Big Sky Page 2

  By the time Jackson was thirteen his mother was already dead of cancer, his sister had been murdered, and his brother had killed himself, helpfully leaving his body—hanging from the light fixture—for Jackson to find when he came home from school. Jackson never got the chance to be selfish, to sprawl and make demands and fold his arms sarcastically. And anyway, if he had, his father would have given him a good skelping. Not that Jackson wished suffering on his son—God forbid—but a little less narcissism wouldn’t go amiss.

  Julia, Nathan’s mother, could go toe to toe with Jackson in the grief stakes—one sister murdered, one sister who killed herself, one who died of cancer. (“Oh, and don’t forget Daddy’s sexual abuse,” she reminded him. “Trumps to me, I think.”) And now all the wretchedness of their shared pasts had been distilled into this one child. What if somehow, despite his untroubled appearance, it had lodged in Nathan’s DNA and infected his blood, and even now tragedy and grief were growing and multiplying in his bones like a cancer? (“Have you even tried being an optimist?” Julia said. “Once,” Jackson said. “It didn’t suit me.”)

  “I thought you said you were going to get me an ice cream.”

  “I think what you meant to say was, ‘Dad, can I have that ice cream you promised and seem to have temporarily forgotten about? Please?’”

  “Yeah, whatever.” After an impressively long pause he added, reluctantly, “Please.” (“I serve at the pleasure of the President,” an unruffled Julia said when their offspring demanded something.)

  “What do you want?”

  “Magnum. Double peanut butter.”

  “I think you might be setting your sights quite high there.”

  “Whatever. A Cornetto.”

  “Still high.”

  Nathan came trailing clouds of instructions where food was concerned. Julia was surprisingly neurotic about snacks. “Try and control what he eats,” she said. “He can have a small chocolate bar but no sweets, definitely no Haribo. He’s like a gremlin after midnight if he gets too much sugar. And if you can get a piece of fruit into him then you’re a better woman than me.” Another year or two and Julia would be worrying about cigarettes and alcohol and drugs. She should enjoy the sugar years, Jackson thought.

  “While I’m getting your ice cream,” Jackson said to Nathan, “make sure you keep an eye on our friend Gary there in the front row, will you?” Nathan showed no sign of having heard him so Jackson waited a beat and then said, “What did I just say?”

  “You said, ‘While I’m gone make sure you keep an eye on our friend Gary there in the front row, will you?’”

  “Right. Good,” Jackson said, slightly chastened, not that he was going to show it. “Here,” he said, handing over his iPhone, “take a photograph if he does anything interesting.”

  When Jackson got up, the dog followed him, laboring up the steps behind him to the café. Julia’s dog, Dido, a yellow Labrador, overweight and aging. Years ago, when Jackson was first introduced to Dido by Julia (“Jackson, this is Dido—Dido, this is Jackson”), he thought the dog must have been called after the singer, but it turned out she was the namesake of the Queen of Carthage. That was Julia in a nutshell.

  Dido—the dog, not the Queen of Carthage—also came with a long list of instructions. You would think Jackson had never looked after a child or a dog before. (“But it wasn’t my child or my dog,” Julia pointed out. “I believe that should be our child,” Jackson said.)

  Nathan had been three years old before Jackson was able to claim any ownership of him. Julia, for reasons best known to herself, had denied that Jackson was Nathan’s father, so he had already missed the best years before she admitted to his paternity. (“I wanted him to myself,” she said.) Now that the worst years had arrived, however, it seemed that she was more than keen to share him.

  Julia was going to be “ferociously” busy for nearly the entire school holiday, so Jackson had brought Nathan to stay with him in the cottage he was currently renting, on the East Coast of Yorkshire, a couple of miles north of Whitby. With good Wi-Fi Jackson could run his business—Brodie Investigations—from just about anywhere. The internet was evil but you had to love it.

  Julia played a pathologist (“the pathologist,” she corrected) in the long-running police procedural Collier. Collier was described as “gritty northern drama,” although these days it was tired hokum thought up by cynical metropolitan types off their heads on coke, or worse, most of the time.

