Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Anything concrete to link the two murders?’ he’d asked the Holroyd girl.

‘Both women. Both dead, boss,’ she said. She obviously didn’t like him but then not many people did.

‘Do we know if there’s anything to connect your victim to the Mabgate whore?’ he asked. ‘Did they know each other?’

‘“The Mabgate whore”,’ she said. ‘Sounds like a character in a revenge tragedy.’

Barry knew bugger all about revenge tragedy. Never wanted to, thank you. He knew a lot about tragedy though. And revenge was coming, he could smell it on the wind. Carol Braithwaite ascending, a cloud of bone and ash, looking for justice. Risen from the grave ,Tracy said.

‘Someone is asking questions,’ Linda Pallister had said on the phone. ‘What should I do?’

‘I’d keep my mouth shut if I were you,’ Barry said. Keep your mouth shut . That wasn’t the right answer, was it? Spill the beans, tell the truth. Silence for thirty-five years and now her name was on everyone’s lips.

‘… did she usually take punters back to her house?’ Gavin Archer asked. ‘Didn’t she work the streets?’ Archer was a DC. Lean and bespectacled, he came into work on a racing bike in the full Lycra scrotum-squeezing clobber, although he never raced, just commuted from the boxy, thin-walled house in Moortown that he shared with his pregnant wife. Another clever bugger.

‘We’re intending to…’

There’d been a lot of blood. Even watching the video in the incident van outside Barry could see that. Gemma whatshername had got everyone off the mark quickly. Inside the house there had been a photographer, two SOCOs, two forensic scientists, pathologist was ten minutes away. Two family liaison officers, looking for life antecedents. Good luck with that. Everyone in the house zipped and booted in bunny suits. All for a dead prostitute.

On the video screen Barry had watched the biologist tracing a blood pattern. When he first started in the police they used to wander all over crime scenes like they were out for a walk in the park.

‘Someone didn’t like her,’ Gemma said, standing next to him in the incident van.

‘That usually is at the root of murder,’ Barry said.

‘… so anyway if we can all be back here at seven a.m. sharp tomorrow for the briefing. Thanks, everyone.’

The incident room emptied, a stream of tired but eager people flowing past him. Barry felt ill, a heart attack walking. Needed a drink. He’d been needing a drink all day. All week. The last two years. The anniversary. You would think it would get better with time but it just got worse. Sam was still in his pushchair when he was killed, now he’d be toddling around, maybe having a stumbling game of kickabout with Barry. And his daughter, in limbo, because none of them could bear to talk about turning off the life support.

He should be coasting towards the end, clearing up paperwork, handing over to his successor, attending a valedictory bash or two. Had something been arranged? No sign of anything. Tracy had joked that there wasn’t one but it was unlikely. A surprise party perhaps. He couldn’t think of anything worse. Tracy’s farewell piss-up had already acquired legendary status. Everyone liked Tracy, although a lot of them had liked to pretend that they didn’t.

‘Detective Superintendent Crawford. Did you want something?’

‘Sorry, DI Hardcastle, I fell asleep there. Bedtime story too long, I guess.’

‘It’s Holroyd actually, boss, Gemma Holroyd. Rachel Hardcastle is the woman who was murdered on Wednesday night. The Mabgate whore,’ she added sarcastically for his benefit.

His phone rang. Strickland. No surprise there then. Carol Braithwaite in her rising pulling them all out of their hidey-holes.

‘Barry? How’s things?’ Ray Strickland said.

‘Things are things,’ Barry said.

‘Just phoning to see if you were coming to the golf club dinner dance tomorrow night.’

‘Golf club dinner-dance,’ Barry repeated, trying to make sense of the words. A vague memory of some fifty-quid-a-head fundraiser that he’d been press-ganged into buying a ticket for. Strickland, Lomax, they never stopped, Len Lomax the worst. They couldn’t hack being retired, losing their power, so they spent their time on charity boards, fundraising committees, magistrates’ panels, keeping their names alive in the press and the community. They weren’t doing good works, they were just denying their impotence. The nearest Barry intended to come to charity when he retired was buying a Remembrance poppy.

‘Yes,’ Strickland said patiently, ‘dinner-dance. Are you coming?’

He couldn’t sleep. Barbara, next to him in sponge rollers and greasy face, was snoring. He thought about taking some of her sleeping pills. Maybe all of them. Taking the easy way out rather than the hard way. He’d just managed to fall into an unsatisfactory doze when the phone rang. Barbara made a noise in her sleep, the low moan of a wounded animal. Bedside clock said five thirty. Wasn’t going to be good news, was it?

‘Another murder, boss,’ Gemma Holroyd said.

‘This one a working girl as well? And don’t tell me you’re all working girls.’

‘Are we? We don’t have a positive ID yet. She was found in the doorway of the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley. Head wounds, stabbed.’

‘Well, you know what they say. One’s unfortunate, two’s a coincidence, three’s a serial killer.’

‘I don’t think we should jump to conclusions, boss.’

‘Faster you jump to conclusions sooner you get to the end.’

‘Anyway if they are related sounds more like a spree.’

‘All just words, killing’s killing.’

He put the phone down and lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Leeds and dead prostitutes. Don’t use the ‘R’ word. He turned to Barbara and patted her back. ‘Want a cup of tea, love?’

He could do without a trio of dead women on his plate. If there were no women, men wouldn’t kill them. That would be one solution to the problem.

Carol Braithwaite. Wondered where that kiddy was. Locked in that flat for weeks with the mother’s body. Barry couldn’t remember his name. Tracy had banged on about him for months. Michael. That was it. Michael Braithwaite.

1975: 10 April

The next day on the kiddies’ ward. Uncomfortable place to be. Tracy touched the little hand, slack in sleep, with the back of hers. ‘Michael,’ she said softly.

Tracy had considered taking him a teddy bear but thought that perhaps he was too old for a soft toy. When they broke into the Lovell Park flat he had been clutching a blue-and-white police car as if his life depended on it, so she bought him a fire engine instead. Tucked it in beside him. He was hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked but he looked peaceful in repose. They reckoned he’d been in the flat with his mother’s body for nearly three weeks. He had been unable to unlock the front door. No one had seen him standing on a chair at the fifteenth-floor window, waving to attract attention. He had lived off what food there was in the house – Carol Braithwaite had been to the supermarket that afternoon, there were unpacked shopping bags in the kitchen. After that, he’d pulled packets of dry food from cupboards, drunk water from the tap. It was freezing in the flat. He’d fed the meter with coins from his mother’s purse until the coins ran out.

He’d pulled a blanket over his mother to keep her warm. Tracy supposed that at first he must have slept next to her. By the time they broke in he was sleeping in a den he had made from a nest of cushions and blankets in the living room. ‘Tough little bugger,’ Lomax said. Perhaps he was a boy used to fending for himself. All this reported to her third-hand by Arkwright.