Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  Theo had a body, Amelia and Julia needed one. Olivia was a different kind of space to Laura, an incorporeal mystery, a question without an answer. A puzzle that could tease you until you went mad. He would never find Olivia, never find out what happened to her, he knew that and he would just have to find the right time to tell them. He was never going to be able to bill them either, was he? Sorry, your baby sister’s dead and gone for ever and that will be £500 for services rendered. (‘You’re too soft to be in business,’ Deborah Arnold said to him every month when she did the accounting, ‘too soft or too stupid.’)

  If it was Marlee and he had to decide – dead or missing for ever – which would he choose? No, he couldn’t go there, couldn’t bear to imagine it, couldn’t tempt fate by trying to. Either scenario depicted the worst thing that could possibly happen. What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened – how did you live your life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a kind of courage that most people didn’t have.

  The front door opened and all the little party girls and their party mothers hit the street at top volume. Jackson hastily stuffed photographs of Laura Wyre’s crime scene beneath the front passenger seat. He was about to get out of the car and go inside when Marlee ran out. Jesus, she was dressed like a hooker. What did Josie think, letting her go out looking like a paedophile’s dream? She even had lipstick on. He thought of JonBenet Ramsay. Another lost girl. When he was in Bliss earlier, a girl had come in, a friend of the receptionist (Milanda – had she made her name up?) and made an appointment for ‘a Brazilian’ and Milanda said, ‘Yeah?’ and the girl said, ‘My boyfriend wants me to get one, he wants to pretend he’s making love with a young girl,’ and Milanda said, ‘Yeah?’ as if that was a good reason.

  Jackson knew the statistics, knew how many known paedophiles would be hanging out in any one area, knew how they’d be clustered, thickly, like flies, around playgrounds, schools, swimming baths (and houses that were signposted with balloons). Claire’s Accessories, that’s where Jackson would go if he was a paedophile. What if reincarnation existed, what if you came back as a paedophile? But then what would you have had to do in the first place to deserve that? What did the holy girls come back as? Flocks of doves, groves of trees?

  ‘Hiya, sweetheart. Good party?’ (Were you just going to run out into the street, not knowing if anyone was waiting for you?) ‘Where were you going? Did you know I was here?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did you remember to say “thank you”?’

  ‘Yep. I said, “Thank you very much for having me”.’

  ‘You’re fibbing,’ Jackson said.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you are, basic interrogation fact, people look up to the left when they’re remembering and up to the right when they’re inventing. You looked up to the right.’ Shut up, Jackson. She wasn’t even listening.

  ‘My bad,’ she said indifferently.

  ‘Your bad?’ What language was that? She looked exhausted, she was black under the eyes. What did they do at these parties? She was drenched with sweat.

  ‘We were dancing,’ she said, ‘to Christina Aguilera, she’s wicked.’ She did a little move to indicate dancing, it was so sexual it turned Jackson’s heart over. She was eight years old, for fuck’s sake.

  ‘That’s nice, sweetheart.’ She smelt of sugar and sweat. He remembered the first time he held her, when the whole of her head fitted into the palm of his hand and Josie said, ‘Be careful’ (as if he wouldn’t be) and he had vowed to himself that nothing bad would ever happen to her, that he would keep her safe. A solemn promise, an oath. Did Theo Wyre make that same vow when Laura was first placed in his arms? Almost certainly. (And what about Victor Land?) But Jackson couldn’t make Marlee safe, he couldn’t make anyone safe. The only time you were safe was when you were dead. Theo was the world’s greatest worrier but the one thing he didn’t worry about any more was whether or not his daughter was safe.

  ‘You’ve got lipstick all over you,’ Marlee said to him. Jackson examined himself in the rear-view mirror and discovered the vivid imprint of Julia’s crimson mouth on his cheek. He rubbed at it aggressively but the colour remained like a spot of heat on his face.

