the dog over to Julia. Twenty-four hours of freedom, he thought.
He tossed a ball for Dido, a gentle throw that went just far enough to remind her that she was still a dog, but not so far that her rusty hips seized up altogether. She trotted ponderously off in pursuit before returning with the ball and dropping it at his feet. It was covered in slobber and sand, and Jackson made a mental note to buy one of those ball-launcher doo-dahs.
The beach was pretty empty at this hour, just Jackson and the congregation of early-morning dog-walkers. They acknowledged each other with a murmured ‘Morning’ or ‘Lovely morning’ (it was). The dogs were more enthusiastic, sniffing each other’s nether regions like connoisseurs. Thank God the owners didn’t have to do that, Jackson thought.
He could see Whitby from here, two miles south along the beach, the skeleton of the Abbey standing on top of the cliff. The tide was definitely going out, he decided. The beach was clean and gleaming in the morning sun. Every morning was a promise, Jackson thought, and chided himself for sounding like a greetings card. No, not a card – it was something he had seen written in Penny Trotter’s shop, the Treasure Trove – on a sign, a painted wooden one. She had a lot of them, along the lines of Caution – Free Range Children and Count the Memories, not the Calories (a motto she lived by, if her waistline was anything to go by), not to mention the ubiquitous Keep Calm and Carry On, banal advice that particularly raised Jackson’s ire.
A little further ahead something had been washed up by the tide. Dido was dipping her paws in the water as delicately as a dowager taking a paddle, and sniffing at whatever it was. It looked like a bag. Jackson called for Dido to come back to him because he didn’t like abandoned bags, even ones that looked as if they’d spent the night at sea. He had a sinking feeling as he approached it. Despite the fact that it was sodden and water-darkened, he could still make out the little rainbows. And a unicorn.
‘Shit,’ he said to Dido. She gave him a sympathetic if uncomprehending look.
‘I used to be a policeman.’
‘Yeah, they all say that,’ the desk sergeant said.
‘Really?’ Did they? Jackson wondered. And who were ‘they’? Men who came into the police station claiming that something bad had happened, which was what he had been asserting for the last ten minutes, to no avail.
‘I really was,’ he protested. ‘With the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. And now I’m a private investigator. I’ve got a licence,’ he added. It sounded lame, even to his own ears.
He had taken the unicorn-and-rainbow backpack home to the cottage and examined it while Nathan was shovelling Crunchy Nut Cornflakes into his mouth like a fireman stoking the boilers on the Titanic. They were on the forbidden list, but where was granola when you needed it? ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ Jackson said to him.
‘What is that? It looks gross.’
‘It’s not gross, just wet.’ The backpack had dried out quite a bit by now, as it had spent the last hour hanging on the rail of the Aga. Yes, Jackson was living with an Aga. He liked it. It was a more manly object than he had previously been led to believe.
‘Don’t you recognize it?’ Jackson asked.
‘Nope.’
‘That girl yesterday – the one on the Esplanade who was hitching?’
Nathan shrugged. ‘Kind of. The one you thought was hitching.’
‘Yes, that one. She was carrying one just like it. It’s seems too much of a coincidence to think it’s not hers.’ Jackson didn’t believe in coincidences. ‘A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen’ – that was one of his mantras. Also ‘If you get enough coincidences they add up to a probability,’ which he’d got from an old episode of Law and Order. ‘Why would it be in the sea?’ he puzzled.
‘Dunno,’ Nathan said.
He would get a less one-sided conversation with Dido, Jackson thought. ‘No, neither do I,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t feel good.’
The first time Jackson had seen the unicorn it had been in Scarborough, twenty miles further south. Had the currents brought it this far? Or had it been lost – or jettisoned – closer to here? Winds and tides and currents – they were the engines that drove the world, weren’t they? And yet he had no understanding of them at all.
The Girl with the Unicorn Backpack. It sounded