of cards and wrapping paper, calendars, candles, soaps, mugs and a lot of twee objects whose function wasn’t readily apparent. It was the kind of business that kept going by staggering from one festivity to the next – Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Hallowe’en, back to Christmas again, and all the birthdays in between.
‘Well, it has no purpose as such,’ Penny Trotter had said when Jackson questioned the raison d’être of a stuffed felt heart that had Love picked out in sequins across its scarlet surface. ‘You just hang it up somewhere.’ Penny Trotter had a romantic nature – it was her downfall, she said. She was a Christian, ‘born again’ in some way. (Once was enough, surely?) She wore a cross around her neck and a band around her wrist with the initials WWJD printed on it, which baffled Jackson. ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ she explained. ‘It makes me stop and think before I do something I might regret.’ Jackson reckoned he would find one of those useful. WWJD – What Would Jackson Do?
Brodie Investigations was the latest incarnation of Jackson’s erstwhile private detective agency, although he tried not to use the term ‘private detective’ – it had too many glamorous connotations (or sleazy, depending how you looked at it). Too Chandleresque. It raised people’s expectations.
Jackson’s days consisted of some dog-work for solicitors – debt tracing, surveillance and so on. Then there was employee theft, DBS, background checks, a bit of due diligence, but really when he hung up the virtual shingle for Brodie Investigations he may as well have suspended one of Penny Trotter’s stuffed hearts because the majority of his work was either following cheating spouses (infidelity, thy name is Gary) or trapping unsuspecting would-be Garys in the sticky insides of honeypots (or fly-traps, as Jackson thought of them) to test fiancés and boyfriends with temptation. Even Jackson, long in the tooth though he was, had not realized just how many suspicious women there were out there.
To this end, he primed his man-eating traps with an agent provocateur. This took the form of a particularly enticing yet lethal honey bee – a Russian woman called Tatiana. More hornet than honey bee, actually. Jackson had first encountered Tatiana in another lifetime when she had been a dominatrix and he had been fancy-free and – briefly, ludicrous though it seemed now – a millionaire. Not sex, not a relationship, God forbid, he’d rather go to bed with the aforesaid hornet than Tatiana. She had simply been on the fringes of an investigation he had got caught up in. And anyway he had been with Julia at the time (or had been under the impression that he was), busily creating the embryo that would one day sprawl its legs and fold its arms sarcastically. Tatiana had been a child of the circus, she claimed, her father a famous clown. Clowns in Russia were not funny, she said. They aren’t here either, Jackson thought. Tatiana herself, unlikely as it seemed, had once been a trapeze artist. Did she still practise? Jackson wondered.
The world had grown darker since he first met her, although the world grew darker every day as far as Jackson could make out, yet Tatiana remained much the same, although she, too, had reincarnated. He had come across her again by chance (he presumed, but who knew?) in Leeds, where she had been working as a waitress in a cocktail bar (there was a song in there somewhere), dipping and puppy-dogging for customers in a tight black sequinned dress. ‘Legitimate,’ she told him later, but the word was rendered implausible on her lips.
Jackson had been having a professional after-hours drink with a lawyer called Stephen Mellors for whom he did sporadic work. The bar was the kind of modish place where it was so dark that you could hardly see your drink in front of you. Mellors, a modish sort himself, metrosexual and proud of it, something Jackson could never be accused of, ordered a Manhattan while Jackson settled for a Perrier. Leeds had never struck Jackson as the kind of place where you could trust the tap water. Not that he had anything against alcohol, quite the opposite, but he had very strict self-imposed drink-driving rules. You only had to scrape a carload of over-the-limit teenagers off the tarmac once to see that cars and alcohol don’t mix.
A waitress had taken their order and a different waitress had brought it to their table. She had bobbed down with