Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Tracy?’ Crawford echoed, coming to a stop and glaring suspiciously at Jackson. Jackson supposed after a lifetime in the force you began to look at everyone suspiciously. Although he had his regrets, Jackson was glad he had got out when he had. ‘Jackson Brodie,’ he said, holding out his hand. Crawford shook it reluctantly. Jackson repeated the story about the will and long-lost cousin Tracy. He sensed he might be on shaky ground, he couldn’t know for sure that Tracy actually had any cousins, but Crawford said, ‘Oh yeah, I seem to remember her mother had a sister in Salford. They weren’t close, I seem to recollect.’

‘That’s right, Salford,’ Jackson said, relieved that he’d mined the correct seam.

DI Peters said, ‘I was saying to him, Tracy works at the Merrion Centre now,’ and it was his turn to be glared at by Crawford.

‘What?’ Peters shrugged. ‘It’s not a state secret.’

‘Yes, well,’ Crawford said to Jackson, all bluff and bluster, ‘don’t go bothering her at work. And I’m not giving you a home address so don’t even ask. She’s going on holiday, in fact she might already have gone. I’ll give her a ring and tell her you were asking for her.’

‘Well, thanks,’ Jackson said. ‘Tell her I’m staying at the Best Western. Hang on, I’ll give you my card.’ He handed over one of his Jackson Brodie – Private Investigator cards to Crawford, who thrust it carelessly into his pocket and said, ‘Unlike you, I’m a proper detective so if you don’t mind you can bugger off, pleasure to meet you, et cetera.’

Charmed I’m sure, Jackson thought. What an old curmudgeon. As Julia would have said. An old curmudgeon who had been around for a long time. Jackson wondered if there was a way of introducing Carol Braithwaite’s name without it seeming odd. He decided there wasn’t but went for it anyway.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he said casually. Crawford was already halfway along the corridor. He stopped and turned, hackles raised. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What?’

‘I just wondered – does the name Carol Braithwaite ring any bells with you?’

Crawford stared at him. ‘Who?’

‘Carol Braithwaite,’ Jackson repeated.

‘Never heard of her.’

The dog looked uneasy, when Jackson collected it outside Millgarth. It was very small in the grand order of things and must, he supposed, feel vulnerable most of the time. ‘Sorry about that,’ Jackson said. They were turning into Wallace and Gromit, he could feel it. Soon he’d be calling the dog ‘lad’ and sharing cheese and crackers with it. There were worse things, he supposed.

‘I’m looking for Tracy Waterhouse,’ Jackson said to the man, more youth than man, who eventually appeared from behind a nondescript grey door in the Merrion Centre. Ravaged by acne, if you knew Braille you could probably have read his face, he had a name badge that announced him to be Grant Leyburn. He looked like he was swimming in a very small gene pool. Jackson felt a twitch of disappointment that the pleasant Canadian girl wasn’t available.

‘Tracy Waterhouse. Is she here?’ Jackson asked.

‘No,’ Grant Leyburn said sullenly. ‘She isn’t.’

‘Do you know where I might find her?’ Jackson persisted.

‘She’s on holiday from tomorrow. Not back for a week.’

‘What about today?’

‘Sick.’

‘You can’t give me a phone number, I don’t suppose?’ Jackson said. ‘Or any other contact details?’ he added hopefully.

Grant raised an overgrown eyebrow and said, ‘What do you think?’

‘I’m guessing no?’

‘Got it in one.’

Jackson fished out a card and handed it over. ‘Maybe you could give this to her when she’s back?’

‘A private detective?’ he said with a sneer. ‘Another one. She’s very popular.’

‘Another one?’ Jackson puzzled.

‘Yeah, someone here earlier.’ He glanced up suddenly at a big round security camera suspended from a ceiling. It looked like a small spaceship. He frowned and said, ‘Someone’s always watching.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Jackson said.

He placed the photograph of the girl with the cock-eyed bunches on a chair near the bedroom window where the best light was. He took a photograph of it with his phone. It had a slight ghostly aura, the photograph of a photograph, twice removed from life. Virtual reality.

He flicked through the photographs on his phone’s camera roll until he came across the one taken on Hope McMaster’s arrival in New Zealand. If not the same child as the one shivering on a British beach then an identical twin. In both photographs the little girl was grinning from ear to ear, already a child with exclamation marks in her brain. If it was a photo of Hope McMaster then it confirmed one thing, she had not appeared fully formed out of nowhere. She had a past. She had once stood, shivering and grinning, on a windswept beach and someone had taken a photo of her. Who?

It would be the middle of the night in the topsy-turvy world that Hope McMaster inhabited. Do you think this is you? he wrote and then thought that sounded prejudicial and erased the sentence and retyped, Do you recognize the girl in this photograph? She would wake up in her tomorrow to either surprise or disappointment.

Jackson googled ‘Carol Braithwaite’ on his phone and came up with nothing. Any combination of Carol Braithwaite/murder/ Leeds/1975, plus any other word he could throw in the mix, came up with nothing. Carol Braithwaite was an adult in 1975 so she couldn’t be Hope McMaster, but she could be Hope’s mother. He had found no mention in the newspaper report of any children but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Was the girl in the photograph Carol Braithwaite’s daughter? Linda Pallister dealt with children nobody wanted, had she dealt with Carol Braithwaite’s? Finessed an under-the-counter adoption? An act of goodwill perhaps, giving a small child a good home and saving it from festering in the system.

The only record he could find online of any girl being abducted in 1975 was the Black Panther’s victim Lesley Whittle. The kidnapping of a small girl would have been news headlines and if she was never found it would reverberate through the media for years. In his time Jackson had looked for plenty of children who were missing, he had never looked for a child who wasn’t missing. Even the most careless parent was unlikely to lose a child and not mention it, unless they had intended to misplace it, of course.

It was more likely that Hope McMaster had been unwanted and simply been given away. That would explain why there was no record. When Jackson was a child a lot of unofficial ‘adoptions’ took place, leaving no paper trail behind them. Illegitimate kids taken in by their grandparents, growing up thinking their mother was their sister. Barren sisters taking in a surplus nephew or niece, raising them as a prized only child. Jackson’s own mother had an elder brother she had never met. He had been given away to a childless aunt and uncle in Dublin before Jackson’s mother was born and he was ‘spoilt’, according to Jackson’s jealous mother. ‘Spoilt’, in his mother’s vocabulary, meant that he had an education, went to Trinity College, became a barrister, married well and died in bourgeois comfort many years later.

Linda Pallister was the key, all he had to do was talk to her, something she seemed to be going out of her way to avoid.

Neither Tracy Waterhouse nor Linda Pallister were in the phone book but that was no surprise. Police and social workers kept a low profile in public otherwise every nutter and ex-con would be hammering on their door at midnight. Jackson went on to 192.com, friend of snoops and investigators who had no access to official records.