His sister used to go dancing in Leeds on Saturday nights with her friends. He could still conjure up Saturday evenings – Francis bolting his tea so he could get out and drink and pick up girls and Niamh in a cloud of hairspray and perfume, fretting about missing the bus. She always came home on the last bus. Until the day she never came home at all.
Later, before Peter Sutcliffe was caught and confessed, when he was still the nameless Ripper and had a large back catalogue of murders to his name, Jackson sometimes wondered if it wasn’t possible that Niamh had fallen within his evil ken. His first victim wasn’t until 1975 but he had started attacking women before that, as early as 1969 he had been found with a hammer and charged with ‘going equipped for stealing’ and only with hindsight could you see what the hammer was for. Manchester, Keighley, Huddersfield, Halifax, Leeds, Bradford his hunting ground, only a short drive from Jackson’s home town. Niamh was strangled, Sutcliffe’s victims were hit on the head and then stabbed as a rule. But who knew what mistakes a man committed when he was still new to the job.
Why did men kill women? After all these years Jackson still didn’t know the answer to that question. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to.
He had a quick shower and attempted to spruce himself up before taking the dog out to perform its evening toilette, going through the whole palaver with the rucksack again. He wondered about buying something smaller, a terrier-sized bag, he was pretty sure that Paws for Thought would sell them. He had tried zipping the dog inside his jacket but it made him look as if he was pregnant. Never a good look. Not on a man anyway.
Jackson felt bad about the steaming brown coil the dog left behind and he had to retrieve an old newspaper from a bin to wrap it in. This was not a problem he had considered before, now he realized that he would have to buy something to pick up crap with. It was the first real drawback he’d encountered to having the dog.
He took the dog back to the room and left it lying Sphinx-like on the bed, watching him sadly. He felt its tragic abandoned eyes on him all the way down in the lift, through reception, and into the street. Perhaps he should have left the television on for it.
When he hit the street he realized that he was starving. He’d had nothing since a coffee and sandwich in the café at Kirkstall Abbey much earlier in the day. He went in search of food and ended up in an Italian restaurant that felt like a garden centre where he drank a half-carafe of Chianti and ate an indifferent bowl of pasta before heading off to look for the bright lights. After that it was all a bit of a blur. Unfortunately.
She woke in the dark, no idea how long she’d been asleep. Thought she was back at home in her own bed. Took her a long time to remember she was in Bluebell Cottage. Tilly missed the noise of London, she needed it to sleep. It was dark here. Too dark. Dark and quiet. Unnatural.
Tilly sat up in bed and listened but the silence was profound. Sometimes when she listened in the middle of the night she could hear all kinds of tiny rustlings and squeaks and squeals as if mysterious wildlife was cavorting around the cottage. She was occasionally woken by a dreadful high-pitched keening which she suspected was some small creature having its life snuffed out by a fox. She always imagined foxes dressed in checked waistcoats and breeches, a hat with a feather. A legacy, she supposed, of some book from her childhood. As a child she had seen a diorama somewhere of stuffed rabbits dressed up as humans. Does in frocks and pelisses, bucks dressed like dandies and squires, a musical quartet, complete with miniature instruments. Rabbits posing as servants in mob caps, in aprons. A heartbreaking row of tiny baby rabbits tucked up in bed, fast asleep for ever. It was repellent and fascinating at the same time and it haunted Tilly’s imagination for years afterwards.
But tonight there were no rabbit hoedowns or mice quadrilles, cunning Mr Fox wasn’t seducing the henhouse, there was just a silence so deep and dark that it was like the sounds of a different dimension rather than the absence of noise.
Tilly clambered awkwardly out of bed, went over to the open window. When she drew back the curtains she was surprised to see a candle burning steadily in a bedroom window in the cottage across the way. Jesus bids us shine with a pure, clear light. Someone keeping a vigil or sending a signal? Late to bed or early to rise? The candle seemed to have a meaning beyond itself but she couldn’t imagine what it might be. Like a little candle burning in the night.
And then an invisible hand lifted the candlestick and moved it away from the window. Shadows flared and loomed on the wall and then the room fell back into darkness.
Suddenly she was awake again. She had been running after a little girl, running and running, down endless corridors, up and down staircases, but she couldn’t catch up with her. And then she was the little girl and she was holding the paw of a small rabbit. They were running for their lives, hand in paw, while being chased by a giant cod. The cod was swimming through the air, sinuous and powerful, whipping its silver body around corners. Ridiculous, it really made you wonder where dreams came from. The rabbit let out a terrible cry as the big ugly lips of the cod closed on its tail. The rabbit was her baby, she understood. The one she had lost all those years ago. She woke up when she heard a voice say, Someone should do something, Matilda. Was it the cod who spoke? It was a very posh accent, you didn’t think of cod speaking with a posh accent. Well, of course, you didn’t think of them speaking at all. It was only when she was drifting off to sleep again that Tilly realized it was the voice of her old drama teacher, Franny Anderson.
Tracy retrieved the Viennese truffles from her bag. It was in another life that she had bought them in Thornton’s. A different life. Before Courtney. BC.
She switched on the TV. The truffles had melted and fused together. Tasted the same though, if you didn’t look at them. Britain’s Got Talent was long finished. She looked for a film on cable and all she could find that was watchable was an unseasonable Elf. She recorded it on Sky Plus for Courtney. Pressing the red record button felt like a commitment to the future. Not that they were going to hang around here to watch it but it was the thought that counted.
If Carol Braithwaite’s life hadn’t been interrupted so abruptly she might be sitting down on her sofa now, feet up, glass and fag in hand, searching through six hundred channels and finding nothing worth watching. In the intervening years she probably wouldn’t have lived a life of much consequence but then who did? But she was long gone. You would think she had disappeared for ever but her name remained, it seemed. The cupboard door was open, the box was off the shelf, the lid was up. Why did Linda Pallister want to talk to her about Carol Braithwaite?
Linda had worked in Child Services all her life, she must have seen the worst that people could offer. Tracy had seen the worst and then some. She felt soiled by everything she had witnessed. Filth, pure and simple. Massage parlours and lap-dancing clubs at the soft end and at the other end the hardcore DVDs of people doing repugnant things to each other. The unclassified stuff that scrambled your synapses with its depravity. The young girls trading their souls along with their bodies, the bargain-basement brothels and saunas, sleaziness beyond belief, girls on crack who would do anything for a tenner. Anything. Arresting girls for soliciting and seeing them go straight back on the streets; foreign girls who thought they were coming to work as waitresses and nannies and found themselves locked in sordid rooms, servicing one man after another all day; students working in ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ (ha!) to pay their fees. Free speech, liberal do-gooders, the rights of the individual – as long as it’s not harming anyone else. Blah, blah, blah. This was where it got you. Rome under Nero.