‘Carol Braithwaite?’

‘No, Barry,’ Tracy said patiently, ‘not unless she’s risen from the grave. Linda Pallister, has Linda phoned you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, if she does, try and find out what she was on about, will you? Maybe she’s going to come clean.’

‘Come clean?’ he said.

‘About what happened to the kid.’

Tracy didn’t know why she was bothering. She had bigger fish to fry. And it was nothing to do with her any more. She was starting a new life. She’s leaving home. ‘Well, anyway, cheers for the info, Barry,’ she said, suddenly brisk. ‘See you around.’

‘Not if I see you first, you old mare.’

‘I’m on holiday actually, from Friday.’

‘Well, make sure you’re back in time for my leaving do.’

‘What leaving do?’

‘Ha, ha. Piss off.’

Would this day never end? Apparently not.

Just before midnight the phone rang. Who called at this time? Trouble, that was who. A spasm of fear grabbed Tracy’s heart. She’d been found out, someone wanted the kid back. She thought of that helpless little thing upstairs in the spare bedroom and her heart cramped further.

She took a deep breath and picked up the receiver, let it just be mad-as-a-bag-of-cats Linda Pallister, she prayed. Tracy was relieved that it was just the mystery caller. They listened to each other for a minute or so. The silence was almost soothing.

‘Not if I see you first, you old mare.’ Nearest he could get to affection. What was all that about? There’ve been no kids reported going astray, have there? It had always been the kids that got to Tracy. Well, they got to everyone, but Tracy had this thing about kids. Started with Lovell Park.

Carol Braithwaite wasn’t a name that Barry had ever expected to hear again and then that mad cow Linda Pallister phoned earlier, babbling on about being in trouble. He hadn’t spoken to her since Sam’s funeral. Chloe had been Amy’s chief bridesmaid. He couldn’t go to that place, couldn’t think about that day, walking her down the aisle. He shouldn’t have given her away, he should have kept her. Safe.

‘Mr Crawford,’ Linda had said, ‘Barry? Do you remember Lovell Park?’

‘No, Linda,’ Barry said. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘Someone’s asking questions,’ she said.

‘Someone’s always asking questions,’ Barry said. ‘That’s because there’s never enough answers to go round.’

‘A private detective called Jackson came to see me this morning,’ Linda Pallister said. ‘He was asking questions about Carol Braithwaite. I didn’t know what to say.’

‘I’d keep on keeping my mouth shut if I were you,’ Barry said. ‘You’ve managed it for thirty-five years.’

And now here was Tracy phoning him, asking if Linda had been in touch about Carol Braithwaite. He had lied, of course. What was that, Barry thought, a cock crowing? Risen from the grave, Tracy had said. A bloody great rooster. One, two, three.

Tracy used to bang on about Linda Pallister and Carol Braithwaite, claiming Linda had made the kid ‘disappear’. At the time he’d told her she was talking through her hat. But of course she was right, everyone had known more about Lovell Park than they let on, everyone except Tracy. She’d been like a bloodhound, trying to find out. It was a long time ago. All those blokes, DCS Walter Eastman, Ray Strickland, Rex Marshall, Len Lomax, one law for themselves, one law for everyone else. Eastman long dead and now Rex Marshall had played his last round of golf too, lying in an undertaker’s somewhere with his arteries furred up like old lead pipes. Falling like skittles. Only Strickland and Lomax left. And Barry. Who’d be the last man standing?

Barry should have said something, done something, but at the time one dead prostitute hadn’t seemed very important in the greater scheme of things. When you got older you realized that every single thing counted. Especially the dead.

He turned his collar up against the cold. All the warmth of the day had disappeared. Why didn’t men his age wear hats any more? When did that stop? His father used to wear a flat cap. Tweed. He quite fancied one himself but Barbara wouldn’t allow it. She controlled his wardrobe. He would rather be out here in the cold looking at the body of a dead whore in a skip than at home with his wife. Barbara would be sitting on the sofa, all prim and proper, not a hair out of place, watching some shit on the telly, quietly seething beneath the make-up. She’d spent thirty years trying to change him, she wasn’t going to give up on the challenge now. It was a woman’s job to try and improve a man. It was a man’s job to resist improvement. That was the way the world worked, always had, always would.

Before, before his grandson died, before Amy, his lovely daughter, was reduced to an empty shell, he hadn’t minded what state his relationship with her was in. It was a traditional, old-fashioned marriage, all the trimmings – he went out to work, Barbara stayed home and nagged. He spent half his life in the doghouse for one domestic misdemeanour or another. Didn’t bother him, he just went down the pub.

After the accident there was no point to anything. All hope gone. But still he shuffled on, one foot in front of the other. Mr Plod the Policeman. Doing his job. Because when he stopped he was going to have to stay at home with Barbara every day. Face up to the futility of everything. Bloody Caribbean cruise, as if that would make things better.

‘Boss?’

‘Yep?’

‘The SOCOs say we can move the body.’

‘Not my case, lad, talk to DI Miller. I’m just an innocent bystander.’

Ten o’clock. A long, lonely night stretched ahead of him.

Jackson thought about phoning Julia, last resort of the insomniac, a woman who abhorred the vacuum of a silence. She could talk anyone to sleep, could give a flock of sheep a run for their money any day, leave a donkey completely legless. Then he remembered how annoyed she had been last time he had called her late at night (‘I have to be on set at six. Is this important?’) and he decided not to risk her indignation.

Boredom drove him to read the folder of hotel information from cover to cover, the fire escape plans on the back of the door, a copy of Yorkshire Life, anything that wasn’t nailed down. He considered, and rejected, the idea of playing a mindless game on his phone and was eventually driven to look for a Gideon Bible in the bedside drawers but when he found one he realized he wasn’t that desperate yet. A yellow Post-it note fluttered out of the Bible. In pencil, someone had written, ‘The treasure here is you.’ Jackson stuck the Post-it note on his forehead and died of boredom.

He came back from the dead after ten minutes, a Lazarus licked to life by a canine redeemer. The dog looked worried. Could a dog look worried? Jackson yawned. The dog yawned. There had to be more to life than this. He folded the Post-it note and put it in his wallet in case he pitched up dead and the people who found him doubted his true worth.

‘Well, the sun’s long past the yardarm,’ he said. ‘Time to raid the minibar.’ Did he used to speak out loud? Before he had the dog? He was pretty sure that he hadn’t. Ergo, as Julia would have said, he was talking to the dog. Was that a bad sign? The dog looked at him as if it was interested in what he was saying. Jackson suspected that he was assigning emotions to the dog that it wasn’t actually experiencing.

He drank down a doll’s house-sized bottle of whisky and chased it with another. Leeds was famed for its nightlife, Jackson thought, why not go out and sample some of it? Just because he was in his golden years didn’t mean he couldn’t kick up his heels a little, make contact with his inner shining silver youth. Better surely than sitting in a hotel room, talking to a dog.