Big Sky Read online

  Jackson tried not to inhale too deeply the scents of the pier—fried food and sugar (“Weapons of mass destruction,” according to Julia)—which despite their unpleasantness were making him salivate. It was lunchtime but he seemed to be running on nothing more than caffeine today. All he had on him was a bag of dog treats and he was still enough meals away from anarchy not to consider them. He gave one to doughty Dido as a reward for her stoicism.

  Across the road he could see a menu board outside a pub announcing that they were serving “Yapas” and it took Jackson some time to fathom that this meant Yorkshire tapas. There was a movement, he had been reading, for “Yexit”—devolution for the county, in other words. Yorkshire, the argument ran, had a population almost the size of Denmark, a larger economy than eleven EU nations, and had won more gold medals at the Rio Olympics than Canada. It was funny, Jackson mused, how he had considered Brexit to be the end of civilization as he knew it, and yet Yexit played a siren tune on his heartstrings. (“Thus are civil wars and tribal genocide fomented,” Julia said. Julia was the only person Jackson knew who started sentences with “thus” and her prediction seemed a bit of a savage outcome for something that began with a Yapas of “shrimp ceviche” and “sweet and sour whelk meat.” Whelk meat was a (so-called) food he would only be prepared to eat if it were to save the life of one of his children. And even then… )

  He was distracted by the departure of Madame Astarti’s client, a thin young woman who didn’t look at all happy with any of the tenses of her life, past, present, or future.

  And then, at last, Crystal was out of Transylvania World, having ditched Snow White, apparently, and before Jackson had time to catch his breath they were off again, back in their respective cars and on the road.

  “Sorry about this,” Jackson apologized to Dido as he gave her a leg up into the back seat. She fell fast asleep immediately.

  Crystal seemed to be going to Scarborough, which was good because that was where Jackson was also bound. If Crystal noticed him, he reasoned, he could claim a perfectly innocent alibi, even though he was following her like a hunter stalking prey, behaving, in fact, exactly like the silver BMW that he was supposed to be investigating. He checked the time again—still an hour before Ewan and Jackson’s pubescent alter ego, Chloe, were due to meet.

  When they reached their destination, more nifty parking ensued. More walking along streets—Crystal was going at a trot, she’d be cantering soon. Why was she in such a hurry? So she could get back and rescue Snow White from the vampires’ clutches?

  They had reached the mean streets by now. Crystal stopped short outside a tattoo parlor and checked the name on the bell on the door next to it. A flat was above, Jackson presumed. After a couple of minutes the door was opened and a woman peered out cautiously. It was hard to judge her age as she had the scrawny morbidity of a meth addict. Not really the type you’d expect a self-styled “wife and mother” to keep company with. She was hugging a man’s cardigan around her body as though she was freezing. On her feet were a pair of old-fashioned furry slippers, the kind that Jackson imagined his grandmother would have worn if he had ever had a grandmother—there wasn’t much in the way of longevity in his ancestral line. The two women exchanged a few intense words on the doorstep before the cardigan-wrapped woman stepped aside and let Crystal inside.

  More loitering ensued on his part, this time in a coffee shop on the other side of the street. Not a coffee shop, more of an apology for a greasy spoon, a run-down place in which Jackson was the only customer, so it was easy to secure a seat near the window from where he could keep a lookout for his client’s reappearance. He ordered a coffee (rank) and pretended to look busy with his iPhone until Crystal suddenly flew out the door. She was halfway up the street before he’d thrown down a five-pound note (a ludicrous overpayment) and cajoled Dido into getting to her feet.

  Jackson changed his mind about keeping up the chase. He thought it might quite possibly kill the dog and that was the last thing he wanted on his slate of shortcomings with either Julia or Nathan. Instead he crossed the street to find out the name of Crystal’s haggard friend. A piece of paper had been stuck with Sellotape above the doorbell and, handwritten in felt tip, it said F. Yardley. He wondered what the F stood for. Fiona? Fifi? Flora? She didn’t look like a Flora. Jackson’s own mother was a Fidelma, a name she had to spell for every English person she ever met. She was from Mayo, which didn’t help. The accent was dense. “Potato speak,” Jackson’s brother, Francis—another F—had called it, dismissive of his Celtic heritage. Francis was older than Jackson and had embraced the freedom of the sixties with relish. He was a welder with the coal board and owned a sharp suit and a motorbike and had a Beatles pudding-bowl haircut. He also seemed to have a different girl every week. He was a role model to aspire to. And then he killed himself.

