Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Keep an eye out for a grey car,’ she said to Courtney. Did kids her age know all the colours? Could the kid sing the whole rainbow?

‘Do you know what colour grey is?’

‘It’s the colour of the sky,’ Courtney offered.

Tracy sighed. Therapist would have a field day with this kid.

They ate supper in the local Chinese. The kid peered closely at the menu and Tracy said, ‘Can you read, Courtney?’

‘No.’ Courtney shook her head and continued to examine the menu.

She proceeded to dig her way through a plate of Singapore noodles. ‘I think there’s a fat kid inside you trying to get out,’ Tracy said. Courtney paused between mouthfuls and stared at Tracy. A few stray noodles hung out of her mouth, like a walrus’s moustache. ‘Not literally,’Tracy said. She sighed and dished out more steamed jasmine rice. ‘My fat kid escaped a long time ago.’

When they finished, not before Courtney had packed a plate of banana fritters with ice cream into her hollow legs, Tracy paid the bill with two twenties peeled off her roll of thirty thousand but raking in vain through her purse for some change, said to Courtney, ‘I haven’t got enough for a tip.’

Courtney stared at her, doing her imitation of a sphinx, and then delved into the depths of her pink backpack and retrieved the purse with the monkey’s face on it and took out four one-pence pieces that she placed carefully on the saucer, muttering, ‘One, two, three, four,’ under her breath.

‘How high can you count, Courtney?’

‘A million,’ Courtney said promptly.

‘Really?’

Courtney held up her left hand and slowly counted off four fingers and a thumb, ‘One-two-three-four-a million.’

‘That’s it?’

Courtney stared steadfastly at her. Tracy could see a noodle lodged between her front teeth. Eventually she held up the index finger on her right hand and said, ‘A million and one.’ She hadn’t finished with her generous tip. She was peering in the backpack, finally coming up with the nutmeg, which she placed with the coins. The waiter removed the saucer with waiter-like inscrutability and like a magician produced a fortune cookie and handed it ceremoniously to Courtney. She placed it carefully in her backpack without cracking it open.

‘Let’s go home,’ Tracy said.

Before they got anywhere near the house in Headingley, Tracy’s phone rang. Her heart sank the moment she heard the strident rant at the other end. Kelly Cross wanting a pound of flesh that Tracy didn’t even realize she was owing. She could take it. She could take whatever she wanted. Sometimes you just had to step up. Sleep, eat, protect. Especially the protect bit.

1975: 9 April

The stench inside was unbelievable. Decomposition. Tracy wouldn’t be able to get it out of her nostrils for days. It was on her skin, her uniform, her hair. Years later she just had to think about the flat in Lovell Park and she could smell it. Kiddy was just standing there in the hallway when they broke in. Filthy, nothing but skin and bone, looked like a famine victim.

Still knackered from climbing fifteen flights and putting in an unexpectedly resistant door, Ken Arkwright moved his beefy body with surprising speed along the hallway and snatched the kiddy up, passed the emaciated little thing to Tracy and started searching in the other rooms.

Tracy held the weightless little body and stroked the dirty hair and murmured, ‘Everything’s all right now.’ Couldn’t think what else to say, what else to do.

Arkwright reappeared and said, ‘No more kiddies, but…’ With an inclination of his head he indicated a door he had opened further up the hallway.

‘What?’ Tracy said.

‘In the bedroom.’

‘What?’

Arkwright dropped his voice to a whisper and said, ‘The mum.’

‘Shit. How long?’

‘Couple of weeks by the look of it,’ Arkwright said. Tracy felt her stomach heave. Told herself to hold on, to think about Dad’s roses, Mum’s Izal, anything that didn’t smell of rotting flesh.

She carried the kiddy through to the living room, glanced in the bedroom as she passed, shielding the kiddy’s eyes, even though they were already closed. She had a glimpse of something on the floor, couldn’t make out what it was but she knew it was bad.

Detective Constable Ray Strickland and Detective Sergeant Len Lomax, first officers from CID on the scene in Lovell Park. They certainly took their time. Tracy looked out of the living-room window, all those dizzying flights down, and saw them finally arriving in a flurry of macho brakes but instead of rushing into the building they got out of the car and stood next to it, deep in conversation – or argument, it was hard to say from this height. There was something conspiratorial in their stance.

‘What the fuck are they doing?’ Arkwright said and Tracy replied, ‘Dunno. Where’s the ambulance? Why is it taking so long?’ What if the kiddy pegged out now? It was a miracle that the kiddy had managed to stay alive all this time – must have grubbed around in cupboards for food. ‘Don’t die, please,’ Tracy murmured, more prayer than request.

Tracy and Arkwright had walked all over the place. The contamination of evidence must have been phenomenal. You didn’t think so much about that then. Now they would have scarpered the second they saw the body, not gone back in until the SOCOs had combed every inch.

Tracy watched as a bicycle rolled up. A girl dismounted and the two detectives pulled apart from each other. The girl was wearing a long smock that looked like a nightdress and her two curtains of hair hung limply on either side of her pale face. Arkwright said, ‘Ey up, the hippies are here.’

‘But where’s the fucking ambulance?’Tracy said. Before she joined the police she had never said so much as ‘damn’, now she cursed like the best of them. She watched as the girl said something to Lomax and Strickland, all three of them wheeled round and came into the building.

‘Listen,’ Arkwright said, cocking his head to one side. ‘That ruddy lift’s working now, would you believe it? It’s like the universe has got one rule for them and one rule for us peasants.’

When Lomax and Strickland arrived at Carol Braithwaite’s door, the besmocked girl was trailing on their heels. ‘Linda Pallister,’ she said with a curt nod in the direction of Ken Arkwright, Tracy invisible apparently. ‘I’m the social worker on call.’With her scrubbed face and robust cyclist’s calves, she looked more like a fifth-former than a grown woman with a job.

‘We don’t need a fucking social worker, we need a fucking ambulance,’ Tracy hissed at her. Strickland suddenly ran out of the room and they all listened to the sound of him throwing up in the bathroom.

‘Sensitive lad, our Ray,’ Len Lomax said.

‘No sign of the pathologist,’ Len Lomax said, ‘but the ambulance is here.’

‘Right,’ Linda Pallister said, when the ambulance men arrived at the door of the flat. She took the kiddy off Tracy, Tracy holding on just a second longer than necessary. ‘It’s OK, I know what I’m doing,’ Linda Pallister said and Tracy nodded mutely, suddenly afraid that she might cry.

When they’d gone, Tracy said to Len Lomax, ‘I asked the kiddy who did it, who did this to Mummy.’

‘And?’

‘Said “Daddy”.’

Lomax laughed, a brutal sound in the dead quiet. ‘It’s a wise child that knows its own father. And as for that bint,’ he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the bedroom where the woman’s decaying body was still lying, ‘I’d bet a hundred to one that she couldn’t name the father.’ He took out his notebook with a strangely theatrical flourish and looked around as if he was going to conjure clues out of the walls.