Linda, mother hen, queen bee, was wearing sensible hiker’s sandals beneath her long patchwork cotton skirt. Her droopy hair was pulled back in a ponytail so you could see the whole of her disgustingly healthy face. She was part of some wholefood cooperative, ate brown rice and grew ‘sprouts’, not the type that came from Brussels, and made ‘cultures’ for stuff like yoghurt and bread. Linda was attending an evening class in beekeeping. All these facts conveyed righteously over a cup of tea that she reluctantly offered. They sat in the kitchen, within the circle of warmth coming from a big, ancient Aga.
The tea was horrible, not proper tea. ‘Rooibos,’ Linda said. Rubbish more like, Tracy thought. The tea was in big, clumsy mugs that ‘someone we know’ had made. ‘We bartered eggs for mugs,’ Linda said smugly. ‘One day,’ she added earnestly, ‘there’ll be no money.’ Well, turned out she was right about that.
Like Tracy, Linda Pallister was still on probation. Unlike Tracy, she had a kid, having got knocked up in the middle of whatever worthy degree it was that she had done, social admin, politics, sociology. She spent the rest of her degree hauling the kiddy around on the back of her bike to nurseries and child-minders.
The boy was wandering around the kitchen half-naked, his rubbery little penis bouncing about. Tracy felt shocked.
‘Jacob,’ Linda said. He peed on the floor right in front of Tracy and Linda didn’t seem bothered. ‘Children should be free to do what they want,’ she said. ‘We shouldn’t impose our rigid, artificial structures on them. He’s very happy,’ she added as if Tracy had said something that indicated otherwise.
Linda mopped up Jacob’s pee and, without washing her hands, cut slices from a brown cake that she’d made. ‘Banana bread?’ she offered Tracy. Tracy politely declined. ‘Watching my figure,’ she said. ‘Someone has to.’
‘What do you want?’ Linda said. ‘You didn’t come here to talk about self-sufficiency and poultry.’
‘No, I didn’t. I just wondered how Michael was doing.’
‘Michael?’ Linda said vaguely, suddenly very preoccupied with wiping Jacob’s nose.
‘The Braithwaite kiddy,’ Tracy said. ‘Is he with foster parents now, because he’s not in the hospital?’
‘He’s in a different hospital now.’
‘Where? Why?’
Linda stared at the unpalatable-looking piece of banana bread on her plate and said, ‘’Fraid I can’t say. Against policy.’
‘So no chance I could go and visit him?’
‘Why would you want to do that?’ Linda asked.
‘To see how he’s doing.’ Because I held him in my arms and it broke my heart, Tracy thought, but she wasn’t about to show any weakness to Linda Pallister.
‘I told you, he’s fine,’ Linda said, suddenly as snappy as a crocodile. When Linda found God a few years later her personality would improve a lot. One of the few arguments Tracy could muster in favour of Christianity.
‘I don’t see how he can be “fine”,’Tracy protested. ‘He was locked in a flat with the rotting corpse of his mother for nearly three weeks.’
‘Well, “fine” is perhaps the wrong word,’ Linda conceded. ‘But he’s getting all the help he needs. You should just leave it alone.’ She pulled her own kiddy close and put a protective arm around him and said again, ‘Just leave it alone.’
‘So I definitely can’t visit him?’ Tracy persisted.
‘No,’ Linda sighed. ‘No visitors. It’s a directive from above.’
For a mad second Tracy thought Linda Pallister meant heaven.
It was ridiculous but Tracy had half formed the notion that if no one wanted Michael Braithwaite she could foster or even adopt him herself. Of course, Tracy knew nothing about children and she was still living at home. She could just imagine the look on her mother’s face if she brought home a neglected, traumatized little boy.
‘He’ll be adopted by someone who will love him,’ Linda Pallister said. ‘He’ll forget what happened to him, he’s too young to remember. Children are very resilient.’
Tracy asked Len Lomax herself, didn’t intend to but she bumped into him the next day. He was coming out of Brotherton House as she was going in.
‘Sir, do you mind me asking what’s happening in the Carol Braithwaite murder case?’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Any suspects?’
‘Not as yet.’