  It was guilt that drove him to suicide. Francis had felt responsible for their sister’s death. If Jackson could speak to Francis now he would give him the usual police spiel about how the only person responsible for Niamh’s death was the man who killed her, but the truth was that if his brother had met Niamh at the bus stop like he was supposed to, then a stranger wouldn’t have raped and murdered her and thrown her in the canal, and for that Jackson had never forgiven his brother. He was okay with grudges. They served a purpose. They kept you sane.

  Jackson rang F. Yardley’s doorbell and after a considerable wait, and a lot of shuffling and rattling of door keys and chains, the door was finally opened.

  “What?” the cardigan woman asked. No preamble there, then, Jackson thought. Close up he could see the look of sunken desperation on her skeletal features. She could have been any age between thirty and seventy. She had changed from the grandmother slippers into a pair of cheap knee-high black patent boots and beneath the oversized cardigan she was wearing a short skirt and a scanty sequinned top. Much as he disliked jumping to easy conclusions, Jackson couldn’t help but think “working girl,” a bargain-basement one at that. He had always gotten on well with the oldest profession when he had been a policeman, and he took out his license and embarked on his usual doorstep patter—“Miss Yardley, is it? My name’s Jackson Brodie. I’m a private detective working on behalf of a client, a Mrs. Crystal Holroyd.” (The truth, after all.) “She’s asked me to make some inquiries about—” Before he could make anything up she said, “Fuck off,” and slammed the door in his face.

  “If you change your mind, give me a ring!” he shouted through the letterbox before posting his card through.

  “Come on,” he said to Dido, hustling her back into the car again. “We need to get our skates on or we’re going to be late for our date.”

  It was only when he was nearing the Palace Theatre that he noticed the silver BMW, cruising quietly as a shark behind him.

  The car turned right and Jackson hesitated for a moment before doing a dodgy U-turn and following it down a side street. To no avail, he could find no sign of it anywhere, so he drove back to the Palace, parked, and took up a position at the bandstand. No band today, no music. The colliery where his father and brother had worked had had a brass band—what colliery didn’t, in those days?—and his brother had played the flugelhorn. The young Jackson had thought it was a silly name for an instrument, but Francis was good. He wished that he could just once hear his brother play a solo again. Or help his sister pin up the hem on a dress she’d made. Or have a good-night peck on the cheek from his mother—the most intimacy she could manage. They were not a family who touched. Too late now. Jackson sighed. He was growing weary of himself. He sensed the time was approaching to let it go. After all, his future was in his own hands.

  He waited at the bandstand for half an hour but Ewan proved a no-show. A youth had pitched up at one point, slouchy in a hoodie, and Jackson wondered if his quarry was young after all, but within a few minutes he was joined by his similarly attired confrères, all in hoodies, trackies, and running shoes, which gave them a criminal air—pretty much like
Nathan and his friends, in fact. Jackson caught a glimpse of the face of one of them—the drowned boy from the other day. He looked blankly through Jackson as if he wasn’t there and then they all moved off like a single-minded shoal. As he watched them leaving, Jackson realized that he was looking at Crystal Holroyd’s Evoque, parked opposite.

  “A bit of a coincidence, that, isn’t it?” he said to Dido.

  “Well, you know what they say,” Dido said. “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.” No, she didn’t say that. Of course she didn’t. She didn’t believe in coincidences, only fate.

  Perhaps, it struck Jackson, he wasn’t following Crystal, perhaps she was following him. He liked a mysterious woman as much as the next man, but there was a limit to the attractions of an enigma and he was reaching it. Before this train of thought could advance any further it was derailed by the reappearance of Crystal herself, followed by a teenage boy—Jackson thought this must be Harry (a good boy)—who was carrying Snow White in his arms. She was not the pristine child he had seen earlier. The last time Jackson had seen Snow White she had been in Whitby. How had she gotten here? Teleportation?

