Started Early, Took My Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

and fluffy.
    She’d been around so long that she had been a humble foot soldier when Peter Sutcliffe was still patrolling the streets of West Yorkshire. She remembered the fear, she’d been afraid herself. That was in the days before computers, when the sheer weight of paperwork was enough to swamp the investigation. ‘There were days before computers?’ one of her younger, cheekier colleagues said. ‘Wow, Jurassic.’
    He was right, she was from another era. She should have gone sooner, only hanging on because she couldn’t think how to fill the long empty days of retirement. Sleep, eat, protect, repeat, that was the life she knew. Everyone was fixated on the thirty years, get out, get another job, enjoy the pension. Anyone who stayed on longer was seen as a fool.
    Tracy would have preferred to have dropped in harness but she knew it was time to go. She had been a detective superintendent, now she was a ‘police pensioner’. Sounded Dickensian, as if she should be sitting in the corner of a workhouse, wrapped in a dirty shawl. She’d thought about volunteering with one of those organizations that helped mop up after disasters and wars. After all, it was something she felt she’d been doing all her life, but in the end she took the job in the Merrion Centre.
    At her farewell piss-up they had given her a laptop and two hundred quid’s worth of spa vouchers for the Waterfall Spa on Brewery Wharf. She was pleasantly surprised, even flattered, that they imagined she was the kind of woman who would use a spa. She already had a laptop and she knew the one they gave her was one of those that Carphone Warehouse gave away for free, but it was the thought that counted.
    When she took the job as head of security in the Merrion Centre Tracy thought ‘fresh start’ and made some changes, not just moving house but getting her moustache waxed, growing her hair into a softer style, shopping for blouses with bows and pearl buttons and shoes with kitten heels to wear with the ubiquitous black suit. It didn’t work, of course. She could tell that, spa vouchers or no spa vouchers, people still thought she was a butch old battleaxe.
    Tracy liked getting up close and personal with the punters. She strolled past Morrisons, the gap where Woolworths used to be, Poundstretcher – the retail preferences of the lumpenproletariat. Was there anyone in the entire soulless place who was happy? Leslie perhaps, although she kept her cards close to her chest. Like Janek, she had a life somewhere else. Tracy imagined Canada was a good place to live. Or Poland. Perhaps she should emigrate.
    It was warm today. Tracy hoped the weather would last for her holiday. A week in a National Trust cottage, lovely setting. She was a member. That was what happened when you grew older and had nothing fulfilling in your life – you joined the National Trust or English Heritage and spent your weekends meandering around gardens and houses that didn’t belong to you or gazing in boredom at ruins, trying to reconstruct them in your mind – long-gone monks cooking, pissing, praying inside walls of cold stone. And you spent your holidays on your own, of course. She’d joined a ‘singles social club’ a couple of years ago. Middle-aged, middle-class people who didn’t have any friends. Rambling, art classes, museum visits, all very sedate. She joined thinking it might be nice to go on holiday with other people but it hadn’t worked out. Spent all her time trying to get away from them.
    The world was going to hell in a handcart. The Watch Hospital, Costa Coffee, Wilkinson’s Hardware, Walmsley’s, Herbert Brown’s (‘Lend and Spend’ a fancy rhyme for a pawnbroker, eternal friend of the underclass). All human life was here. Britain – shoplifting capital of Europe, over two billion quid lost every year to ‘retail shrinkage’, a ridiculous term for what was, after all, straightforward thieving. And double that figure if you added the amount of stuff that