Big Sky (Jackson Brodie) by Kate Atkinson

Author:Kate Atkinson [Atkinson, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781409043850
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2019-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Unicorn in the Room

There was a café in town that Jackson had suggested might be a good place to meet. He knew they allowed dogs, although that was true of just about everywhere, no one would have had any trade in this town if they didn’t embrace the canine customer, but this particular place also managed a decent pot of coffee. He had arrived early and had already drained the cup sitting in front of him while Dido, at his feet beneath the table, was still chewing her way industriously through the cooked sausage he had ordered for her. (‘Losing her teeth,’ Julia said sadly.)

He had bought a copy of the Yorkshire Post from a nearby newsagent and was perusing it idly, wondering if Vince Ives’s wife’s murder had made it into its pages. He eventually found it inside, a small piece about ‘Wendy Easton, also known as Ives’. A police spokesman said it was ‘a particularly brutal murder. We are asking anyone who may have information to come forward.’ Nothing about the golf club that she was attacked with, they must be keeping that detail back. Jackson’s inner policeman was still interested in the golf club. Was it Vince’s spare putter – a weapon of opportunity – or did the killer bring it with him in a premeditated act? If—

‘Mr Brodie?’

‘Mrs Holroyd?’

‘You’ll recognize me,’ Jackson had told the new client over the phone, ‘because I’ll be the man with the yellow Labrador.’ He should probably have been wearing a red carnation in his buttonhole or carrying a copy of the Guardian, both of which, around here, would have been less likely than a man in the company of a yellow Lab.

She was called Mrs Holroyd and she hadn’t reciprocated with a means of identifying herself to him. It had struck him when she said her name that fewer and fewer women these days prefaced themselves with the epithet ‘Mrs’. It was a title that made him think of his mother. Headscarf and shopping bag and a washerwoman’s hands.

Crystal Holroyd did not look like his mother. Not at all. Not one bit.

Tall, blonde, and apparently enhanced in many different ways, Crystal Holroyd was accessorized not with a dog but a child, a girl called Candy, masquerading, if Jackson wasn’t mistaken, as Snow White. Or rather, Disney’s idea of Snow White – the familiar red and blue bodice and yellow skirt, the iconic red headband with the little bow. Jackson had once been the father of a small girl. He knew these things.

He felt a little spasm of pain at the memory of the last time he had seen Marlee, no longer little, no longer a girl but a grown-up woman now. They’d had a furious row that seemed to erupt out of nothing. (‘You’re such a Luddite, Dad. Why don’t you just go and find a picket line to stand on somewhere or join a demonstration and shout “Maggie Thatcher – milk snatcher!”’ Yes, it had been a complex and rather long-winded insult.

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