When Marilyn Nettles finally shuffled to the door, Jackson held up one of his business cards to prove his credentials. He caught a whiff of an old-fashioned scent – lavender and gin. The beginnings of a dowager’s hump and a mouth that looked as if it had spent a lifetime clamped around a cigarette. She took the card from him as if it might be smeared with something infectious and, peering at it, said dismissively, ‘Private Investigator, that could mean anything.’
‘Well, what it means,’ Jackson said helpfully, ‘is that I’m investigating something private. Carol Braithwaite,’ he added.
Marilyn Nettles gave a grunt of recognition at the name and said, ‘Well, come in, come in,’ suddenly impatient, even though she had been keeping him on the doorstep before.
Jackson had to duck to get through the door. The place was tiny, the front door opening directly into what an estate agent would have called ‘a living-kitchen’. An open stairway led up to the next storey. The house was simply one room stacked on top of another. Walking across the floor he felt its incline, like a funhouse. There was a wash of nicotine over the walls.
‘Sit down,’ she said, indicating a two-seater sofa, one half of which was occupied by what Jackson first took to be a cushion, then a piece of feline taxidermy and just as the question Why would you stuff a cat? passed through his brain the object itself turned into a real cat. At the sight of Jackson the animal rose from the sofa and stretched extravagantly, arching its back like a caterpillar. It was a strangely threatening gesture, a fighter warming up for the ring. It unsheathed its claws and flexed them, digging them deep into the fabric of the sofa. Jackson was glad he had left the dog tied to a railing in the yard outside.
As if reading his mind, Marilyn Nettles said, ‘Have you been with a dog?’ in much the same tone of voice a jealous wife would have used to ask him if he had been with another woman. ‘He hates dogs, can smell them at a hundred paces.’ Jackson sat down gingerly next to the cat, which had now settled grumpily back into its impersonation of a cushion. Jackson wondered if it suffered from the effects of passive smoking.
A little carriage-clock on the mantelpiece struck a tinny-sounding hour and Marilyn Nettles flinched like a woman who had just realized how long it was since she’d had a drink.
‘Coffee, Mr Jackson?’
‘It’s Brodie, actually. Jackson Brodie.’
‘Hmm,’ she said as if that seemed unlikely and wavered her way to the back of the room where some basic and pretty elderly appliances lined one wall. She flicked the switch on an electric kettle and spooned instant coffee into mugs before adding a slug of gin to one of them, which explained her unexpected hospitality, Jackson supposed.
The place was shabby, cat fur and dust floating on sunbeams. Nothing had been papered or painted, or indeed washed, for a long time. Something uncomfortably hard behind the cushion at his back turned out to be an empty bottle of Beefeater. There were clothes draped on the sofa. Jackson didn’t like to look too closely in case they proved to be Marilyn Nettles’s undergarments. He got the impression that she slept, ate and worked in this one room.
An old Olivetti Lettera sat on a table by the window, surrounded by piles of paper. Jackson got up from the sofa and investigated the manuscript. He started to read the unfinished page in the typewriter –
Little did petite blonde Debbie Mathers realize that the handsome debonair man she had married was really a monster in disguise who would use their apparently idyllic honeymoon as an opportunity to murder his new bride in order to collect on the insurance policy that he—
‘Mr Jackson?’
‘Sorry,’ Jackson said, flinching. He hadn’t heard Marilyn Nettles’s approaching tread on the biscuit-crumbed carpet. ‘Couldn’t help taking a peek at your latest oeuvre. It’s “Brodie”, by the way.’
‘It’s crap,’ she said flatly, nodding her head at the Olivetti. ‘But it pays the bills.’
She nodded in the direction of a bookcase where a series of books displayed their titles on their spines – The Poisoned Postwoman, The Faithless Fiancé. Red Blood Press were the publishers, their logo a drawing of a fountain pen dripping with blood. Marilyn Nettles removed a book from the line-up and handed it to Jackson. The Slaughtered Seamstress was the title, raised and embossed in a metallic red on a lurid cover that depicted a half-naked, bug-eyed woman in the foreground, her mouth open in a scream as she tried to escape from a shadowy male figure who was wielding a huge knife. On the back page there was a soft-focus photograph of ‘Stephanie Dawson’ that looked as if it had been taken decades ago. There had been a lot of cigarettes and alcohol on the road between that photograph and the woman who stood before Jackson now.
