1975: 9 April

The stench inside was unbelievable. Decomposition. Tracy wouldn’t be able to get it out of her nostrils for days. It was on her skin, her uniform, her hair. Years later she just had to think about the flat in Lovell Park and she could smell it. Kiddy was just standing there in the hallway when they broke in. Filthy, nothing but skin and bone, looked like a famine victim.

Still knackered from climbing fifteen flights and putting in an unexpectedly resistant door, Ken Arkwright moved his beefy body with surprising speed along the hallway and snatched the kiddy up, passed the emaciated little thing to Tracy and started searching in the other rooms.

Tracy held the weightless little body and stroked the dirty hair and murmured, ‘Everything’s all right now.’ Couldn’t think what else to say, what else to do.

Arkwright reappeared and said, ‘No more kiddies, but . . .’ With an inclination of his head he indicated a door he had opened further up the hallway.

‘What?’ Tracy said.

‘In the bedroom.’

‘What?’

Arkwright dropped his voice to a whisper and said, ‘The mum.’

‘Shit. How long?’

‘Couple of weeks by the look of it,’ Arkwright said. Tracy felt her stomach heave. Told herself to hold on, to think about Dad’s roses, Mum’s Izal, anything that didn’t smell of rotting flesh.

She carried the kiddy through to the living room, glanced in the bedroom as she passed, shielding the kiddy’s eyes, even though they were already closed. She had a glimpse of something on the floor, couldn’t make out what it was but she knew it was bad.

Detective Constable Ray Strickland and Detective Sergeant Len Lomax, first officers from CID on the scene in Lovell Park. They certainly took their time. Tracy looked out of the living-room window, all those dizzying flights down, and saw them finally arriving in a flurry of macho brakes but instead of rushing into the building they got out of the car and stood next to it, deep in conversation – or argument, it was hard to say from this height. There was something conspiratorial in their stance.

‘What the fuck are they doing?’ Arkwright said and Tracy replied, ‘Dunno. Where’s the ambulance? Why is it taking so long?’ What if the kiddy pegged out now? It was a miracle that the kiddy had managed to stay alive all this time – must have grubbed around in cupboards for food. ‘Don’t die, please,’ Tracy murmured, more prayer than request.

Tracy and Arkwright had walked all over the place. The contamination of evidence must have been phenomenal. You didn’t think so much about that then. Now they would have scarpered the second they saw the body, not gone back in until the SOCOs had combed every inch.

Tracy watched as a bicycle rolled up. A girl dismounted and the two detectives pulled apart from each other. The girl was wearing a long smock that looked like a nightdress and her two curtains of hair hung limply on either side of her pale face. Arkwright said, ‘Ey up, the hippies are here.’

‘But where’s the fucking ambulance?’Tracy said. Before she joined the police she had never said so much as ‘damn’, now she cursed like the best of them. She watched as the girl said something to Lomax and Strickland, all three of them wheeled round and came into the building.

‘Listen,’ Arkwright said, cocking his head to one side. ‘That ruddy lift’s working now, would you believe it? It’s like the universe has got one rule for them and one rule for us peasants.’

When Lomax and Strickland arrived at Carol Braithwaite’s door, the besmocked girl was trailing on their heels. ‘Linda Pallister,’ she said with a curt nod in the direction of Ken Arkwright, Tracy invisible apparently. ‘I’m the social worker on call.’With her scrubbed face and robust cyclist’s calves, she looked more like a fifth-former than a grown woman with a job.

‘We don’t need a fucking social worker, we need a fucking ambulance,’ Tracy hissed at her. Strickland suddenly ran out of the room and they all listened to the sound of him throwing up in the bathroom.

‘Sensitive lad, our Ray,’ Len Lomax said.

‘No sign of the pathologist,’ Len Lomax said, ‘but the ambulance is here.’

‘Right,’ Linda Pallister said, when the ambulance men arrived at the door of the flat. She took the kiddy off Tracy, Tracy holding on just a second longer than necessary. ‘It’s OK, I know what I’m doing,’ Linda Pallister said and Tracy nodded mutely, suddenly afraid that she might cry.

