Started Early, Took My Dog Read online

  He walked away, the dog still in his arms, glancing back once to make sure that Colin was still alive. It wouldn’t have bothered him too much if he was dead but he didn’t want to find himself on a murder charge.

  He could feel the dog’s frightened little heartbeat, a pulse, against his chest. Tic-tic-tic. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, using the tone of voice he had used to soothe his own daughter when she was small. ‘Everything’s OK now.’ It was a long time since he had spoken to a dog. He tried to loosen the rope around the dog’s neck but the knot was too tight. He turned round the tag on the dog’s collar so that he could read it. ‘Let’s see if you’ve got a name,’ he said.

  ‘The Ambassador?’ Jackson said, looking doubtfully at the small dog. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

  He was drifting, a tourist in his own country, not so much a holiday as an exploration. A holiday was lying on a warm beach in a peaceful country with a woman by your side. Jackson had tended to take his women wherever he found them. He didn’t usually go looking.

  He had been living in London for the last couple of years, taking over the rent on the little Covent Garden flat in which he had briefly shared a counterfeit marital bliss with his fake wife, Tessa. A man called Andrew Decker had killed himself (somewhat messily) in the living room of the flat and Jackson was surprised how little this bothered him. A specialist trauma-scene cleaning company had come in (now there was a profession you wouldn’t want) and by the time Jackson had changed the carpet and disposed of the chair that Andrew Decker had shot himself in you would never have known that anything untoward had happened. It had been a righteous death and Jackson supposed that made a difference.

  Jackson’s official identity was all in the past – army, police, gumshoe. He had been ‘retired’ for a while but that had made him feel as if he was redundant to the world’s needs. Now he called himself ‘semi-retired’ because it was a term that covered a lot of bases, not all of them strictly legal. He was off the grid a lot these days, picking up work here and there. His specialist subject on Mastermind would be looking for people. Not necessarily finding them, but half the equation was better than none. ‘Really you’re looking for your sister,’ Julia said. ‘Your own dear grail. You’re never going to find her, Jackson. She’s gone. She’s never coming back.’

  ‘I know that.’ Didn’t make any difference, he would go on looking for all the lost girls, the Olivias, the Joannas, the Lauras. And his sister, Niamh, the first lost girl (the last lost girl). Even though he knew exactly where Niamh was, thirty miles away from where he was at the moment, mouldering in cold, damp clay.

  Lowering his expectations of cars, Jackson had been pleasantly surprised by the third-hand Saab he bought in a dodgy auction in Ilford. There were a few unhelpful clues to the Saab’s previous ownership – a light-up Virgin Mary on the dashboard, a creased postcard from Cheltenham (Looking good here, all the best, N.) and an Everton mint, covered in fluff, in the glove compartment. The only thing Jackson did to improve the Saab was to fit a CD player. He discovered it was easy to live on the road. He had his phone and his car and his music – what more did a man need?

  Before Tessa, Jackson had enjoyed expensive cars. The money his second wife stole from him had been an unlooked-for legacy – two million pounds left to him by a batty old woman who had been his client. It had seemed an immense sum at the time, diminished now in comparison to the trillions lost by the masters of the universe, although two million would still probably buy you Iceland.

  ‘Well,’ his first wife, Josie, said, ‘as usual, you were the architect of your own downfall.’ He hadn’t exactly been left destitute. The proceeds of the sale of his house in France hit his bank account the day after Tessa emptied it. ‘Jackson lives to ride another day,’ Julia said.

  Of course, he had never really felt entitled to the money and Tessa’s theft of it felt more like a turn in the wheel of fortune than outright robbery. Not a proper wife but a trickster, a grifter. Tessa wasn’t her real name, of course. She had taken him for the longest of cons – seduced, courted, married and robbed him blind. It seemed the perfect irony that the policeman had married the criminal. He imagined her lying on a beach somewhere in the Indian Ocean, a cocktail in hand, the classic movie ending for a heist. (‘Well, women were deceivers ever, Jackson,’ Julia said, as if she were complimenting her sex rather than condemning it.) Finding people was his forte, ironic therefore that his errant wife had so far completely eluded him. He had followed clues, a trail of breadcrumbs that so far had taken him everywhere and led him nowhere. He was good but Tessa was oh-so-much better. He almost admired her for it. Almost.

