Tracy held the weightless little body and stroked the dirty hair and murmured, ‘Everything’s all right now.’ Couldn’t think what else to say, what else to do.
Arkwright reappeared and said, ‘No more kiddies, but . . .’ With an inclination of his head he indicated a door he had opened further up the hallway.
‘What?’ Tracy said.
‘In the bedroom.’
‘What?’
Arkwright dropped his voice to a whisper and said, ‘The mum.’
‘Shit. How long?’
‘Couple of weeks by the look of it,’ Arkwright said. Tracy felt her stomach heave. Told herself to hold on, to think about Dad’s roses, Mum’s Izal, anything that didn’t smell of rotting flesh.
She carried the kiddy through to the living room, glanced in the bedroom as she passed, shielding the kiddy’s eyes, even though they were already closed. She had a glimpse of something on the floor, couldn’t make out what it was but she knew it was bad.
Detective Constable Ray Strickland and Detective Sergeant Len Lomax, first officers from CID on the scene in Lovell Park. They certainly took their time. Tracy looked out of the living-room window, all those dizzying flights down, and saw them finally arriving in a flurry of macho brakes but instead of rushing into the building they got out of the car and stood next to it, deep in conversation – or argument, it was hard to say from this height. There was something conspiratorial in their stance.
‘What the fuck are they doing?’ Arkwright said and Tracy replied, ‘Dunno. Where’s the ambulance? Why is it taking so long?’ What if the kiddy pegged out now? It was a miracle that the kiddy had managed to stay alive all this time – must have grubbed around in cupboards for food. ‘Don’t die, please,’ Tracy murmured, more prayer than request.
Tracy and Arkwright had walked all over the place. The contamination of evidence must have been phenomenal. You didn’t think so much about that then. Now they would have scarpered the second they saw the body, not gone back in until the SOCOs had combed every inch.
Tracy watched as a bicycle rolled up. A girl dismounted and the two detectives pulled apart from each other. The girl was wearing a long smock that looked like a nightdress and her two curtains of hair hung limply on either side of her pale face. Arkwright said, ‘Ey up, the hippies are here.’
‘But where’s the fucking ambulance?’Tracy said. Before she joined the police she had never said so much as ‘damn’, now she cursed like the best of them. She watched as the girl said something to Lomax and Strickland, all three of them wheeled round and came into the building.
‘Listen,’ Arkwright said, cocking his head to one side. ‘That ruddy lift’s working now, would you believe it? It’s like the universe has got one rule for them and one rule for us peasants.’
When Lomax and Strickland arrived at Carol Braithwaite’s door, the besmocked girl was trailing on their heels. ‘Linda Pallister,’ she said with a curt nod in the direction of Ken Arkwright, Tracy invisible apparently. ‘I’m the social worker on call.’With her scrubbed face and robust cyclist’s calves, she looked more like a fifth-former than a grown woman with a job.
‘We don’t need a fucking social worker, we need a fucking ambulance,’ Tracy hissed at her. Strickland suddenly ran out of the room and they all listened to the sound of him throwing up in the bathroom.
‘Sensitive lad, our Ray,’ Len Lomax said.
‘No sign of the pathologist,’ Len Lomax said, ‘but the ambulance is here.’
‘Right,’ Linda Pallister said, when the ambulance men arrived at the door of the flat. She took the kiddy off Tracy, Tracy holding on just a second longer than necessary. ‘It’s OK, I know what I’m doing,’ Linda Pallister said and Tracy nodded mutely, suddenly afraid that she might cry.
When they’d gone, Tracy said to Len Lomax, ‘I asked the kiddy who did it, who did this to Mummy.’
‘And?’
‘Said “Daddy”.’
Lomax laughed, a brutal sound in the dead quiet. ‘It’s a wise child that knows its own father. And as for that bint,’ he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the bedroom where the woman’s decaying body was still lying, ‘I’d bet a hundred to one that she couldn’t name the father.’ He took out his notebook with a strangely theatrical flourish and looked around as if he was going to conjure clues out of the walls.
‘Did you know her?’ Tracy asked. Lomax looked at her as if she’d just grown another head. ‘Of course I didn’t fucking know her,’ he said.
