what I’m asking you to find out, isn’t it?”

  He got the distinct impression that there was something she wasn’t saying. Truth, in Jackson’s experience, was often to be found skulking behind the lines. Sometimes, of course, that could be preferable to it charging you from the front with a bayonet.

  Jackson couldn’t imagine being married to a woman who looked like Crystal Holroyd. The Only Way Is Essex, a program he had come across by accident (truly) when channel surfing, was full of Crystal types. She wasn’t from Essex—she was, if he judged her accent right, from somewhere in the East Riding. It showed how old he was, Jackson supposed, that he still thought in terms of the Yorkshire ridings, done away with years ago when the administrative boundaries were redrawn.

  Crystal Holroyd wasn’t his type, although Jackson wasn’t sure he had a type anymore. (“As long as she’s breathing, I expect,” Julia said recently. Unnecessarily hostile, he thought.) His ideal woman used to be Françoise Hardy—he had, after all, always been a bit of a Francophile. He had in fact married someone in that mold, albeit English—the treacherous she-wolf Tessa—but he suspected she had been a tailor-made artifact perfectly designed to ensnare him. (“I can be your type,” Tatiana said. “I can be French if you want.” She said it to provoke, not seduce. She seemed to derive a lot of amusement from his bachelor state. It was bad enough that Julia had long ago taken up occupation in his brain, but to have Tatiana now buzzing around in there as well was an unwelcome development. It gave a whole new meaning to the term “inner voice.” At least between them they had managed to eject his first wife, Josie.)

  “And what do you want me to do if I find out who it is that’s following you?” he asked Crystal Holroyd, fearing another search-and-destroy request like that of Chloe’s mother, Ricky Kemp.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just want to know who it is. Wouldn’t you?”

  Yes, he would.

  “And you are experienced at this kind of thing, aren’t you?” she asked, a doubtful little frown momentarily creasing her smooth features. Botox? Jackson wondered. Not that he knew the first thing about it except that you paid someone who wasn’t medically qualified to stick needles in your face. It seemed like the macabre stuff of horror movies. Jackson liked his women au naturel. (“Warts and all,” he said to Julia, who didn’t seem to take the remark in the spirit of a compliment.)

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Holroyd—Crystal—it’s not my first rodeo.”

  “But you’re not a cowboy, I hope,” she said, giving him a level look. She had startlingly green eyes, the green of glacier waters in the Rockies. (He’d been there, with the daiquiri-drinking woman from Lancashire. She’d been a travel writer—still was, he supposed—which was why their surprisingly antagonistic relationship had been conducted almost entirely on foreign shores.)

  “No,” Jackson laughed. “I’m not a cowboy. I’m the sheriff.”

  She didn’t seem impressed.

  He took down her details. Crystal didn’t work, she was “just” a housewife and a mother, although that was a full-time job, she added defensively.

  “Absolutely,” Jackson said. He wasn’t going to be the one to stand up and question the choices women made. He had done that once or twice in his life and it had always ended badly. (Luddite still echoed in his brain.)

  Crystal lived with her husband, the aforesaid Tommy, in a big house called High Haven a few miles from here. Tommy owned a haulage firm and, as well as the mini Snow White, there was a stepson, Harry, from the first marriage. He was a good boy, Crystal said. Sixteen but “a bit young for his age. Also old for his age,” she added.

  “Was your husband divorced?” Jackson asked, thinking so far, so cliché, the first wife traded in for a newer model, but Crystal said no, she had died in an accident.

  “What kind of an accident?”

  “She fell off a cliff.”

  “A cliff?” Jackson’s little gray cells held hands with each other and started to skip with excitement. People didn’t fall off cliffs—he himself had recently acquired expertise in this matter—they jumped or they were pushed or they wrenched you over with them.

  “Yeah, a cliff. It was an accident. Well, I hope it was.”

  The choice of café was his, the choice of car park was hers—“The one behind the Co-op. Park near the wall by the railway. I’ll try and park there as well,” she had told him on the phone. He had complied with this instruction although he hadn’t understood it, certainly hadn’t interpreted it as meaning that ten minutes after finishing his second coffee and paying the bill he would be slowly tailing her Range Rover as it exited the car park.

  It was a big car park and if he had been parked further away f
rom her, he realized, it would have been well-nigh impossible to keep track of her when she left. He liked a woman who planned ahead.

  “You leave the café first,” she said. “I’ll follow five minutes later.”