  He was still looking for her, his search unfurling across the country, tracking her like a lazy hunter following spoor. It wasn’t so much that he wanted his money back – a lot of it was in shares that had fallen into the financial basement – he just didn’t like being taken for a fool. (‘Why not, when you are one?’ Josie said.)

  In the company of the Saab, he had been to Bath, Bristol, Brighton, the Devon coast, down to the toe of Cornwall, up to the Peak District, the Lakes. He had avoided Scotland, the savage country where both his heart and his life had been in danger twice now. (The best of times, the worst of times.) Third time even unluckier, he suspected. But he had ventured into Wales which he was surprised to like, before driving through the suffocating rural peace of Herefordshire, Wiltshire, Shropshire, the fatlands of Gloucestershire, the post-industrial blight of the Midlands. He had zigzagged across the Pennines to take in the bleak victims of Thatcherism. The coal gone, the steel gone, the ships gone. Like most countries, he discovered, the puzzling jigsaw that was his native land seemed to be at odds with itself. A disunited kingdom.

  Since disengaging from the rat race Jackson had found himself increasingly drawn to the less direct ways. He had become a dawdler on the back roads, following the thread veins on the map. A traveller on the scenic route, idly put-putting around the green and leafy byways, searching for the lost pastoral England that was lodged in his head and his heart. A golden, pre-industrial age. Unfortunately that Arcadian past was no more than a dream.

  ‘Arcadia’ was a word that Julia had taught him one lost weekend in Paris that felt like a lifetime ago now. They were visiting the Louvre and she had pointed out Poussin’s painting of Les Bergers d’ Arcadie and the tomb it depicted with the words ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. ‘Open to interpretation, of course,’ she said. ‘Does it mean death is here, even in this simple paradise, i.e. there’s no escaping it, chum – a memento mori, if you will, “As you are now so once was I” kind of thing – or does it mean the person who is dead also once enjoyed the good life, which is the same message really. Either way, we’re all doomed. Only of course – irritatingly – it got all mixed up in that Da Vinci Code piffle.’

  Julia might have been instinctively attracted to all kinds of nonsense but at heart she was a classicist. She was also very wordy and Jackson had stopped listening to her long before she finished explaining. Nonetheless, he had been struck by the poignancy of the inscription.

  And now he was looking for his own Arcadian bower. What had begun as a rather vague search for Tessa had morphed into a quite different purpose. He was a man on a real-estate mission. He was looking for a peg to hang his hat on, an old dog looking for a new kennel, one untainted by the past. A fresh start. Somewhere there was a place for him. All he had to do was find it.

  He had saved the best to last. North Yorkshire, God’s own county, the gyre he had been circling around all this time. None of his other stops on his peregrinations could exert the same pull on the lodestone of his heart as North Yorkshire did. Of course, Jackson was a West Riding man himself, made from soot and rugby league and beef dripping, but that didn’t mean he was about to go and live there. The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.

  He set the SatNav for the heart of the sun, or, to be more accurate, Yo
rk. The voice on Jackson’s SatNav was ‘Jane’, with whom he had been in a contentious relationship for a long time now. ‘Why not just mute her?’ Julia said reasonably. ‘In fact, why do you need her at all, you’re always going on about what a good sense of direction you’ve got.’ He did have a good sense of direction, he said defensively. He just liked the company.

  ‘Get a life, sweetie.’

  ‘Go east, old man,’ he had muttered to himself as he tapped his coordinates into Jane and prepared to cross the spine of the Pennines again and return to the cradle of civilization.

  Slightly south-east, Jane corrected him silently.

