Started Early, Took My Dog Quotes
"Despite pleas from her teachers to stay on and ‘make something of herself’, Tracy had left school at fifteen to do a shorthand and typing course and went straight into Montague Burton’s offices as a junior, eager to get on with her adult life."
"Sixteen, never been kissed by a boy, never drunk wine, not even Blue Nun. Never eaten an avocado or seen an aubergine, never been on an aeroplane. It was different in those days."
"Her stomach rumbled like a train. She’d been on the cottage cheese and grapefruit diet for a week. Wondered if you could starve to death while you were still overweight."
"‘Jesus H. Christ,’ Arkwright gasped, bending over and resting his hands on his knees when they finally achieved the fifteenth floor. ‘I used to be a rugby wing forward, believe it or not.’"
"‘Ay, well, you’re just an old, fat bloke now,’ Tracy said."
"‘Remember, don’t hurt the nanny.’ ‘Unless I have to.’"
"‘What a week,’ Grant said, making a gurning face. ‘School half-term and a bank holiday. We’ll be going over the top. It’ll be carnage.’"
"‘She’s passing Workout World,’ Grant said. ‘Tracy’s OK,’ Leslie said. ‘She’s a Nazi.’ ‘No she’s not.’"
"‘Ey up,’ Grant said. ‘Tracy’s going into Thornton’s. Must need her daily rations topping up.’"
"‘She’s a right fat pig,’ Grant said. ‘She’s not fat, just big.’"
"‘You’re a big girl,’ he said when she met him for a drink beforehand in Whitelock’s. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Want to make something of it?’"
"Think how many starving kids you could feed and educate with all that missing money. But then it wasn’t money, was it, not real money. There was no such thing as real money any more, it was just an act of the collective imagination."
"Regrets, she had a few. Quite a lot actually. Wished she’d found someone who appreciated her, wished she’d had kids and learned how to dress better."
"‘Someone should do something.’ Tilly was surprised to find herself speaking out loud."
"Not really an equal footing. Tilly’s father had owned a wet fish shop in the Land of Green Ginger – a street more romantic in name than in reality."
"You go to sleep living in a prosperous country and you wake up in a poor one, how did that happen? Where had the money gone, and why couldn’t they just get it back?"
"If Tilly had had a child she would have wrapped it in lamb’s wool and treated it like an egg, fragile and perfect."
"You would think that after all these years in the profession she would be able to slip into a role, she was, after all, most comfortable in someone else’s skin."
"Everything a blur. She didn’t have the faintest idea where she was."
"A small, helpless dog seemed like a good place to draw that line."
"‘God created Man,’ she repeated. ‘And then he had a better idea.’"
"‘All roads lead away from home,’ Jackson said."
"It wasn’t being frightened that turned you into stone, it was being the one who did the frightening."
"Every day is a gift, I’m going to make my time on earth count."
"No one should be allowed to own a view like this."
"Men were a continual presence in Julia’s life but always of peripheral importance."
"Good riddance. She had more important things on her agenda. Like a kidnapped kid."
"The future was suddenly a place that you might want to be, rather than a place where you were going to have to slog it out with tedium on a day-by-day basis."
"She had embarked on an unexpected and perilous adventure and it was possible that she would fall off the edge of the world."
"Part of Tracy’s brain was still on the beat in the Merrion Centre and hadn’t caught up with the bizarre turn the day’s events had taken."
"The one thing that was odd was that Courtney hadn’t mentioned her mother."
"‘Well, you do now,’ Tracy said. The kid snapped her head up and stared at Tracy before glancing warily round the kitchen."
"Tracy hadn’t appreciated just how small a kid really was. Small and vulnerable. And heavy."
"Just the sight of the small, naked body sitting in her own snot-coloured bath had almost moved her to tears."
"She was surprised to find such deep wells of primal, untapped emotions inside the calcified shell."
"‘Last slice?’ Courtney gave her a thumbs-down, a small emperor in the Colosseum."
"She found herself blinking back tears. ‘I haven’t got a bedtime book, I’m afraid,’ she said quickly."
"‘Well, the sun’s long past the yardarm,’ he said. ‘Time to raid the minibar.’"
"‘The treasure here is you.’ Jackson stuck the Post-it note on his forehead and died of boredom."
"Suddenly she was awake again. She had been running after a little girl, running and running, down endless corridors, up and down staircases, but she couldn’t catch up with her."
"She woke up when she heard a voice say, Someone should do something, Matilda."
"Pressing the red record button felt like a commitment to the future."
"Men didn’t deserve women. ‘We don’t deserve them,’ he said to Ian Winfield as they rolled their way to the bar."
"‘Oh God, no,’ he said. ‘They’re far superior to us. Wouldn’t want to be one though.’"
"‘Fun,’ she said, ‘life’s supposed to be fun, Ray.’"