  ‘She was such a little scrap of a thing,’ Binky Rain was saying, although Jackson wasn’t really listening. He had caved in to a flurry of Carmina Buranas and said to Marlee, ‘Do you want to go and visit an old lady on the way home?’ sweetening this not very inviting invitation with the promise of cats so that now she was rolling around in the weed-filled jungle of Binky’s garden with an assortment of reluctant felines.

  ‘And she’s your child?’ said Binky, looking doubtfully at Marlee. ‘I don’t think of you as having a child.’

  ‘No?’ he said absently. He was thinking about Olivia Land; she was just a scrap of a thing too. Would she have wandered off? Amelia and Julia said no, that she was very ‘obedient’. obedient enough to leave the tent in the middle of the night and go with someone who told her to? Go where? Jackson had tried to sweettalk his old pal Wendy in police records to show him the evidence from Olivia’s case, but even if she’d been willing it wouldn’t have done any good because it was all missing. ‘Sorry, Jackson, it’s gone AWOL,’ Wendy said. ‘It happens. Thirty-four years is a long time.’

  ‘Not that long,’ Jackson said. Although Olivia’s case had never been officially closed there was hardly anyone left alive who had worked it. Before the days of sophisticated DNA testing and police profiling, before computers, for God’s sake. If she was abducted now, there would be a better chance of finding her. Maybe. All the senior detectives who had worked the case were dead and the only person Jackson could find any trace of was a female DC called Marian Foster who seemed to have done most of the interviews with the Land girls. She had just retired as a superintendent from a northern force that was too close to Jackson’s old home for him to feel excited about the prospect of a visit. Of course, nowadays the parents would be the first people you thought about, especially the father. How aggressively had the police gone after Victor when they interviewed him? If it had been Jackson’s case, Victor Land would have been his prime suspect.

  Out of earshot of Marlee, Jackson asked Binky, ‘Do you remember the disappearance of Olivia Land? Little girl abducted from around here thirty-four years ago?’

  ‘Frisky,’ Binky said, sticking to her own agenda. ‘She’s hardly more than a kitten.’

  ‘The Land family,’ Jackson persisted, ‘did you know them? He was a maths lecturer at St John’s, they had four little girls.’ You didn’t forget the disappearance of a child in a neighbouring street, did you?

  ‘Oh, those girls,’ Binky said. They were wild children, completely undisciplined. In my opinion, children should be neither seen nor heard. Really, families like that deserve what happens to them.’ Jackson thought of several responses to this remark but in the end he kept them all to himself. ‘And, of course,’ Binky continued, ‘he was the son of Oswald Land, the so-called polar hero, and I can assure you that he was a complete charlatan.’

  ‘Do you remember seeing anyone who didn’t belong, a stranger?’

  ‘No. The police were such a nuisance, going from house to house, asking questions. They even searched my garden, can you believe. I gave them short shrift, I can tell you. She was very strange.’

  ‘Who was strange? Mrs Land?’

  ‘No, that eldest one, long white streak of a thing.’

  ‘Strange how?’

  ‘Very sly. And you know, they used to break into my garden, shout things, and steal from my lovely apple trees. This was such a lovely orchard.’ Jackson looked around at the ‘epple’ trees, now as gnarled and ancient as Binky Rain.

  ‘Sylvia?’

  ‘Yes, that was her name.’

  Jackson left Binky’s by way of the back-garden gate. He’d never exited that way before and was surprised to find himself in the lane that ran a
long behind the back of Victor’s garden. He hadn’t realized how close the two properties actually were to each other – he was standing only a few yards from where the fateful tent was pitched. Had someone climbed over the wall here, plucked Olivia from sleep? And then left the same way? How easy would it be to climb a wall with a three-year-old slung over your shoulder? Jackson could have managed it with no bother. The wall was smothered in ivy, providing plenty of hand- and footholds. But that mode of entry implied an intruder and that wouldn’t explain why the dog didn’t bark in the night. Rascal. And it was the kind of dog that would have barked, according to Amelia and Julia, so it must have known Olivia’s captor. How many people would the dog not bark at?

