Big Sky Read online

  To this end, he primed his man-eating traps with an agent provocateur. This took the form of a particularly enticing yet lethal honeybee—a Russian woman called Tatiana. More hornet than honeybee, actually. Jackson had first encountered Tatiana in another lifetime when she had been a dominatrix and he had been fancy-free and—briefly, ludicrous though it seemed now—a millionaire. Not sex, not a relationship, God forbid, he’d rather go to bed with the aforesaid hornet than Tatiana. She had simply been on the fringes of an investigation he had gotten caught up in. And anyway he had been with Julia at the time (or had been under the impression that he was), busily creating the embryo that would one day sprawl its legs and fold its arms sarcastically. Tatiana had been a child of the circus, she claimed, her father a famous clown. Clowns in Russia were not funny, she said. They aren’t here either, Jackson thought. Tatiana herself, unlikely as it seemed, had once been a trapeze artist. Did she still practice? Jackson wondered.

  The world had grown darker since he first met her, although the world grew darker every day as far as Jackson could make out, yet Tatiana remained much the same, although she, too, had reincarnated. He had come across her again by chance (he presumed, but who knew?) in Leeds, where she had been working as a waitress in a cocktail bar (there was a song in there somewhere), dipping and puppy-dogging for customers in a tight black sequinned dress. “Legitimate,” she told him later, but the word was rendered implausible on her lips.

  Jackson had been having a professional after-hours drink with a lawyer called Stephen Mellors for whom he did sporadic work. The bar was the kind of modish place where it was so dark that you could hardly see your drink in front of you. Mellors, a modish sort himself, metrosexual and proud of it, something Jackson could never be accused of, ordered a Manhattan while Jackson settled for a Perrier. Leeds had never struck Jackson as the kind of place where you could trust the tap water. Not that he had anything against alcohol, quite the opposite, but he had very strict self-imposed drunk-driving rules. You only had to scrape a carload of over-the-limit teenagers off the tarmac once to see that cars and alcohol don’t mix.

  A waitress had taken their order and a different waitress had brought it to their table. She had bobbed down with her tray of drinks, a potentially precarious move for a woman in four-inch heels, but it did allow Mellors to eye up her cleavage as she put his Manhattan down on their low table. She delivered Jackson’s Perrier in the same manner, pouring the water slowly into his glass as if it were an act of seduction. “Thanks,” he said, trying to behave like a gentleman (a lifelong project) and not look at the cleavage. Instead he looked her in the eye and found that she was smiling at him in a feral way that was startlingly familiar and saying, “Hello, Jackson Brodie, we meet again,” as if she were auditioning for a part as a Bond villainess. By the time Jackson had recovered the power of speech she had stalked off on those killer heels (they weren’t called stilettos for nothing) and disappeared into the shadows.

  “Wow,” Stephen Mellors said approvingly. “You’re a lucky man, Brodie. Thighs like a nutcracker. I bet she does a lot of squats.”

  “Trapeze, actually,” Jackson said. He noticed a fallen sequin, glinting on the table in front of him like a calling card.

  They made their way out of the park, Nathan loping along like a puppy, Dido gamely hirpling as if she could do with a hip replacement (she could, apparently). At the gates of the park there was a noticeboard onto which several posters had been affixed advertising the various delights of the summer season—Lifeboat Flag Day, Tom Jones at the open-air theater, Showaddywaddy at the Spa. There was some kind of eighties revival show, a variety thing, at the Palace, with Barclay Jack topping the bill. Jackson recognized his gurning face. The North’s very own side-splitting laughter-maker. Parental guidance required.

  Jackson knew something dodgy about Barclay Jack, but he couldn’t get the knowledge to rise up from the seabed of his memory—a dismal place that was littered with the rusting wreckage and detritus of his brain cells. Some scandal to do with kids or drugs, an accident in a swimming pool. There’d been a putative raid on his house that had come to nothing and then a lot of apologizing and backtracking from the police and the media, but that was his career pretty much ruined. There was something else too, but Jackson had exhausted his powers of retrieval.

  “That guy’s a wanker,” Nathan said.

  “Don’t use that word,” Jackson said. Was there an age limit, he wondered, when you let your child swear with impunity?

