Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

Tracy sighed. ‘No, I’ll be off. My mum’s making her lamb hotpot.’

At least he had learned his lesson, he was not going to be the foolish prey of boredom tonight. Instead he ordered something innocuous sounding on room service, no alcohol to accompany it, and when the food arrived he stretched out on the bed with his plate and picked up the remote.

Collier . Of course. Jackson sighed. Just when you thought it was safe to switch on the TV.

Collier was a rugged but occasionally sensitive detective inspector who worked in both a gritty northern town (‘Bradthorpe’) and a green farming dale (‘Hardale’). He frequently kicked against the traces of authority in the search for the truth and was invariably vindicated at the end. He was a maverick but (as someone said at least once in the course of every programme) ‘a brilliant detective’. He was unreliable towards women but they were, nonetheless, continually charmed by him. In his own experience, Jackson had found the exact opposite to be true, the more unreliable he was (usually from no fault of his own, he would just like to point out) the less impressed women were with him.

Julia, of all people, Julia, who had ‘given up acting to concentrate on being a mother and a wife’ (a declaration that no one, particularly not Jackson, believed), had recently been cast in Collier . Jackson had presumed she would be a corpse, or, at best, a bit-part barmaid, but it turned out that she was playing a forensic pathologist. (‘ A forensic pathologist? ’ He had been unable to disguise the disbelief in his voice.

‘Yes, Jackson,’ she said, with exaggerated forbearance. ‘I don’t actually have to have a medical degree or conduct post-mortems. It’s called acting .’

‘Even so…’ Jackson murmured.)

DS Charlie Lambert, an actress called Saskia Bligh, was Vince Collier’s glamorous (tough but fair, sexy but professional) sidekick. She argued, bullied, cajoled, sprinted and karate-kicked her way through the episode. She was a thin blonde with big, slightly weepy eyes and cheekbones that you could have hung washing on (as his mother would have said). Not Jackson’s type. (He had a type? What? The woman from last night? Surely not.) Saskia Bligh looked as if she bruised easily. Jackson liked his women to be robust.

Collier and Lambert. There were just the two of them, Morse and Lewis, Holmes and Watson, a double-handed duo that could solve every murder in the district with only a smidgeon of background help from semi-anonymous techies and uniforms. Jackson would like to see the pair of them work a case in the real world. Julia, in the shape of her character, existed to provide ‘a foil for their relationship’. ‘It’s not about crime, you have to understand,’ Julia said. ‘It’s about them as people .’

‘They’re not real,’ Jackson pointed out.

‘I know that. Art renders reality.’

‘Art?’ Jackson repeated incredulously. ‘You call Collier “art”? I thought rendering was what you did to dripping.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Julia was replacing a previous pathologist, a man. The actor playing him had been caught with child pornography on his computer and had been quietly transformed into a nonce in a prison somewhere. Ironic justice, a form of jurisprudence that Jackson felt a particular fondness for. Cosmic justice was all well and good but generally its wheels took longer to grind.

Vince Collier had recently acquired a mother from nowhere (caring but nagging, sensible but anxious). One of those old actresses who had been around for ever. (‘To humanize him,’ Julia explained.) Jackson didn’t think having a mother ‘humanized’ (whatever that meant) anyone. Everyone had a mother – murderers, rapists, Hitler, Pol Pot, Margaret Thatcher. (‘Well, fiction’s stranger than truth,’ Julia said.)

The face of Vince Collier’s mother was familiar. Jackson tried to remember why but the tiny people who resentfully ran his memory these days (fetching and carrying folders, checking the contents against index cards, filing them away in boxes that were then placed on endless rows of grey metal Dexion shelving never to be found again) had, in an all too frequent occurrence, mislaid that particular piece of information. This sketchy blueprint for the neurological workings of his brain had been laid down in Jackson’s childhood by the Numskulls in his Beezer comic and he had never really developed a more sophisticated model.

Jackson supposed that other people’s small brain-dwelling inhabitants ran their operations rather like air-traffic controllers, always aware of the location of everything they were responsible for, never sloping off for tea breaks or loitering in the shadowy recesses of rarely accessed shelves, where they smoked fly cigarettes and kvetched about their poor working conditions. One day they would simply lay down tools and walk off, of course.

Vince Collier’s mother had apparently been misfiled somewhere on the endless Dexion.

Ten-take Tilly , Julia had called her. Jackson had visited her on set, dropped in unexpectedly when he realized he was driving past the place where they filmed Collier . ‘Poor old thing, her memory’s shot to pieces,’ Julia said. ‘They should have realized that before they took her on. She’s going to be killed off soon.’

‘Killed off?’ Jackson said.

‘In the programme.’

They were drinking coffee, sitting in what seemed to be a cowshed, a chilly adjunct to the catering truck, where trestle tables were set up.

‘It’s not a cowshed, it’s a barn,’ Julia said.

‘Is it real or part of the set?’

‘Everything is real,’ Julia said. ‘On the other hand, of course, you could argue that nothing is real.’

Jackson banged his head on the wooden table. But not in a real way.

Julia was dressed for her part, in blue scrubs, her hair strained into a bun. ‘You’ve always been attracted to women in uniform,’ she said.

‘Maybe, but I’ve never had a thing for people who cut up corpses.’

‘Never say never,’ Julia said.

Jackson wondered where their son was. Neither of them had mentioned him. ‘Is Jonathan looking after Nathan?’ he asked eventually and Julia shrugged in a non-committal way.

‘He either is or he isn’t. And don’t tell me that he could be doing both at the same time. We’re not talking parallel universes here.’

She sighed heavily and said, ‘Isn’t. I’ve got a nanny, a local girl. And it’s a bit late to worry about the welfare of your son.’

‘Well, I haven’t worried earlier because you told me he wasn’t my son,’ Jackson said reasonably.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an autopsy at three o’clock.’

It came to him suddenly. ‘Well I never,’ Jackson said to the dog. The dog looked at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence. Vince Collier’s mother was none other than the confused old woman in the Merrion Centre. ‘I knew I’d seen her before. It was the wig that threw me.’

He watched Collier to the bitter end. Julia appeared twice (‘Dr Beatrice Butler’, maternal but savvy, sexy but intellectual – a sketchy version of Julia’s own complexity). The first time she was on screen she was attending a murder scene where she estimated the time of death of a mutilated prostitute and then a short time later she was in the mortuary, where she was pretending to cut open the body of the victim. Jackson preferred nature programmes, even at their most bloodthirsty they were preferable to this crap. ‘It’s very popular,’ Julia said. ‘Great viewing figures.’