‘Who?’
Arcadia
Friday
She woke with a jerk. Something unnatural had disturbed her sleep. Not birdsong, not an alarm clock, not the first bus grumbling its way past the top of the street. Tracy shot out of bed and hurried to the landing window from where you could get a good view of the street. A street crawling with police. Two uniforms knocking on the door opposite. A couple of squad cars parked further up the street. A plainclothes she recognized, Gavin Archer. More uniforms. They were doing door-to-door in Tracy’s street. Could only mean one thing, they knew she’d been at Kelly’s house last night. They knew about the kid. They’d probably seen the security tapes in the Merrion Centre, seen Kelly Cross swapping the kid for cash like a street corner drug deal.
Two uniforms coming this way.
Tracy went into mental overdrive. Made a dash for the bedroom, pulled on her old tracksuit and ran along the hall to Courtney’s room. The kid woke up quickly as if she was used to having to exit houses with little warning. Tracy put her finger to her lips and whispered, ‘Shush.’ Something else the kid seemed to understand. The kid jumped into action and seized the precious pink rucksack and the even more precious silver wand.
They padded quickly downstairs. Just as they reached the hallway, the doorbell rang, loud and insistent. A wave of adrenalin cascaded through Tracy’s body. She snatched up her bag, pushed the kid into the red duffel coat and hustled her to the back door. Tracy fumbled with the lock, her hands shaking. When she finally got the door open she hefted Courtney under one arm – it was like trying to run with a small sheep – and made a dash for the back gate. No one in the lane. Tracy pulled open the door to the lock-up, bustled the kid into the back of the car and said, ‘Buckle up.’
Tracy’s heart was knocking so hard it was making her chest feel sore. She came out of the lane, turned left, drove away sedately. Passed an empty police car and a uniform on a doorstep speaking to a sleepy woman. A dog van coming the other way ignored her. Tracy made her getaway, moving through them all like a ghost.
Behind her, a grey Avensis with a pink rabbit hanging from its rear-view mirror glided stealthily away from the kerb, like a big fish. It was cut off by one of the uniforms, asking questions.
Tracy decided it would be safer on the deserted back roads. They could hang around in the vicinity of the National Trust holiday cottage she had booked. She could get the keys to the cottage at two in the afternoon. Not keys exactly, just a code for a keypad on the door that a housekeeper activated ahead of their arrival. They wouldn’t have to see anyone, talk to anyone. Then they could be invisible, off the radar, like stealth fighters. She only needed a day or so.
The kid fell asleep. It was foggy on the back roads. The fog felt good, like a friend. What had she done? One minute she was buying a sausage roll in Greggs, the next she was on the run from murder and kidnapping. Not that she’d murdered Kelly Cross, she just felt as if she had. Next time she was tempted to buy a kid, Tracy thought, she would take out some kind of warranty against buyer’s remorse. A twenty-four-hour test run to make sure that she hadn’t picked one that came trailing clouds of gory baggage. As if. As if she was going to go and buy another kid. No chance, she was sticking to this one like glue. Thick and thin, hell and high – oh, bugger and blast – suddenly there in front of them a deer stepped delicately out of the fog and into the road, and stood there, surprised, like someone who finds herself unexpectedly on a brightly lit stage in front of an audience.
Tracy heard someone scream, thought it might be herself, wasn’t sure she’d ever screamed before. She slammed on the brakes, yelled, ‘Hold on!’ to Courtney, remembering all the things she’d heard about people running into cows, horses, deer, kangaroos, even sheep, and not walking away alive. She prayed to the particular god who kept kidnapped kids from being killed by wildlife. Tracy closed her eyes.
There was a thud, like driving at full speed into a wall of sand. Tracy was socked in the face by an airbag. It hurt like hell. She was going to have some great bruises. She spun round to check on Courtney. No rear-side airbags, that was a good thing, kids got injured by them. Courtney wasn’t hurt, didn’t even look surprised. ‘OK?’ Tracy said. Kid gave her a thumbs-up. You had to love her.
The windscreen looked as if someone had thrown a rock into the centre of it. A starburst clock. Thank God, the deer hadn’t come through the windscreen and into the car. That would have been too much.