Tracy glanced at Ray Strickland. He looked shaky and green as if he was about to throw up again. He hadn’t even gone through to look at the body yet. When they first entered the flat Tracy heard them all talking in the hallway, heard Lomax say to Linda Pallister, ‘That’s the bedroom on the left, where the body is.’
‘How did he know that?’ she asked Arkwright in the pub when they came off shift.
‘Psychic,’ Arkwright said. ‘He does table-knocking and spirit readings in the Horse and Trumpet’s snug on Thursday evenings.’ Arkwright had a way of saying things so dead-pan that Tracy took him seriously for a second.
‘Think the next round’s yours, lass,’ he laughed.
Neither Lomax nor Strickland bothered with a statement from Tracy.
‘What could you have to say that he hasn’t said?’ Lomax said, jabbing a finger in Arkwright’s direction.
Barry, of all people, pitched up, said, ‘Sir?’ to Strickland.
‘Getting to be Ray’s bum-boy, isn’t he?’ Arkwright murmured to Tracy. Strickland said something inaudible to Barry and then Barry looked as sick as Strickland. They disappeared into the small, cold kitchen, where empty packets of cereal and anything else the kiddy had been able to find were strewn across the floor. It was a miracle that the kiddy hadn’t died of hypothermia, let alone starvation.
Lomax said, ‘Bugger off,’ to Arkwright, ‘and get knocking on a few doors. And take her with you,’ he said, nodding his head in Tracy’s direction. Arkwright retained an admirable poker face. ‘Let’s get going, lass,’ he said.
Carol Braithwaite, the neighbours said. Blankly. Nobody seemed to know her. ‘Only moved in at Christmas,’ one of them said. ‘Bit raucous, heard a few fights.’ Hear anything else? ‘Kid crying.’ ‘She brought men back,’ another one said. The classic ‘Kept herself to herself,’ from another one. Nobody knew her. Never would now.
Of course, everything was subjective. No true fixed point in the world. Tracy was beginning to understand that.
Tracy and Arkwright, knocking on door after door in Lovell Park. Thin walls, Tracy said, you would think someone would have heard something.
Carol Braithwaite. Three ‘O’ Levels and two convictions for soliciting.
‘A good-time girl,’ Arkwright said. A good-time girl. Police-speak. It didn’t help an investigation if you said the word ‘prostitute’. They got what they deserved, deserved what they got.
‘Doesn’t look like she had much of a good time to me,’Tracy said.
One of those three ‘O’ Levels had been in needlework, another in cookery, the third in typing. Information courtesy of flower-child Linda Pallister. Carol would have made a good wife but somehow that wasn’t the path she’d taken. At school Tracy had always been wary of the domestic science crowd – methodical girls with neat handwriting and neither flaws nor eccentricities. For some reason they were usually good at netball as well, as if the gene that enabled them to jump for the hoop contained the information necessary for turning out a cheese and onion flan or creaming a Victoria spongesandwich mix. Their career paths didn’t usually lead to prostitution. Of course, if you said ‘gene’ in the seventies people thought Levi’s or Wranglers. They weren’t the hot topic they were now. Tracy wondered if Carol Braithwaite had ever played netball.
Even at school Tracy had already suspected that she would make no one a good wife. Couldn’t sew a straight seam, couldn’t even cook a simple macaroni cheese or do hospital corners. She had a knock-out
right jab though. Something that she’d discovered one hectic Saturday night of catfights and drunken brawls when a leery pair of young blokes nearly had her cornered on Boar Lane. Did her reputation as a copper a bit of good but hadn’t exactly enhanced her status as a woman. (‘Built like a brick shit-house, that Tracy Waterhouse.’)
When they eventually returned after knocking on doors everyone had gone and been replaced by Barry, a lone uniform, guarding the broken door of the flat.
‘I was told not to let anyone in,’ he said officiously. ‘Sorry.’
‘Fuck off, you big nit,’ Arkwright said, pushing past him. ‘I left my cigarettes in there.’ Tracy laughed.
‘Can you tell me what happened here?’
‘Eh?’ Arkwright said.
