Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘I don’t know,’ Barry said. ‘Have you got a runner for the three thirty at Lingfield Park?’ He flourished his warrant card and said, ‘I’m looking for Mrs Pallister, Linda Pallister?’

‘Someone else was looking for her yesterday. He said he was a private detective.’

‘Can you tell me when you last saw Linda?’ Barry asked.

‘Last night,’ she said promptly. ‘Just after Collier finished. She was getting into a car. She didn’t come back.’

‘What kind of car?’Who needed CCTV, Barry thought, when you had twitchers?

‘A four-door saloon,’ she said. ‘Grey.’

‘All cars are grey at night,’ Barry said.

This Jackson bloke was the ruddy Scarlet Pimpernel, here there and everywhere, always one step ahead of Barry. And everywhere he went, women were disappearing.

‘OK,’ Barry said to himself as he climbed back in the car. He talked to his car quite a lot these days. It didn’t talk back, didn’t have any expectations of him. ‘Let’s say, for argument’s sake, this Jackson character is investigating on behalf of Carol Braithwaite’s kid, all grown up now, what – in his late thirties?’ All that ‘finding out more about myself’ shit that people went in for these days. Not Barry, Barry would happily know less about himself. ‘And so, on Michael Braithwaite’s behalf, he contacts Linda Pallister.’ Someone’s asking questions , she’d said to him when she phoned him on Wednesday. ‘And the same bloke, this Jackson, was looking for Tracy for the same reason – Carol Braithwaite. But then both Linda and Tracy disappear. That can’t be good, can it?’

Michael Braithwaite had woken his mother from her endless sleep. And now she was rising, a dust storm, looking for justice, looking for vengeance. A revenge tragedy.

Jackson and the dog strolled along the pier, a pair of flâneurs by the sea. Jackson could feel the warmth of the sun on his scalp. He had been to Whitby as a boy. He didn’t know where the money had come from for a holiday, there was never money for decent clothes and food, let alone for ice creams or pantomimes, certainly not holidays. Jackson must have been five or six when they came here, half his sister’s age and still young enough to be her pet. Francis, their brother, was already a teenager slouching moodily around the arcades in the evening. There was no photographic proof of their furlough as none of them had ever owned a camera. The rich had always commissioned portraits of themselves but the poor moved invisibly through history.

Jackson couldn’t explain this primitive past to his daughter, let alone his son, born into a science-fiction future where every breathing second of his life was being digitally recorded, usually by Mr Metrosexual, Jonathan Carr. (Julia was being unusually shifty, even for her, about Jonathan. Was it over between them?)

He could remember very little about their family holiday here in that faraway time, only impressionistic memories of sounds and smells. They had stayed in a guest house where a gong was rung at dinnertime and meals were served that were astonishingly different from the potato and bread-laden fare of home and even now his most vivid memory of the holiday was of a stewed chicken dish and a lemon pudding, both of which had prompted his mother to sniff and say, ‘Huh, very fancy,’ as if the food were a criticism of her rather than something to be enjoyed.

There had been milk and arrowroot biscuits for the children in the evening – unheard-of luxuries at home, where a vicious rub on the face with a flannel by his mother had been the only herald of bedtime.

He suddenly recalled something long ago tucked away in a forgotten corner by the little men running his brain. His mother had bought him a set of paper sandcastle flags – in his mind’s eye he could still see a red lion on a yellow background. And his father wearing his cheap suit to sit on the beach, his trouser legs rolled up to reveal his pale, hairy, Scottish shins. It had been a poor sort of childhood, in every way. Belonged in a museum.

Not one as interesting as the RNLI museum on the prom where recorded tales of heroism and disaster brought an uncomfortable lump to Jackson’s throat. We have to go out, but we don’t have to come back , the motto of the US Coastguard, the watchword of all rescuers. Sacrifice, like stoicism, not a fashionable word. Jackson stuffed a twenty-pound note into the miniature lifeboat collecting-box at the door.

He carried on, passing shops that sold shells, shops devoted to vampires (no getting away from them), to jet, to scented candles the smell of which made him retch, and endless cheap and nasty souvenirs. He crossed the swing bridge to the old town and visited the Captain Cook Memorial Museum to pay homage to the great navigator himself.

Afterwards, he bought some fudge in Justin’s Fudge Shop and noticed a house on Henrietta Street that was for sale, but he saw that the whole street was subsiding and the kipper smokehouse at the end was atmospheric in all the wrong ways.

The place was heaving with visitors. May Bank Holiday weekend, used to be Whitsuntide, when did that change? He ran up the 199 steps to the abbey and was pleased at how fit he still was. Everywhere people were puffing and panting their way up the steps. He had never seen so many fat people in one place at the same time. He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.

He left the dog in the porch when he went into St Mary’s Church. He took a seat in a box pew marked in old lettering, For Strangers Only . It seemed appropriate. These days he was always the stranger in town. He contemplated the interior of the church, fashioned long ago by shipwrights. The only other people there were a young – very young – Goth couple, black clothes, black lipstick and piercings everywhere, who were messing about in the pews. The boy said something to the girl and she sniggered. Vampire freaks.

He sat for a while on a bench in the graveyard of St Mary’s. The headstones all leaned like trees in the wind, the names on them erased by the salted air. ‘ Safe in their Alabaster Chambers ,’ he murmured to the dog. The dog cocked its head inquisitively as if it were making an effort to understand what he was saying. Seagulls were squabbling yobbishly overhead. The sun winked on the sea like diamonds. Jackson was long enough in the tooth to know that it was over when you started reaching for clichés. He stood up and said out loud, ‘Time to go,’ to the dead beneath his feet, but the meek members of the resurrection made no effort to stir themselves and only the dog obeyed his call.

He walked back down into town on the cobbled donkey road rather than the 199 steps, finishing off Justin’s fudge as he went.

‘Come on,’ he said to the dog. ‘I’ll race you.’

He hit the beach running. Jackson couldn’t remember when he had last run on a beach.

When they reached Sandsend the dog investigated the rock pools, finding a small dead squid like a deflated condom that it worried for a while until it disintegrated. A large brackish piece of seaweed kept it entertained for several minutes more. Jackson sat on a rock and contemplated the horizon. What was out there? Holland? Germany? The edge of the world? Why had someone tried to bury Carol Braithwaite’s murder? And how was it relevant, if at all, to Hope McMaster? And other questions that he didn’t know the answer to, in fact, the more questions he asked, the more they multiplied. It had started with one, I wondered if you could find out some information about my biological parents? and had exploded exponentially from there.