Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Actually,’ Tracy said, ‘we’re not. Not going home just yet. Couple of errands to run.’

It took half an hour in the bank to empty her account of its savings. Kid got through a banana and an apple. Tracy had brought her passport with her, knew the drill on fraud prevention, didn’t stop the teller behaving as if she were robbing the place. Security cameras everywhere and thirty thousand in cash in her handbag. Hard not to look guilty.

After that they went to see her solicitor and Tracy gave him instructions to sell her house. Solicitors were slow-moving animals, you couldn’t get out of their offices in under two bananas. Could you overdose on bananas? She could hear her mother’s voice, ‘You’ll turn into a cheese and onion crisp if you carry on eating them like that.’ (She hadn’t.) And the bananas were small, ‘fun-sized’, according to the supermarket label. Tracy ate one in the car, wondered what people did before bananas. She didn’t understand what ‘fun-sized’ meant in the context of a banana. She’d arrested a guy once peddling kiddy porn, Fun-sized Treats one of the videos was called. Nothing innocent. Anywhere.

‘Are we going home now ?’ Courtney asked when they were back in the car. Kid was used to being moved around like a billiard ball. Kids had no power over where they went, who they went with.

‘Soon. First we’re going to see a man.’ In the rear-view mirror she caught the frown pinching Courtney’s face and added, ‘A nice man.’

Nice-ish, anyway, if her memory served her. On the surface. He was also a conman, a thief and a fixer but Tracy didn’t mention that to the kid. He lived in an impressive house in Alwoodley, bought, no doubt, with the proceeds of a life in crime, and was commendably pokerfaced when he opened his front door to find Tracy and a small pink fairy standing in front of him.

‘Superintendent,’ he said genially, ‘and a friend. What a pleasant surprise.’

‘I’m retired,’ Tracy said.

‘Me too,’ Harry Reynolds murmured. ‘Do come in.’

He was a dapper little bloke – cravat, crease in his beige twill trousers, the kind of smart slippers that could pass for shoes – and had picked up his bus pass quite some time ago, although Tracy doubted somehow that Harry Reynolds travelled on public transport, especially as there was a Bentley parked on his driveway.

He led them into a knocked-through living room – high-quality patio doors and a koi carp pond almost directly outside, as if Harry Reynolds wanted to view the expensive fish without having to leave the airlock of his house.

Inside, the walls were covered with framed school photographs of two children, a boy and a girl. Tracy recognized the uniform of a feepaying prep school with a name she never knew how to pronounce.

‘The grandkids,’ Harry Reynolds said proudly. ‘Brett’s ten, Ashley’s eight.’Tracy presumed that Brett was the boy and Ashley the girl but you could never be sure any more. The rest of the décor was hideous, big glass vases that might have been regarded as ‘art’ in the seventies, sentimental china ornaments of clowns with balloons or sad-faced children with dogs. A big brass sunburst clock adorned one wall and on another a football match was being played out on the biggest TV screen that Tracy had ever seen. Crime pays. There was a surprising smell of baking wafting through the house.

‘Don’t want to interrupt the game,’ Tracy said politely, although years in uniform policing dirty Leeds United home matches meant that she would have happily put a sledgehammer into the screen.

‘No, no,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘It’s a shit game, excuse my French, pet,’ he added in Courtney’s direction. ‘Anyway, it’s on Sky Plus, not live, I can catch up later.’ He had the kind of Yorkshire accent that Tracy thought of as ‘aspirational’. Dorothy Waterhouse’s accent.

Harry Reynolds switched the TV off and settled the pair of them on puffy sofas, as big as barges, that were upholstered in an outmoded mauve leather. It seemed an undignified end for a cow. He excused himself and went to fetch ‘refreshments’. The sun was shining hotly on the garden but the windows and doors were all closed, the whole house hermetically sealed against the outside world. Tracy felt her blouse sticking to her back. The waistband of her big pants was cutting her in half. She always swelled during the course of the day. How did that happen? she wondered.

Courtney sat silently, staring out of the window. Maybe Kelly had drugged her. Nothing new there, think of the gallons of laudanum mothers used to ply their kids with to keep them quiet. These days more kids were being slipped tranquillizers and sleeping pills than people realized. If it had been up to Tracy she would have sterilized a lot of parents. You couldn’t say that, of course, made you sound like a Nazi. Didn’t take away from the truth of it though.

Tracy’s phone rang. Für Elise . She raked it out of her bag, expecting it to be her silent caller. She frowned at the screen. ‘Barry’, it said. Fear washed through her, had he found out something about Courtney? She let it go to voicemail.

Harry Reynolds came back into the room, carrying a tea-tray. Für Elise again. Barry again. Voicemail again.

‘Problem?’

‘Nuisance call,’ Tracy said dismissively.

Für Elise yet again. For God’s sake, she thought, go away, Barry.

‘Want me to do something about it?’

Tracy wondered what ‘doing something’ would be for someone like Harry Reynolds.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s probably one of those computer-generated calls. From India or Argentina or somewhere.’

‘Bloody blacks,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘Taking over everywhere. It’s a different world these days.’ He set the tray down. Teapot, cups and saucers – nice china – orange juice and a plate of scones. Butter, a little dash of jam. He pushed the plate of scones towards Tracy. ‘Fresh batch from the oven, made them myself,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to keep yourself busy, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ Tracy said. ‘Busy, busy.’ She was going to pass on the scones but she couldn’t resist. She’d been motoring all day on nothing more than two Weetabix and half a stale doughnut. Oh yeah, and two Jaffa cakes. And a tuna roll from the picnic. A packet of salt and vinegar crisps. A handful of carrot sticks, although they hardly counted. It was surprising how it all added up. She joined Slimming World last year and had to keep a ‘food diary’. After a while she started making the diary up. Ryvita, cottage cheese, celery sticks, two apples, a banana, tuna salad at lunchtime, grilled chicken, green beans for dinner . She couldn’t own up to the crap she grazed on all day. Put on weight the first week, didn’t go back.

‘Made the raspberry jam as well,’ Harry Reynolds said. ‘There’s a pick-your-own place off the A65, just past Guiseley. Do you know it?’

‘No, don’t think I do.’ As if. Tracy had never picked anything in her life apart from scabs and daisies and the latter was more of an assumption than an actual memory. She nibbled on a scone. It was warm and buttery in her mouth and the jam was both sweet and tart at the same time. She ate the rest of it, trying not to look greedy.

‘Naughty but nice,’ Harry Reynolds laughed, biting into one of the scones.

The scones made Tracy aware of a lot of things she might have missed out on in life. Like taking a turn off the A65 to a pick-yourown-fruit place. She’d been called out to a murder there once, just south of Otley. A prostitute who’d been taken for her last ride and dumped in a ditch. She’d heard rumours that Harry Reynolds had had his fingers in that particular pie, running girls and porn in the sixties, but he didn’t seem the type to Tracy. Naughty but nice. She thought of the madam in her house in Cookridge handing out sherry and shelled nuts. That was the seventies, of course. Nothing innocent. Norah, that was her name. Norah Kendall.