  Julia had been given her own storyline for once. “It’s a big arc,” she told Jackson. He thought she said “ark” and it took him a while to sort this mystery out in his head. Now, still, whenever she talked about “my arc” he had a vision of her leading an increasingly bizarre parade of puzzled animals, two by two, up a gangplank. She wouldn’t be the worst person to be with during the Flood. Beneath her scatty, actressy demeanor she was resilient and resourceful, not to mention good with animals.

  Her contract was up for renewal and they were drip-feeding the script to her, so, she said, she was pretty certain that she was heading for a grisly exit at the end of her “arc.” (“Aren’t we all?” Jackson said.) Julia was sanguine, it had been a good run, she said. Her agent was keeping an eye on a Restoration comedy that was coming up at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. (“Proper acting,” Julia said. “And if that fails there’s always Strictly. I’ve been offered it twice already. They’re obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel.”) She had a lovely throaty laugh, especially when being self-deprecating. Or pretending to be. It had a certain charm.

  As suspected, no Magnums, no Cornettos, they only had Bassani’s,” Jackson said, returning with two cones held aloft like flambeaux. You might have thought that people would want their kids to stop eating Bassani’s ice cream after what had happened. Carmody’s amusements were still there as well, a rowdy, popular presence on the front. Ice cream and arcades—the perfect lures for kids. It must be getting on for a decade since the case was in the papers? (The older Jackson grew, the more slippery time became.) Antonio Bassani and Michael Carmody, local “worthies”—one of them was in jail and the other one had topped himself, but Jackson could never remember which was which. He wouldn’t be surprised if the one in jail wasn’t due to get out soon, if he hadn’t already. Bassani and Carmody liked kids. They liked kids too much. They liked handing kids around to other men who liked kids too much. Like gifts, like forfeits.

  An eternally hungry Dido had waddled back hopefully on his heels and in lieu of ice cream Jackson gave her a bone-shaped dog treat. He supposed it didn’t make much difference to her what shape it was.

  “I got a vanilla and a chocolate,” he said to Nathan. “Which do you want?” A rhetorical question. Who under voting age ever chose vanilla?

  “Chocolate. Thanks.”

  Thanks—a small triumph for good manners, Jackson thought. (“He’ll come good in the end,” Julia told him. “Being a teenager is so difficult, their hormones are in chaos, they’re exhausted a lot of the time. All that growing uses up a lot of energy.”) But what about all those teenagers in the past who had left school at fourteen (nearly the same age as Nathan!) and gone into factories and steelworks and down coal mines? (Jackson’s own father and his father before him, for example.) Or Jackson himself, in the Army at sixteen, a youth broken into pieces by authority and put back together again by it as a man. Were those teenagers, himself included, allowed the indulgence of chaotic hormones? No, they were not. They went to work alongside men and behaved themselves, they brought their pay packets home to their mothers (or fathers) at the end of the week and—(“Oh, do shut up, will you?” Julia said wearily. “That life’s gone and it isn’t coming back”).

  “Where’s Gary?” Jackson asked, scanning the banks of seats.

  “Gary?”

  “The Gary you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on.”

  Without looking up from his phone, Nathan nodded in the direction of the dragon boats, where Gary and Kirsty were queuing for tickets
.

  And the battle is over and the Union Jack is being hoisted. Let’s have a cheer for the good old Union flag!

  Jackson cheered along with the rest of the audience. He gave Nathan a friendly nudge and said, “Come on, cheer the good old Union flag.”

  “Hurrah,” Nathan said laconically. Oh, irony, thy name is Nathan Land, Jackson thought. His son had his mother’s surname, it was a source of some contention between Julia and Jackson. To put it mildly. “Nathan Land” to Jackson’s ears sounded like the name of an eighteenth-century Jewish financier, the progenitor of a European banking dynasty. “Nat Brodie,” on the other hand, sounded like a robust adventurer, someone striking west, following the frontier in search of gold or cattle, loose-moraled women following in his wake. (“When did you get so fanciful?” Julia asked. Probably when I met you, Jackson thought.)