  “Okay,” Jackson said. He had no trouble being compliant with a good-looking woman. A willingness that had been the cause of his downfall on more than one occasion.

  Crystal had already given him the number plate of her car—a big white Evoque that was easy to spot—and he sauntered past it now, pretending nonchalance, although he was scrutinizing it, inside and out. You could tell a lot about a person by their car. The windows were blacked out but through the windscreen he could see that the interior was pristine, especially considering it was Snow White’s carriage. Julia’s car was an object lesson in chaos—dog biscuits and crumbs, discarded clothing, sunglasses, stray running shoes belonging to Nathan, newspapers, Collier scripts covered in coffee stains, half-read books. She called it her “sluttery,” which was an old word, apparently. (“Old words are the best,” she said. Like “wife,” Jackson thought.)

  It wasn’t the interior of Crystal Holroyd’s car that interested Jackson, though, so much as the outside, where something had been tucked behind one of the windscreen wipers. Not a parking ticket but a white envelope with a name written on it. Tina.

  Jackson gently prized it free. (“You know what killed the cat, don’t you?” Julia said. Yeah, Jackson thought, but it had eight more lives left, didn’t it? Did he? He’d fallen off a cliff, been attacked by a mad dog, almost died in a train crash, nearly drowned, been crushed in a garbage truck, blown up—his house had been, anyway—and that wasn’t counting a couple of near misses when serving in the police and the Army. His life had been a litany of disasters. What if he was already on his ninth life? The last go-round. Perhaps he should be more cautious.)

  The envelope wasn’t sealed and he was able to slip the contents out. Not a note or a letter, but a photograph of Snow White—in a different princess costume, a blue dress. It was a candid snap of her on a swing somewhere. A long lens, by the look of it. Who took photos of kids in parks with long lenses? Perverts, stalkers, private detectives, that was who. He turned the photo over. On the back someone had written Keep your mouth shut, Christina. Interesting. Until he looked at the back of the photo he had thought that perhaps it was innocent—someone Crystal knew who wanted her to have a photo they’d taken of her daughter. But there was nothing innocent about Keep your mouth shut, was there? Whoever had written the message hadn’t bothered to add or else at the end. They didn’t need to.

  And Tina and Christina—were they both Crystal? Three women in one. A holy trinity. Or an unholy one?

  There were always more questions than answers. Always. Perhaps when you died all the questions were answered and you were finally given the gift of that clichéd thing “closure.” Perhaps he would finally find out who murdered his sister, but then it would be too late to get justice for her and that would be almost as frustrating as not knowing who killed her. (“Let it go, Jackson,” Julia said. But how could he?)

  He replaced the photograph, returned the envelope to the windscreen, and hustled back to his car before Crystal could catch sight of him. He glanced around. If someone was following her—and, given the photo, it seemed more likely now—then they would have seen him looking at it. Had he just made a rookie mistake or would it give whoever was after Crystal Holroyd pause for thought? Whether he liked it or not, she was under his protection now. Whether she liked it or not, as well.

  He watched Crystal as she approached her car, holding Candy by the hand, the two of them chatting away to each other. She stopped short at the sight of the envelope and then plucked it warily from behind the windscreen wiper, opened it even more warily. She looked at the photo and then turned it over and read the message on the back. It was difficult from this distance to discern the exact expression on her face, but her body language was talking loudly. She went rigid, a statuesque statue, staring at the message as if trying to decipher a foreign language. Then she hoisted Candy up in her arms as if she might not be safe on the ground. A Madonna and child, although Jackson supposed Our Lady had never sported pink heels like Crystal Holroyd. Jackson’s mother had dragged him to Mass every Sunday in a vain attempt to instill religion into him. A Madonna who looked like Crystal Holroyd might have made it more likely.

  Crystal snapped back into life. She put Candy in the child seat in the back of the Evoque and within seconds was driving off at speed like a woman on a mission.

  Jackson followed her out of the car park. Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn’t Crystal Holroyd that Jackson was following out of the car park, it was the silver BMW that was slinking slowly out behind her.

  Initially, he had suspected Crystal Holroyd of paranoia as the claim she had made over her mint tea had seemed a tad dramatic (“I’m being followed”), but, lo and behold, it turned out that she was right.

  Their little three-car convoy snaked its way out of town and along the A174, Jackson bringing up the rear. He was good at discreet surveillance—he should be, he’d done enough of it in his time. He had taken a photograph of the BMW’s number plate, another application to the DVLA.