‘Marilyn Nettles, Yorkshire Post crime reporter.’ She flashed a card with her credentials on it. They were standing outside the entrance to the Lovell Park flats, in the cold, freezing their socks off, while Arkwright lit up. ‘Colder than a witch’s tit,’ Arkwright said. Tracy caught sight of Linda Pallister’s bike, leaning against a fence. She had travelled in the ambulance with the kiddy. It seemed unlikely that the bike would still be here when she returned for it. There was a kiddy seat on the back of it.
Tracy remembered Marilyn Nettles from somewhere but couldn’t place her until Arkwright said later, ‘She infiltrated Dick Hardwick’s leaving do.’
‘Infiltrated?’ Tracy said. ‘You mean she was in the same pub at the same time?’
‘As I said, infiltrated. She’s a nosy cow.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
Skinny, mid-thirties, dyed black hair left over from the previous decade, cut in a bob so sharp that it looked as if it would cut you if you got too close to her. She had a beaky nose that gave her a hungry look. She was the kind who would trample over the bodies of the fallen to get to the story.
‘’Fraid I can’t comment on what happened here,’ Arkwright said to her. ‘Ongoing investigation. I expect there’ll be a press conference, pet.’
Marilyn Nettles shrank from the word ‘pet’. Tracy could see her wanting to say, ‘Don’t use condescending sexist language with me, you great big ignorant police oaf,’ and having to bite down on it and say instead, ‘Neighbours are saying it was a woman called Carol Braithwaite?’
‘Couldn’t comment on that.’
‘I believe she was a known prostitute.’
‘Wouldn’t know about that either, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh come on, Constable, can’t you give me a little something?’
Marilyn Nettles did something funny with her mouth, followed up by something funny with her eyes. It took Tracy a second or two to realize that she was trying to flirt with Arkwright. She was deluded. It was like trying to flirt with a wardrobe.
‘Have you got something in your eye?’Tracy asked her innocently.
Marilyn Nettles ignored Tracy, strangely fixated on Arkwright. ‘Help a poor girl out,’ she said. She pinched her thumb and forefinger together. ‘Feed me just a little titbit? Give me something?’
With laboured slowness Arkwright delved into a pocket in his uniform and retrieved a ten-pence piece. It was over four years since Britain had gone decimal but Arkwright still referred to ‘the new money’.
‘Here, lass,’ he said to Marilyn Nettles, handing over the coin. ‘Go buy yourself a bag of chips. You need fattening up.’
She turned on her heel and stalked off in disgust towards a red Vauxhall Victor.
‘Wouldn’t like to have to get into bed with her,’ Arkwright said. ‘It would be like cuddling up to a skeleton.’ He looked at the rejected coin and spun it high in the air. He caught it on the way down and slapped it on the back of his hand.
‘Heads or tails?’ he said to Tracy.
‘You all right, lass?’ Arkwright said, draining his bitter and looking around as if he was expecting another one to materialize from nowhere.
‘Yeah,’ Tracy said.
‘Another one?’
Tracy sighed. ‘No, I’ll be off. My mum’s making her lamb hotpot.’
At least he had learned his lesson, he was not going to be the foolish prey of boredom tonight. Instead he ordered something innocuous sounding on room service, no alcohol to accompany it, and when the food arrived he stretched out on the bed with his plate and picked up the remote.
Collier. Of course. Jackson sighed. Just when you thought it was safe to switch on the TV.
Collier was a rugged but occasionally sensitive detective inspector who worked in both a gritty northern town (‘Bradthorpe’) and a green farming dale (‘Hardale’). He frequently kicked against the traces of authority in the search for the truth and was invariably vindicated at the end. He was a maverick but (as someone said at least once in the course of every programme) ‘a brilliant detective’. He was unreliable towards women but they were, nonetheless, continually charmed by him. In his own experience, Jackson had found the exact opposite to be true, the more unreliable he was (usually from no fault of his own, he would just like to point out) the less impressed women were with him.
Julia, of all people, Julia, who had ‘given up acting to concentrate on being a mother and a wife’ (a declaration that no one, particularly not Jackson, believed), had recently been cast in Collier. Jackson had presumed she would be a corpse, or, at best, a bit-part barmaid, but it turned out that she was playing a forensic pathologist. (‘A forensic pathologist?’ He had been unable to disguise the disbelief in his voice.
