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.

When Marilyn Nettles finally shuffled to the door, Jackson held up one of his business cards to prove his credentials. He caught a whiff of an old-fashioned scent – lavender and gin. The beginnings of a dowager’s hump and a mouth that looked as if it had spent a lifetime clamped around a cigarette. She took the card from him as if it might be smeared with something infectious and, peering at it, said dismissively, ‘Private Investigator, that could mean anything.’

‘Well, what it means,’ Jackson said helpfully, ‘is that I’m investigating something private. Carol Braithwaite,’ he added.

Marilyn Nettles gave a grunt of recognition at the name and said, ‘Well, come in, come in,’ suddenly impatient, even though she had been keeping him on the doorstep before.

Jackson had to duck to get through the door. The place was tiny, the front door opening directly into what an estate agent would have called ‘a living-kitchen’. An open stairway led up to the next storey. The house was simply one room stacked on top of another. Walking across the floor he felt its incline, like a funhouse. There was a wash of nicotine over the walls.

‘Sit down,’ she said, indicating a two-seater sofa, one half of which was occupied by what Jackson first took to be a cushion, then a piece of feline taxidermy and just as the question Why would you stuff a cat? passed through his brain the object itself turned into a real cat. At the sight of Jackson the animal rose from the sofa and stretched extravagantly, arching its back like a caterpillar. It was a strangely threatening gesture, a fighter warming up for the ring. It unsheathed its claws and flexed them, digging them deep into the fabric of the sofa. Jackson was glad he had left the dog tied to a railing in the yard outside.

As if reading his mind, Marilyn Nettles said, ‘Have you been with a dog?’ in much the same tone of voice a jealous wife would have used to ask him if he had been with another woman. ‘He hates dogs, can smell them at a hundred paces.’ Jackson sat down gingerly next to the cat, which had now settled grumpily back into its impersonation of a cushion. Jackson wondered if it suffered from the effects of passive smoking.

A little carriage-clock on the mantelpiece struck a tinny-sounding hour and Marilyn Nettles flinched like a woman who had just realized how long it was since she’d had a drink.

‘Coffee, Mr Jackson?’

‘It’s Brodie, actually. Jackson Brodie.’

‘Hmm,’ she said as if that seemed unlikely and wavered her way to the back of the room where some basic and pretty elderly appliances lined one wall. She flicked the switch on an electric kettle and spooned instant coffee into mugs before adding a slug of gin to one of them, which explained her unexpected hospitality, Jackson supposed.

The place was shabby, cat fur and dust floating on sunbeams. Nothing had been papered or painted, or indeed washed, for a long time. Something uncomfortably hard behind the cushion at his back turned out to be an empty bottle of Beefeater. There were clothes draped on the sofa. Jackson didn’t like to look too closely in case they proved to be Marilyn Nettles’s undergarments. He got the impression that she slept, ate and worked in this one room.

An old Olivetti Lettera sat on a table by the window, surrounded by piles of paper. Jackson got up from the sofa and investigated the manuscript. He started to read the unfinished page in the typewriter –

Little did petite blonde Debbie Mathers realize that the handsome debonair man she had married was really a monster in disguise who would use their apparently idyllic honeymoon as an opportunity to murder his new bride in order to collect on the insurance policy that he—

‘Mr Jackson?’

‘Sorry,’ Jackson said, flinching. He hadn’t heard Marilyn Nettles’s approaching tread on the biscuit-crumbed carpet. ‘Couldn’t help taking a peek at your latest oeuvre. It’s “Brodie”, by the way.’