‘They adopted a kiddy not long after Carol Braithwaite’s murder, then they emigrated sharpish to New Zealand.’
‘Oh my God,’ Tracy murmured. That was why Michael disappeared, the Winfields took him. She remembered Ian Winfield from her visit to the hospital, how protective he’d been of Michael.
‘I’ve said too much,’ Barry said.
‘You haven’t said enough.’
‘It’s all going to come out eventually.’
‘What’s going to come out, Barry? What’s going on?’
Barry sighed heavily. The sigh was followed by a long silence.
‘Still there, Barry?’
‘Haven’t gone anywhere. Tracy? I’ve seen you on tape with Kelly Cross, at the Merrion Centre.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, shit. Exactly. And they found your fingerprint in Kelly’s house. What’s going on?’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘I never thought you did,’ Barry said.
‘I bought the kid off her,’ Tracy said.
‘Shit.’
Dark outside. The darkest dark she’d ever known. If she went outside and walked down the short path to the gate, which she did every hour or so to make a perimeter check, Tracy could sense the vastness of the black sky, a scattering of stars, disappearing as the mist fell again. Tracy imagined that out there somewhere in the darkness she could hear the deer breathing.
1975: July
Tracy had finally managed to dispense with the awkward burden of her virginity. She’d started to take driving lessons, fed up with waiting to get on the police driving course. Her instructor was a one-man business, Dennis, separated from his wife, in his forties.
After the first lesson he suggested to Tracy that they go for a drink and he took her to a place off the Harrogate Road and bought her a brandy and Babycham without asking her what she would like. It was ‘a lady’s tipple’ apparently. Wondered what Arkwright would say if she told him that, next time he plonked a pint glass of Theakston’s in front of her. Same thing after the next lesson (‘You’ve got a good sense of where you are on the road, Tracy’). After the third lesson (‘You’ve got to watch that speedometer, Tracy’), they drove up beyond Heptonstall and they did it in the back of his car on a forestry trail somewhere. He wasn’t what you’d call a catch, but then Tracy wasn’t looking to keep him.
‘Where’ve you been?’ her mother said when Tracy came back from her tryst. Her antennae were twitching, they could have used Dorothy Waterhouse in the war. Wouldn’t have needed to bother with Bletchley Park. ‘You look different,’ she said accusingly.
‘I am different,’ Tracy said boldly. ‘I’m a woman.’
She was grateful to Dennis for the matter-of-fact nature of the act but he was more grateful to her for being twenty and ‘well upholstered’ so it was a reasonably well-balanced exchange. She cancelled her next lesson, told him she was emigrating. Signed up with BSM and passed her test after eight lessons. It seemed an unfriendly thing to do but it was no more than he expected. He phoned the house once afterwards and, Sod’s Law, her mother answered. ‘Someone by the name of Dennis called for you,’ she reported when Tracy came in from work. ‘He wanted to know where your disembarkation port was. I told him not to be filthy.’
Things continued to look up for Tracy. Not long after she passed her driving test she signed the rental lease on a place of her own. She’s Leaving Home. She had left behind the single bed in her parents’ house where, apart from their annual evacuation to Bridlington, she had slept every night since coming home from the private maternity hospital that her parents thought would give their baby (hopefully a boy) a better start in life than an NHS ward. The maternity hospital was so underheated that Dorothy Waterhouse came home with chilblains and the infant Tracy with croup. Still, they had mixed with a better class of mother and baby and that was the important thing.
Tracy’s new home was a boxy little bedsit with an Ascot water heater and filthy carpets. A two-bar electric heater that smelled dangerous and a hot-water bottle to embrace at night as she huddled in her sofa-bed. The bedsit was unfurnished and Tracy had bought everything second-hand, keeping stuff in her father’s shed until she’d accumulated enough goods and chattels for the bachelorette life. When she got the key Arkwright and Barry helped her move it all in. When they finished they had tea and biscuits, sitting on the sofabed. ‘You won’t be here long, love,’ Arkwright said. ‘Some bloke’ll come along soon and snap you up.’ He patted the sofa-bed as if this would be the location of a future marriage proposal.
Barry smirked and choked on his Blue Riband.