  Jackson was debating whether or not to make himself known to Crystal when all hell suddenly broke loose.

  Harry carried Candy outside and Crystal unlocked the Evoque. Harry got in the back so he could strap his sister into her car seat. Crystal wanted him to come with them but he said, “I can’t miss the evening performance.”

  “It’s not a matter of life and death, you know, Harry,” she said. She wished he would come with her. The most important thing now was to keep Candy safe, but Harry needed to be kept safe as well, didn’t he? He was still just a kid. Crystal had no idea what she was going to do, but she knew what she wasn’t going to do—she wasn’t going to stand up in court and talk about the past. What kind of a stain on her kids’ lives would that be? Keep your mouth shut, Christina.

  On the other hand, she was no one’s pawn anymore. Of course, that was something else the judge’s chess-playing friend, Sir Cough-Plunkett, had taught her. In the endgame a pawn can change into a queen. Crystal had a feeling there was an endgame in play, she just wasn’t sure who her opponent was.

  Crystal had just opened the driver’s door when it happened. Two men—big brawny blokes—ran up and took her completely by surprise, and one punched her in the face.

  The Wing Chun kicked in and she bounced back up to her feet and landed a punch or two, but the bloke was like Rambo. It was over in a second and she found herself on the ground. The bloke who had hit her was already in the driving seat and the other one was slamming Harry’s door shut, with Harry still inside, not to mention Candy, and then throwing himself into the front passenger seat. They drove off with a showy squealing of tires and, just like that, the entire content of Crystal’s life disappeared up the road.

  She struggled to her feet and ran after the car, but there wasn’t much point. Even at her fastest she wasn’t going to beat the Evoque. She could see Harry staring out the rear windscreen, openmouthed in shock. His little face, she thought, a tug of something cataclysmic in her heart.

  Jackson Brodie appeared out of somewhere. He’d been following her all day. Did he really think she hadn’t noticed?

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “My car’s just been hijacked with my kids in it, so no, I would say, not all right. Some fucking sheriff you are. Where’s your car?”

  “My car?”

  “Yes, your fucking car. We have to follow them.”

  En Famille

  “Mrs. Mellors? I’m DC Ronnie Dibicki and this is DC Reggie Chase. I wonder if we could come in and have a word with Mr. Mellors. Is he at home?”

  “No, he’s not, I’m afraid. Do call me Sophie,” she offered, holding out a hand to shake. “Is there a problem? Is it something to do with a case he’s working on?” she asked, all spousal support.

  “Sort of…” Reggie said.

  Sophie Mellors was a very well-put-together polite fortysomething. She was tall, wearing a neat dress and a modest pair of heels, and everything about her was fifty shades of mellow, from the brown of her eyes to the honey of her dress to the caramel of her shoes. Expensive shoes. Reggie always looked at the shoes first. You could tell a lot about a person by their shoes. Jackson Brodie taught her that. She would like to see him again, despite her initial antagonism at the sight of him on the cliff the other day. In fact she wanted to catch up with him quite badly. For a brief period of time she had masqueraded as his daughter and it had felt nice.

  “Come in, why don’t you?” Sophie said. “Gracious” was the adjective for her, Reggie thought. She was wearing what Reggie believed was called a tea dress. She was garden-party ready. Reggie thought of Bronte Finch, disheveled in her workout gear, encouraging them to eat strawberry tarts. Small animals only.

  Sophie Mellors led them into a huge kitchen that must have once been the beating heart of a farm. Reggie imagined farmhands in here, sitting around a big table for a harvest supper or a hot breakfast before lambing. A big table groaning with hams and cheeses. Yellow-yolked eggs, freshly laid by hens pecking in the yard. Reggie knew absolutely nothing about farming except that farmers had one of the highest suicide rates of any profession, so she supposed it wasn’t all hams and lambs, just a lot of muck and mud and worry. Anyway, whatever farming had happened here was long gone, the kitchen in Malton was now a hymn to expensive appliances and craftsman-built cupboards. A lasagne was sitting cling-filmed on a counter, waiting to go into the Aga. Of course there was an Aga, you would expect nothing less of a woman like this.