‘You haven’t found the key?’
‘Key?’ He flinched. He definitely flinched. ‘What key?’
‘The key to Carol Braithwaite’s flat. It was locked from the outside.’
‘I think you might have made a mistake there, WPC Waterhouse. Fancy yourself as a detective now, do you?’
He stalked off righteously, climbed into a red Vauxhall Victor that Tracy recognized from somewhere. She tried to get a look at the driver, caught a glimpse of a razor-sharp bob and a beaky nose that liked to poke itself where it shouldn’t. Why was Len Lomax getting into a car with Marilyn Nettles? And why had he flinched when she asked about the key?
‘He knew about that key,’ she said to Barry.
‘That’s crap,’ Barry said. Barry got nervy every time she mentioned Carol Braithwaite’s name, why was that? (‘Because you never stop fucking mentioning her, that’s why.’) He drained his pint in one go and said, ‘Got to be off, got a date. That Barbara’s agreed to go to the pictures with me. Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the Tower.’
‘Monty Python? Oh, very romantic, Barry,’ Tracy said.
Took Tracy years to get out of uniform and into CID. You had to wonder, was it because she was a woman, or because she was a woman who asked the wrong questions? Or the right questions. Barry’s star, on the other hand, rose quickly. It wasn’t long before he was drinking pals with Lomax, Strickland, Marshall, even Eastman, a scrum of beer-swilling, fag-smoking blokes. Thick as thieves, all of them. The good old days.
She was like a terrier with the scent of a rabbit in its nose. Wouldn’t let it go.
‘And what’s her name?’ Ray Strickland said, frowning into his pint.
‘Tracy Waterhouse. She’s all right, Tracy,’ Barry said hastily, ‘but she just keeps going on about how the kiddy said his father did it. Won’t let it drop.’
A week later, Len Lomax took Barry to one side and told him that they’d lifted a bloke in Chapeltown who confessed to being Carol Braithwaite’s killer. ‘Said he was the boy’s father,’ Lomax said.
‘So, he’s been arrested, there’ll be a trial?’ Barry said and Lomax said, ‘Unfortunately not, bloke got into a fight in Armley while he was on remand, someone stuck him with a knife.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yeah, dead. In the light of everything, the kiddy, what happened to him, the whole thing will probably be dropped.’
It was only much later that Barry wondered if what Lomax had told him was true. He could just have made it up. Barry never asked questions, always took what Lomax and Strickland said as gospel. God knows why.
‘Let your lady friend know,’ Lomax said.
‘My lady friend?’ Barry puzzled. He had had one not entirely successful date with Barbara. Turned out she didn’t like Monty Python. (But they’re just idiots, what’s funny about that?) Morecambe and Wise was more her thing.
‘Your WPC,’ Lomax said.
‘Tracy? OK.’ Barry wondered when he had become Strickland and Lomax’s dogsbody.
‘Remember, Crawford, discretion’s the better part of valour.’ Barry had no idea what he was talking about.
The lights of a petrol station loomed out of the fog and the woman said, ‘Can we have a pit-stop, please?’ Jackson pulled the Saab on to the forecourt and she led the kid by the hand to the toilets round the back.
‘Just be a sec,’ she said. The kid looked back over her shoulder at Jackson. She was gazing at him as if she was wondering whether he was about to leg it and leave them in the lurch. She hadn’t said a word so far. Jackson wondered if she was mute, or perhaps just
traumatized. He gave her his reassuring Queen Mother wave and she semaphored slowly back with her silver wand.
He supposed it might be a good idea to stock up on supplies. The garage wasn’t big but it still managed to sell everything from bunches of flowers and bags of smokeless fuel to foodstuffs and top-shelf magazines. Eight o’clock in the morning and the place was deserted, just one young, very bored girl at the counter, watched over by a couple of CCTV monitors that allowed her to keep an eye on the pumps. She was chewing on a piece of her long, stringy hair, as if it were liquorice. The girl was small and slim and Jackson wondered if she should be out here all on her own. It would be too easy to overpower her and force her to open the till, or worse.
