see the point of walking, let alone running (‘There is no point,’ Jackson said), and although Dido would have made a game attempt to go with him, the Queen of Carthage could really only run in her sleep now.
Running wasn’t pointless, of course. Sometimes you did it to try to outrun your thoughts, sometimes you did it to chase them and bring them down. Sometimes you did it so that you didn’t think at all. Jackson had tried meditation (he had, honestly), but he just couldn’t sit and think of nothing. Could anyone, really? He imagined the Buddha cross-legged beneath his tree with a cartoon speech balloon filled with things like ‘Remember to buy dog food, check tyre pressures, phone my accountant.’ But running – running was meditation.
Although at the moment his mind was full, rather than empty – consumed by the girl with the backpack. Or now, of course, without the backpack. He had trawled his police contacts – fewer than he thought, most were retired now or in some cases dead – and had come up with no one. He’d been out of the real business of detecting for too long. Entrapping unfaithful boyfriends and husbands wasn’t dealing with criminals, just high-functioning morons.
And as for image-enhancement software, he didn’t know where to start with that, so he had sent the photo of last night’s Peugeot’s number plate to Sam Tilling, his eager young apprentice. He was pretty sure he would know what to do with it. If he could decipher the number plate then Jackson could apply to the DVLA for the owner’s details – having a private investigator’s licence was useful for something, although not much. Not for the first time, Jackson found himself regretting leaving the police, where he’d had all those resources at his fingertips. Why did he leave? He honestly couldn’t remember. A whim, probably.
If he hadn’t retired from the field so prematurely he would be in clover by now. Out to pasture with a good pension, savings, lots of leisure time. He could be learning new things – hobbies, something he’d never had time for. Tree identification, for one. He was surrounded by them at the moment but he would have been hard-pressed to identify a single species. He could manage oak because the leaves were distinctive and because they had occupied such a central position in British history – all that shipbuilding, King Harry’s great navy. Heart of oak. Steady, boys, steady. The future Charles II hiding in an oak tree. When he was younger, Jackson’s politics had been on the side of the Roundheads, now he felt a certain sympathy towards the Royalists. It was the trajectory of age, he presumed.
As for the rest of the trees in the wood, they were just generic ‘trees’, he couldn’t tell a birch from a beech. Someone should invent a Shazam for trees and plants. (They probably had.) Gap in the market, Jackson thought. Quite a niche market though, National Trust members mostly. Middle class, middle income – the frail and overburdened backbone of England. The kind of people who owned Labradors and listened to The Archers and couldn’t abide reality TV. Me, Jackson thought. Even if the Labrador was on loan and he didn’t actually listen to The Archers (‘As if,’ as Nathan would say), just to Julia’s endless précis of the programme. Jackson was the first person in his entire family to elbow their way into the middle class and if anyone questioned his right to be there he could wave his National Trust membership card in their face as proof. Perhaps Julia was right about the class war being over but not everyone having lost.
He hadn’t encountered a single soul on his run. This wasn’t a popular part of the wood. You could probably die here and not be found for weeks. If ever. The same was true for a tree, he supposed. If a tree fell in the forest and there was no one to hear it, did it make a sound? Although it sounded like a Zen koan (yes, he knew the word ‘koan’), really it was a scientific question, to do with vibration and air pressure and the physiology of the ear. If a man fell in the forest—?
He went flying, tripping on a tree root that had been waiting in hiding to ambush him and exact revenge for his ignorance. More punishment for his knees. At least there was no one around to see his pratfall, although