  “It’s nothing urgent, nothing for him to concern himself with,” Ronnie said. “We’re conducting an investigation into a historic case, former clients of Mr. Mellors. We thought that perhaps he might be able to give us some information. Do you know where your husband is?”

  “Just now? No, actually I have no idea, but he said he’d be home in time for supper.” She glanced at the lasagne as if it might have an opinion on her husband’s punctuality. “Ida’s been hacking all afternoon with Buttons and he promised he’d eat with us when she got back. En famille, as it were.”

  Ida’s been hacking all afternoon with Buttons. Reggie couldn’t even begin to translate that sentence. She presumed that Buttons had nothing to do with Cinderella and, equally, that hacking had nothing to do with computers. Sai had hacked into the global soft drinks corporation whose name was the second most recognized word in the world. So it goes.

  “Do you want to wait?” Sophie Mellors asked. “Would you like a coffee or a tea?” They declined in unison. “Or a glass of wine?” she said, indicating a bottle of red waiting patiently on the counter. “Not on duty, thank you,” Ronnie said primly. The wine was already open. Breathing, Reggie thought. Everything in the world was breathing, one way or another. Even the inanimate rocks, we just didn’t have the ears to hear them.

  Ronnie gave her a little nudge and murmured, “Planet Earth calling.”

  “Yeah,” Reggie sighed. “I hear it.”

  A boy, a teenager, burst into the kitchen, with adolescent energy and burgeoning testosterone. He was dressed in a mud-splattered school rugby kit and was battered and bruised from a game.

  “My son, Jamie,” Sophie introduced with a little laugh, “fresh from the fight.”

  Reggie was pretty sure that was a line from “Holding Out for a Hero.” She had not been averse to karaoke when she was a student and drunk. Those days seemed painfully long ago.

  “Good game?” Sophie said.

  “Yeah, good,” he said.

  “These are detectives who need a word with Dad.”

  The boy wiped his hands on his shorts and shook hands with both of them and Sophie said, “You don’t know where he is, do you? He said he’d be back in time for supper.”

  The boy shrugged. “No idea, but…” He took out his phone and said, “He’s on Find My Friends. You can see if he’s on his way back.”

/>   “Oh, yes, clever boy,” Sophie said. “I wouldn’t have thought of that. We’re all on it, but I only use it sometimes to check where Ida is. Looking for your husband seems…”—she stared at the lasagne again as if it would come up with the right word for her—“intrusive,” she decided eventually. (Ronnie sighed audibly. Sophie Mellors was a wordy sort of woman.) She hadn’t finished either. “It’s like looking at someone’s texts or emails. As if you don’t trust them to be honest with you. Everyone has a right to some privacy, even husbands and wives.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Reggie said. Reggie who, after Sai had ended their relationship, had stalked him obsessively on the GPS tracking site they shared, not to mention Facebook and Instagram and anywhere else where he might appear in his Reggie-less future. “Trust’s everything,” she nodded.

  “Look, there’s Ida,” Sophie said fondly, pointing at a green dot on Jamie’s phone moving toward the house. “She’s almost home. Her friend’s mother is dropping her off. We take it in turns.”

  “And there’s Dad,” Jamie said, pointing at a red dot. They all four of them peered at it.

  “Looks like Mr. Mellors is in the middle of nowhere,” Ronnie said. “He’s not moving.”

  “It’s just a field,” Jamie said cheerfully. “He’s often there.”

  “Really?” Sophie said, the lightest of frowns passing over her face like a summer cloud.

  “Yeah,” Jamie said.

  “And you’ve never wondered what he does there?” Ronnie asked, deploying her eyebrow.

  The boy shrugged again and with an admirable lack of teenage curiosity said, “No.”

  “Meditating, perhaps,” Sophie suggested brightly.

  “Meditating?” Ronnie said, the eyebrow launching into space.