Once inside he had trouble deciding what to buy. He supposed he should get something for his new acquaintances, the kid had a little backpack but it seemed doubtful it was filled with rations. He bought bottled water, milk and juice, a couple of pasties, apples, a bunch of bananas, a packet of nuts, chocolate, some dog treats and, lastly, a plastic cup of black coffee to take away. The shop was bigger inside than it was outside.
Back in the Saab Jackson waited. He sipped his coffee. Hot and wet and that was about all. It tasted vaguely of rust. He opened the packet of nuts and threw a handful in his mouth. He heard a train somewhere, muffled by the fog, and wondered where it was going. A cow bellowed nearby, low and moody, like a foghorn. It was at times like this that he felt like taking up smoking again. He waited some more. He wondered if he should go and see if the pair of them were OK. Perhaps there had been some kind of emotional breakdown in the toilets.
He watched as the girl in the garage came out from her sanctum and started hauling the buckets of flowers and bags of smokeless fuel out front. Whatever they were paying her, he thought, it didn’t seem like enough. She paused on the threshold, clutching a plastic bucket of flowers that were already tired inside their cellophane shrouds, the same kind of weedy-looking bouquets that were propped against trees or stuck through wire fencing to indicate where some unfortunate cyclist or pedestrian had been knocked off the planet. A rotting pile had been left at the site of the train crash. Someone had shown him a photograph later. The bouquets had been placed at the bridge above the track. Kitsch-looking soft toys and teddy bears too.
’Twas just this time, last year, I died. Two years to be accurate. For some reason Schrödinger’s cat popped into his mind. ‘Both alive and dead at the same time,’ Julia said. That had been Jackson after the train crash. ‘Neither one thing nor t’other,’ his brother would have said.
The girl from the garage cast a suspicious glance in Jackson’s direction but then her attention was drawn away from him as a black Land Cruiser suddenly appeared out of the fog, slowing to a stop on the other side of the forecourt. It waited with the engine running, looking vaguely menacing, like a pent-up bull waiting to go into the ring. Before Jackson could form much of a thought about it (such as what a stupid, badass kind of vehicle, who do they think they are, warlords, gangsters?), a man – a cross-bred species, half rugby fullback, half silverback gorilla – climbed out of the passenger side and also made his way round the back.
The driver then climbed out of the Land Cruiser and started to approach the Saab. Brothers-in-arms. Both men had the doughy faces of people reared on a diet of fat and potatoes and were dressed in leather jackets that had last been fashionable some time in the seventies, unless you lived in Albania where they had never become démodé and possibly never would.
Before he reached the Saab the woman reappeared, screaming her head off at Jackson. She lumbered across the forecourt like a charging rhino, carrying the girl under one arm while with her free hand she was struggling to remove the bag that was strapped across her front. The silverback gorilla was on her heels but not for long because she managed to pull the bag over her head and, holding it by the strap at arm’s length, in one surprisingly graceful movement – more ballet than hammer throw, the kid under her arm forming a kind of ballast – she twirled round and socked the guy following her full in the face with the bag. He went down like lead. Jackson flinched inwardly and wondered what a woman would carry in a handbag that could do that kind of damage. An anvil? Thatcher would have liked a handbag like that.
The driver of the Land Cruiser changed trajectory and started heading towards the woman. Jackson was halfway out of the car, intending to head him off, but the woman yelled and gestured at him to get back in the Saab. He did, surprised at his own obedience to her barking parade-ground tones.
The girl from the garage, ignorant of the ruckus that was developing, stepped out uncertainly on to the forecourt, holding a bucket of tulips. Unfortunately the driver of the Land Cruiser, running towards the Saab as if he was heading for the try-line, failed to swerve in time and sent the girl flying across the concrete, tulips spilling everywhere. It put the driver off his stride long enough for the woman to fling the kid in the back seat of the Saab and lunge in after her, bellowing at Jackson, ‘Drive, drive! Just fucking drive, will you?’
Again, obedient to orders.
In the rear-view mirror he could see the girl still sprawled motionless on the ground. She would be lucky if something wasn’t broken. Like her head, for example. He could make out the shape of the guy who had been handbagged, still out cold on the ground, but then everything behind them was swallowed by the fog. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw that the woman had pulled the kid down on to the floor of the car and was snailed protectively over her body. Did she think they had guns? When there were guns around, Jackson preferred being inside a vehicle that was armoured and official rather than a thin-skinned family saloon, manufactured in a neutral country.