When they’d gone, Tracy said to Len Lomax, ‘I asked the kiddy who did it, who did this to Mummy.’

‘And?’

‘Said “Daddy”.’

Lomax laughed, a brutal sound in the dead quiet. ‘It’s a wise child that knows its own father. And as for that bint,’ he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the bedroom where the woman’s decaying body was still lying, ‘I’d bet a hundred to one that she couldn’t name the father.’ He took out his notebook with a strangely theatrical flourish and looked around as if he was going to conjure clues out of the walls.

‘Did you know her?’ Tracy asked. Lomax looked at her as if she’d just grown another head. ‘Of course I didn’t fucking know her,’ he said.

Tracy glanced at Ray Strickland. He looked shaky and green as if he was about to throw up again. He hadn’t even gone through to look at the body yet. When they first entered the flat Tracy heard them all talking in the hallway, heard Lomax say to Linda Pallister, ‘That’s the bedroom on the left, where the body is.’

‘How did he know that?’ she asked Arkwright in the pub when they came off shift.

‘Psychic,’ Arkwright said. ‘He does table-knocking and spirit readings in the Horse and Trumpet’s snug on Thursday evenings.’ Arkwright had a way of saying things so dead-pan that Tracy took him seriously for a second.

‘Think the next round’s yours, lass,’ he laughed.

Neither Lomax nor Strickland bothered with a statement from Tracy.

‘What could you have to say that he hasn’t said?’ Lomax said, jabbing a finger in Arkwright’s direction.

Barry, of all people, pitched up, said, ‘Sir?’ to Strickland.

‘Getting to be Ray’s bum-boy, isn’t he?’ Arkwright murmured to Tracy. Strickland said something inaudible to Barry and then Barry looked as sick as Strickland. They disappeared into the small, cold kitchen, where empty packets of cereal and anything else the kiddy had been able to find were strewn across the floor. It was a miracle that the kiddy hadn’t died of hypothermia, let alone starvation.

Lomax said, ‘Bugger off,’ to Arkwright, ‘and get knocking on a few doors. And take her with you,’ he said, nodding his head in Tracy’s direction. Arkwright retained an admirable poker face. ‘Let’s get going, lass,’ he said.

Carol Braithwaite, the neighbours said. Blankly. Nobody seemed to know her. ‘Only moved in at Christmas,’ one of them said. ‘Bit raucous, heard a few fights.’ Hear anything else? ‘Kid crying.’ ‘She brought men back,’ another one said. The classic ‘Kept herself to herself,’ from another one. Nobody knew her. Never would now.

Of course, everything was subjective. No true fixed point in the world. Tracy was beginning to understand that.

Tracy and Arkwright, knocking on door after door in Lovell Park. Thin walls, Tracy said, you would think someone would have heard something.

Carol Braithwaite. Three ‘O’ Levels and two convictions for soliciting.

‘A good-time girl,’ Arkwright said. A good-time girl. Police-speak. It didn’t help an investigation if you said the word ‘prostitute’. They got what they deserved, deserved what they got.

‘Doesn’t look like she had much of a good time to me,’Tracy said.

One of those three ‘O’ Levels had been in needlework, another in cookery, the third in typing. Information courtesy of flower-child Linda Pallister. Carol would have made a good wife but somehow that wasn’t the path she’d taken. At school Tracy had always been wary of the domestic science crowd – methodical girls with neat handwriting and neither flaws nor eccentricities. For some reason they were usually good at netball as well, as if the gene that enabled them to jump for the hoop contained the information necessary for turning out a cheese and onion flan or creaming a Victoria spongesandwich mix. Their career paths didn’t usually lead to prostitution. Of course, if you said ‘gene’ in the seventies people thought Levi’s or Wranglers. They weren’t the hot topic they were now. Tracy wondered if Carol Braithwaite had ever played netball.