His definition of elderly had changed as he himself had moved nearer to the event horizon of death. When he was twenty, old people were forty. Now he was over the hill of his half-century the definition began to stretch towards something more yielding, but nonetheless once you hit fifty there was no escaping the fact that you had a one-way ticket on a non-stop service to the terminus.

He drove off, aware that the barbecuing family were watching him all the way down the drive. He understood, he would have been wary of himself as well.

In Knaresborough Jackson had sought out Old Mother Shipton’s Cave, a destination that had once been a stopover on that school trip to Fountains. The schoolboy Jackson had gazed in surprise at the petrified items in Old Mother Shipton’s Cave – umbrella, boots, teddy bears – hanging beneath the well. The alchemy of the Dropping Well was due simply to the high mineral content of the water and yet even now the adult Jackson still found something strangely affecting in its preservation of mundane objects. His younger self had thought that ‘petrified’ meant ‘terrified’ and had wondered if he were to become too frightened by something, or someone, would he end up like those inert, everyday objects? It didn’t work like that, he knew now. It wasn’t being frightened that turned you into stone, it was being the one who did the frightening.

After Jackson had almost died in the train crash he was grateful to have survived but there was a part of him that had feared that being saved would turn him soft and he would become one of those grateful evangelists of positive living (Every day is a gift, I’m going to make my time on earth count, et cetera). However, somewhat to his surprise, the new version of Jackson that emerged from this harrowing was a colder and harder one than he had expected. ‘The leaner, meaner Jackson,’ Julia laughed. ‘Ooh, I’m scared.’ Perhaps she should be.

He would never be free of her now that they were united through their son. Two become one. As the Spice Girls might say.

*

He had met Julia at Rievaulx. He tended to meet her on neutral territory these days. There had been an unfortunate incident a couple of years ago when a tired and emotional Jackson had turned up on the doorstep of the Dales cottage she was sharing with her arty, überbourgeois husband, Jonathan Carr, and bluntly ‘explained’ to him that Nathan was not, as Jonathan thought, his child. And he had the evidence to prove it, Jackson said, triumphantly waving the results of a DNA test in his face.

There was, naturally, some violence but it hardly mattered. Jackson had threatened a custody suit but he was aware that he was blustering and Julia knew it too. ( Jonathan Carr’s opinion didn’t count, not to Jackson anyway.) Jackson didn’t want to bring up another child, with or without Julia, he just wanted to establish the fundamental principle of ownership.

Now there was an unstated delicacy in their triangular relationship. The man who fathered the boy, the man who was raising him and the treacherous woman at the apex. My Son Calls Another Man Daddy. Trust Hank to tell it how it is.

He had met Julia and Nathan not at Rievaulx itself but on the Terraces above, from where there was a panoramic vista of breathtaking beauty. It brought out the Romantic soul in Jackson, once hidden in a dark, deep mineshaft but lately peeking its head, unabashedly, into the daylight. He might have become a harder version of himself on the outside but on the inside the spirit could still soar. Rievaulx, Beethoven’s Fifth, a mother and child reunion.

They had strolled between the two Grecian temples – follies, built to amuse eighteenth-century aristocrats, now in the custody of the National Trust. ‘Crikey, fancy having all this as your private picnic ground,’ Julia said. ‘Imagine.’ She sounded even more husky than usual. ‘High pollen count,’ she said, shaking a packet of Zyrtec at him. Jackson was relieved that Nathan showed no sign of having inherited his mother’s lungs (or, indeed, her histrionic disposition).

‘No one should be allowed to own a view like this,’ Jackson said.

‘Ah, you can take the boy out of his collectivist past, but you can’t take the collectivist past out of the boy.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ Jackson said.

‘Is it?’

Nathan skipped ahead of them on the grass. ‘The boy’, Julia called him, bonhomous with love. The only boy. Men were a continual presence in Julia’s life but always of peripheral importance, including, Jackson suspected, her arty-farty husband (hats off to the man who managed to stay married to inconstant Julia). But not the boy, the boy beamed hotly at the centre of her universe.

‘Does Jonathan know you’re here?’ he asked.

‘Why should he?’ Julia said.

‘Why shouldn’t he?’ Jackson said.

She ignored the question. There was nothing you could do with her, she was impossible. (In that, at least, she was constant.)

‘Bare ruined choirs and all that,’ Julia said, changing the subject. ‘Shakespeare, the dissolution of the monasteries,’ she added instructively, having over the years realized the great black holes in Jackson’s general knowledge.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that. I’m not entirely ignorant.’

‘Really?’ she said, absent-mindedly rather than ironically. Her attention was all on the boy, none on the man. Jackson had, in fact, learned a great deal about the shock and awe of the Reformation in the course of his wanderings around the abbeys of Yorkshire but there was no point in being didactic with Julia, she was always going to know more about everything than him. She was the product of a sound education and a good memory, while, let’s face it, Jackson was in possession of neither.

Jackson ignored Julia in turn, gazing meditatively (some – mostly women – might say mindlessly) at the amphitheatre, nature’s heavenly bowl, that contained Rievaulx. Even in ruins the abbey was matchless, celestial. Awesome. Awesome, his daughter Marlee’s blasé teenage voice sounded in his head. By the time Nathan was a teenager Jackson would be into his sixties. His diamond years.

‘Cheer up, sweetie,’ Julia said, ‘it may never happen.’

‘It already has,’ Jackson said gloomily.

*

Jackson had occasionally to remind himself that there was a third purpose to his leisurely Byzantine progress around the country. Everything came (and went) in threes, as far as he could see. Three Fates, three Furies, three Graces, three Kings, three monkeys, a threepersoned God.

‘Three-headed dogs,’ Julia added. ‘To the Pythagoreans, three was the first real number, because they saw it as having a beginning, a middle and an end.’

Jackson was working on behalf of a client. Despite the fact that he was no longer a private detective, despite the fact that he no longer had clients, that he no longer dabbled in the soul-destroying tedium of divorce cases and debt chasing and missing pets, despite all that, he had somehow acquired a woman called Hope McMaster who lived as far away from Yorkshire as you could get without getting closer again. New Zealand, in other words.

He should have said no, in fact, he was pretty sure he did say no when Hope McMaster sent him a long email (too long, a life story) out of the blue at the end of the previous year. I was adopted and I wondered if you could find out some information about my biological parents? How uncomplicated that sounded to his ears now.

Exactly how Hope McMaster had got hold of a contact address for him was unclear but somewhere along the line – as was so often the case – it seemed to involve Julia (‘a friend of a friend of a friend’). Nowhere in the world was safe. Julia probably had friends on the moon (or friends of friends of friends, ad infinitum). And somehow six degrees of separation from Julia always ended up at Jackson.

In the course of his lackadaisical odyssey around the country Jackson had been able to dovetail neatly the stalking of his thieving false wife with the pursuit of Hope McMaster’s case. Cornwall, Gwynedd, Doncaster, Harrogate were all locations where he had tried unsuccessfully to hunt down Hope McMaster’s mysterious identity. ‘So,’ Julia said, as they left Rievaulx Terraces behind them and headed towards the comforting arms of the Black Swan in Helmsley, ‘you’re basically looking for two women, your wife and Hope McMaster, and you have no idea who either of them really are.’