Started Early, Took My Dog

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said.

  ‘No you don’t,’ Tracy agreed.

  ‘Banana? Apple? Dog treat?’ he offered. The girl took an apple. ‘Would Mummy like something?’ Jackson said, looking at Tracy in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘She’s not my mummy,’ the kid said, matter-of-factly. Little kick to Tracy’s heart.

  ‘The things kids say,’ she said, returning his gaze in the mirror. ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to have an accident. You’ve got a fairy on board.’

  Who were those guys back at the garage? A pair of leather jacketed thugs working in tandem, but for who and why? The first one had banged open the door of the toilets while the kid was washing her hands. He opened his mouth to say something but before he could spit anything out Tracy kneed him hard where it hurt the most. And ran. Someone wanted that kid back, didn’t they? And it wasn’t Kelly Cross, she didn’t want anything any more. Would never want anything ever again.

  The Saab driver dialled 999 while driving, phoned it in anonymously, reporting an ‘incident’, made it sound serious. He came across as a professional rather than – his pet obsession, it seemed – an ‘innocent bystander’. ‘Send an ambulance,’ he said authoritatively.

  ‘Using a mobile phone while driving,’ Tracy said when Jackson finished the call. ‘That’s a crime right there.’

  ‘Arrest me,’ he said.

  Her own phone had been like a beacon, flashing her identity out to anyone who might be looking for her. Anyone could find you if you had a mobile. A woman on the run with a kidnapped kid shouldn’t be advertising herself. She had thrown the phone out of the car window. They were outlaws now.

  They were on roads that weren’t familiar to her, places that meant nothing – Beckhole, Egton Grange, Goathland – but then signs began to appear for the coast. Tracy didn’t really want to go to the coast, she wanted to get to the holiday cottage. She could see that there was an argument to be made for staying with this man. Without him she was a lone woman on the run with a kid who didn’t belong to her. Together they were a family. Or something that resembled a family to anyone looking for them. Tracy contemplated sticking with him a bit longer, dismissed the idea. She reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Pit-stop again, I’m afraid,’ she said ruefully.

  He drew to a halt. They were in the middle of nowhere. Tracy liked the middle of nowhere better than the middle of somewhere.

  ‘That dog could probably do with getting out as well,’ she reminded him. ‘Stretch its legs, powder its nose.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’re probably right.’

  They all climbed out of the car. Tracy moved a short distance away to a discreet little limestone outcrop hillock. ‘I’m not needing,’ Courtney whispered to her.

  ‘Good,’ Tracy said, watching the dog bounding off into the heather, the man following it. All Tracy needed was for him to be further away from the car than she was. And to be slower to react. And on the whole to be more stupid. Turned out he was all of those things. She seized the kid’s hand and said, ‘Come on, quickly. Get back into the car.’

  The fog was their friend again. Before the Saab driver knew what was happening Courtney had scrambled into the back seat and buckled herself in. You had to hand it to the kid, she was pretty good at the old fast exit. Tracy got in the driving seat and turned the ignition. Within seconds they were half a mile further down the road than Jackson Brodie.

  His phone was on the passenger seat. Tracy slowed down and threw it out of the car on to the verge.

  A hundred yards further along the road Courtney said, ‘He left his bag.’

  Tracy stopped this time and hauled the rucksack over to the front seat, opened her door and threw it out.

  ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ she said.

  Barry went into the Best Western, his warrant card blazing a trail ahead of him. The woman behind the desk was taken aback by his bullish entrance. She was wearing full air-hostess make-up, a suit that was a size too small for her and had her hair pinned up in a style so complicated it had surely needed a couple of Victorian ladies’ maids to arrange it that morning. On the lapel of the jacket was a badge that said Concierge, as if it might be her name. Barry remembered when hotel concierges were all unscrupulous middle-aged blokes who were on the take left, right and centre.

  ‘Well, I thought he was a bit strange?’