  He tugged at the ivy and discovered a gate in the wall, the spit of Binky’s. He thought of The Secret Garden, a film he had watched on video with Marlee and which had enraptured her. No one would have had to climb anything, they could just have walked into the garden. Or perhaps no one walked in and then out with Olivia – perhaps someone walked out with her and then walked back in without her. Victor? Rosemary Land?

  * * *

  Marlee was almost asleep by the time they reached David Lastingham’s house. Would he ever call it David and Josie’s house? (No.) The sugar high Marlee had been riding had long since turned into irritability. She was covered in grass seeds and cat hairs, which would undoubtedly cause a row with Josie. Jackson suggested that she sleep at his house tonight, at least that way he could get her cleaned up, but she declined because ‘We’re going berry-picking in the morning.’

  ‘Berry-picking?’ Jackson said, as he rang David Lastingham’s doorbell. He thought of hunter-gatherers and peasants.

  ‘So Mummy can make jam.’

  ‘Jam? Your mother?’ The born-again wife, the jam-making peasant mother, came out of the kitchen, licking something off her fingers. The woman who was previously too busy to cook – the queen of Iceland – who now spent her evenings making cosy casseroles and carelessly tossing together salads for her new, reconstituted family. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who used to give him blow-jobs while he was driving, who would pin him up against any available surface and groan, ‘Now, Jackson, hurry,’ who fitted her body against his in sleep, who used to wake up every morning and turn sleepily to him and say, ‘I still love you,’ as if relieved that the night hadn’t stolen her feelings for him. Until one morning, three years after Marlee was born, she woke up and didn’t say anything.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said to him now. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘We went to see a witch,’ Marlee said.

  Le chat noir. Les chats noirs. Did chats have a gender? Was there a chatte?

  ‘Bonsoir, Jackson. Joan Dodds greeted him with the stress on the soir rather than the bon. She despised tardiness in people.

  ‘Bonsoir, Jackson, the whole class chorused as Jackson made his sheepishly late entrance.

  ‘Vous êtes en retard, comme toutes les semaines, Joan Dodds said. She was a retired schoolteacher who had the kind of character that would have made her an excellent dominatrix. Jackson remembered a time when the women in his life actually seemed to want to make him happy. Now they all just seemed to be angry all the time. Jackson felt rather like a small, rather naughty boy. ‘Je suis désolé, he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple ‘sorry’ sound so extreme and forlorn.

  In Bliss, Jackson had shown Milanda his licence and asked if he could see the place where Laura Wyre was killed. ‘Morbid,’ was her only comment. The boardroom, as Theo had reported, was now used as a storeroom. The nail-varnish trolley had been moved and was no longer acting as her cenotaph. Laura’s blood was in plain sight, a washed-out (but not washed-out enough) stain on the bare floorboards. ‘Christ,’ Milanda said, finally roused out of her torpor. ‘I thought that was paint or something. That’s disgusting.’

  On his way out of the door, Milanda said, ‘She’s not haunting the place. I’d know if she was here. I’ve got second sight, I’d feel her if she was here.’

  ‘Really?’ Jackson said. Milanda seemed an unlikely recipient of second sight, and she said, ‘Oh yes, seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,’ and Jackson thought, inbred, rural, and Milanda fixed him with her baby-blue eyes – an unnatural, startling colour that he realized must be contacts – and said, ‘You, for example,’ and Jackson said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Milanda said, ‘black cats are very lucky for you.’ And Jackson felt an unexpected disappointment because for one weird, unnerving moment he had thought she was actually going to say something portentous.

  9

  Amelia

  ‘DON’T BE A CROSSPATCH, MR BRODIE’ AMELIA mimicked. ‘What are you like, Julia?’ (And she had kissed him! She had actually kissed him!) ‘Why not just take your clothes off in the street?’

  ‘Oh, I do believe you’re jealous, Milly!’ Julia laughed with (cruel) delight. ‘What would Henry say if he found out?’

  ‘Shut up, Julia.’ Amelia could feel herself heating up and she walked faster to get away from her sister. Julia had to run to keep up. She sounded wheezy and Amelia thought it was insane for someone with hay fever to smoke so much. Amelia had absolutely no sympathy for her.