‘Stay here,’ she said to Courtney and clambered out of the car. The deer was lying on the road, illuminated by the headlights. A female, a hind. It was panting, making nasty tubercular sounds. Tracy knelt down next to it and its eyes rolled wildly. There was a huge gash across its neck and blood was pumping out from somewhere beneath its body. It made a frantic effort to struggle to its feet but this was a deer that was going nowhere, today or any other day. It was horrible to see an animal so wounded. Tracy felt more for the deer than she had for Kelly Cross. She had to put it out of its suffering but she could hardly whack it with a jack in front of the kid.
Courtney appeared at her side. ‘Bambi,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah,’ Tracy said. ‘Bambi.’ More like Bambi’s mother. Disney had a lot to answer for. No intention of getting that DVD for the kid. Dead Disney mothers (murdered mothers, in fact) leaving their kids to face the world alone, that was a story the kid could do without. Story Tracy could do without.
To Tracy’s relief, the animal grew quieter, no longer trying to lift its head. Tracy welled up. Poor bloody thing. Courtney patted her hand. The deer’s eyes grew dull and it gave a great shuddering breath and lay still.
‘Is he dead?’ Courtney whispered.
‘Yes,’Tracy said, swallowing hard. ‘She. She’s dead. Gone to join all her friends in deer heaven.’ Sacrifices, to save the kid. Save the kid, save the world. Tracy put out a hand and stroked the deer’s flank. The kid passed the wand over its body.
The Audi was as mortally wounded as the deer. ‘I guess we’ll have to walk,’ Tracy said. ‘Find a garage.’ She heard the sound of another car approaching, the noise baffled by the fog. The fog didn’t feel like a friend any more.
They were going to have to take their chances. Tracy just hoped the car wasn’t being driven by the police. A grey car materialized out of the grey mist. An Avensis. ‘Shit,’ Tracy muttered as the driver climbed out of the car and approached through the gloom.
Tracy grabbed the kid by the hand and hissed, ‘Run.’ She could hear him shouting behind her as they crashed through the undergrowth. ‘Tracy? Tracy Waterhouse? I just want to talk.’
‘Yeah,’ she muttered to the kid, ‘that’s what they all say.’
She stopped and sat on the ground, exhausted, at the foot of a big tree. ‘Get our breath back,’ she muttered to Courtney. Had life with Kelly Cross been so bad, compared to this? Would Kelly still be alive if Tracy hadn’t bought the kid off her? The kid knelt next to her, picked up a skeletal leaf left over from autumn and tucked it into her backpack. Her priorities were different from Tracy’s.
The wood seemed to enfold itself around them. Tracy thought of Sleeping Beauty. They could die here and turn into leaf mould before they were found. A crack broke the silence, startling them both, and Tracy wrapped her arms round Courtney and clung on to her. Nerves screwed tight as piano wires.
‘Are there wolves in the wood?’ the kid whispered.
‘Not as such,’ Tracy said.
She understood she was on the edge of everything now, the abyss ahead, behind the darkness, desperation the only way forward. Kid smelled of last night’s shampoo, and something green and sappy. A woodland nymph.
‘Come on, let’s keep moving.’ She hauled herself to her feet, picked up the kid. She was too small to keep running. Wasn’t that what had made Tracy take notice of her in the first place? Tracy had assumed that Kelly Cross was running with the kid because she was late or impatient or just plain bad but perhaps she hadn’t been running towards somethin
g, perhaps Kelly had also been running away. What if, in her own fashion, she too had been trying to save the kid? Was that why she was dead? Had she been punished for finding the kid or for losing her?
Was the Avensis driver trying to get the kid back, was she someone’s property, a paedo ring maybe? The Avensis driver looked like he might be harbouring a pervert inside his grey skin. Was he this so called private detective, the Jackson bloke?
‘Where are we going?’ Courtney asked.
‘Good question,’ Tracy puffed. ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea.’
The trees started to thin and there was light ahead. Go towards the light, that was what they said, wasn’t it?
They crashed out of the wood. And nearly got run over.