  ‘Strange? How?’ Barry asked. Barry didn’t think there was anything left in the world that would seem strange to him these days. She was an Aussie. They were everywhere.

  ‘Bit, I don’t know, paranoid? He always looked as if he was sneaking around. One time I thought he had something concealed in his jacket and he always carried his bag with him, a rucksack. You think “terrorist” these days, don’t you? He definitely seemed a bit dodgy. What did he do?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Barry said. ‘If I could just get a look at his room?’

  There was nothing in the hotel room. The Jackson bloke had checked out early this morning and the chambermaid who had cleaned had done a good job. Barry couldn’t see any helpful clues as to who he really was – no pubic hairs curled up in the corner of the bathroom or a big greasy thumbprint on the underside of the toilet seat. He had left nothing behind, apparently, apart from a generous tip for the maid. Shame he hadn’t left a note pinned to the wall explaining what exactly he was up to.

  Barry took a miniature of vodka from the minibar and sat on the single bed and drank it down in one. He felt tired all the time. He put his head in his hands and stared at the carpet, noticed something the chambermaid had missed – a hair. It didn’t look human. He tweezered it up with his fingers and examined it closely. Looked like a dog hair.

  This Jackson bloke had come searching for the truth about Carol Braithwaite, hadn’t he? Linda,Tracy, Barry. Bit players, walk-on extras in the drama of Carol Braithwaite’s death. Maybe it was time the main players stepped up to the stage. End of days now. Barry was going down in flames, he might as well take a few more down with him.

  What he would really have liked to do right now was to lie down on the bed and have a snooze but he heaved himself up and drank down another miniature vodka. Then he filled up the two small bottles with water and replaced them in the minibar.

  He couldn’t go on. He didn’t have it in him. The reckoning was coming. For Barry. For everyone.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ he said, returning the plastic room key. ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport, eh?’

  The dog sat by his side as they both stared at the retreating Saab. ‘I don’t believe it,’ Jackson said. He felt as if he had lost an old faithful friend. ‘I liked that car,’ he said.

  The car started to slow down and Jackson said, ‘Come on, she must have changed her mind,’ and sprinted after it. The Saab stopped long enough for his phone to be thrown on to the verge before moving off again, Jackson and the dog in pursuit. The car goaded him by stopping once more and ejecting Jackson’s rucksack. He ran after it again and just before he reached the Saab it set off again. He retrieved his phone and his bag and waited to see if anything else was going to be bailed out of the car but this time the Saab accelerated away. ‘The fairer sex,’ Jackson said to the dog. (‘Fairer in what way exactly?’ he had once asked Julia. ‘In love and war,’ she said.)

  In the rear window of the car Jackson could see the silver wand moving from side to side, like a metronome. The kid’s farewell.

  They were in the middle of nowhere. Phone a friend? Did he have any? Julia perhaps. Not much she could do. Ask the audience? He turned to the dog. A dumb creature. He found the packet of dog treats in his pocket, all he had salvaged from his shop at the garage. They were little biscuits in the shape of tiny bones. They looked surprisingly appetizing but he resisted and tossed one to the dog.

  A taxi firm seemed like a sensible option but the phone, although it seemed to have survived its ousting, showed there was no signal up here. Nothing for it but
to set off and walk. The dog, naturally, was happier with this plan than Jackson.

  They hoofed it for a good half-hour before they encountered any sign of civilization. The dog heard the approaching car before Jackson did. Jackson caught hold of its collar and towed it over to the verge where they waited for the vehicle to appear out of the fog. Memories of the Land Cruiser made Jackson consider throwing himself in the nearest ditch but there was no ditch and he could see now that it wasn’t the Land Cruiser that was advancing towards them along the deserted road, it was an Avensis, a grey one.

  Jackson put out his hand to flag it down. ‘Stand and deliver,’ he murmured to the dog.

  The Avensis stopped and the nearside window rolled down. ‘Hello there, fancy seeing you here,’ the driver said.