  “Can we go now?” Nathan said, yawning excessively and unselfconsciously.

  “In a minute, when I’ve finished this,” Jackson said, indicating his ice cream. Nothing, in Jackson’s opinion, made a grown man look more of a twit than walking around licking an ice-cream cone.

  The combatants of the Battle of the River Plate began their lap of honor. The men inside had removed the top part of the boats—like conning towers—and were waving at the crowd.

  “See?” Jackson said to Nathan. “Told you so.”

  Nathan rolled his eyes. “So you did. Now can we go?”

  “Yeah, well, let’s just check on our Gary.”

  Nathan moaned as if he was about to be waterboarded.

  “Suck it up,” Jackson said cheerfully.

  Now that the smallest manned navy in the world was sailing off to its moorings, the park’s dragon boats were coming back out—paddleboats in bright primary colors with long necks and big dragon heads, like cartoon versions of Viking longboats. Gary and Kirsty had already mounted their own fiery steed, Gary pedaling heroically out into the middle of the boating lake. Jackson took a couple of photos. When he checked his phone he was pleasantly surprised to find that Nathan had taken a burst—the modern equivalent of the flicker books of his own childhood—while Jackson was off buying the ice creams. Gary and Kirsty kissing, puckered up like a pair of puffer fish. “Good lad,” Jackson said to Nathan.

  “Now can we go?”

  “Yes, we can.”

  Jackson had been following Gary and Kirsty for several weeks. He had sent enough photographs of them in flagrante to Gary’s wife, Penny, for her to have divorced her husband for adultery several times over, but every time Jackson said to her, “I think you’ve got enough evidence now, Mrs. Trotter,” she always said, “Just stay on them a bit longer, Mr. Brodie.” Penny Trotter—it was an unfortunate name, Jackson thought. Pig’s trotters. A cheap meal from a butcher. His mother had cooked pig’s feet, the head too. Snout to tail and everything in between, nothing wasted. She was Irish, the memory of famine engraved on her bones, like the scrimshaw he had seen in the museum in Whitby. And, being an Irish mother, of course she fed the men of the family first—in order of age. Next it was his sister’s turn, and then, finally, their mother would sit down with her plate, dining on whatever was left—often nothing more than a couple of potatoes and a drop of gravy. Only Niamh ever noticed this maternal sacrifice. (“Come on, Ma, have a bit of my meat.”)

  There were occasions when Jackson’s sister appeared more vivid to him in death than she had been in life. He did his best to keep the memory of her alive as there was no one else left to tend the flame. Soon she would be snuffed out for eternity. As would he, as would his son, as—(“For Christ’s sake, Jackson, give it a break,” Julia said crossly).

  Jackson had begun to wonder if Penny Trotter took some kind of masochistic pleasure in what amounted (almost) to voyeurism. Or did she have an endgame that she wasn’t sharing with Jackson? Perhaps she was simply waiting it out, Penelope hoping Odysseus would find his way home. Nathan had a school project for the holidays about the Odyssey. He didn’t seem to have learned anything, whereas Jackson had learned quite a lot.

  Nathan attended a private school (mostly thanks to Julia’s fee for Collier), which was something that Jackson objected to on principle but was secretly relieved by as Nathan’s local comp was a sink school. (“I can’t decide which you are,” Julia said, “a hypocrite or just a failed ideologue.” Had she always been so judgmental? That used to be the job of his ex-wife Josie. When had it become Julia’s?)

  Jackson had grown bored with Gary and Kirsty. They were creatures of habit, going out together every Monday and Wednesday evening, in Leeds, where they worked at the same insurance company. The same pattern: a drink, a meal, and then a couple of hours closeted in Kirsty’s tiny modern flat, where Jackson could guess what they were up to without, thank goodness, having to actually witness it. Afterward Gary drove home to Penny and the brick-built, character-free, semidetached house they owned in Acomb, a flat suburb of York. Jackson liked to think that if he was a married man conducting an illicit affair—something he had never done, hand to God—then it would have been a little more spontaneous, a little less predictable. A little more fun. Hopefully.

