Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

what? Not my kid? Tracy closed the bus doors in her mind. Put big metal security shutters down. She hadn’t heard anything. Thought instead about that little warm hand slipping into hers.
    She knew someone who could find out more for her. Linda Pallister. She was still in fostering and adoption, wasn’t she? If she hadn’t retired yet, she could find out the status of Kelly Cross’s kids.
    Tracy couldn’t remember when she had last seen Linda Pallister. It must have been at Barry Crawford’s daughter’s wedding, three years ago. Detective Superintendent Barry Crawford,Tracy’s ex-colleague. Linda’s daughter, Chloe, was best friends with Barry’s daughter, Amy, and was the chief bridesmaid, a fright in burnt-orange satin. ‘I had “bronze” in my head for their dresses, you know,’ Amy Crawford said ruefully to Tracy. Nothing in the poor girl’s head but mush now that she inhabited the land of the living dead. Her own dress had been the usual overblown white garment, her bouquet made up of raffish orange and yellow flowers. The men’s buttonholes were a single orange gerbera, like something a clown would squirt water out of. (‘I wanted something a little bit different,’ Amy said.)
    ‘Very cheerful,’ Barbara Crawford, mother of the bride, had commented, wincing at the gaudiness of it all. Barbara herself tastefully overdressed in turquoise silk (‘Paule Vasseur,’ she murmured to Tracy as if it were a secret). It had been no parish tea affair for Barry and Barbara’s one and only, but a lavish case of overspend. Politely, no one mentioned that the bride’s belly was already straining at her wedding dress.
    The bridesmaids’ shoes were burnt orange too, their pointy feet poking out from beneath jaundiced dresses that looked like the sunset at the end of the world. Their bouquets hung from their arms on ribbon-like handbags, big pomanders or perhaps colourful cannonballs. ‘I tried to suggest something different, I really did,’ Barbara Crawford said in the loudest sotto voce that Tracy had ever heard. ‘Amy was always so headstrong.’
    Amy’s husband was called Ivan. Ivan the Terrible , Barry always called him, naturally. ‘Ivan? What kind of a name is that?’ he said to Tracy after Amy’s engagement was announced. ‘Bloody Russian.’
    ‘Actually, I think it’s because he had a Norwegian grandfather,’ Tracy said.
    ‘Norwegian?’ Barry said incredulously, as if she’d just announced that Ivan’s family came from the moon. Ivan was a financial adviser, Tracy had consulted him when she was wondering where to stash her annual ISA. ‘Pop in and have a chat, no charge for a friend of Barry’s,’ he said to her at the wedding. He seemed a nice enough chap, pretty harmless on the whole, which was about the best you could hope for from a human being, in Tracy’s opinion. Unfortunately, he went bankrupt shortly afterwards and lost the business. No one wanted financial advice from a man who couldn’t even keep his hands on his own money. Barry implied there was fraud involved but when Tracy went to see Ivan to retrieve some paperwork he explained that he had lost a flash drive with all his clients’ details on it. ‘Must have slipped out of my pocket,’ Ivan said miserably to Tracy. Most of his clients took away their business after that. ‘I would have done the same,’ Ivan said.
    ‘Not even a traditional fruit cake,’ Barbara fretted, coming across Tracy forking up the chocolate sponge and butter cream wedding cake.
    ‘Well, at least it’s not orange,’ Tracy said.
    Of course, Tracy was in no position to make style notes about anything. Uncomfortable in a powder blue, polyester-mix two-piece that was giving off so much static she worried she would spontaneously combust before they got to the cutting of the cake. She’d bought a hat but didn’t wear it because it made her look like a man in drag. Tracy could count the number of weddings she’d been invited to on the fingers