Said he used to be a policeman. Anyone could say that.
He had woken dead on five thirty as usual. When he switched on the bedside light in his bedroom in the Best Western the first thing that Jackson saw was the dog standing next to the bed, staring intently into his face as if it had been willing him to wake. Jackson growled a greeting and the dog wagged its tail enthusiastically in response.
He drank a poor man’s cup of instant coffee in the room and gave the dog its breakfast. It wolfed its food down in seconds. Jackson was beginning to see that the dog always ate as if it was starving. He understood because it was the same way he ate. First rule of life, acquired in the army, reinforced in the police – if you see food, eat it because you don’t know when you’ll see it again. And eat anything that’s put in front of you. Jackson had no qualms where meat was concerned, he could eat his way from snout to tail without any queasiness. He suspected that the dog was equally omnivorous.
Half an hour later and he was checked out and ready to hit the road. Marilyn Nettles was going to have two unexpected visitors. One man and his dog. He’d been planning to go to Whitby anyway so, clearly, fate was talking to him. In a difficult foreign language, like Finnish, it was true, but you couldn’t have everything.
He informed SatNav Jane that he was heading for the coast on the scenic route and then, like Lot before him, he left the city behind without a backward glance.
The tracking device that the room-service waiter had attached to the dog’s collar was currently in the Saab’s glove compartment. Jackson had considered placing it on a long-distance lorry, imagining with some satisfaction the misdirection caused by an Eddie Stobart eighteen-wheeler pulling up in Ullapool or Pwllheli, but then he might not discover who wanted to keep tabs on him. Pursuit was a two-way enterprise, quarry and hunter united in the quest, not so much a duel as a duet.
The tracking device was a nice bit of kit. Jackson had no idea they made them so small these days. It was a while since he’d had reason to purchase anything from a spyware site. He would like to buy something similar for Marlee, a gadget so tiny that she would fail to notice it because she would never (‘No way!’) agree to carry anything that implied parental supervision or control. If he could, Jackson would have his daughter chipped, like a dog. Nathan as well, of course. He had two children, he reminded himself, it was just that one didn’t seem to count quite as much as the other.
Was the dog chipped? ‘Colin’ hadn’t looked the type to care enough about a dog to chip it but then Colin didn’t look the type to own a dog that didn’t exactly advertise his machismo. He was a pit bull man, right down to his St George’s tattoo and his shaved head. Did the dog, in reality, belong to a wife, a mother, a child? Was someone waking up each morning and feeling a lurch of sorrow for their missing pet? Going to put you down, should have done it the minute that bitch left, Colin had yelled at the dog in Roundhay Park. Jackson experienced a pinch of annoyance at the woman who had escaped Colin’s clutches but had left her dog behind to suffer.
What had been a light veil of mist in Leeds had grown thicker as he drove. It held the promise, although not the certainty, of a glorious day later, but in the early hours it had made driving perilous. He regretted now not having cashed in the prescription for spectacles that an optician had given him.
‘Things seem a bit blurry,’ he had said to the impossibly young girl testing his eyes. He wanted to ask if she was qualified but felt oddly vulnerable in the dark as she stared into his eye with a torch, so close that he could smell the mint on her breath.
‘Yes,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘The lenses in your eyes are growing harder. It happens at your age.’ Some things grew harder with age, some things grew softer.
On the road less travelled all kinds of wildlife were gambling recklessly with their lives on the unforgiving tarmac. A narrow miss with a badger a few miles back had tuned his reflexes up a notch. Jackson liked to think of himself as a knight of the road. It would be a shame to tarnish his shining armour with the blood of the innocent. He flicked the switch on the light-up Virgin Mary on the dashboard. The Mother of God might not have the candle wattage of the Saab’s full beam in her belly but perhaps she had a different kind of protective power. A sanctified figurehead leading him through the valley of darkness.
A sudden dip took Jackson, the Saab and the Holy Mother into a denser pocket of fog. It was like flying through a cloud and Jackson almost expected the Saab to buck with turbulence. In the cottonwool heart of the dip he saw a flash of silver and Split the lark came unwonted into his brain, the little men running his memory lazily reaching, in their morning lethargy, for the nearest thing to hand. Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled. The argent blaze heralded a new kind of hazard – a woman. A woman who suddenly hurtled out from the trees at the side of the road.
