Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

His philosophy where fighting was concerned was to keep clear of anything fancy. One good, well-placed blow was usually enough to lay a man down. The punch was driven by a flash of black anger. There were days when he knew who he was. He was his father’s son.

Right enough, Colin’s legs went from beneath him and he dropped to the ground, making a face like a suffocating fish. Strange squeaking and squealing noises came from his lungs as he fought for breath.

He squatted down next to Colin and said, ‘Do that to anyone or anything again – man, woman, child, dog, even a fucking tree – and you’re dead. And you’ll never know whether or not I’m watching you. Understand?’ The man nodded in acknowledgement even though he still hadn’t managed to take a breath, looked in fact like he might never take another one. Bullies were always cowards at heart. His phone had clattered to the pavement and he could hear a woman’s voice saying, ‘Colin? Col – are you still there?’

He stood up and stepped on the phone and ground it into the pavement. Unnecessary and ridiculous but somehow satisfying.

The dog was still cowering in the boot. He could hardly leave it there so he picked it up and was surprised to find that it was warm even though it was shivering all over as if it was frozen. He cradled it against his chest and stroked its head in an effort to reassure it that he wasn’t another big man about to beat it up.

He walked away, the dog still in his arms, glancing back once to make sure that Colin was still alive. It wouldn’t have bothered him too much if he was dead but he didn’t want to find himself on a murder charge.

He could feel the dog’s frightened little heartbeat, a pulse, against his chest. Tic-tic-tic . ‘It’s OK,’ he said, using the tone of voice he had used to soothe his own daughter when she was small. ‘Everything’s OK now.’ It was a long time since he had spoken to a dog. He tried to loosen the rope around the dog’s neck but the knot was too tight. He turned round the tag on the dog’s collar so that he could read it. ‘Let’s see if you’ve got a name,’ he said.

‘The Ambassador?’ Jackson said, looking doubtfully at the small dog. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

He was drifting, a tourist in his own country, not so much a holiday as an exploration. A holiday was lying on a warm beach in a peaceful country with a woman by your side. Jackson had tended to take his women wherever he found them. He didn’t usually go looking.

He had been living in London for the last couple of years, taking over the rent on the little Covent Garden flat in which he had briefly shared a counterfeit marital bliss with his fake wife, Tessa. A man called Andrew Decker had killed himself (somewhat messily) in the living room of the flat and Jackson was surprised how little this bothered him. A specialist trauma-scene cleaning company had come in (now there was a profession you wouldn’t want) and by the time Jackson had changed the carpet and disposed of the chair that Andrew Decker had shot himself in you would never have known that anything untoward had happened. It had been a righteous death and Jackson supposed that made a difference.

Jackson ’s official identity was all in the past – army, police, gumshoe. He had been ‘retired’ for a while but that had made him feel as if he was redundant to the world’s needs. Now he called himself ‘semi-retired’ because it was a term that covered a lot of bases, not all of them strictly legal. He was off the grid a lot these days, picking up work here and there. His specialist subject on Mastermind would be looking for people. Not necessarily finding them, but half the equation was better than none. ‘Really you’re looking for your sister,’ Julia said. ‘Your own dear grail. You’re never going to find her, Jackson. She’s gone. She’s never coming back.’

‘I know that.’ Didn’t make any difference, he would go on looking for all the lost girls, the Olivias, the Joannas, the Lauras. And his sister, Niamh, the first lost girl (the last lost girl). Even though he knew exactly where Niamh was, thirty miles away from where he was at the moment, mouldering in cold, damp clay.

Lowering his expectations of cars, Jackson had been pleasantly surprised by the third-hand Saab he bought in a dodgy auction in Ilford. There were a few unhelpful clues to the Saab’s previous ownership – a light-up Virgin Mary on the dashboard, a creased postcard from Cheltenham ( Looking good here, all the best, N .) and an Everton mint, covered in fluff, in the glove compartment. The only thing Jackson did to improve the Saab was to fit a CD player. He discovered it was easy to live on the road. He had his phone and his car and his music – what more did a man need?

Before Tessa, Jackson had enjoyed expensive cars. The money his second wife stole from him had been an unlooked-for legacy – two million pounds left to him by a batty old woman who had been his client. It had seemed an immense sum at the time, diminished now in comparison to the trillions lost by the masters of the universe, although two million would still probably buy you Iceland.

‘Well,’ his first wife, Josie, said, ‘as usual, you were the architect of your own downfall.’ He hadn’t exactly been left destitute. The proceeds of the sale of his house in France hit his bank account the day after Tessa emptied it. ‘ Jackson lives to ride another day,’ Julia said.

Of course, he had never really felt entitled to the money and Tessa’s theft of it felt more like a turn in the wheel of fortune than outright robbery. Not a proper wife but a trickster, a grifter. Tessa wasn’t her real name, of course. She had taken him for the longest of cons – seduced, courted, married and robbed him blind. It seemed the perfect irony that the policeman had married the criminal. He imagined her lying on a beach somewhere in the Indian Ocean, a cocktail in hand, the classic movie ending for a heist. (‘Well, women were deceivers ever, Jackson,’ Julia said, as if she were complimenting her sex rather than condemning it.) Finding people was his forte, ironic therefore that his errant wife had so far completely eluded him. He had followed clues, a trail of breadcrumbs that so far had taken him everywhere and led him nowhere. He was good but Tessa was oh-so-much better. He almost admired her for it. Almost.

He was still looking for her, his search unfurling across the country, tracking her like a lazy hunter following spoor. It wasn’t so much that he wanted his money back – a lot of it was in shares that had fallen into the financial basement – he just didn’t like being taken for a fool. (‘Why not, when you are one?’ Josie said.)

In the company of the Saab, he had been to Bath, Bristol, Brighton, the Devon coast, down to the toe of Cornwall, up to the Peak District, the Lakes. He had avoided Scotland, the savage country where both his heart and his life had been in danger twice now. (The best of times, the worst of times.) Third time even unluckier, he suspected. But he had ventured into Wales which he was surprised to like, before driving through the suffocating rural peace of Herefordshire, Wiltshire, Shropshire, the fatlands of Gloucestershire, the post-industrial blight of the Midlands. He had zigzagged across the Pennines to take in the bleak victims of Thatcherism. The coal gone, the steel gone, the ships gone. Like most countries, he discovered, the puzzling jigsaw that was his native land seemed to be at odds with itself. A disunited kingdom.

Since disengaging from the rat race Jackson had found himself increasingly drawn to the less direct ways. He had become a dawdler on the back roads, following the thread veins on the map. A traveller on the scenic route, idly put-putting around the green and leafy byways, searching for the lost pastoral England that was lodged in his head and his heart. A golden, pre-industrial age. Unfortunately that Arcadian past was no more than a dream.