  Ahead, Jackson could see the Evoque indicating right. He had put High Haven into his GPS so he was pretty sure this was Crystal heading for home. The silver BMW had obviously escorted her as far as it wanted to, or needed to, and now sailed on past the turning with Jackson following it.

  Was it a private detective, like himself, behind those blacked-out windows? A private detective who had just witnessed his quarry having a clandestine meeting with a strange man in a café who was now following him? Had they been photographed together? It wouldn’t look good if, despite her doubt, it turned out that it was the suspicious husband who was having her followed. That photo could well have been a message from him—a threat that he would go after custody of his child, for example. Or perhaps he was the kind who decided to punish an errant wife by killing the kids. Jackson had dealt with one of those once—a guy had driven his two-door hatchback into a river with his two little girls strapped in the back. Even thinking about it now years later made him feel sick.

  And no matter that it was entirely innocent, had he inadvertently made himself look like the man Crystal Holroyd was having an affair with? Or—and this was a complicated thought for the little gray cells to take on board—had Crystal Holroyd herself made Jackson look like the man she was having an affair with? Why would she do that? In order to dangle a big fat red herring in front of someone? He was overthinking it, wasn’t he?

  A couple of miles further along and they hit roadworks being policed by temporary traffic lights. The BMW roared through on amber, Jackson got stuck on (an unnecessarily long) red. Conceding that the pursuit was over, he did a U-turn when the lights changed and headed back. He checked his watch—still a couple of hours to go before his rendezvous with Ewan. Plenty of time.

  As he neared the turnoff for High Haven again, he caught sight of the Evoque, this time pulling out onto the main road. It was being driven fast, very fast, as if there were a getaway driver at the wheel rather than a woman who defined herself as a housewife and a mother. The Evoque was not a car Jackson would have chosen himself. It was designed to be a woman’s car, albeit a well-off woman. Still, he admitted reluctantly, it had pretty good technical and performance specs. Some of the models—this one, apparently—could do zero to sixty in just under seven seconds. You had to give it credit for that, and besides, a man driving a mid-range Toyota wasn’t really in a position to judge.

  Where was Crystal Holroyd going in such a hurry? Had she pretended to go back along the road to High Haven in order to shake off the silver BMW? Or to shake off a mid-range Toyota? But that would make no sense at all. The woman was a puzzle, all right, he thought. She was already almost out of sight when he put his foot on the accelerator and set off in pursuit of her. The little gray cells were taken by surprise and had to
run in an attempt to keep up.

  Transylvanian Families

  Crystal settled Candy in front of Peppa Pig when they got back home. There was a TV in the kitchen, so she could keep an eye on her from the conservatory, where she was smoking an urgent cigarette. Not that Candy was about to go anywhere, Peppa was like heroin to her. Candy was still in disguise as Snow White, but Crystal had kicked off her heels and pulled on a pair of jeans and an old T-shirt. She felt the need to do some cleaning. Cleaning would help her think about the photograph and its message. Keep your mouth shut, Christina. Who called her Christina anymore? No one, that was who. Tina was long dead and buried as well, resurrected as Crystal, as shiny and polished as glass. And what was she supposed to keep her mouth shut about? No one had asked her anything. It had to be something to do with the silver BMW, didn’t it? Was it keeping an eye on her to make sure she didn’t open her mouth (but not saying about what)?

  As she had predicted to a skeptical Jackson Brodie, she was followed from the car park. In the rearview mirror she could just make out Jackson Brodie’s Toyota. It made her feel marginally safer—but only marginally—to think that someone was watching the person watching her. Perhaps someone was watching him too, an endless trail of people with her in their sights. Nothing to do with Tommy, she felt sure of that now. It felt bigger and nastier than that. It felt like the past. Well, it was true, wasn’t it? If she opened her mouth about the past then all the demons in hell would fly out.

  Was Jackson Brodie any good? she wondered. Not my first rodeo, he had said. Typical man, full of his own sugar. She’d been at the whim of swaggering men all her life, men who treated her like a doll—and not in a good way. (“Braggadocio,” Harry said. “From the Italian.” Sounded like a racehorse.) Crystal preferred quiet men with low opinions of themselves—Vince Ives, for example. He seemed like one of the good ones. Had Wendy really been murdered? Why? Had she failed to keep her mouth shut about something? Did she have a past, too? It seemed unlikely. She shopped from the Boden catalog and was proud of having grown a horrible stunted little tree.