Started Early, Took My Dog Read online

  After his six months on the road he was beginning to wonder if he even wanted to stop. Jackson Brodie, the rambling man. A vagabond. Hotels were becoming boring, but what about a caravan? Josie’s parents had been in possession of a small Sprite that they had loaned to Jackson and Josie in the early days of their marriage when they still qualified as newly-weds and Jackson, just back from the Gulf and out of the army, had thought of enlisting in the French Foreign Legion if this was what his life was to be from then on – caravanning holidays in the company of Little Englanders. Now, though, he could see a certain charm in his ex-in-laws’ obsession with loading up the wagons and moving on, pioneers of the open road.

  He could fit out a caravan (he imagined Romany rather than Sprite) as neatly as a little boat and a shipshape Jackson could boil up water on an open fire, catch rabbits with little wire traps, sleep with the smell of woodsmoke in his hair. Apart from the odd accidental roadkill or the mercy killing of a victim of myxomatosis, he had never knowingly dispatched a rabbit but supposed he could if it was a necessity. Especially if it was a big rabbit called Muffin.

  On reflection he wasn’t a caravan man. And, truth be told, he was growing tired of his vagrant life. He wanted a home. He would like a woman in that home. Not all the time, he had grown too used to his own company. There was a time when he had been a man who only felt fulfilled when facing life shoulder to shoulder with a woman. He had enjoyed being married, perhaps more than his wife had. His real wife, not the crooked trickery which had been his second wife. (‘A Fata Morgana,’ Julia said. ‘A mirage.’)

  Julia had once told him that the ideal partner was one that you could keep in a cupboard and take out when you felt like it. Jackson thought it unlikely that there were women out there who would acquiesce to being kept in a cupboard. Didn’t stop men trying to find them though.

  Sensing animals would not be welcome in the Best Western he had sneaked the dog in, concealed in his rucksack. Beforehand, in the car park, Jackson had tipped out half the bag’s contents and invited a not entirely compliant dog to enter into the bespoke space. With some encouragement from Jackson, the dog had eventually settled into the innards of the bag. There was something to admire in the dog’s character. ‘Good dog,’ he said, because praise seemed to be called for.

  Once he was in the room he released the dog from its prison. He opened a can of dog food and dumped it in the bowl he had bought and the dog ate as if famished. There was a ‘hospitality tray’ in the room with tea, coffee, a kettle and cups and saucers. Jackson took one of the saucers and filled it with water from the bathroom. The dog drank as if it had been in a drought.

  He had dropped into a chemist on the way to the hotel and picked up an ad hoc first-aid kit and now used the TCP and cotton wool to clean up the dog’s scratches. The dog stood stoically while it was prodded and poked and only flinched slightly when the antiseptic touched broken skin or Jackson found a bruise. ‘Good dog,’ Jackson said again.

  Jackson flicked the switch on the kettle and made a mug of tea, dividing the little packet of biscuits between himself and the dog. When he had finished, the dog jumped up on to one of the twin beds, circled round and round until it appeared satisfied, and then curled up and fell asleep immediately. It was the bed Jackson would have chosen for himself, being nearest to the door (a room for Jackson was all about exits) but the dog, despite its size, had a remarkably unmovable look about it.

  Jackson’s phone vibrated in his pocket like a hefty trapped wasp. Two messages. The first was a text from Marlee asking him if she could have her birthday money early. Her birthday wasn’t for another six months, which seemed to Jackson to give ‘early’ a new meaning. It was a blatantly mercenary message with a perfunctory ‘love you’ added at the end. He thought he would sit on it and make her sweat for a few days. He had never imagined, when his daughter was small and infinitely, eternally lovable, that he would ever develop a combative relationship with her.

  The second message was more benign – an email from Hope McMaster. How’s it going? it said. Haven’t heard from you in a while. He tried to work out what time it would be in New Zealand. Were they twelve hours ahead? Early morning there. Hope McMaster was living in tomorrow – a concept that baffled Jackson’s brain. She struck him as the kind of person who might be up early to email. Or was she an insomniac, growing more anxious as Jackson came nearer to the black hole at the beginning of her life? (‘It’s a void,’ she said.)