‘Yes, Jackson,’ she said, with exaggerated forbearance. ‘I don’t actually have to have a medical degree or conduct post-mortems. It’s called acting.’
‘Even so . . .’ Jackson murmured.)
DS Charlie Lambert, an actress called Saskia Bligh, was Vince Collier’s glamorous (tough but fair, sexy but professional) sidekick. She argued, bullied, cajoled, sprinted and karate-kicked her way through the episode. She was a thin blonde with big, slightly weepy eyes and cheekbones that you could have hung washing on (as his mother would have said). Not Jackson’s type. (He had a type? What? The woman from last night? Surely not.) Saskia Bligh looked as if she bruised easily. Jackson liked his women to be robust.
Collier and Lambert. There were just the two of them, Morse and Lewis, Holmes and Watson, a double-handed duo that could solve every murder in the district with only a smidgeon of background help from semi-anonymous techies and uniforms. Jackson would like to see the pair of them work a case in the real world. Julia, in the shape of her character, existed to provide ‘a foil for their relationship’. ‘It’s not about crime, you have to understand,’ Julia said. ‘It’s about them as people.’
‘They’re not real,’ Jackson pointed out.
‘I know that. Art renders reality.’
‘Art?’ Jackson repeated incredulously. ‘You call Collier “art”? I thought rendering was what you did to dripping.’
‘You know what I mean.’
Julia was replacing a previous pathologist, a man. The actor playing him had been caught with child pornography on his computer and had been quietly transformed into a nonce in a prison somewhere. Ironic justice, a form of jurisprudence that Jackson felt a particular fondness for. Cosmic justice was all well and good but generally its wheels took longer to grind.
Vince Collier had recently acquired a mother from nowhere (caring but nagging, sensible but anxious). One of those old actresses who had been around for ever. (‘To humanize him,’ Julia explained.) Jackson didn’t think having a mother ‘humanized’ (whatever that meant) anyone. Everyone had a mother – murderers, rapists, Hitler, Pol Pot, Margaret Thatcher. (‘Well, fiction’s stranger than truth,’ Julia said.)
The face of Vince Collier’s mother was familiar. Jackson tried to remember why but the tiny people who resentfully ran his memory these days (fetching and carrying folders, checking the contents against index cards, filing them away in boxes that were then placed on endless rows of grey metal Dexion shelving never to be found again) had, in an al
l too frequent occurrence, mislaid that particular piece of information. This sketchy blueprint for the neurological workings of his brain had been laid down in Jackson’s childhood by the Numskulls in his Beezer comic and he had never really developed a more sophisticated model.
Jackson supposed that other people’s small brain-dwelling inhabitants ran their operations rather like air-traffic controllers, always aware of the location of everything they were responsible for, never sloping off for tea breaks or loitering in the shadowy recesses of rarely accessed shelves, where they smoked fly cigarettes and kvetched about their poor working conditions. One day they would simply lay down tools and walk off, of course.
Vince Collier’s mother had apparently been misfiled somewhere on the endless Dexion.
Ten-take Tilly, Julia had called her. Jackson had visited her on set, dropped in unexpectedly when he realized he was driving past the place where they filmed Collier. ‘Poor old thing, her memory’s shot to pieces,’ Julia said. ‘They should have realized that before they took her on. She’s going to be killed off soon.’
‘Killed off?’ Jackson said.
‘In the programme.’
They were drinking coffee, sitting in what seemed to be a cowshed, a chilly adjunct to the catering truck, where trestle tables were set up.
‘It’s not a cowshed, it’s a barn,’ Julia said.
‘Is it real or part of the set?’
‘Everything is real,’ Julia said. ‘On the other hand, of course, you could argue that nothing is real.’
Jackson banged his head on the wooden table. But not in a real way.
Julia was dressed for her part, in blue scrubs, her hair strained into a bun. ‘You’ve always been attracted to women in uniform,’ she said.
‘Maybe, but I’ve never had a thing for people who cut up corpses.’
‘Never say never,’ Julia said.
Jackson wondered where their son was. Neither of them had mentioned him. ‘Is Jonathan looking after Nathan?’ he asked eventually and Julia shrugged in a non-committal way.