ago. It was up to him, Jackson knew, to make things better. You could hardly walk your daughter up the aisle if you were at loggerheads with her.
Mrs Holroyd’s daughter, in contrast to his own, seemed a placid, well-behaved sort of child. She was eating apple slices with one hand, and with the other was holding a soft toy that at first Jackson had taken for a white horse but on closer inspection turned out to be a unicorn, its horn a spiralling rainbow cornet. He thought of the girl on the Esplanade. Inevitably. He had a duty of care that he was failing to fulfil.
‘Are you all right, Mr Brodie?’
‘Yes, yes, Mrs Holroyd, thanks.’
‘Call me Crystal.’
He ordered another pot of coffee and she ordered a mint tea. Jackson always felt slightly mistrustful of people who drank herbal tea. (Yes, he did know this was utterly irrational.) He was about to fold up the Yorkshire Post, ready to get down to business, when she put her hand on his arm and said, ‘Hang on.’ She took the newspaper off him and read intently. Her lips moved when she read, he noticed. They were very nice lips, not apparently subjected to surgery like some other parts of her – not that he was necessarily an expert in these things. She wore pink lipstick. The lipstick matched her (very) high heels, a classic kind of court shoe that implied a woman, rather than a girl. You could tell a lot about a person by their shoes. The short, but not immodestly short, dress she was wearing showed off her great legs. (‘Observational conclusions,’ he said in his defence to Judge Julia in his head. She presided over the court of women.)
‘Wendy Ives. Murdered,’ Crystal Holroyd murmured, shaking her head. ‘What the duck? I can’t believe it.’
‘Did you know her?’ Jackson asked. He supposed it was a small town.
‘Yeah, a bit. Just socially. She’s married to Vince, he’s a friend of my husband. Nice bloke.’
Vince hadn’t mentioned any friends last night, in fact he had seemed remarkably friendless to Jackson.
‘They were getting divorced,’ she went on. ‘Wendy had started calling herself by her maiden name.’ She frowned at the newspaper. ‘She wasn’t particularly nice, not that that’s a reason to kill someone.’
‘Sometimes it’s enough,’ Jackson said.
‘Well, she certainly gave Vince the runaround.’
‘I met him by chance last night,’ Jackson confessed.
‘Really? How? Where?’
‘On the cliffs. He was thinking of jumping.’
‘Fuck me,’ she said and then clamped her hands over Snow White’s ears as if trying to beat the speed of sound and said to her, ‘You didn’t hear that, sweetheart.’ Snow White carried on contentedly eating her apple – one slice for her, one slice for the unicorn. No poisoning ensued, no glass coffin required.
It seemed Crystal Holroyd suspected that she was being followed and she wanted him to find out by who.
‘Do you think it could be your husband? Does he think you might be cheating on him?’ Jackson sighed inwardly at finding himself on familiar turf. Yet another suspicious spouse. But – to his surprise – this didn’t seem to be the case.
‘Could be Tommy, I suppose,’ she said. ‘It seems unlikely, though.’
‘Are you?’ Jackson asked. ‘Cheating on your husband? Just so we’re clear.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I am not.’
‘Who else would have a reason to follow you, do you suppose?’
She shrugged. ‘That’s what I’m asking you to find out, isn’t it?’
He got the distinct impression that there was something she wasn’t saying. Truth, in Jackson’s experience, was often to be found skulking behind the lines. Sometimes, of course, that could be preferable to it charging you from the front with a bayonet.
Jackson couldn’t imagine being married to a woman who looked like Crystal Holroyd. The Only Way is Essex, a programme he had come across by accident (truly) when channel-surfing, was full of Crystal types. She wasn’t from Essex – she was, if he judged her accent right, from somewhere in the East Riding. It showed how old he was, Jackson supposed, that he still thought in terms of the Yorkshire ridings, done away with years ago when the administrative boundaries were redrawn.
Crystal Holroyd wasn’t his type, although Jackson wasn’t sure he had a type any more. (‘As long as she’s breathing, I expect,’ Julia said recently. Unnecessarily hostile, he thought.) His ideal woman used to be Françoise Hardy – he had, after all, always been a bit of a Francophile. He had in fact married someone in that mould, albeit English