  Leeds was a long drive over the moors and so Jackson had contracted a helpful youth called Sam Tilling who lived in Harrogate and had been kicking his heels between university and joining the police when Jackson recruited him to do some legwork for him. Sam cheerfully carried out the more tedious assignments—the wine bars, the cocktail lounges, and the curry houses where Gary and Kirsty indulged in bridled passion. They occasionally tottered off on a day trip somewhere. It was Thursday today so they must have bunked off work on account of the good weather. Jackson, with no real evidence, imagined that Gary and Kirsty were the kind of people who would deceive their employers without any qualms.

  As Peasholm Park was practically on Jackson’s doorstep, he had chosen to follow them himself today. Plus, it gave him something to do with Nathan, even if Nathan’s preferred default position was to be inside playing Grand Theft Auto on his Xbox or chatting online with his friends. (What on earth did they find to say to each other? They never did anything.) Jackson had tried dragging Nathan (almost literally) up the hundred and ninety-nine steps to the gaunt ruins of Whitby Abbey in a vain attempt to make him understand history. Similarly the museum, a place that Jackson liked for its quirky medley of exhibits from fossilized crocodiles to whaling memorabilia to the mummified hand of a hanged man. None of that interactive, keep-the-ADHD-kids-amused-no-matter-what stuff. Just a gallimaufry of the past, still in its original Victorian cases—butterflies pinned, birds stuffed, war medals displayed, dolls’ houses open to view. The odds and ends of people’s lives, which, when all was said and done, were the things that mattered, weren’t they?

  Jackson was surprised that Nathan wasn’t attracted by the gruesomeness of the mummified hand. “The Hand of Glory” it was called and it carried an elaborate, confusing folktale of gallows and opportunistic housebreakers. The museum was full, too, of Whitby’s maritime heritage, also of no interest whatsoever to Nathan, and obviously the Captain Cook Museum was a nonstarter. Jackson admired Cook. “First man to sail around the world,” he said, trying to engage Nathan’s interest. “So?” he said. (So! How Jackson hated that contemptuous So?) Perhaps his son was right. Perhaps the past was no longer the context for the present. Perhaps none of it mattered anymore. Was this how the world would end—not with a bang but a So?

  While Gary and Kirsty were gallivanting, Penny Trotter was seeing to business—a gift shop in Acomb called the Treasure Trove, the interior of which smelled of an unholy mix of patchouli-scented incense and artificial vanilla. The stock consisted mostly of cards and wrapping paper, calendars, candles, soaps, mugs, and a lot of twee objects whose function wasn’t readily apparent. It was the kind of business that kept going by staggering from one festivity to the next—Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Halloween, back to Christmas again, and all the birthdays in between.

  “Well, it has no p
urpose as such,” Penny Trotter had said when Jackson questioned the raison d’être of a stuffed felt heart that had Love picked out in sequins across its scarlet surface. “You just hang it up somewhere.” Penny Trotter had a romantic nature—it was her downfall, she said. She was a Christian, “born again” in some way. (Once was enough, surely?) She wore a cross around her neck and a band around her wrist with the initials WWJD printed on it, which baffled Jackson. “What Would Jesus Do?” she explained. “It makes me stop and think before I do something I might regret.” Jackson reckoned he would find one of those useful. WWJD—What Would Jackson Do?

  Brodie Investigations was the latest incarnation of Jackson’s erstwhile private detective agency, although he tried not to use the term “private detective”—it had too many glamorous connotations (or sleazy, depending how you looked at it). Too Chandleresque. It raised people’s expectations.

  Jackson’s days consisted of some dog work for solicitors—debt tracing, surveillance, and so on. Then there was employee theft, DBS, background checks, a bit of due diligence, but really when he hung up the virtual shingle for Brodie Investigations he may as well have suspended one of Penny Trotter’s stuffed hearts because the majority of his work was either following cheating spouses (infidelity, thy name is Gary) or trapping unsuspecting would-be Garys in the sticky insides of honeypots (or fly traps, as Jackson thought of them) to test fiancés and boyfriends with temptation. Even Jackson, long in the tooth though he was, had not realized just how many suspicious women there were out there.