Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Tapes,’ Barry said vaguely. He had learned a long time ago to avoid words like ‘yes’ and ‘no’. They backed you into corners you couldn’t get out of.

‘Yeah, security tapes. You were sending someone over. That woman who was murdered last night-’

‘Kelly Cross?’

‘Yeah, well known to us, and you. Apparently a policeman remembered seeing her in here on Wednesday. You wanted to see the tapes, see if she was with anyone. Thought they’d send a grunt to pick them up,’ he added, ‘not a superintendent.’

‘I am a grunt,’ Barry said. ‘I grunt all the time.’

There were three tapes, grainy black-and-white. He watched them back at Millgarth, took hours. Tracy flitted in and out of view occasionally, on patrol on her new beat. He’d almost dropped off to sleep when Kelly Cross finally came into view, dragging a kid behind her. Seconds later, there was Tracy again, on her heels. Tracy was yomping along as if she was about to storm a fort.

There were another two cameras outside, trained along the street in both directions. Barry picked up Kelly again on one of them. She was at a bus stop with the little kiddy standing next to her. Then Tracy hove into view again and she and Kelly Cross had a brief exchange of words. A bus arrived and Kelly suddenly disappeared inside it. Tracy was left on the pavement, holding the little girl’s hand. After a few seconds the pair of them walked off, out of reach of the camera.

Kids who disappeared after their mothers were murdered. Yeah, Barry could see why Tracy would have got herself involved in something like that. But kiddies who disappeared before their mothers were murdered, that was a more puzzling matter. Something Barbara said to him this morning, something about meeting Tracy in the supermarket, Tracy having a kid with her. This kid?

Barry ejected the tape, fitted it into the inside pocket of the coat that was hanging on the back of his chair. He found a clerical assistant in the corridor and said, ‘Tell DI Holroyd that the tapes from the Merrion Centre have come, will you. Two of them.’

Perhaps this Jackson bloke had managed to find Tracy. Seemed unlikely that a so-called private detective could find her when Barry had failed. Still, worth a shot, he thought. Said he was staying at the Best Western, didn’t he? Shrugged himself into his coat. ‘Barry Crawford is leaving the building,’ he said to the desk sergeant.

Outside the Slug and Lettuce on Park Row there was a big builder’s skip. Barry tossed the third tape from the Merrion Centre into it.

What was it they said – discretion was the better part of valour?

1975: 12 April

‘What do you think, Barry?’

‘What?’

‘What do you think, Barry?’

They’d come from Elland Road, where a good-natured match had got bumpy at the end. They’d brought the horses in. Tracy didn’t think horses should be used for crowd control, it was like sending them into battle. Barry was with them, trying to avoid buying a round.

It wasn’t that Tracy valued Barry’s opinion particularly but no one seemed to want to talk about it. Carol Braithwaite was being swept under the carpet like a bit of rubbish. ‘She was somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter. We don’t even know the cause of death.’

‘Strangled,’ Barry said.

‘How come you know?’ Tracy asked. Barry shrugged. ‘No one seems to be doing much, case just seems to be disappearing,’ Tracy said. Three days since Arkwright had put in that door in Lovell Park but it was as if it had never happened. Tiny piece in the paper by that Marilyn Nettles woman and that was it. ‘It doesn’t even feel as if anyone’s looking,’Tracy said. ‘And you,’ she added, turning accusingly to Barry, ‘what were you doing there anyway?’

‘What are you getting at?’

Tracy thought of Lomax and Strickland in Lovell Park, both looking shifty, behaving like Special Branch, knowing more than they were saying.

‘Have they spoken to you at all?’ she asked Barry. He shrugged. ‘You’re doing a lot of shrugging, Barry.’

‘Ah, the mysteries of CID,’ Arkwright said. ‘Ours not to reason why. It seems pretty straightforward to me. The poor lass picked up a punter, took him back to her flat and he turned out to be a wrong ’un. It happens.’

‘The oldest profession,’ Barry said, as if he was a man of the world. ‘Ever since there’ve been whores there’s been people killing them. They’re not going to stop now.’

‘And that makes it OK, does it, Barry? The whole door-locked from-the-outside thing, what about that?’

‘What’s your point?’ Barry said. ‘You think a couple of CID blokes knocked off a prozzie and then covered it up? That’s nuts.’

Sounded almost reasonable to Tracy’s ears.

‘You’re talking through your hat, Tracy,’ Barry said. ‘You’d better not spread rumours like that, you’ll be out on your arse quicker than you can say “Eastman”.’

‘They had a witness,’ Tracy said. ‘He was four – so what? He said to me, he told me, his father killed his mother. Shouldn’t they at least be trying to find out who his father is?’

‘I’m sure they are,’ Barry said. ‘But it’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Barry’s right,’ Arkwright said. ‘It’s an ongoing investigation. They’re not going to come running to you every time they get a bit of information, lass.’

‘Thought I’d go and see Linda Pallister, that social worker,’Tracy said to Arkwright once Barry had left.

‘That hippy bird?’ Arkwright said.

‘She lives in a commune.’

‘Filthy nutters,’ Arkwright said. ‘Do yourself a favour, Trace. Call off the attack poodles, eh?’

An ‘urban commune’, according to Linda. Fancy term for what was really just a squat, a dilapidated old house in Headingley that was due for demolition. The residents kept chickens in the back garden. Muddy parsnips and leeks grew stunted and misshapen where once there had been a small parterre.

Tracy had just come off shift and was still in uniform. ‘Pig,’ she heard one of the blokes who lived in the house mutter as she passed him in the hallway. Someone else made a grunting noise. Tracy felt like arresting them, marching them out of there in handcuffs. Wouldn’t have needed much of an excuse, the sweet sickly stink of marijuana drifted from the living room.

Linda, mother hen, queen bee, was wearing sensible hiker’s sandals beneath her long patchwork cotton skirt. Her droopy hair was pulled back in a ponytail so you could see the whole of her disgustingly healthy face. She was part of some wholefood cooperative, ate brown rice and grew ‘sprouts’, not the type that came from Brussels, and made ‘cultures’ for stuff like yoghurt and bread. Linda was attending an evening class in beekeeping. All these facts conveyed righteously over a cup of tea that she reluctantly offered. They sat in the kitchen, within the circle of warmth coming from a big, ancient Aga.

The tea was horrible, not proper tea. ‘Rooibos,’ Linda said. Rubbish more like, Tracy thought. The tea was in big, clumsy mugs that ‘someone we know’ had made. ‘We bartered eggs for mugs,’ Linda said smugly. ‘One day,’ she added earnestly, ‘there’ll be no money.’ Well, turned out she was right about that.

Like Tracy, Linda Pallister was still on probation. Unlike Tracy, she had a kid, having got knocked up in the middle of whatever worthy degree it was that she had done, social admin, politics, sociology. She spent the rest of her degree hauling the kiddy around on the back of her bike to nurseries and child-minders.

The boy was wandering around the kitchen half-naked, his rubbery little penis bouncing about. Tracy felt shocked.