  ‘Do we have to go so fast, your legs are much longer than mine.’

  They were on St Andrew’s Street, approaching a girl who was sitting on the ground, on an old sheet, a dog – some kind of lurcher – stretched out at her side.

  Jackson hadn’t given two hoots that she’d thought he was an English pointer, but he looked downright pleased to know that Julia thought he was a German shepherd. And Julia would choose that because it was exactly the right dog, not a Dobermann, not a Rottweiler, and certainly not a pointer – he was a German shepherd through and through. She had lied to Jackson, well, not exactly lied, but she had led him to understand that she was an Oxford don when in fact she was just a lecturer in further education, teaching ‘communication skills’ (as it was so laughably called) to day-release slaters and apprentice bricklayers and other assorted riff-raff. She wanted to like those boys, to think they were good – perhaps a little too rumbustious but at heart decent human beings – but they weren’t, they were little shits who never listened to a word she said.

  Julia was immediately attracted to the homeless girl’s dog, of course, which meant that one or the other of them would have to give the girl money because you could hardly make a fuss of the dog and not give something in return, could you? Julia was on her knees on the pavement, letting the dog lick her face. Amelia wished she wouldn’t do that, you didn’t know where that dog’s tongue had been – well, you did, and that’s why you didn’t want it washing your face.

  The girl had yellow hair, an odd canary colour, and her face was sallow, almost jaundiced. Amelia used to give money to beggars and Big Issue sellers but these days she was more circumspect. She had once come across one of her own students begging on Oxford High Street. Amelia knew for a fact that the girl – Lisa, a day-release hairdresser – was living comfortably at home with her parents, and the dog she had with her (because they all had dogs, of course) was the family pet. Plus, it was a well-known fact that a lot of beggars actually had homes, and some of them even had cars. Was it a well-known fact? How did she know it? From the Sun probably, the slaters were always leaving copies of the Sun strewn around in their wake. What an extraordinary image that suddenly conjured up in her mind – copies of the sun broadcast carelessly around the universe like gold coins. She laughed and the girl looked at her and asked, ‘Can you help me?’ and Amelia said, ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, Milly, for heaven’s sake,’ Julia said, abandoning her puppy-talk and raking through her bag for her purse, ‘there but for fortune and all that.’ Julia came up with a five-pound note – five pounds that she actually owed to Amelia – and handed it to the girl, who took it as if she was doing Julia a favour. It hadn’t been the money, the girl hadn’t wanted money, not really. She had asked Amelia
if she could help her and Amelia had told the truth. She couldn’t help her, she couldn’t help anyone. Least of all herself.

  ‘She’ll spend it on drugs,’ she said to Julia as they walked away from the girl.

  ‘She can spend it on what she wants,’ Julia said. ‘In fact drugs sound like a good idea. If I was in her position I would spend money on drugs.’

  ‘She’s in that position because of drugs.’

  ‘You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about her.’

  ‘I know she’s sponging off people who exhaust themselves working for a living.’ Oh God, she was turning into a fascist in her old age. She’d be demanding the return of hanging and flogging soon, well, not flogging perhaps but capital punishment – after all, why not? There were enough people in the world, surely, without keeping space for the evil bastards who tortured children and animals and macheted the innocent. ‘Evil bastards’, that was tabloid language from the slaters’ Suns. She might as well cancel her subscription to the Guardian right now the way she was going.

  ‘Is “macheted” a verb?’ Amelia asked Julia.

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  Well, that was the end then, she was Americanizing words. Civilization would fall.

  They stopped outside a burger bar. Inside it was heaving with foreign language students and Amelia groaned at the sight of them. She was sure the only language they improved when they were in Cambridge was obscenities or vocabulary for junk food.

  In London, Julia did a lot of mystery shopping for an agency – checking the service in burger bars and pizza places, high-street clothes shops and big chemists’ chains. As far as Julia was concerned it almost qualified as acting and as a bonus she usually got to keep the goods or eat the food. The agency were delighted when they discovered she was in Cambridge, where they no longer had a mystery shopper.