‘Something, lad?’ Arkwright said.
‘Nothing,’ Barry said.
Having a place of her own raised many questions for Tracy that she never really grappled with successfully. For example, should she buy four dinner plates or two? There was a stall on the market that sold Wedgwood seconds. It was a stupid question, she only needed one plate, she dined alone every night. Findus Crispy Frozen Pancakes, Vesta curries, Smash potato. The nearest she got to cooking was frying up a batch of potato scallops.
She had imagined a future of domesticity, of inviting people from work round for ‘a bite to eat’ and turning out a fish pie or a plate of spaghetti, bottle of cheap plonk and a block of Wall’s Cornish ice cream afterwards and everyone saying, Tracy’s OK, you know. Never happened, of course. It wasn’t that kind of life. Not those kind of people.
Coming out of the station, not long after the move, Tracy nearly jumped out of her skin when Marilyn Nettles stepped out of nowhere in front of her. There was definitely something of the night about the woman.
‘Can we have a word?’ she said. If she was looking for a story she’d come to the wrong person. ‘Maybe we can grab a coffee somewhere? I’m not looking for information,’ she added. ‘The opposite, in fact. I wanted to tell you something.’
They drank sickly, milky coffees in a steamy café. It was drizzling outside, miserable summer rain. Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Tracy wondered what it would be like to live somewhere different. Marilyn Nettles took a pack of cigarettes from her handbag and said to Tracy, ‘Do you want a cancer stick?’
‘No thanks. No – wait, go on then.
‘So?’ Tracy said, drawing on the fag. She might lose some weight if she took up smoking. She stirred the foam on her coffee round and round. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’
‘The boy,’ Marilyn Nettles said.
Tracy stopped stirring. ‘What boy?’
‘The Braithwaite boy. Michael. Do you know where he is?’
‘He’s in foster care. Unless you know something different.’
‘I do. He was sent to an orphanage. Nuns.’ Marilyn Nettles shivered. ‘I hate nuns.’
‘An orphanage?’Tracy said. She had imagined Michael Braithwaite with experienced foster parents, the solid church-going type who’d seen hundreds of distressed kids pass through their hands, people who knew how to heal and comfort. But an orphanage? The very word sounded melancholic. Abandoned.
‘His name has been changed. There’s a restraining order in place,’ Marilyn Nettles said. ‘All kind of legalese. To protect him, supposedly. I’ve been warned off. From on high.’
Tracy heard Linda Pallister’s voice in her head, No visitors. It’s a directive from above.
‘He witnessed a murder,’ Marilyn Nettles said, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘And then he disappears. Pouf ! Just like that. I would call that suspicious. I would say that perhaps someone made him disappear.’
Barry had told Tracy that Len Lomax had told him ‘in confidence’ that ‘someone’, someone who claimed to be Michael’s father, had confessed to the murder and had promptly died in custody. It wasn’t something she could tell Marilyn Nettles, she’d be all over it like a rash and before she knew it Tracy would be reading about it in the papers. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked.
Marilyn Nettles shook her head as if t
rying to dislodge an insect from her hair. ‘I’ve said too much already.’ She glanced nervously round the café. ‘I just wanted to tell someone. It’s not that I’m big on little kids but you have to feel sorry for that one. What chance does he have?’
‘Which orphanage did they send him to?’
‘Doesn’t matter, he’s been moved around.’ She got up abruptly and left a handful of coins on the table. ‘For the coffee,’ she said, as if Tracy might have thought the money was for something else.
Tracy paid for the coffee and checked her watch. She groaned inwardly, perhaps outwardly too. She had a party to go to.
Tracy’s parents were taking a leap into the unknown, attempting something that had never been attempted before in the Waterhouse household. They were throwing a party. The bungalow in Bramley was humming with tension.
Only a few years off retirement her father had been given ‘a significant promotion’ and, quite aberrantly, her parents had decided to celebrate in public. The invitation list was problematic as her parents had no friends as such, only acquaintances and neighbours and a few work colleagues of her father. Somehow or other they managed to scrape together a quorum.