  On the way to the car park they passed a bungalow with its name proudly on the gate—Thisldo. Nathan took some time decoding it and then snorted with laughter. “That’s crap,” he said.

  “It is,” Jackson agreed. (“Crap” was allowed, he judged—too useful a word to ban completely.) “But, you know, perhaps it’s quite, I dunno… Zen” (Zen—was he really saying that?) “to know when you’ve gotten somewhere and realize that it’s enough. Not striving, just accepting.” A concept Jackson struggled with every day.

  “It’s still crap.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  In the car park there were what Jackson always thought of as “bad boys”—three of them, only a couple of years older than Nathan. They were smoking and drinking cans of something that would definitely be on Julia’s taboo list. And loitering far too near Jackson’s car for his liking. Although in his head he drove something more virile, his actual vehicle of choice was currently a tragically uninspiring mid-range Toyota that endorsed his parental, Labrador-sitting status.

  “Lads?” he said, suddenly becoming a policeman again. They sniggered at the authority in his voice. Jackson could sense Nathan shrinking toward him—for all his bravado, he was still a child. Jackson’s heart filled at this sign of vulnerability. If anyone laid a finger on his son or upset him in any way Jackson had to suppress the urge to rip their head off and stick it where the sun never shone. Middlesbrough, perhaps.

  Dido growled instinctively at the boys. “Really?” Jackson said to her. “You and whose wolf?”

  “That’s my car,” he said to the boys, “so hop it, lads, okay?” It would take more than a posturing teenage prat to scare Jackson. One of them crushed his empty can underfoot and bumped the car with his arse so that the alarm went off and they all exploded into laughter like hyenas. Jackson sighed. He could hardly beat them up, they were still—technically—children and he preferred to restrict his acts of violence to people old enough to fight for their country.

  The boys slouched away slowly, still facing him, their body language an insult. One of them was making an obscene gesture with both hands so he looked as though he was trying to do one-fingered juggling with an invisible object. Jackson turned the alarm off and unlocked the car. Nathan got in the car while Jackson gave Dido a leg up into the back. She weighed a ton.

  As they drove out of the car park they overtook the trio of boys, still sauntering along. One of them was imitating an ape—oo-oo-ooo—and tried to climb onto the hood of the Toyota when it crawled past them, as though they were in a safari park. Jackson put his foot down hard on the brake and the boy fell off the car. Jackson drove off without looking back to see if there was any damage done. “Wankers,” he said to Nathan.

  Albatross

  The Belvedere Golf Club. On the green were Thomas Holroyd, Andrew Bragg, Vincent Ives. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker. Actually, the owner of a haulage company, a travel-agent-cum-hotelier, and a telecom-equipment area manager.

  It was Vince’s turn to tee off. He took up a stance and tried to focus. He heard Andy Bragg sighing impatiently behind him.

  “Maybe you should stick to mini golf, Vince,” Andy said.

  There were different categories of friends in Vince’s opinion. Golf friends, work friends, old school friends, shipboard friends (he’d been on a Mediterranean cruise a few years ago with Wendy, his about-to-be-ex-wife), but friend friends were harder to come by. Andy and Tommy were in the golf-friends box. Not with each other—with each othe
r they were friend friends. They had known each other for years and had a relationship so tight that Vince always felt as though he was on the outside of something when he was with them. Not that he could put his finger on what it was that he was excluded from exactly. He wondered sometimes if it wasn’t so much that Tommy and Andy shared a secret as that they liked to make him think they shared a secret. Men never really left the snigger of the schoolyard, they just grew bigger. That was his wife’s opinion, anyway. Soon-to-be-ex-wife.

  “The ball won’t move by telepathy, Vince,” Tommy Holroyd said. “You have to hit it with the club, you know.”

  Tommy was a big, fit man in his forties. He had a brawler’s broken nose which didn’t detract from his looks, indeed seemed to add to them where women were concerned. He’d started to run to flesh a bit, but he was still the sort you’d definitely want in your corner rather than in the other bloke’s. He’d had a “misspent youth,” he laughed to Vince, leaving school early and working the doors on several of the rougher northern clubs and hanging around with “the wrong people.” Vince had once inadvertently overheard him refer to “protection work”—a vague term that seemed to cover a multitude of either sins or virtues. “Don’t worry, those days are over,” Tommy said with a smile when he realized that Vince had heard what was being said. Vince had raised his hands meekly as though he was surrendering and said, “No worries, Tommy.”