  Jackson peered at his face, regretting again not having bought those spectacles. Did he know him?

  The Avensis driver opened the passenger door and said, ‘There’s a hell in hello, isn’t that what they say? Give you a lift, squire?’

  It was the room-service waiter who had left the tracking device. Jackson looked to the dog for confirmation but the dog had already hopped niftily into its now customary position in the footwell.

  Reluctantly, Jackson climbed in after it.

  A small pink furry rabbit hung droopily from the rear-view mirror. If it came to a contest between dreck car accessories Jackson was confident that his own little mascot, the light-up Virgin Mary wobbling on the dashboard, attached by a sucker and bearing an AA battery in her holy insides, would win hands down against a pink furry rabbit.

  ‘Whitby, is it, guv?’ the Avensis driver said, tipping an imaginary chauffeur’s hat.

  ‘Please.’ Well, this took weird to a new level.

  ‘Nice mutt,’ the Avensis driver said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jackson said. ‘I think you said that last night when you put a tracking device on him. Why do you want to follow me?’

  ‘Maybe I’m following the dog.’ He restarted the Avensis’s engine and said, ‘Right, squire, here we go. First we take Manhattan, eh?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Straight in there with the difficult questions. Who am I?’ his new friend repeated thoughtfully. ‘Who am I? Of course, you might ask – who are any of us?’

  ‘It wasn’t really a philosophical question,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Name, rank and number?’

  ‘Just a name would do.’ Close up Jackson could see that the man looked slightly moth-eaten. He had the ashen skin of a smoker and on cue he retrieved a packet of cigarettes from the glove compartment. ‘Want one?’

  ‘No thanks.’ Just accept you’ve entered into an alternative reality, Jackson counselled himself. It probably happened round about the time he reached Leeds. ‘Is this something to do with Linda Pallister?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Or Hope McMaster?’

  ‘Ah, Hope springs eternal in the human breast: / Man never is, but always to be blest. Pope. Wrote some good stuff. Know him?’

  ‘Not personally,’ Jackson said.

  ‘What you doing all the way out here then?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Jackson said, defeated by the complexity of the story before he even started it. He settled for the simple version. ‘Someone stole my car.’

  The fog had finally begun to lift, streaks of pale gold gleaming through the thinning wisps.

  ‘Looks like it’s going to be a nice day,’ the Avensis driver said.

  ‘First to see the sea,’ was always the call when they went to the seaside. Jackson, Josie and Marlee. It seemed a long time ago now that they had been a tight little family threesome. The winner (always Marlee even if she had to have the sea pointed out to her) merited three chocolate buttons. Josie rationed sweets as if there was a war on.

  And no sign of the sea at all today, the coast still entombed in fog. A ‘sea fret’, they said in Yorkshire. In Scotland, the far, far north, Ultima Thule, Louise would have said ‘haar’. They were separated by a common language and an invisible border crossing. Did she ever think about him?

  By the time they crested a final hill the fog had begun to roll back and Whitby started to reveal itself in all its dramatically Gothic glory – the abbey, the harbour, West Cliff, the higgledy-piggledy fishermen’s houses.

  ‘You can see why Count Dracula landed here, can’t you?’ the driver of the Avensis said.

  ‘Dracula isn’t real,’ Jackson pointed out. ‘He’s a fictional character.’

  The driver shrugged and said, ‘Fact, fiction, what’s the difference?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Jackson said. But before he could embark on a convincing proof (such as Do you want to feel the difference between a fictional punch and a real one?) they began their descent into town and the Avensis driver said, ‘Drop you at the police station, shall I?’

  ‘The police station?’

  ‘Report the theft of your motor.’

  ‘Yeah, of course, good idea,’ Jackson said. So strange had been the advent of the Avensis that it had managed to push the whole escapade with the woman and child to the back of his mind. It felt like he was in an episode of The Prisoner, any moment a giant ball of bubblegum would come bouncing along the road and swallow him up and demonstrate that there was indeed only a thin line separating fact and fiction.

