Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

The dress wasn’t finished when she died, the hem still tacked with big white stitches. It hung on the back of her bedroom door, flat and limp without her body to inhabit it, as if she had suddenly been made invisible. Which she had, of course. Jackson’s brother, Francis, said, ‘Shame she didn’t finish it, she would have liked to have been buried in it.’ And then he said, ‘What t’fuck am I talking about, Jackson? Shame? What kind of a nancy word is that? Shame she’s dead, more like,’ and he threw the dress on the fire where it burned up so much more quickly than Jackson would have expected. Too quickly, certainly, for him to snatch it back from the flames.

Jackson had gone to view Niamh’s body in the undertakers. She was wearing a shroud like an old-fashioned nightdress. It came right up to her chin so you couldn’t see the marks on her neck where she’d been strangled. Nonetheless her face looked wrong, as if the corpse was pretending to be his sister and not making a very good job of it. The shroud wasn’t something she would have chosen to wear. His sister liked smart, old-fashioned clothes, high heels, soft sweaters, knee-length pencil skirts.

He had had a couple of old photographs in which she didn’t look like herself either, but not in the same way that her corpse had felt alien. He didn’t know what had happened to the photographs. Gone in the fire, he assumed. When he lived in Cambridge, after Josie left him, his house had been destroyed by an explosion. (Again, the résumé of his life more exciting than the extended version.)

Niamh would have looked much nicer buried in that green dress. Nobody would have been able to see that it wasn’t finished.

When he left home a handful of years after her death, the only thing of his sister’s that Jackson still had in his possession was a small pottery wishing well that said, ‘Wishing you Well from Scarborough’. Niamh had been on a day trip with a group of friends and had brought it back for him. Presents were all the more precious for being almost unheard of in his family. The British Museum had intact pots that had survived for thousands of years but not a shard of the wishing well remained now, the explosion having taken care of that too.

He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, knowing that sleep would be a long time returning. He wondered what the woman he slept with last night was doing at that moment. Perhaps she was out on the town again with her gaggle of friends, or, more probably, she was at home with the owner of the skateboard, fast asleep having sorted out packed lunches and school uniforms, preparing for another working day. Jackson felt a stab of guilt that he hadn’t said goodbye, but had slipped away like a fox from a henhouse. Although what difference would it have made? Really?

From the other bed came a companionable kind of canine snoring from his new partner. Let sleeping dogs lie, he thought.

His phone buzzed and he fumbled for the light by the bed.

It was a message from Hope McMaster in tomorrow’s world – OMG, where did you get that photo?! It’s me, I’m sure of it. HAVE YOU FOUND OUT SOMETHING?? WHO AM I??!!!!

Not yet , he replied, rather tersely. Sit tight, don’t get excited . He didn’t want to be responsible for Hope McMaster going into a premature labour brought on by exclamation marks. Jackson realized, rather late in the day, that perhaps he shouldn’t have drip fed information to her, allowing her anxiety room to bloom as each new mystery revealed itself. Better to have presented the whole thing at the end, tied up with a big red satin ribbon – Surprise, you are in fact a true descendant of the Romanovs! (And no, this had never happened to one of Jackson’s clients.) The way things were going, he would never be able to tell Hope McMaster who she was, only who she wasn’t.

‘… so it’s a late finish for us all and it’s going to be an early start tomorrow and most of us won’t know the difference because we’ll be working through. I just want to bring you up to speed on where we are now. If there’s some of you here who haven’t met me before, I’m DI Gemma Holroyd and I’m the SIO on this case.’

Barry lolled carelessly against the back wall of the incident room and closed his eyes. Two murders in two days. Same MO. Same-ish. He had two weeks to go before he was out of this place. He didn’t want to leave a mess behind. Clean pair of heels. Shut the door, last person in the building turn off the light. Goodbye to the Homicide and Major Enquiry Team.

‘To recap, Kelly Anne Cross, forty-one years old, was found at approximately ten p.m. this evening by a neighbour. Rough estimate from the pathologist puts time of death somewhere between seven and nine, we’ll have a more accurate time after the autopsy. There’s a bit of a queue, I’m afraid, we’re still processing the murder of Rachel Hardcastle whose body was found in a skip in Mabgate yesterday evening, a suspected arson in Hunslet, and a three-car pile-up on the inner ring road.

‘There’s no question that the lady was murdered, however. It was a vicious attack, she appears to have been punched in the head as well as having knife wounds to the chest and abdomen. No sign of any weapon on the premises. Similar but not the same MO as Rachel Hardcastle,’ she said, with unnecessary exaggeration. Barry didn’t have to open his eyes to know she was staring pointedly at him. Wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of opening them.

‘Rachel Hardcastle, the lady in the Mabgate skip, and Kelly Cross were both known prostitutes. Lots of prints at Kelly Cross’s murder scene, lots of DNA, all being processed. I’m sure the lab will have useful information for us tomorrow.

‘From the house-to-house we haven’t got much yet, not a lot in the way of CCTV in that area, car registrations haven’t turned up anything. Preliminary report back on the blood pattern…’

Barry tuned out. She was efficient, he’d give her that. Neat suit, neat hair, proper shoes, plenty of make-up, not like some of the butch lezzies you saw around. Strangely, the woman she reminded him most of was his wife. But then, all women did. Perhaps not Tracy. He’d been planning on making Gemma Holroyd SIO on the next big case anyway, even without Tracy’s prompting.

He had gone down to Kelly Cross’s squalid dump of a house, sat in the incident van, second time in twenty-four hours. Barry remembered Kelly Cross’s mother, couldn’t recall her name, something Irish. A real piece of work, but good for a quick knee-trembler up a dark alley. Those were the days. Different days, different Barry. He sometimes wondered if he had his time over again and lived his life like a saint – would it make a difference? No drinking, no smoking, no swearing, no dishonesty or immorality, no whores. He could join a public library, take Barbara out to dinner, buy her flowers. Change nappies, heat bottles and try and come home every night in time to read Amy a bedtime story. He would even try to give Barbara a hand with the housework. Then maybe, just maybe, he would clock up so many Brownie points that the universe would give him a pass and Amy wouldn’t climb into a little tin can of a two-door car with her drunken husband at the wheel and her baby in the back.

In fact, maybe it would just have been easier if he had ripped his chest open the day that his daughter was born and offered up his heart as a sacrifice on an altar somewhere. And then everything would be all right. Oh, and Carol Braithwaite. He would have to tell the truth about her as well. Just to make things right. You had to make everything right before you went.

Barry sucked in air through his mouth. Drowning in air. He was in his last days. The empire crumbling, the barbarians at the gate. Not barbarians, just shiny smart-arses with degrees in criminology.