The next dilemma was how to phrase the handwritten invitations in a way that would ensure that people left promptly at the end. Drinks and snacks, 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm was the wording finally decided on. ‘The guests’, her mother said, as if they were a dangerous breed of animal. Tracy was press-ganged into making an appearance. Her mother said, ‘You can invite a couple of friends if you like.’ ‘’S’all right,’ Tracy said. ‘I’ll come on my own.’
She arrived early and speared toothpicks, charged with pineapple and cubed cheese, into the pale green skull of a cabbage. When the guests arrived Tracy wandered around like a waitress with platters of vol-au-vents her mother had spent all afternoon stuffing with prawns or shredded chicken. There weren’t enough to go round and when they ran out her mother hissed, ‘Get the cheese straws from the kitchen. Hurry!’ As if she was asking for weapons reinforcements.
Dorothy Waterhouse had hoped that they would be able to hold the whole thing outside, on the newly laid concrete slabs of the patio. Tracy’s mother lived in fear that their previously orderly acquaintances would be transformed into a rowdy crowd under the influence of Tracy’s father’s rum punch, the main ingredient of which was not rum but orange squash.
To her mother’s disgust it had rained of course and everyone was crushed, elbows like chicken wings, into the newly extended (but not enough) living room. The banality of the occasion was depressing (The builders didn’t try and rip you off then? . . . In my day you stood still when a hearse passed you . . . Someone said number 21 had been sold to a Paki family.) Tracy filched a handful of cheese straws and escaped to the bathroom. Sent up a little prayer of thanks that she didn’t live here any more.
She put the toilet lid down and had a seat, munching her way through the cheese straws while she watched the rain streaming down the raindrop glass of the bathroom window. Wondered about that, raindrops on raindrop glass, seemed an excess of water in an already wet town. Heard the hollow word ‘orphanage’ in her brain. She could have given that kiddy a home. She should have taken him from that hospital bed, run away with him, given him the love he needed.
Tracy sighed and crammed the last bit of cheese straw into her mouth, brushed the flakes off her clothes and washed her hands. She had a sudden image of the cold, poky bathroom in the Lovell Park flat. There had been make-up scattered messily on a shelf. A plastic submarine lay beached in the grubby bathtub. Were Carol’s last thoughts for her son? She must have been afraid that he’d be killed as well. What chance does he have? Marilyn Nettles said.
In the kitchen her mother was unmoulding a temperamental charlotte russe. ‘Have to go out, Mum,’Tracy shouted down the hallway. She unhooked her lightweight summer mac from the hallstand and accelerated out of the house, her mother’s faint cries of protest following her down the garden path.
She traipsed through the rain, visiting every orphanage and care home in the book. None of them had heard of Michael Braithwaite, but, of course not, his name had been changed, according to Marilyn Nettles. She tried describing him, Little boy, four years old, mother murdered, but everywhere she went heads were shaken, doors were closed. Warrant card didn’t seem to help at all, positively hindered, in fact. It was ten o’clock at night when she finally got back to her own flat, soaked through to the bone. The party would be long over now, her mother would already have hoovered up every last crumb.
Linda Pallister had a Hillman Imp now, it seemed. Couldn’t drive it though because Tracy was standing in the road in front of it.
‘Tell me where he is, Linda. Tell me what he’s called.’
Linda rolled down the car window and said, ‘Go away, leave me alone or I’ll call the police.’
‘I am the police,’ Tracy said. ‘This uniform isn’t fancy-dress.’ Should have thumped her one. Should have pulled her fingernails out one by one until she told. But that was then.
Sacrifice
Saturday
The next thing he knew was best described as nothing. Jackson was in the pitch dark, he was paralysed and the air around him was as noxious as the netherworld. He had already died once in his life but it hadn’t resembled this at all. The first time round, after the train crash, it had been the classic white corridor scenario, complete with his dead sister and a sense of euphoria. He had gone, briefly, to a heaven, a heaven which had almost undoubtedly manifested itself as a result of oxygen deprivation to his brain. This time round he had apparently taken the staircase that went down the other way.
He drifted off, came to again, and realized that he wasn’t in fact paralysed but was trussed, not so much a turkey as an Egyptian mummy. His ankles were tightly bound, his hands were tied behind his back and his mouth was taped up. To begin with it was painful, then it was excruciatingly painful and then after a time the pain was replaced with a numbness which was worse, somehow. His head hurt but no more than you would expect if you had been kicked and punched in it, that is to say, a lot. He would be lucky to escape without brain damage.