For a split second Jackson thought she was a deer – a mile or two back there’d been a barely visible road sign displaying a stag that looked as if it was running for its life. The woman looked that way too. No bears and wolves any more, the only predators women ran from nowadays were men. She wasn’t alone, she was dragging a child by the hand, a small one, wearing a red duffel coat. The coat was a dark flare in the fog.
Jackson absorbed all of this in the nanosecond between spotting the woman and child and slamming on the brakes in an effort to avoid making roadkill out of the pair of them. The dog, startled awake by the Saab’s emergency stop, remained safely lodged in the footwell of the car and gave him an unreadable look. ‘Sorry,’ Jackson said.
When he got out of the car he found the woman down on all fours like a cat, gasping for breath. Jackson was sure the Saab hadn’t come into contact with her. And she was a big woman, maybe not as much of a buffer as a deer but he would have noticed the dunt, surely? ‘Did I hit you?’ he puzzled. She shook her head and, sitting back on her heels, managed to wheeze, ‘I’m out of breath, that’s all.’ She nodded in the direction of the child standing impassively by, and said, ‘I was carrying her. She’s heavier than she looks. Good brakes,’ she added, glancing at the Saab, inches away from her.
‘Good driver,’ Jackson said.
The child’s red duffel coat was open, revealing a gauzy pink dressing-up costume beneath. A fairy, an angel, a princess, they were all pretty much cut from the same cloth as far as Jackson was concerned. It was an area of retail Marlee had familiarized him with, somewhat against his will. A battered star-topped silver wand indicated ‘fairy’. Was this the flash of silver he had seen in the fog? The girl was clutching the wand, two-handed like a battleaxe, as if her life depended on it. Jackson wouldn’t have liked to be the one who tried to wrestle it off her, she might be small but she was a punchy-looking kid.
The rest of her ensemble was also the worse for wear. There was a rip in the skirt and bits of twig and leaf were caught in the cheap fabric. It reminded Jackson of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Julia had taken him to see. The fairies in the play had been filthy, mud-stained creatures who looked as though they had crawled out of a bog. At fourteen, Julia had played Puck in a school production of the play. At the same age, his own daughter had aspirations to be a vampire. ‘It’s a phase,’ Josie said. ‘Well, I should hope so,’ Jackson said.
&nbs
p; He helped the woman struggle to her feet. She was wearing a tracksuit that only served to emphasize how broad in the beam she was, built like a collier, Jackson thought. She had a big, practical handbag strapped across her front.
Jackson wondered if she shouldn’t be even a little wary of the fact that she was stepping into the vehicle of a complete stranger in the middle of nowhere and, for all she knew, was walking into a worse nightmare than the one she had left behind. Who was to say that the Saab driver wasn’t a murderous psycho, combing the countryside for prey?
‘I used to be a policeman,’ he said, for reassurance. Although, of course, that was exactly what you would say if you were hoping to trick someone into getting into a car with you. (Perhaps it was himself he was trying to reassure, perhaps it was the woman who was a psycho.)
‘Yeah, me too,’ she muttered and laughed a grim kind of laugh.
‘Really?’ he said but she ignored him. ‘Is someone after you?’ he asked. The woman and the child both turned instinctively to look towards the wood. Jackson tried to imagine something flying out from trees that he didn’t feel up to dealing with and, short of an armoured tank (or a small wand-wielding girl), came up a blank. Instead of answering the question the woman said, ‘We need a lift.’
Jackson, also not one to waste words, said, ‘You’d better get in the car then.’
He adjusted the mirror to try to look at the woman in the back seat. He couldn’t see her face, however, as she had twisted herself round awkwardly in order to keep watch out of the rear window of the car. It wasn’t worth the effort. If anyone was behind them there would be little chance of spotting them in this fog. Or vice versa. He adjusted the mirror so that he could inspect the small girl sitting next to the woman. The girl raised her eyebrows at him, an inscrutable gesture.