like one of those Scandi noir books that he didn’t read. Jackson didn’t like them much – too dark and twisted or else too lugubrious. He liked his crime fiction to be cheerfully unrealistic, although in fact he hardly read anything any more in any genre. Life was too short and Netflix was too good.
The unicorn backpack had yielded no clues. No purse, not so much as a hairbrush or soggy bus pass. ‘I’ll take it into a police station later,’ he said to Nathan. There was no police station where he was living. Just the valley, the wood, a shop, a string of estate-worker and holiday cottages. Sometimes the cows. There was a hotel of sorts, too – the Seashell. He’d had a so-so pub lunch in the beer garden with Julia and Nathan. Fish pies, sticky toffee puddings, that kind of thing. They were served in individual pottery dishes. ‘Freezer to microwave,’ Julia said dismissively, even though that pretty much described her own cuisine.
‘Okay,’ Nathan said with a shrug, interested in neither the genesis nor the exodus of the unicorn backpack. His own backpack was enormous, with a huge swoosh on it. Even his phone cover was branded with logos. Teenage boys were like living sandwich boards, covered in free advertising for corporate evil. Whither individuality? Jackson wondered. (‘Oh, enough with the Anthem for Doomed Youth,’ Julia said.)
‘Come on, eat up,’ he said. ‘Time to go.’
‘In a minute.’
‘Now.’
‘In a minute. I’ve got to do this.’ He was Instagramming his cereal. No, actually he was photographing himself, the cornflakes just happened to be in shot. Teenage boys didn’t photograph the food in front of them, that wouldn’t have been cool – it was what the very uncool Garys and Kirstys of this world did, snapping every meal that passed in front of their faces. Lamb Kandhari in the Bengal Brasserie on the Merrion Way. Chicken Pad Thai in Chaopraya. Kirsty and her favourite cocktail – lime daiquiri – in Harvey Nichols. The daiquiri photographed better than Kirsty. Jackson had been on holiday in South Africa a few years ago (long story) and the bar staff couldn’t understand the way the woman he was with (even longer story) pronounced her drink of choice – a daiquiri or, in her thick accent, a ‘dackerree’. She was unrepentantly from the wrong side of the Pennines, so the whole trip had been damned from the start. Her considerable thirst was finally quenched when she learned to communicate by pronouncing it ‘dikeeree’, courtesy of Jackson, channelling a non-PC version of himself. (‘What do you call a nest of lesbians? A dyke eyrie.’ The court of women gave no relief to him on this one.)
Jackson himself would never have drunk anything so frivolous. A straight malt, a pint of Black Sheep, a Ricard or a Pernod on occasion.
Kirsty put all her food and drink on her private Instagram account in the misplaced belief that Penny Trotter would never see it. ‘Fat Rascals in Bettys in Harlow Carr – yum!’ (‘Fat Bastards,’ Julia called them.) ‘Nothing’s ever private,’ Sam Tilling, Jackson’s helpmeet, said – because apart from covering the more tedious aspects of surveillance, the boy detective was also a boy wizard – not in the Potter sense (although unfortunately for his love life he was a bit Potterish), but he knew more about computing than Jackson ever wanted to.
‘He’ll kill himself,’ Penny Trotter said, perusing the photographs with him the last time Jackson had visited the Treasure Trove. Gary’s wedding-ringed hand was in the picture as he reached for a vanilla slice. He was diabetic. Type 2, Jackson presumed – it was how the human race was going to end, on a tide of sugar and visceral fat – but no, his faithful wife said, type 1. ‘The full Monty, daily injections of insulin,’ which she had to remind him about. ‘He’s the sort of man who needs mothering,’ Penny said. Did Kirsty know? Jackson wondered. Would she be plying him with Fat Rascals if she did? Did she mother him? It seemed unlikely.
‘Come on,’ Jackson said to Nathan.
‘In a minute.’
‘Because, like, photographing yourself’s important,’ Jackson said sarcastically.
‘Yeah. It is.’ (‘You can’t impose your own values on him,’ Julia said. I can damn well try, Jackson thought. It was his job to make a man out of the boy.)
Jackson supposed he should be grateful that he didn’t have to wrangle his son to school every morning. Grateful, too, that Nathan wasn’t climbing into strangers’ cars