‘The Butchered Bride. They call it “True Noir”,’ Marilyn Nettles said. ‘Basically they’re books for people who can’t read.’ She contemplated the screaming woman on the jacket. ‘Women in jeopardy,’ she said, handing Jackson a mug of coffee. ‘Very popular. You have to wonder.’
‘You do,’ he agreed. The mug looked as if it was some time since it had made the acquaintance of any washing-up liquid. Oiled by her alcohol-infused Nescafé, Marilyn Nettles seemed more inclined to talk, albeit reluctantly. She lit a cigarette without offering one to Jackson and said, ‘So what do you want?’
‘What can you tell me about Carol Braithwaite?’
‘Not a lot. Not much more than was in that original newspaper report. Why? What’s your interest in her?’
‘I’m working on behalf of a client,’ Jackson said. ‘Someone who I think may have some connection to Carol Braithwaite.’
‘Who?’
‘That’s confidential information, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re not a sodding priest. We’re not talking secrets of the confessional.’
Jackson pressed on. ‘There was your piece in the newspaper and then the whole case seems to disappear. Did you interview anyone at the time, did you find out anything about Carol Braithwaite?’
She stared quizzically at the tip of her cigarette as if it was going to provide the answers. ‘So many questions and such a long time ago,’ she murmured.
‘But you must remember,’ Jackson said.
‘Must I?’
‘Have you ever heard the names Linda Pallister or Tracy Waterhouse? A social worker and a policewoman, in 1975? Ring a bell?’ A little flicker of something in Marilyn Nettles’s eyes. ‘Hope McMaster? Dr Ian Winfield? Kitty Winfield?’ Jackson persisted.
‘For heaven’s sake, all these names,’ she said irritably. ‘I knew next to nothing. I was encouraged not to know anything, as you might say. I was warned off.’
‘Warned off?’
‘Yes, warned off. I didn’t believe that they were idle threats either. No more articles, don’t report the inquest, forget it happened.’
‘So someone threatened you?’ Jackson said. ‘Who?’
‘Oh, names, names,’ Marilyn Nettles said dismissively. ‘Everyone always wanting to name names. It doesn’t matter now. Most of us are dead anyway, even the ones that are alive.’ She seemed to drift off to some place in her head. She came back after a while and tapped the manuscript on the table in front of her. ‘I went down to London, wanted to make it big on the broadsheets, but it never really happened. Ended up back here, covering local stories for the Whitby Gazette and writing this stuff to keep my head above water.’
‘Well,’ Jackson said, ‘none of us end up where we expect to.’
‘I don’t know why the woman can’t be left dead and buried, I don’t know why everyone’s so intent on digging her up.’
‘Everyone?’
‘There was a man here earlier. He said he was a private detective as well. The pair of you look like brush salesmen if you ask me.’
‘Did he give you a card?’
Marilyn Nettles rooted around amongst the pages of The Butchered Bride, and handed over the cheap card. ‘Brian Jackson,’ Jackson sighed. They had obviously been dogging each other’s footsteps all week. He had been driving away f
rom Whitby when he offered Jackson a lift. His had been the name, hadn’t it, that was written in Linda Pallister’s diary for the morning of Jackson’s original appointment with her. Jackson had read the name ‘B. Jackson’ and thought Linda Pallister might have been confused. Was it Brian Jackson’s questions that had spooked Linda Pallister into disappearing?
Marilyn Nettles sighed, seemed to gather herself and continued, ‘And anyway a lot of what happened had to be kept out of the public domain, had to be censored “to protect the innocent”, as they say. Restraining orders all over the place. I was allowed to write hardly anything about Carol Braithwaite and nothing whatsoever about the child.’
‘The child?’ Jackson said, almost leaping off the dusty sofa with eagerness. This had to be Hope McMaster, surely? ‘You didn’t say anything about a child.’
‘You didn’t ask. He was called Michael,’ Marilyn Nettles said. ‘A boy, four years old.’
Jackson sagged back on to the sofa, deflated by disappointment. ‘Carol Braithwaite had a son?’