Domestic abuse didn’t quite seem to fit the bill any more.
‘Who were those goons?’
‘I haven’t got the faintest idea,’ she said.
‘They seemed to be after you.’
‘Looked like it,’ she said.
Jackson was still on adrenalin overload but the other occupants of the car appeared imperturbable. In the footwell, the dog remained determinedly asleep. Jackson was pretty sure it was pretending. How long before it regretted its choice of new pack leader? The kid also had a pretty good poker face on her and his Amazonian hitchhiker was raking through her bag as if finding a lipstick or a tissue was more interesting than contemplating the carnage in their wake. They had made an attempt to clean themselves up a bit in the garage toilets. He noticed that the woman no longer had blood on her hands. Jackson felt there might be a metaphor hiding in there somewhere.
He thought of the guy she had smacked with her handbag, laid out cold on the concrete. Frailty, thy name is woman!
‘What have you got in that bag?’ he asked. Me and the cat, he thought, helplessly curious.
She removed a big black Maglite and displayed it for his appreciation in the rear-view mirror. It looked like old police issue. They weighed a ton, no wonder the guy hadn’t bounced back up again. She was taking no prisoners, that was for sure. She replaced the Maglite and returned to delving in the bag, finally coming up with a mobile phone. Jackson assumed that she was going to phone in the incident at the garage.
‘Are you phoning the police?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she said and promptly rolled down the window and threw the phone out of it. He turned round and looked at her.
‘What?’ she said.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked when Jackson took his own phone out of his pocket. Another chippy woman, Jackson thought with a sigh. Chippy women wherever he went. Chippy mothers who begat chippy daughters and so the circle of chippiness was unbroken.
‘Phoning 999.’
‘Why?’
‘The girl in the garage,’ he said, with exaggerated forbearance. ‘An innocent bystander,’ he added, thinking of the tulips, the primary coloured spearheads scattered across the forecourt.
‘Innocent bystander?’ the woman said. ‘What innocent bystander? Is anyone real
ly innocent?’
‘Kids? Dogs?’ Jackson offered. ‘Me?’
She snorted derisively in the way that a woman married to him ten years might have done.
‘I get it, you don’t want to involve the police,’ he said. ‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’
‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘And anyway, is anyone really a bystander?’ she mused as if they were in the middle of a philosophical debate. ‘You could argue that we’re all bystanders.’
‘It’s not a case of semantics,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ve just left that girl and I would say, yes, “innocent” and “bystander” pretty much cover her role in the proceedings.’
‘Semantics,’ she murmured. ‘Big word for this time of day.’
Your average upstanding citizen tended to phone for the emergency services in these circumstances. Fugitive, criminal, woman with a lethal handbag, what was her story? Jackson sighed. ‘Seeing as I appear to be helping you escape from something that seems pretty dodgy, to say the least, can I take it on trust that you’re on the side of good?’
‘Good?’
‘As in the opposite of bad.’
‘Because I’m a woman? A woman with a child? Doesn’t always follow.’
The child in question was now asleep. The silver wand, no longer really fit for purpose, had finally slipped from her slack fingers. He hoped this wasn’t a routine kind of day for her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Because you said you were police.’
‘Again, doesn’t always follow,’ she said with a shrug.
‘I’m still going to phone it in.’ He half expected her to knock him out with the Maglite but at that moment the kid woke up and said, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Got any bananas in there?’
‘It just so happens,’ he said, producing a bunch from the plastic carrier bag on the passenger seat. Like a magician. Or a fool. He was a cocky so-and-so. Was he really ex-police? He seemed a bit on the wimpy side, the sort that liked to rescue damsels in distress but not if it involved too much hardship. He was quite attractive, she’d give him that, but that was possibly the last thing on Tracy’s mind. Dodging and weaving to escape mysterious men who were chasing you could do that to a woman. Being a woman could do that to a woman. He had a silly little dog, you had to wonder what attracted a man to an animal that size.