desperation on her skeletal features. She could have been any age between thirty and seventy. She had changed from the grandmother slippers into a pair of cheap knee-high black patent boots and beneath the oversized cardigan she was wearing a short skirt and a scanty sequined top. Much as he disliked jumping to easy conclusions, Jackson couldn’t help but think ‘working girl’, a bargain-basement one at that. He had always got on well with the oldest profession when he had been a policeman, and he took out his licence and embarked on his usual doorstep patter – ‘Miss Yardley, is it? My name’s Jackson Brodie. I’m a private detective working on behalf of a client, a Mrs Crystal Holroyd’ (The truth, after all.) ‘She’s asked me to make some enquiries about—’ Before he could make anything up she said, ‘Fuck off,’ and slammed the door in his face.
‘If you change your mind, give me a ring!’ he shouted through the letterbox before posting his card through.
‘Come on,’ he said to Dido, hustling her back into the car again. ‘We need to get our skates on or we’re going to be late for our date.’
It was only when he was nearing the Palace Theatre that he noticed the silver BMW, cruising quietly as a shark behind him.
The car turned right and Jackson hesitated for a moment before doing a dodgy U-turn and following it down a side street. To no avail, he could find no sign of it anywhere, so he drove back to the Palace, parked and took up a position at the bandstand. No band today, no music. The colliery where his father and brother had worked had had a brass band – what colliery didn’t, in those days? – and his brother had played the flugelhorn. The young Jackson had thought it was a silly name for an instrument, but Francis was good. He wished that he could just once hear his brother play a solo again. Or help his sister pin up the hem on a dress she’d made. Or have a goodnight peck on the cheek from his mother – the most intimacy she could manage. They were not a family who touched. Too late now. Jackson sighed. He was growing weary of himself. He sensed the time was approaching to let it go. After all, his future was in his own hands.
He waited at the bandstand for half an hour but Ewan proved a no-show. A youth had pitched up at one point, slouchy in a hoody, and Jackson wondered if his quarry was young after all, but within a few minutes he was joined by his similarly attired confrères, all in hoodies, trackies and trainers, which gave them a criminal air – pretty much like Nathan and his friends, in fact. Jackson caught a glimpse of the face of one of them – the drowned boy from the other day. He looked blankly through Jackson as if he wasn’t there and then they all moved off like a single-minded shoal. As he watched them leaving, Jackson realized that he was looking at Crystal Holroyd’s Evoque, parked opposite.
‘A bit of a coincidence, that, isn’t it?’ he said to Dido.
‘Well, you know what they say,’ Dido said. ‘A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.’ No, she didn’t say that. Of course she didn’t. She didn’t believe in coincidences, only fate.
Perhaps, it struck Jackson, he wasn’t following Crystal, perhaps she was following him. He liked a mysterious woman as much as the next man, but there was a limit to the attractions of an enigma and he was reaching it. Before this train of thought could advance any further it was derailed by the reappearance of Crystal herself, followed by a teenage boy – Jackson thought this must be Harry (a good boy) – who was carrying Snow White in his arms. She was not the pristine child he had seen earlier. The last time Jackson had seen Snow White she had been in Whitby. How had she got here? Teleportation?
Jackson was debating whether or not to make himself known to Crystal when all hell suddenly broke loose.
Harry carried Candy outside and Crystal unlocked the Evoque. Harry got in the back so he could strap his sister into her car seat. Crystal wanted him to come with them but he said, ‘I can’t miss the evening performance.’
‘It’s not a matter of life or death, you know, Harry,’ she said. She wished he would come with