  He had been trying to visit all of the Betty’s Tea Rooms – Ilkley, Northallerton, two in Harrogate, two in York. A genteel itinerary that would have done a coachload of elderly ladies proud. Jackson was a big fan of Betty’s. You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty’s, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable food and the fact that the waitresses all looked as if they were nice girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped this morning. It was the way that everything was exactly right and fitting. And clean.

  ‘The older you get, the more like a woman you become,’ Julia said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’ Long after their relationship had ended, after Julia had herself married and had the child which for a long time she had denied was Jackson’s, she was still chattering away in his brain.

  If Britain had been run by Betty’s it would never have succumbed to economic Armageddon. Over a pot of house blend and a plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in the café in St Helen’s Square in York, Jackson fantasized about being governed by a Betty’s oligarchy – Cabinet ministers in spotless white aprons and cinnamon toast all round. Even Jackson in his most aggrandizingly masculine moments would have to agree that the world would be a better place if it was run by women. ‘God created Man,’ his daughter Marlee said to him a few weeks ago, and for a moment Jackson thought that her adolescent pessimism had made her turn to some kind of fundamentalist Christian religion. She registered the look of alarm on his face and laughed. ‘God created Man,’ she repeated. ‘And then he had a better idea.’

  Ha, ha. Or LOL, as his daughter would have said.

  In York he had spent many hours in the great cathedral train shed of the National Railway Museum where he paid tribute to the Mallard, Yorkshire-built and the fastest steam train in the world, a record that could never be taken away from her. Jackson’s heart had swelled with pride at the sight of the beautiful shining blue flanks of the engine. Not a day went by that he didn’t mourn the loss of engineering and industry. This was no country for old men.

  As well as teashops Jackson had also discovered an unlooked-for delight in bagging the ruined abbeys of Yorkshire on his journey – Jervaulx, Rievaulx, Roche, Byland, Kirkstall. Jackson’s new pastime. Trains, coins, stamps, Cistercian abbeys, Betty’s – all part of the semi-autistic male impulse to collect – a need for order or a desire to possess, or both.

  He still needed to collar Fountains, the mother of all abbeys. Years ago (decades ago now) Jackson had been on a school trip to Fountains Abbey, a rare thing, Jackson hadn’t gone to the kind of school that had outings. All he could remember was playing football amongst the ruins, until a teacher put a stop to it. Oh yes, and trying to kiss a girl called Daphne Wood on the back seat of the coach on the way home. And receiving a thumping for his pains. Daphne Wood had a tremendous right hook. It was Daphne Wood who had taught him the value of getting in there with one swift, mean blow rather than prancing around with a duellist’s finesse. Jackson wondered where she was now.

  Rievaulx was sublime but his favourite abbey so far was Jervaulx. Privately owned, with an honesty box at the gate and no English Heritage branding, the ruins had touched his soul in some inarticulate and melancholy place, the nearest thing to holiness for an atheistic Jackson. He missed God. But then who didn’t? As far as Jackson was concerned, God slipped out of the building a long time ago and he wasn’t coming back, but, like any good architect, he had left his work behind as his legacy. North Yorkshire had been designed when God was in his pomp and each time that Jackson came here he was struck anew by the power that landscape and beauty had over him these days.

  ‘It’s your age,’ Julia said.

  Of course, these were the very same rich and powerful abbeys that in the Middle Ages farmed the sheep, the golden fleeces which provided the foundation of the wool trade and England’s wealth and which led in turn to the Satanic mills of the West Riding, and thence to poverty, overcrowding, disease, child exploitation on levels beyond belief and the death and destruction of the dream of Arcadia. For want of a nail. Those mills were museums and galleries now, the abbeys in ruins. The world turns.

  The day that Jackson visited Jervaulx it had been deserted apart from the everlasting sheep (nature’s lawnmowers) and their fat lambs and he had wandered amongst the peaceful stones where wild flowers sprang from between the cracks and wished that his sister was laid to rest in a place like this instead of the mundane municipal cemetery that had been her last stop on earth. He had unfinished business there, a promise never given to a dead sister to avenge her senseless death. He supposed Niamh would always be calling him home, the siren song of the dead, for the rest of his life.