  Tommy Holroyd was proud of being “a self-made man.” Although wasn’t everyone self-made, by definition? Vince was beginning to think that he hadn’t made much of himself.

  As well as being a bouncer, Tommy had been an amateur boxer. Combat seemed to be in the family—Tommy’s own father had been a professional wrestler, a well-known “heel,” and had once beaten Jimmy Savile in the ring, at the Spa Royal Hall in Brid, something his son boasted about on his father’s behalf. “M’dad beat the nonce to a pulp,” he told Vince. “If he’d known what he was really like he’d have killed him, I expect.”

  Vince, for whom the world of wrestling was as arcane and exotic as a Chinese emperor’s court, had to google the word “heel.” A villain, an antagonist, someone who cheated or showed contempt. “It was a role,” Tommy said, “but m’dad didn’t have to do much acting. He was a nasty bastard.” Vince felt sorry for Tommy. His own father had been as meek as a half of Tetley’s Mild, his favorite tipple.

  Tommy’s narrative continued its rapid upward climb, from boxing to promoting, and when he’d made enough money from the ring he acquired an HGV license and bought his first truck and that was the beginning of his fleet—Holroyd Haulage. It might not be the biggest flotilla of freight trailers in the North but it certainly seemed to be amazingly successful, if Tommy’s lifestyle was anything to go by. He was flashily affluent, with a swimming pool and a second wife, Crystal, who, rumor had it, had once been a glamour model.

  Tommy wasn’t the kind of bloke who would pass you by on the street if you were in trouble, although Vince wondered if there might be a price to pay later. Vince liked Tommy, though, he was easygoing and had what Vince could only think of as presence, a kind of northern swagger that Vince often coveted, feeling the singular lack of it in his own makeup. And Crystal was stunning. “A Barbie doll” was Wendy’s verdict on her. Vince thought that Wendy’s idea of stunning would be to taser him, her once benign indifference to him having turned to loathing. And what had he done to provoke that feeling? Nothing!

  Not long before Vince was first introduced to Tommy, Lesley—Tommy’s first wife—had died in an awful accident. She had fallen off a cliff, trying to rescue the family pet—Vince remembered reading about it in the Gazette (“Wife of prominent East Coast businessman killed in tragedy” and so on), remembered saying to Wendy, “You should be careful if you take Sparky up on the cliff.” Sparky was their dog, a puppy at the time. “Who are you more worried about—me or the dog?” she said, and he had said, “Well…” which he could see now was the wrong answer.

  The Merry Widower, Andy had called Tommy, and he had indeed seemed surprisingly unmarked by the tragedy. “Well, Les was a bit of a burden,” Andy said, rotating his index finger against the side of his head as if he was trying to screw a hole through to his brain. “Looney Tunes.” Andy wasn’t the sentimental sort. Quite the opposite. At the time, there had still been a desiccated bunch of flowers attached to a bench close to where Lesley Holroyd had gone over the cliff. It had seemed an inadequate kind of memorial.

  “Earth to Vince,” Tommy said. “A seagull’s going to land on you if you don’t move off that tee soon.”

  “What’s your handicap on the mini-golf course, Vince?” Andy laughed, obviously not willing to let the subject go just yet. “That windmill’s tricky, those sails are a bugger to get through. And, of course, you have to be a real pro to face the rocket. It’s a killer, it’ll get you every time.”

  Andy wasn’t showy like Tommy. “Yeah, he’s a quiet one, our Andrew,” Tommy chuckled, putting his arm around Andy’s shoulders and giving him a (very) manly hug. “It’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch, Vince.”

  “Piss off,” Andy said good-naturedly.