‘Yes. They said they were protecting him from the press, from public curiosity. It was a sensationalist kind of story.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, he was locked inside the flat with the body of his dead mother. They estimated it was about three weeks. But you know, he witnessed a murder . . . and then he disappeared.’
‘Do you think someone killed him?’
‘As good as. He disappeared into the system, wretched life in care, et cetera,’ she said wearily. ‘I’m growing tired of this interrogation, I have work to do,’ Marilyn Nettles said. ‘It’s time you went.’ She stood up suddenly and swayed a little and hung on to the table for support and Jackson jumped up from the sofa, intending to shore her up if necessary. In doing so he dislodged the manuscript on her desk, sending the pages of The Butchered Bride fluttering like disembodied birds on to the floor. The cat, startled awake, narrowed its mean marble eyes and went from nought to sixty in two seconds, hissing and spitting at Jackson.
Exit Jackson stage right, pursued by a cat.
Escaped by a whisker. He threw the dog a dog treat, casting the tiny bone high in the air. The dog jumped and caught it neatly.
Perhaps, after all, then, the girl in the photograph was not Hope McMaster. But it did rather beg the question, if this Brian Jackson bloke was mining the same mysterious seam as Jackson himself – Linda Pallister, Marilyn Nettles, Tracy Waterhouse – then what – or who – was he looking for?
As soon as he pulled up outside Linda Pallister’s house Barry could sense the lace curtains twitching all around. Nosy neighbours, a policeman’s best friend. Barry climbed out of the car and tried the doorbell but it didn’t look like a house where anyone was home. The curtains were closed and it had an abandoned air. He banged loudly on the door and shouted ‘Linda!’ through the letterbox.
A Hyacinth Bucket type, one-woman Neighbourhood Watch, popped up out of nowhere as if she’d been crouched behind the privet ready to spring.
‘Janice Potter,’ she said. ‘I live next door. Can I help you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Barry said. ‘Have you got a runner for the three thirty at Lingfield Park?’ He flourished his warrant card and said, ‘I’m looking for Mrs Pallister, Linda Pallister?’
‘Someone else was looking for her yesterday. He said he was a private detective.’
‘Can you tell me when you last saw Linda?’ Barry asked.
‘Last night,’ she said promptly. ‘Just after Collier finished. She was getting into a car. She didn’t come back.’
‘What kind of car?’Who needed CCTV, Barry thought, when you had twitchers?
‘A four-door saloon,’ she said. ‘Grey.’
‘All cars are grey at night,’ Barry said.
This Jackson bloke was the ruddy Scarlet Pimpernel, here there and everywhere, always one step ahead of Barry. And everywhere he went, women were disappearing.
‘OK,’ Barry said to himself as he climbed back in the car. He talked to his car quite a lot these days. It didn’t talk back, didn’t have any expectations of him. ‘Let’s say, for argument’s sake, this Jackson character is investigating on behalf of Carol Braithwaite’s kid, all grown up now, what – in his late thirties?’ All that ‘finding out more about myself’ shit that people went in for these days. Not Barry, Barry would happily know less about himself. ‘And so, on Michael Braithwaite’s behalf, he contacts Linda Pallister.’ Someone’s asking questions, she’d said to him when she phoned him on Wednesday. ‘And the same bloke, this Jackson, was looking for Tracy for the same reason – Carol Braithwaite. But then both Linda and Tracy disappear. That can’t be good, can it?’
Michael Braithwaite had woken his mother from her endless sleep. And now she was rising, a dust storm, looking for justice, looking for vengeance. A revenge tragedy.
Jackson and the dog strolled along the pier, a pair of flâneurs by the sea. Jackson could feel the warmth of the sun on his scalp. He had been to Whitby as a boy. He didn’t know where the money had come from for a holiday, there was never money for decent clothes and food, let alone for ice creams or pantomimes, certainly not holidays. Jackson must have been five or six when they came here, half his sister’s age and still young enough to be her pet. Francis, their brother, was already a teenager slouching moodily around the arcades in the evening. There was no photographic proof of their furlough as none of them had ever owned a camera. The rich had always commissioned portraits of themselves but the poor moved invisibly through history.
