Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

‘And found me,’ Brian Jackson said, beaming. ‘Twenty years in the Met behind me. Give me a task and I’m like a dog with a bone.’ Jackson had begun to think of Brian Jackson as his doppelgänger – God knows why – but now he could see that really he was his polar opposite. ‘Made an appointment with Linda Pallister, tracked her down,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘Dog, bone, et cetera. She spilled the beans, most of them anyway, seemed keen to get it off her chest. Changed her mind, took fright, of course.’

Brian Jackson’s phone rang – the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, Da-da-da- daa . Sounded naff on a phone. He didn’t answer it. ‘In constant demand,’ he said to Jackson.

Linda Pallister had not been squirrelled away by Brian Jackson. She had, despite her daughter Chloe’s protestations, simply run away. ‘Bolted,’ Brian Jackson said, ‘to avoid facing the music.’ She had caught an easyJet flight to Malaga and hidden herself away like a desperado in a cheap apartment block on the Costa del Sol.

‘It’s all quite banal really, isn’t it?’ Julia said. ‘People frightened of losing their jobs, their reputations, their marriages. You feel that tragedy should be more operatic somehow.’

Jackson’s knee-jerk reaction was to disagree with her but when he thought about it he suspected Julia might be right. His own sister, as beautiful as she was, more beautiful than was possible in his memory, wanted nothing more than the most ordinary of lives and what she got was the most ordinary of murders. A random act of violence. A girl who opened the wrong box. As far as her killer was concerned, Niamh could probably have been anyone – the girl before her, the girl after her. Better to go up in flames at the stake, or jump from a mountain ledge, be torn apart by wolves, rather than have your fate placed in the hands of some wanker waiting at a bus stop.

‘The Ambassador loves having his tummy tickled,’ Julia said.

Jackson was definitely going to give the dog a different name. He wondered what Louise, back in Edinburgh, had called the puppy he had given her. She probably hadn’t even kept it.

‘Where are you going now?’ Julia asked him when he said goodbye to her at security in Manchester airport.

‘Journey’s end,’ he said.

‘In lovers meeting?’

‘I doubt it.’

He was still looking for a new home, he had to lay his head down somewhere every night. He supposed he was still looking for his thieving wife as well, but his enthusiasm for the hunt had cooled. He suspected he might have done with travelling for now. He held Nathan, the boy, in his arms, and kissed him goodbye. And there it was.

To his surprise, to his alarm – the fierce churning of the heart, the unbreakable, sacrificial bond. Love. He knew who he was, he was this boy’s father.

It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it. It was terrifying, although Julia would have said ‘wonderful’, being the full half of the glass.

‘Stop putting words in my mouth,’ Julia said.

In the security control room at the Merrion Centre, Grant had his feet up, reading the paper instead of watching the screens. Leslie could see the headline in the paper, ‘Leeds prostitute murders – man held for questioning’ and then something about ‘a new Ripper’.

‘It never stops,’ Leslie said.

‘Slappers, what do you expect?’ Grant said, reaching for a packet of Monster Munch.

‘I expect people to behave better.’

‘You’ll be waiting a long time. What’ve you got there?’ Grant asked.

‘A purse.’ Someone had handed it in, found it in the car park. The purse was bulky, stuffed with all kinds of things, credit cards, store cards, little cards with dental and hair appointments, some of them well out of date. Notes of the ‘Remember to’ variety that the owner must have written to herself. Miss Matilda Squires . Leslie remembered her, how upset she’d been. She found a note tucked into the back of the purse with a name and address on it. ‘My address,’ it said helpfully, just in case someone wanted to steal her identity or turn up on her doorstep and rob her at knifepoint. ‘Matilda Squires,’ Leslie said. ‘Isn’t that the name of the actress who fell under the train?’

‘Dunno,’ Grant said. He turned the page and gawped openly at the good-as-naked Page 3 girl on offer. Leslie missed Tracy. She didn’t allow sleazy newspapers and snack food. Leslie wondered why she had never come back from holiday.

‘Maybe she’s dead,’ Grant said, quite animated by the idea. She wasn’t dead. She had sent Leslie a postcard, a picture of the London Eye, and on the back Tracy had written, ‘Won’t be coming back, it was nice knowing you, have a good life, best wishes,Tracy.’ She didn’t tell Grant. The message wasn’t for him.

Leslie was decamping as well. She hadn’t told anyone but her flight to Canada left in a couple of days. She had taken her cue from Tracy, she was simply going to disappear. She’d get a job for the summer, go to the lake with her parents and her brother and her dog and then after that she’d get started on her good life. Leave this place far behind.

The best room in the house. The ‘Sleeping Beauty suite’. It was meant for a bigger family, of course, but big and best was what Tracy wanted for the kid. She had been lucky to get the suite, only managed it because the hotel had a last-minute cancellation. Tracy’s old friends, the world and his wife, or in this case Europe and his Frau , all seemed to be taking their holidays in Disneyland Paris at the same time.

She had expected there would be only parents with children in the park but there were all sorts of permutations – groups of young guys, gangs of giggling girls, old couples and honeymooners. Tracy couldn’t imagine why you would want to spend a romantic break in the centre of the dark beating heart of capitalism.

There was even the occasional lone male. ‘Beware,’ Tracy murmured to the kid.

It was surprising how easy it was to step out of one life and into another. They had spent a couple of weeks lost in London, where no one knew who you were or cared. They’d tested out their new identities on doctors and dentists and opticians. Kid had had her ears syringed, eyes tested, wore specs now. Added to her allure. Tracy, or rather Imogen Brown, had opened a new bank account and Harry Reynolds had transferred funds into it, all nicely laundered with a credible history. She was surprised, she hadn’t actually expected him to come through with the money, thought he would simply sell her house on and pocket the profit.

When they passed through passport control at St Pancras Tracy had expected there to be questions, expected to be scrutinized suspiciously. Expected an expressionless official to take them to one side and say, ‘Would you just come this way, madam?’ but they boarded the Eurostar train with ease and in no time at all they were in the Magic Kingdom.

The kid had her priorities. In the hotel shop Tracy bought her a new fairy outfit – Tinker Bell’s green attire. The matching wand had a butterfly hovering on the top. Half the kids in the hotel were dressed up, dozens of fairies and Peter Pans, the occasional pirate. You couldn’t walk along a hotel corridor without bumping into an adult re-enactor pretending to be Goofy or Mary Poppins. It was surreal and vaguely alarming. The kid accepted it as normal.

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall,’ Tracy said when they returned to the hotel suite, ‘who’s the fairest fairy of them all?’