  I’m a quiet one, Vince thought, and no one needs to worry about watching me. Andy was a small, wiry sort of bloke. If they were animals, Tommy would be a bear—and not a harmless soft teddy like the ones Vince’s daughter, Ashley, covered her bed with. The bears were still there, waiting patiently for his absent daughter’s return from her gap year. Tommy would be one of the ones you had to watch out for, like a polar or a grizzly. Andy would be a fox. That was a nickname Tommy sometimes used for Andy: Foxy. And Vince himself? A deer, he thought. Caught in the headlights of the car that was about to mow him down. Wendy at the wheel, probably.

  Had either of them actually played mini golf? he wondered. He’d spent hours—enjoyable (mostly)—with Ashley when she was young, stoically encouraging her while she repeatedly missed the tee or mulishly insisted on attempting a putt, over and over, while a queue built up behind them, wailing “Daaaad?” every time he signaled to the people who were waiting that they should play through. Ashley had been an obstinate child. (Not that he’d been resentful. He loved her!)

  Vince sighed. Let Tommy and Andy have a laugh if they wanted to. Male banter—it used to be fun (more or less), all that swank and strut. Cocks of the North, all of them. It was in blokes’ DNA or their testosterone or something, but Vince was too depressed these days to join in with the (mostly) good-natured jeering and one-upmanship.

  If Tommy was still curving upward on the graph of life then Vince was on a decidedly downward gradient. He was grinding toward fifty and for the last three months he had been living in a one-bedroom flat behind a fish-and-chip shop, ever since Wendy turned to him one morning over his breakfast muesli—he’d been on a short-lived health kick—and said, “Enough’s enough, don’t you think, Vince?,” leaving him slack-mouthed with astonishment over his Tesco Finest Berry and Cherry.

  Ashley had just set off on her gap year, backpacking around Southeast Asia with her surfer boyfriend. As far as Vince could tell, “gap year” meant the lull between him funding her expensive private school and funding her expensive university, a remission that was nonetheless still costing him her airfares and a monthly allowance. When Vince was young he had been taught the worthy nonconformist virtues of self-discipline and self-improvement, whereas Ashley (not to mention the surfer boyfriend) simply believed in the “self” bit. (Not that he was resentful. He loved her!)

  As soon as Ashley had fledged, on an Emirates flight to Hanoi, Wendy reported to Vince that their marriage was dead. Its corpse wasn’t even cold before she was internet dating like a rabbit on speed, leaving him to dine off fish and chips most nights and wonder where it all went wrong. (Tenerife, three years ago, apparently.)

  “I got you some cardboard boxes from Costcutter to put your stuff in,” she said as he stared uncomprehendingly at her. “Don’t forget to clear out your dirty clothes from the basket in the utility roo
m. I’m not doing any more laundry for you, Vince. Twenty-one years a slave. It’s enough.”

  This, then, was the return on sacrifice. You worked all the hours God gave, driving hundreds of miles a week in your company car, hardly any time for yourself, so your daughter could take endless selfies in Angkor Wat or wherever and your wife could report that for the last year she had been sneaking around with a local café owner who was also one of the lifeboat crew, which seemed to sanction the liaison in her eyes. (“Craig risks his life every time he goes out on a shout. Do you, Vince?” Yes, in his own way.) It clipped at your soul, clip, clip, clip.

  Wendy enjoyed shaving and shearing, slicing and trimming. She had the Flymo out on the lawn almost every night in summer—over the years she had spent more time with the lawnmower than she had with Vince. And she might as well have had secateurs for hands. One of Wendy’s weird hobbies was growing a bonsai tree (or stopping it growing, Vince supposed), a cruel pastime that reminded him of those Chinese women who used to bind their feet. That was what she was doing to him now, snipping at his soul, trimming him down to a dwarf version of himself.

  He had trudged through his life for his wife and daughter, more heroically than they could imagine, and this was the thanks he received. Couldn’t be a coincidence that “trudge” rhymed with “drudge.” He had presumed that there was a goal to be reached at the end of all the trudging, but it turned out that there was nothing—just more trudging.

  “You again?” the jolly, bustling woman behind the chip-shop counter said to him every time he came in. He could probably have reached out of his back window and into the chip shop and scooped the fish out of the fryer himself.

  “Yes, me again,” Vince said without fail, brightly, as if it was a surprise to him too. It was like that film Groundhog Day, except that he didn’t learn anything (because, let’s face it, there was nothing to learn) and nothing ever changed.