Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

Linda Pallister appeared suddenly at the opposite side of the hospital bed as if she’d been lurking nearby. ‘You again,’ she said to Tracy by way of greeting.

‘Want to get a cuppa?’ Tracy said. ‘In the canteen? Human being to human being?’

They drank weak, stewed tea. Tracy had picked up a large Kit Kat while Linda chose a sour-looking apple. Tea and apples didn’t go together, everyone knew that.

‘What’s going to happen to that poor kiddy now?’ Tracy asked, snapping her Kit Kat into four fingers and already lamenting their finish before she’d even begun eating them.

‘He’ll be discharged, eventually, and go to a foster home,’ Linda said, biting into her green apple. ‘There aren’t any relatives.’ Big horsey teeth, would have made a good herbivore.

‘What about his father?’ Tracy asked and Linda Pallister raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Isn’t one.’

‘Can I talk to someone about the kiddy?’ Tracy asked.

‘You are talking to someone,’ Linda said. ‘You’re talking to me.’

‘You know he witnessed his mother’s murder, don’t you?’ Chomp-chomp-chomp , mechanically eating her apple. ‘He told me his father killed his mother,’ Tracy persisted. ‘CID just dismissed it.’

‘He’s four years old,’ Linda said. ‘He doesn’t know what’s real and what’s a fairy tale. Kids lie, it’s just what they do.’ There was a pause while her – rather piggy – little eyes seemed to assess Tracy. ‘A man he thinks of as his father,’ she added, tapping a folder in front of her on the table. ‘Carol didn’t know who his father was.’

The manila folder had a label in one corner, the name ‘Carol Braithwaite’ typed on it.

‘She was already a client?’ Tracy asked, touching the folder. Linda slammed her hand down on it as if Tracy was about to prise it open with her eyes.

‘Miss Braithwaite was known to Social Services,’ she said primly.

‘What for?’

‘I can’t talk about individual clients.’ She stood up abruptly, clamping the manila folder to her chest.

‘You knew the kid was at risk?’ Tracy said, standing up as well, aware of how much taller than Linda Pallister she was. ‘Maybe if you’d visited you would have found Michael a bit sooner. Before he spent three weeks locked in a flat with his mother’s corpse.’

Tracy had a sudden flashback to Linda Pallister taking the boy off her in the flat to give to the ambulance men. She held him high on one hip so that he was facing over her shoulder and his eyes locked on to Tracy’s as he was being carried away. Tracy felt as if he had reached in and scooped something out of her soul. She shuddered at the memory.

‘I have a very heavy caseload,’ Linda Pallister said defensively. ‘Every case is assessed on its individual merits. And now, if you don’t mind, I have to go.’

‘Look,’Tracy said, taking out a Biro, ‘let me write down my phone number.’ She prised the folder from Linda Pallister’s grip and said, ‘Not going to look inside, honestly.’ She wrote ‘WPC Tracy Waterhouse’ on Carol Braithwaite’s file and her home phone number.

‘This is my phone number,’ Tracy said. ‘If you ring, my mum will probably answer, but just talk her down. OK?’ She added the date to make it seem more official. ‘Just, you know, to keep in touch.’

‘Keep in touch?’

‘About the kiddy. About Michael.’

‘I have to go,’ Linda said, snatching the manila folder back, her face as sour as her apple core.

‘Yeah, I know, heavy caseload,’ Tracy said.

After Linda left, Tracy returned to the children’s ward. Michael was still asleep but she sat by his bed and watched him until a doctor came round, a simpering, silent nurse by his side. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked, seeing Tracy’s uniform – she was due on shift in half an hour.

‘No, I just wondered how he was.’

‘You’re one of the people who found him?’ Tracy didn’t think of herself and Arkwright as people, she thought of them as police.

‘Yes,’ Tracy said. ‘Me and my partner.’

The nurse took the boy’s pulse, cast a dismissive glance in Tracy’s direction. Wrote something on the boy’s chart. ‘Thank you, Margaret,’ the doctor said. Well, that was a first, Tracy thought, a doctor thanking a nurse. First-name terms, a medical romance perhaps. Tracy’s mother, on the afternoons that she didn’t go to her bridge club, put her feet up on the sofa and read Mills and Boon novels.

‘Ian Winfield,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m the consultant paediatrician on the ward.’ Tracy thought he was going to shake her hand and have a chat about Michael’s condition but instead he said, ‘The boy’s doing fine, but he needs to rest now. It’s probably best if you leave.’ Dismissed. Tracy couldn’t see what harm there was in just sitting there. The nurse looked at her, ready for trouble.

As Tracy was leaving the hospital she caught sight of Linda Pallister again. So much for her heavy caseload. She was coming out of the Cemetery Tavern, deep in argument with Ray Strickland. The odd couple. He got hold of her by the elbow and pulled her close, said something angrily to her. She looked terrified. Then Ray let her go and she walked unsteadily off. No bike, Tracy noticed.

‘I went to the hospital yesterday, to see the kiddy,’ Tracy said to Ken Arkwright, over a pint of Tetley’s bitter.

‘How was he?’

‘Asleep. I bumped into that social worker. Linda Pallister.’ Ken Arkwright grunted.

‘Anything happening? Anyone being questioned?’

‘You’ve got to remember,’ Arkwright said, ‘that the police don’t have the resources for law enforcement, for old-fashioned policing. Best we can do is clean up after people’s mess.’ He ripped open a packet of salt and vinegar crisps as if it was a trial of strength and offered one to Tracy. She hesitated, as befitted a girl on a cottage cheese and grapefruit diet. The chip-shop smell of the salt and vinegar crisps made her nose twitch.

‘Well, make up your mind,’ Ken Arkwright said.

‘All right. Go on then,’ she said, succumbing finally and grabbing a handful.

‘People are their own worst enemy,’ Ken Arkwright sighed. ‘What can you do?’

‘I know,’Tracy said. They were in a pub on Eastgate frequented by refugees from the HQ in Brotherton House. That was just before they moved to the new HQ at Millgarth. A fug of cigarette smoke and the ripe smell of fresh and stale beer swilled together. Double Diamond works wonders. In 2008 Carlsberg would announce the closure of Tetley’s brewery and it would be ‘regenerated’ – restaurants, shops and apartments. ‘A sparkling destination on Leeds waterfront’. Ken Arkwright would have been dead for twenty years by then and in 2010 Tracy would be having a Mud ‘N’ Scrub Body Cleansing Massage in the Waterfall Spa, courtesy of the vouchers that were her leaving present from the force.

‘You haven’t seen Strickland or Lomax?’ Tracy asked through a mouthful of crisps. ‘They haven’t said anything more to you? About the investigation?’

‘To me? Eastman’s golden boys?’ Arkwright said. ‘No, lass.’

‘Thing is, Arkwright,’ Tracy said, ‘the flat was locked.’

‘So?’

‘I didn’t see a key anywhere, did you? We had a good look around, we had enough time, Lomax and Strickland took for ever getting there. Yale and a deadlock. Someone left and locked the door after them.’

‘What’s your point?’ Arkwright said.

‘It was locked from the outside . Don’t you see, it wasn’t just some random punter that she picked up. It was someone who had a key . Someone who locked that little boy in.’

Arkwright frowned into his pint. ‘Just leave it, lass, eh? CID know what they’re doing.’