Jackson couldn’t explain this primitive past to his daughter, let alone his son, born into a science-fiction future where every breathing second of his life was being digitally recorded, usually by Mr Metrosexual, Jonathan Carr. ( Julia was being unusually shifty, even for her, about Jonathan. Was it over between them?)
He could remember very little about their family holiday here in that faraway time, only impressionistic memories of sounds and smells. They had stayed in a guest house where a gong was rung at dinnertime and meals were served that were astonishingly different from the potato and bread-laden fare of home and even now his most vivid memory of the holiday was of a stewed chicken dish and a lemon pudding, both of which had prompted his mother to sniff and say, ‘Huh, very fancy,’ as if the food were a criticism of her rather than something to be enjoyed.
There had been milk and arrowroot biscuits for the children in the evening – unheard-of luxuries at home, where a vicious rub on the face with a flannel by his mother had been the only herald of bedtime.
He suddenly recalled something long ago tucked away in a forgotten corner by the little men running his brain. His mother had bought him a set of paper sandcastle flags – in his mind’s eye he could still see a red lion on a yellow background. And his father wearing his cheap suit to sit on the beach, his trouser legs rolled up to reveal his pale, hairy, Scottish shins. It had been a poor sort of childhood, in every way. Belonged in a museum.
Not one as interesting as the RNLI museum on the prom where recorded tales of heroism and disaster brought an uncomfortable lump to Jackson’s throat. We have to go out, but we don’t have to come back, the motto of the US Coastguard, the watchword of all rescuers. Sacrifice, like stoicism, not a fashionable word. Jackson stuffed a twenty-pound note into the miniature lifeboat collecting-box at the door.
He carried on, passing shops that sold shells, shops devoted to vampires (no getting away from them), to jet, to scented candles the smell of which made him retch, and endless cheap and nasty souvenirs. He crossed the swing bridge to the old town and visited the Captain Cook Memorial Museum to pay homage to the great navigator himself.
Afterwards, he bought some fudge in Justin’s Fudge Shop and noticed a house on Henrietta Street that was for sale, but he saw that the whole street was subsiding and the kipper smokehouse at the end was atmospheric in all the wrong ways.
The place was heaving with visitors. May Bank Holiday weekend, used to be Whitsuntide, when did tha
t change? He ran up the 199 steps to the abbey and was pleased at how fit he still was. Everywhere people were puffing and panting their way up the steps. He had never seen so many fat people in one place at the same time. He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.
He left the dog in the porch when he went into St Mary’s Church. He took a seat in a box pew marked in old lettering, For Strangers Only. It seemed appropriate. These days he was always the stranger in town. He contemplated the interior of the church, fashioned long ago by shipwrights. The only other people there were a young – very young – Goth couple, black clothes, black lipstick and piercings everywhere, who were messing about in the pews. The boy said something to the girl and she sniggered. Vampire freaks.
He sat for a while on a bench in the graveyard of St Mary’s. The headstones all leaned like trees in the wind, the names on them erased by the salted air. ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,’ he murmured to the dog. The dog cocked its head inquisitively as if it were making an effort to understand what he was saying. Seagulls were squabbling yobbishly overhead. The sun winked on the sea like diamonds. Jackson was long enough in the tooth to know that it was over when you started reaching for clichés. He stood up and said out loud, ‘Time to go,’ to the dead beneath his feet, but the meek members of the resurrection made no effort to stir themselves and only the dog obeyed his call.
He walked back down into town on the cobbled donkey road rather than the 199 steps, finishing off Justin’s fudge as he went.
‘Come on,’ he said to the dog. ‘I’ll race you.’
He hit the beach running. Jackson couldn’t remember when he had last run on a beach.
When they reached Sandsend the dog investigated the rock pools, finding a small dead squid like a deflated condom that it worried for a while until it disintegrated. A large brackish piece of seaweed kept it entertained for several minutes more. Jackson sat on a rock and contemplated the horizon. What was out there? Holland? Germany? The edge of the world? Why had someone tried to bury Carol Braithwaite’s murder? And how was it relevant, if at all, to Hope McMaster? And other questions that he didn’t know the answer to, in fact, the more questions he asked, the more they multiplied. It had started with one, I wondered if you could find out some information about my biological parents? and had exploded exponentially from there.