  ‘All roads lead home,’ Julia said.

  ‘All roads lead away from home,’ Jackson said.

  Josie, his first wife, had once said to him that if he ran far enough he would end up back where he started but Jackson didn’t think that the place he had started from existed any more. He had returned a few years ago, taken Marlee to meet her dead relatives, and he had found that it wasn’t the town he remembered. The slag heaps were levelled, the mine’s machinery long gone, only the pit-head wheel remained, cut in two and planted on a roundabout on the outskirts of town, more like an ornament than a memorial. There was not much evidence to show that it had ever been a place where his father had spent his life toiling in the velvet dark.

  Niamh herself had been underground nearly forty years – too late to track down clues, sniff out DNA, interview witnesses. The coffin was closed, the case as cold as that clay she was buried in. When she was murdered his sister was just three years older than his daughter was now. Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let’s face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.

  Seventeen, Niamh’s life hardly begun when it was halted. His sister couldn’t stop for death, so he had, very kindly, stopped for her. Emily Dickinson. Poetry? Jackson? Believe it or not.

  Poetry had started to get under his skin a couple of years ago, round about the time he had almost died in a train crash. (In synopsis, Jackson’s life always sounded more dramatic than the mild ennui of living it every day.) He didn’t think the two things necessarily had anything to do with each other, but in his resurrected life he had decided to catch up, rather late in the day, with some of the things he had missed out on in his impoverished education. Like culture, for example. While living in London he had committed himself to a programme of self-improvement, feasting from the liberal banquet on offer in the capital – art galleries, exhibitions, museums, even the occasional classical concert. He developed a bit of a taste for Beethoven, the symphonies at any rate. Lush and tuneful, they seemed designed to address the soul. He caught the Fifth at the Proms. He’d never been to the Proms before, put off by all those jingoistic Last Night shenanigans, and, indeed, the self-important Promenaders proved to be over-privileged smug wankers but Beethoven hadn’t written the music for them. He had written it for Everyman, in the guise of a middle-aged trooper who was surprised to find himself moved to tears by the triumphant blossoming swell of brass and horsehair.

  Not a lot of theatre, Julia and her actor friends had killed off any hope for him in that arena. He had made the mistake of taking Marlee to three hours of bum-numbing Brecht, by the end of which he wanted to shout
out, ‘Yes! You’re right, the earth revolves around the sun, you said that when you first came on stage, you’ve been saying it ever since, you don’t need to keep saying it. I get it!’ Marlee slept through most of it. He loved her for that.

  This attempt at betterment had extended beyond paintings and piano recitals and museum artefacts, he had also been grimly working his way through the world’s classics. Fiction had never been Jackson’s thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things – death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale. But poetry had wormed its way in, uninvited. A Toad, can die of Light! Crazy. So that here he was, thinking of his long-dead, long-lost sister, bolstered by a woman who felt a funeral in her brain.

  As he left Jervaulx, Jackson had placed a twenty-pound note in the honesty box – more than any English Heritage fee but it was worth the money. And besides, he liked the fact that even in these days and times there was someone willing to trust to a man’s honesty.

  When he was thirteen Jackson had spent one of the better summers of his life staying on a farm called Howdale on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. He was never sure how this rural idyll had come about, church or state, one of them was probably involved somewhere along the line – the parish priest or his social worker must have organized it, he supposed. The social worker had been a temporary acquisition, appearing out of the blue one day in the middle of the worst year of his life and disappearing just as mysteriously a few months later, even though it was still the worst year of his life. The social worker was there (apparently) to help guide him through that terrible year of bereavement which began with his mother dying of cancer and ended with his brother killing himself after their sister was murdered. (‘Top that if you can,’ he occasionally found himself thinking grouchily when he was a policeman and listening to some stranger’s less impressive lament.)