  Jackson sighed and tapped out a message. Am in Leeds. Seeing Linda Pallister tomorrow.

  There was an immediate response from Hope McMaster. Fantastic! she replied. Let’s hope she comes up with some answers.

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ Jackson said to the phone, sounding to his own ears disconcertingly like his mulish daughter. ‘No,’ he had told her the last time they were together, ‘you cannot have a tattoo, no matter how “pretty”, or a ring in your belly button, a blue streak in your hair, a boyfriend. Especially not a boyfriend.’

  Yes, he tapped out to Hope McMaster, let’s hope so.

  Hope McMaster’s case had turned out to be a slow-burn affair. For months now Jackson had been reporting back to her, occasional, laconic emails that elicited an immediate chirpy response about the weather in Christchurch (Snow!) or ‘little Aaron’s’ first day at nursery school (I don’t mind telling you I went home and sobbed my heart out). Hope McMaster shared with Julia a (misplaced) faith in exclamation marks. Jauntiness never conveyed itself well in the written word, in Jackson’s opinion.

  He had always thought of New Zealanders as a rather gloomy race – the Scots abroad – but Hope seemed as happy-clappy as you could get. Of course, much of Jackson’s information about New Zealanders came from watching The Piano. At the cinema, in the early days of his (true) marriage, before they had a baby, before it all started to go wrong. After Marlee was born they rented videos and fell asleep in front of them. Now, like so much else in Jackson’s world, videos were obsolete.

  Nonetheless he was intrigued by New Zealand, although not so much because of Hope McMaster as the fact that last year he had read Captain Cook’s journals and had been impressed by the heroism of his navigation and leadership. First man to sail round the world in both directions. Like the Mallard, a record never to be broken. The Endeavour and the Mallard, consummate examples of the female form.

  Cook was a Yorkshireman, naturally. You could but be in awe of the first voyage, the magnificent voyage, to observe the transit of Venus, to find the mythical southern continent, that took him to Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand. Heart of oak. Sometimes Jackson regretted that he would never make his mark on history, that he would never map a new country, that he would never fight in a just war. ‘Be grateful for an ordinary life,’ Julia said, Julia who had always wanted to be extraordinary in some way.

  ‘I am,’ Jackson said. ‘I really am.’

  But.

  Imagine sailing into Poverty Bay for the first time, imagine captaining a heroic little three-masted barque to the other side of the world. A new-found land where the sun rises first. Well, Christchurch is really quite English, in many ways, you know, Hope McMaster wrote to him. I wouldn’t want you to be disappointed. You should visit! You would love New Zealand! Would he?

  She was two years old when she last saw England. How much could she remember about it? Nothing. How much could she remember about her life before she was adopted? Nothing.

  The next planned stop on Jackson’s itinerary after Leeds was Whitby, Cook’s old stamping ground. He rather fancied living by the sea, could see himself in an old fisherman’s cottage built from ancient ship’s timbers. Hearts of oak. He could take a bracing walk along the beach every day in the company of the dog and sink a pint in the evening with old sailors. Jackson, the fisherman’s friend.

  Whitby was where Cook had served his apprenticeship and where the Endeavour had started her life as a big-bellied barque, plying the coal trade up and down the east coast. A collier. Jackson groaned at the word.
He hated Collier. TV detective. Vince Collier, not a man but a construct, a hybrid of all that was bad, put together by a committee and approved by a focus group.

  Mum said I was born Sharon Costello, Hope wrote. Her adoptive parents had been a childless couple from Harrogate – Dr Ian Winfield, a paediatrician at St James’s Infirmary in Leeds and his wife, Kitty, a former model. The Winfields renamed Sharon ‘Hope’.

  Now that Mum’s dead – lung cancer, not a great way to go – I feel I can ask these questions about my ‘origins’, Hope McMaster had written. (‘She does like details, doesn’t she?’ Julia said.) It seemed to Jackson that the best time to find answers to Hope McMaster’s questions might have been before her mother died but he didn’t say that.