  They had slowed to a crawl, the Avensis driver peering around, a stranger in town.

  ‘Do you know where the police station is?’ Jackson asked.

  The Avensis driver tapped the SatNav on his dashboard. ‘No, but she does.’ Jackson felt a possessive pang. In his mind Jane was a one man woman.

  The Avensis pulled into the police station car park on Spring Hill. Jackson got out of the car, as did the Avensis driver. ‘Stretch my legs a bit,’ he said. This turned out to be a form of exercise that involved leaning against the side of his car and lighting up another cigarette.

  ‘Believe it or not, squire,’ the driver said, ‘but I think we’re both on the same side, both working towards the same end, just coming at it from different starting points.’

  ‘The same end?’

  ‘Lawks, is that the time?’ the driver said, making a great show of looking at his wristwatch. (Lawks? Who said lawks any more? Well, apart from Julia, of course.) ‘Have to go, got to see a dog about a man.’

  Short of tying him up, blindfolding him and playing non-stop heavy metal in his ears, Jackson couldn’t think of a way of getting the other man to identify himself or his mission. Jackson was surprised, therefore, when the driver stuck out his hand and said, ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond. Nah, mate, joking. It’s Jackson.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Jackson said.

  ‘Brian Jackson.’ He searched in his pockets and finally came up with a thin card – Brian Jackson – Private Investigations. ‘Two hundred quid an hour, plus expenses.’ Before Jackson could say anything, and there was quite a lot he wanted to say, Brian Jackson had climbed back in the car. He rolled down the window and said, ‘Sayonara. Be seeing you around,’ and drove off.

  ‘Two hundred quid an hour,’ Jackson said to the dog. ‘I’m undercharging.’

  ‘Plus expenses,’ the dog said. In a parallel universe obviously, the one where dogs communicate and men are dumb creatures. In this reality, the dog simply waited silently for its next orders.

  *

  He tied the dog up outside and entered the police station. The desk sergeant was on the phone and held up a finger to Jackson indicating he would be with him in a moment. The finger then pointed at a functional chair against the wall. Jackson admired a man who could communicate so much in so few words. No words at all in fact, just a digit.

  The desk sergeant finished his phone call and made a beckoning gesture to Jackson with his admirably articulate finger.

  ‘Can I help you with something, sir?’ he asked when Jackson approached the desk.

  Jackson hesitated. It was theft pure and simple. His car had been taken without his permission. The woman
had not only stolen the Saab but she was on the run with her kid, being chased by two pretty nasty men. That was quite a list of possible police matters. ‘She’s not my mummy.’The girl’s words came back to him. Surely he didn’t have to add kidnapping to that list? Kids were always saying things like that. A couple of months ago Marlee had screamed at him, ‘You’re not my real father!’

  ‘Sir?’

  If he reported the Saab as stolen, the police would be after a woman who was in a bad place but claimed to be on the side of good. And Jackson’s instincts tended towards the renegade.

  On the other hand . . .

  She had taken his car.

  He thought of the kid, solemnly waving her wand. He thought of the woman using her body as a shield for the kid to stop a possible bullet. He sensed the balance was tipping in the woman’s favour.

  Still.

  His car.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Jackson said. ‘A mistake. Sorry to bother you.’ Of course, there was one person who could find his car for him. The person whose tracking device was in the glove compartment. But then he’d be employing Brian Jackson at Two hundred quid an hour, plus expenses, to do a job he should be able to do himself. Male pride couldn’t countenance that.

  ‘Business before pleasure,’ he said to the dog. A small map that he had picked up from a Tourist Information office near the harbour led Jackson to his destination – a cottage that was hiding down a narrow passage, in a yard. The address that Jackson was looking for, courtesy of 192.com, was the end-stop, shouldering all the weight of three other cottages that lurched dramatically, due to some ancient subsidence.