‘Grab the St John’s Ambulance bloke before he leaves the theatre. This stupid bugger’s having a heart attack.’
And then it all went dark.
Everyone Wants to Be the Wolf
EWAN: WUU2TPM?
CHLOE: Nothing. Meet u?
EWAN: What time good 4u?
CHLOE: 4?
EWAN: Yh?? Great? Sos where?
CHLOE: Spa?
EWAN: Gud. Bandstand?
CHLOE: OK
EWAN: SYS! LOLO!
It was like learning a foreign language. It was a foreign language. Chloe – the real Chloe – was locked in her bedroom and grounded for the rest of her life after her mother had discovered that she was being groomed online. ‘Ewan’ purported – unlikely in the extreme – to like puppies and Hello Kitty and a slick Korean boy band that Jackson had watched on YouTube with a kind of fascinated horror. ‘Getting down with the kids, Dad?’ Nathan said sarcastically when he spotted him watching it. In reality, Jackson supposed, Ewan was probably a pitiful fortysomething sitting in front of his computer in his underpants. (‘Well, you know,’ Julia said, ‘a large proportion of paedophiles are quite young.’ How on earth did she know that? ‘We covered it in an episode of Collier. Didn’t you see it?’ ‘Mm, must have missed that one,’ he said. He did know that, actually, and somehow he wished he didn’t. The idea of boys not that much older than Nathan stalking girls on the internet was too disturbing.)
Chloe’s mother, a terrifying woman called Ricky Kemp, had opted not to follow the conventional route of calling the police, mainly because her partner, Chloe’s father, was a certified member of the East Coast criminal fraternity. ‘I know some really bad people,’ she said. Jackson didn’t doubt her.
Jackson had been handed Chloe’s laptop and phone by Ricky and was now masquerading as her in an attempt to net Ewan. Reverse grooming in the strange world of dark justice.
‘And then when you’ve collared him just hand him over to me,’ Ricky instructed. Jackson wasn’t against entrapment – it took up the bulk of his business – nor was he against clearing the streets of one more pervert, but he wasn’t at all sure about the handing-over bit. He wasn’t a vigilante, he really wasn’t, although his idea of right and wrong didn’t always conform to the accepted legal standard. Which was a nice way of saying that he had broken the law. On more than one occasion. For the right reasons.
Ewan might be a sad loser, but did Jackson want to be responsible for him being beaten to a pulp – or worse, probably – by Chloe’s father and his underworld friends? If he did manage to rendezvous with Ewan, Jackson planned to risk the wrath of the local mafia and make a citizen’s arrest, before calling the police and letting the cold dead hand of the law take care of him.
Hopefully it would all be resolved this afternoon at four o’clock when they met for their ‘date’.
He made coffee on the Aga with the help of his faithful old friend Bialetti and sat in the morning sun on the bench outside his front door. Dido bumbled out after him and stretched at his feet on the small lawn in front of the cottage. Jackson scratched her behind her left ear, a favoured spot, and her fur quivered down the length of her spine. (‘You quiver if I scratch behind your ear?’ Tatiana asked. She had met Dido. She liked dogs, she said. When she was ‘little child’ she had been part of a dog troupe act. ‘We turn tricks together,’ she told him. ‘Do tricks,’ he corrected her. ‘Whatever.’)
Jackson wondered idly how Vince was getting on. It took him a moment to retrieve his surname, proceeding methodically through the alphabet until he got to ‘I’. Ives. St Ives, he thought. Jackson had never been to Cornwall, there were still large patches of the map of Britain that remained unexplored by him. (Leicestershire – a mystery. Ditto Suffolk. And many other places as well, to be honest.) Perhaps he should go on a road trip. A grand tour of the kingdom. Perhaps he’d find St Mary Mead if he looked hard enough.
Vince Ives probably wasn’t a saint, but Jackson didn’t feel he was a sinner either. But who knew?
It wasn’t every day you fell off a cliff. Luckily, it turned out that there was a handy life-saving shelf of sloping rock beneath and they had only fallen a few feet, although they had both yelled enough to start an avalanche before slithering to a halt inches from the edge.