  Hope Winfield married Dave McMaster (runs a successful real-estate office) five years ago and had given up teaching geography at a secondary school to bring up little Aaron and her as yet unborn second child (‘the squid’ – as we call her! ). In the beginning it had been a mere matter of curiosity, she said. She would like to be able to tell the kids more about their genealogy. When you have a child you start to wonder about their genetic inheritance and although my ‘real’ parents will always be Mum and Dad I can’t help but be curious . . . you know how it is, you feel as if you’ve lost something but you just don’t know what it is.

  Jackson’s own bad genes had been modified in Marlee (he hoped) by Josie’s more temperate birthright. But what hope was there for Nathan? It wasn’t just Julia’s lungs that were compromised. Her whole family had been riotously dysfunctional in a way that went beyond the Gothic. Betrayed emotionally by her parents, Julia had lost a clutch of sisters, the eldest, Sylvia, to suicide, Amelia to cancer and the baby of the family, Olivia, to murder – by Sylvia. There had been another baby, too, Annabelle, who had lived for only a handful of hours, joined in the grave shortly afterwards by the girls’ mother.

  Julia was the only person Jackson knew who could outplay him in the game of personal misery. It was what had drawn them to each other in the beginning, it was what had pulled them apart in the end.

  ‘One by one all those little birds fell out of the nest,’ Julia said. She claimed there was ‘comfort to be had in metaphors’. Jackson didn’t see it himself. He didn’t point out to her that Amelia had been more like a ponderous bustard and suicidal, murderous Sylvia was worse than a cuckoo.

  ‘Christ robs the Nest – / Robin after Robin / Smuggled to Rest,’ Julia said and Jackson said, ‘Emily Dickinson,’ just to see the look of astonishment on her face.

  ‘You’re not ill, are you?’ she asked. ‘Or mad?’

  ‘Much Madness is divinest Sense,’ he said cheerfully.

  *

  ‘Murder and suicide aren’t genetic,’ Julia said, scoffing sandwiches in the Black Swan in Helmsley after their visit to Rievaulx Terraces. ‘Nathan isn’t predisposed to tragedy.’ Jackson wasn’t so sure about that but he kept that thought to himself.

  According to Hope, John and Angela Costello, from Doncaster, were killed when a drunken lorry driver ploughed into the back of their car. Their two-year-old daughter, Sharon, wasn’t with them at the time, which seemed rather to beg the question, ‘Where was she?’ Newly orphaned, she was adopted by the Winfields, renamed Hope and shortly afterwards they emigrated to New Zealand.

  They’d given up hope of having children, Hope said, then I came along, like a gift. Some people donated organs when they died. John and Angela Costello donated their child.

  ‘So it wasn’t the Winfields who had given up hope,’ Julia said. ‘It was the Costellos.’

  Looking back, Jackson could see that even as he was reading Hope’s introductory missive from the ether (some novels were shorter and less detailed than Hope McMaster’s emails) his intuitive antennae had been twitching. No relatives? The past obliterated? A name changed? A child too young to remember anything? A sudden removal to a faraway land?

  ‘Kidnapped,’ Julia had said decisively, buttering a scone, but then she always had a flair for the dramatic.

  Before he had taken on the task of investigating her past he had felt obliged to remind Hope McMaster how curiosity had worked out for the cat.

  ‘Pandora’s box,’ Julia said, already reaching for a second scone before finishing the first. ‘Although the word pithos actually translates as “large jar”. Pandora released evil into the world and—’

  ‘I know,’ Jackson interrupted. ‘I know what she did.’

  ‘People have a need to find the truth,’ Julia said. ‘Human nature can’t abide a mystery.’

  In Jackson’s experience, finding the truth – whatever that was – only deepened the mystery of what had really happened in the past. And perhaps Hope’s little Aaron and the squid would discover a family history that they would rather had stayed securely locked away, well out of pesky Pandora’s reach.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not about liking what you find out, it’s about knowing,’ Julia said.

  Any time he spent with Julia always degenerated in the end into a mixture of comforting familiarity and irritable argument. Rather like marriage but without the divorce. Or the wedding for that matter.

  Nathan had run himself into oblivion on the Terraces and one sandwich and a dish of ice cream later he was asleep in Jackson’s arms, leaving Julia free to tackle her afternoon tea untrammelled. The soft, sandbag weight of his boy in his arms was disturbing. Jackson wasn’t sure that he wanted his heart stirred by unbreakable, sacrificial bonds.