Perhaps he would be lucky to escape at all. He wriggled, awkwardly, like a particularly incompetent worm, until his head butted up against a hard surface. Slowly, he manoeuvred his way round what turned out to be a disturbingly claustrophobic space, not much bigger than a coffin. An oddly shaped sarcophagus filled with something stinking.
In the course of his squirming it eventually dawned on Jackson that he was sharing air with food refuse, an aroma of chop suey and the indefatigable scent of chips and fried fish. He was entombed in some kind of large, commercial waste bin along with the collective leftovers of several fat-based local restaurants. I heard a Fly buzz – when I died. That would be because there really was a fly in here with him, buzzing irritably with the knowledge that it, too, couldn’t get out.
There was a certain relief in the realization. At least he hadn’t gone mad, nor had he gone to hell or turned into a giant worm. He had simply been knocked on the head by a couple of hulking thugs and dumped in a garbage bin.
The relief didn’t last long. He couldn’t shout for help, he couldn’t move – writhing didn’t really count – and had no way of escaping. And where was the dog, it didn’t seem to be in here with him. Was it lying hurt or maimed somewhere? Dog in jeopardy.
Then something worse happened. Much worse. The heavy engine sound of an industrial vehicle. The snarling of slow gears, hydraulic arms rising and falling, the careless clattering and comradely exchanges that all signalled the arrival of an early morning bin lorry. He struggled furiously, trying to rock the bin, but to no avail at all. He tried kicking with his bound feet but could barely make an impact. Nothing more than a low, desperate moan escaped beyond the barrier of tape across his mouth.
There were other bins parked nearby, he heard them being wheeled away towards the lorry, heard them being lifted, emptied, returned. Two of them
. His was about to be the third. He heard one binman say to another, ‘Did you see Top Gear last night?’ and the other one replying, ‘No, the wife watches Collier. I need to get Sky Plus. Collier’s crap.’
Jackson could hear them, clear as a bell. He was inches away from them but incapable of attracting their attention. He had survived the Gulf, he had survived Northern Ireland and a devastating train crash and he was going to die like trash (exactly like trash, in fact), by being crushed to death in a bin lorry.
The wheelie-bin was suddenly jolted and he found himself being bumped and rumbled along towards his nemesis. Jackson in jeopardy.
This was it then.
The end.
Jackson caught the sound of a dog barking. Not just barking, yapping furiously, the kind of noise that drove people crazy if there was no let-up to it. There was no let-up. On and on, the dog barked. Yap, yap, yap. There was something familiar about it.
‘What is it?’ he heard one of the binmen say. ‘What are you trying to tell me, eh?’
‘What’s that you say, Skippy?’ another said, in a bad Australian accent. ‘Someone’s in trouble, d’you say?’
‘Me!’ Jackson roared silently.
Someone laughed and said, ‘Skippy’s a kangaroo, not a dog. It should be Lassie.’
‘This one’s a Laddie by the looks of him.’
He was going to die while all around him people were discussing the gender of a dog?
Daylight suddenly. So sharp it dazzled him. And fresh sea air. Light and air, all a man needed when you got right down to basics. And a faithful friend who wasn’t going to let you go to the great boneyard in the sky without kicking up a hell of a fuss.
‘Leave no man behind, eh?’ Jackson said to the dog as he staggered back to Bella Vista.
Tilly made herself an early morning cup of tea. The nice weather had broken and the rain was lashing against the little window of the kitchen. The clocks said ten past five and although Tilly could no longer feel entirely certain about what that meant, she was pretty sure it was the morning because she could hear Saskia snoring behind her bedroom door. Saskia denied that she snored, she was always muttering about the noise that Tilly made, ‘Gosh, Tilly, you were like an express train in a tunnel last night,’ or (overheard saying to Padma – there, Padma, remembered her name, no problem) ‘I can’t stand it, I’m getting no sleep, you know, it’s like sharing a house with a giant hog.’ Padma saying, ‘Have you tried earplugs, Miss Bligh?’