"‘Have to go home,’ he whispered when Walter Eastman came over to him. ‘Before I die. Get me a taxi, will you?’"
"‘Happy New Year!’ he shouted. He stumbled on another few yards and then turned again and shouted, louder this time, ‘What was your name?’"
"Families weren’t always such great places to be, especially for kids."
"‘Toast?’ Tracy offered. The kid gave her a thumbs-up."
"She was hoping for enlightenment, ended up with glandular fever. Put her off spirituality for life."
"He never ceased to be amazed by how many round-heeled women there were in the world."
"‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ Hopefully not."
"Funny how she could remember the name of a child she didn’t know and had trouble recalling what simple everyday objects were called."
"‘I talked to Barry on the phone last night. He was with a dead woman’."
"‘Shoplifting’s a crime,’ Tracy said. Courtney offered her the packet. Tracy took two Jaffa cakes and crammed them in her mouth."
"The wind has such a rainy sound / Moaning through the town."
"Boozing and whoring, he said, the Rights of Man."
"Ever since she was a child she had done that. Commented on herself. Stepped outside and watched herself, almost like an out-of-body experience."
"Newcomer Kathryn Gillespie is destined for great things."
"Kitty Winfield stood beside her mother’s grave and wept silently."
"Sixties’ icon Kitty Gillespie, where is she now?"
"Kitty Gillespie walked onto the set and illuminated it. Unfortunately not."
"To Kitty, the woman I will always love most in the world."
"Kitty Gillespie was tied naked to a bedpost and degraded."
"Kitty Winfield tripped lightly down the stairs."
"The years after her marriage would make for a very dull book in other people’s eyes."
"Kitty Winfield opened the bottle of sleeping pills prescribed for her by her husband."
"It’s as if I don’t really exist! I’m baffled!"
"Now, Miss Gillespie, if you could just open your legs."
"Such a great emptiness inside where a baby should be."
"But I must have come from somewhere. Everyone comes from somewhere!"
"A lot of those old adoption societies have lost their records."
"Ice cream, ice cream, I scream for ice cream."
"Unlike you, I’m a proper detective so if you don’t mind you can bugger off, pleasure to meet you, et cetera."
"Soon he’d be calling the dog ‘lad’ and sharing cheese and crackers with it. There were worse things, he supposed."
"It had a slight ghostly aura, the photograph of a photograph, twice removed from life. Virtual reality."
"Even the most careless parent was unlikely to lose a child and not mention it, unless they had intended to misplace it, of course."
"An act of goodwill perhaps, giving a small child a good home and saving it from festering in the system."
"You saw them all the time staring out of the back or hanging out of the passenger window, their ears fluttering in the slipstream, but an unsecured dog was an accident waiting to happen."
"He put Kendel Carson’s ‘Cowboy Boots’ on the car stereo, a song that wasn’t as redneck as the title suggested."
"All those tiny ancient marine life forms falling to the ocean floor to come back to life one day as a Disney Fairies Tea Set."
"Stealing them was one of the things you didn’t do. Bottom line. She had taken a child that wasn’t hers."
"The only record he could find online of any girl being abducted in 1975 was the Black Panther’s victim Lesley Whittle."
"‘Are we going home now?’ Courtney asked when they were back in the car. Kid was used to being moved around like a billiard ball. Kids had no power over where they went, who they went with."
"When they finished, not before Courtney had packed a plate of banana fritters with ice cream into her hollow legs, Tracy paid the bill with two twenties peeled off her roll of thirty thousand but raking in vain through her purse for some change, said to Courtney, ‘I haven’t got enough for a tip.’"
"‘A million and one.’ She hadn’t finished with her generous tip."
"In his own experience, Jackson had found the exact opposite to be true, the more unreliable he was (usually from no fault of his own, he would just like to point out) the less impressed women were with him."
"Everyone had a mother – murderers, rapists, Hitler, Pol Pot, Margaret Thatcher."
"One day they would simply lay down tools and walk off, of course."
"Everything is real," Julia said. "On the other hand, of course, you could argue that nothing is real."
"It's very popular," Julia said. "Great viewing figures."
"Real murder was disgusting. And smelly and messy and usually heartbreaking, invariably meaningless, occasionally tedious, but not this neat sanitized narrative."
"We're in luck," he said to the dog, tossing it a custard cream. "Marilyn Nettles, here I come."
"The treasure here is you," Tracy read out loud.
"This will be easier when I have a dummy," she said, twirling around, trying to see the hem.
"Maybe if you’d visited you would have found Michael a bit sooner. Before he spent three weeks locked in a flat with his mother’s corpse."
"Every case is assessed on its individual merits."
"If you ring, my mum will probably answer, but just talk her down. OK?"
"Just leave it, lass, eh? CID know what they’re doing."
"Next time she was tempted to buy a kid, Tracy thought, she would take out some kind of warranty against buyer’s remorse."