  He had been surprised to find himself daunted rather than happy when Nathan proved to be his son. It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.

  Recently, Julia had begun to imply that Jackson should be ‘more of a father’ to Nathan and they should spend time ‘as a family’. ‘But we’re not,’ Jackson protested. ‘You’re married to someone else.’When Jackson had been forced into deciding which of his offspring to spend Christmas Day with he had opted for his moody daughter (a disastrous decision). Julia saw it, perhaps rightly, as a clear case of favouritism.

  ‘Jackson’s choice,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t be in two places at once,’ Jackson complained.

  ‘An atom can be in several places at once, according to quantum physics,’ Julia said.

  ‘I’m not an atom.’

  ‘You’re nothing but atoms, Jackson.’

  ‘Maybe, but I still can’t be in two places at once. There’s only one Jackson.’

  ‘How true. Well, have a very Merry Christmas. God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son, et cetera. Jackson couldn’t even manage to give his a present on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Bah, humbug,’ Jackson said.

  In the Black Swan, Julia licked cream off her fingers in a way that would have once looked provocative to Jackson. She used to wear scarlet lipstick but these days her lips were unpainted. In the same way, her unruly hair was scraped back and bundled into a restraining clip. Motherhood had in some ways made her into a paler version of the woman she used to be. Jackson was surprised at how much he sometimes missed the old Julia. Or maybe she was the same Julia and what he missed was being with her. He hoped not. There wasn’t room in his heart anyway. The (rather small) space available these days for a woman in the cupboard of Jackson’s heart was almost entirely occupied by the candle burning for his Scottish nemesis, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe. An old flame flickering weakly rather than burning brightly, denied oxygen by their absence from each other. They had never had sex, he hadn’t seen her for two years, she was married to someone else and had a child by him. It was not what most people thought of as a relationship. Someone should put out the light.

  ‘The heart is infinite,’ Julia said. ‘Plenty of room.’ In Julia’s heart maybe, not Jackson’s, contracted and growing smaller with every blow it suffered. A poor torn heart, a tattered heart.

  ‘Poppycock,’ Julia said.

  The thing was, John and Angela Costello, the purported parents o
f little Sharon, soon to be transformed into Hope Winfield, had never become dust. Never been totalled in a car crash, never walked the dark streets of Donny. They hadn’t died, because they had never lived.

  No car crash, no death certificates, no record of a couple by that name ever having lived in Doncaster. There was no birth certificate for a ‘Sharon Costello’ with parents of that name. Just to be sure Jackson had chased up another Sharon Costello, born on Hope McMaster’s birthday – 15 October 1972 – who lived in Truro. She turned out to be a wild goose, puzzled by his interest in her.

  Of course the Winfields might have changed Hope’s birth date as well as her name. Jackson would have done if he’d been trying to disguise a child.

  The Winfields themselves checked out. They had definitely lived in Harrogate, home of the Betty’s mother ship, and an excuse – not that he needed one – for Jackson to spend a pleasant twenty-four hours in that town, possibly one of the most civilized places he had ever visited. But then, of course, everyone knew, Jackson in particular, that civilization was a thin veneer.

  Ian Winfield was definitely a paediatrician at St James’s from 1969 to 1975, when he left to take up a post in Christchurch. And he was certainly married to Kitty, who really had been a model. Hope McMaster had emailed some of her professional photographs – Kitty Gillespie, all sixties fringe and eye make-up, a type Jackson felt a strangely instinctive attraction to. Jackson had a vague recollection in his head – ‘Kitty Gillespie, the poor man’s Jean Shrimpton’. Not such a poor man by the look of her. The sixties didn’t look like history to Jackson, maybe they never would.

  Mum was quite the thing, wasn’t she? Hope McMaster wrote. Nothing like dumpy little me – proof positive I was adopted! Hope had emailed him many little thumbnails of her family – of herself, of Dave, of Aaron, of their dog (a golden retriever, what else), of the Winfields and of Hope as a child (Dave has scanned everything! ).