Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘You’re here about the kid,’ Tracy said.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Bang to rights. I’m here about the kid. Not this one though, as interesting as I find her.’ He turned round and stared at Courtney. She stared back.

‘Don’t bother,’ Tracy said. ‘She won’t look away first. What do you mean, you’re not interested in her?’ Her spirits rose. She felt incredibly chuffed. ‘You mean you haven’t come to get her back?’

‘Nah. I’m here about a different kid.’

‘Different kid?’ Tracy said.

‘Not a kid any more. Used to be a kid.’

‘We all used to be kids.’

‘Not me.’

A group of fawns sauntered across the road in front of the car. ‘Look,’ Courtney said.

‘I see them, pet,’ Tracy said, keeping her eyes on Brian Jackson.

‘Why don’t we all hop in my car,Tracy?’ Brian Jackson said. ‘A lot safer for you than this one. This one’s been reported stolen. Mine’s not stolen – thief’s honour. I’ll give you a lift to wherever you’re going – Leeds, is it? And we can have a little chat along the way.’

‘Not until you tell me what this is about.’ She suddenly felt incredibly irritated, the leaden cloak of defeat, now no more than a poor metaphor, dropped from her shoulders. Tracy had her mojo back. ‘I am very busy at the moment and I do not have time for your mucking me about, so start talking.’

‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘Keep you hair on.’ Courtney made a noise indicating surprise and Tracy said, ‘Not literally,’ to her, without turning round.

‘I’m waiting,’ Tracy said.

‘Michael Braithwaite,’ he said. ‘Name mean anything to you?’

‘Michael Braithwaite?’

‘Yeah, thought it might. I’ve got a couple of questions. Need to fill in some blanks. You’re a key witness, as you might say. What do you reckon – shall we get going?’

‘You said that you weren’t the person I should be worried about,’ Tracy said. ‘Who is the person I should be worried about?’

He sat in the dining room of Bella Vista and ate his ‘full Yorkshire breakfast’ as if the only thing that had happened to him between closing his eyes last night and opening them again this morning had been an untroubled sleep in Valerie ’s flowery bower.

The baffled (one might say traumatized) binmen had wanted to phone emergency services but somehow or other Jackson had managed to persuade them that he had ended up in the bin as a result of a dangerous prank on the part of his friends. ‘A joke that went wrong.’

‘Some joke,’ one of them said.

They had had to tilt the bin to free him and he had rolled out with the rubbish, like a legless bug. One of them produced a Stanley knife and cut the duct tape that was binding his ankles and wrists. It took some time for his limbs to come back to life but he managed to rip off the duct tape gag himself and to stumble off down the road, aware of the dubious glances at his back. He passed a shop window full of clocks. All the hands of the clocks were stretched out vertically. Six o’clock. He thought he had been in the bin for hours but it was less than two. Not a wheelie-bin but a Tardis.

The dog scampered by his side all the way back to Bella Vista in a state of near-delirium. At the site of the train crash two years ago Jackson’s life had been saved by a girl administering CPR. Now he had been saved by the loyalty of a dog. The less innocent he was, the more innocent his saviours became. There was some kind of exchange at work in the universe that he didn’t understand.

They had re-entered Valerie the same way that they had left, via the fire escape. The smell of bacon was already seeping under the door, fighting with the scent of air freshener trapped in the soft furnishings.

He squeezed himself into Valerie ’s small ensuite bathroom and had the best shower of his life, despite the postage-stamp size of the towel and the wafer of soap that soon melted into nothing. A near-death experience proved to be just the thing to work up a man’s appetite and once he was presentable again he left the dog – immediately forlorn at this ungrateful desertion – and exited Valerie in the conventional way to investigate Mrs Reid’s ‘full Yorkshire breakfast’.

Nothing discernibly Yorkshire about the breakfast at all. Jackson didn’t know what he’d expected – Yorkshire pudding, a symbolic white rose cut into the toast perhaps – but instead there was the usual fry-up consisting of flabby slices of bacon, a pale, glassy egg, mushrooms like slugs and a sausage that inevitably reminded him of a dog turd. Worst of all was the (predictable) disappointment afforded by the coffee, which was weak and acidic and left Jackson feeling slightly queasy.

Only one other table in the dining room was occupied, by a middle-aged couple. Apart from the occasional inaudible remark of the ‘pass-the-salt’ kind the twosome breakfasted in a glum silence, bordering on the hostile.

The lack of marital conversation gave Jackson peace to digest the night’s events. The ‘message’ in the early hours – Leave Carol Braithwaite alone . What did that mean – that he had got too close to an inconvenient truth? Yet he didn’t feel as if he had found out anything at all about Carol Braithwaite’s death. Quite the opposite. Who was warning him off and why? Was it because of something Marilyn Nettles had told him yesterday, something she had said? Or perhaps something she hadn’t said? She had been economical with her answers.

Something had been nagging away at him as he fell asleep last night, before his encounter with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He had been thinking about Jennifer, the girl he and Steve had snatched in Munich, trying to remember the name of her brother and then – it came to Jackson suddenly – he hadn’t asked Marilyn Nettles the right question. It was such a simple question as well.

The breakfasts were being served by a young girl. She looked familiar and it was only when she refilled his cup, caffeine was caffeine, after all, no matter how bad, that he recognized her as the female half of the Goth couple in St Mary’s Church yesterday. Now her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was devoid of make-up. All her piercings, or at least the ones that were visible, had been removed. A truculent teenager rather than a wannabe vampire.

‘Lovely morning,’ Jackson said conversationally to her and was rewarded with a surly look.

‘If you’re not being made to work,’ she said.

‘Are you?’ he said. ‘Being made to?’ She didn’t look as if she could be made to do anything.

‘White slave trade.’

It seemed unlikely. In Whitby.

She shambled out of the dining room, carelessly dripping coffee from the pot as she went. He heard the door to the kitchen being pushed open aggressively and the sound of something crashing and breaking. Mrs Reid’s militant response was countered by the girl’s voice whining, ‘Oh, Mum !’ in exactly the same mardy tone that Marlee adopted nowadays.

The girl barged out of the kitchen again and stomped up the stairs.

‘You just can’t get the staff these days, can you?’ Jackson said cheerfully to his gloomy fellow breakfasters, neither of whom felt it necessary to come back with witty repartee, or indeed any repartee at all.

He rewarded the dog with the turd-like sausage, purloined from the Yorkshire breakfast, only regretting that everything that went in one end had to come out at the other.

Jackson stripped the bed, bundled up the sheets and left them on the mattress. On top of the sheets he placed twenty-five pounds in payment for the night. No tip, as there had been no discernible service worth rewarding. Easy money for Mrs Reid. He could have checked out in the normal way, of course, it just felt better like this. Saved a lot of unnecessary talking.