Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  Jackson hadn’t thought about that street for a long time, a gloomy terrace with passages like tunnels that went through to a back alley. They’d moved to a better class of street when Jackson was nine. No whores hanging around on the doorstep, smoking their lungs out. Was Shirley Morrison married? She had a ring on her finger but it was neither a wedding nor an engagement ring. It was silver, Celtic or Scandinavian – what did that mean?

  ‘When I picked Tanya up, Michelle laughed and said, “She does go on, doesn’t she?” Now that’s disassociation.’

  ‘She must have had some reason for killing him,’ Jackson puzzled, ‘even if it wasn’t premeditated. Something must have triggered it.’

  It felt as if all the air in the office had been used up. It wasn’t midday yet but already it was sweltering. Shirley’s light-brown hair was screwed up carelessly on top of her head and the fine hairs at the nape of her neck were dark with sweat. He wondered what she’d do if he invited her to lunch, a nice pub with a garden, or they could buy a sandwich and go for a walk by the river. It wouldn’t be unprofessional, it would just be moving this appointment outside. Who was he kidding? His motives were entirely unprofessional.

  If Josie died Jackson would get sole custody. Marlee wouldn’t go to the other side of the world. (‘Lord of the Rings,’ she’d said to him, quite thrilled, as if Bilbo and Gandalf and the rest of their crew actually lived in New Zealand and were waiting for her to join their fellowship. She hadn’t read the books, only seen the DVDs, which were far too scary for an eight-year-old in Jackson’s opinion, but not in the opinion of David Lastingham apparently.)

  For her part, of course, Josie had failed to keep any of the promises she had made – to love and honour him, to be faithful to him – he could still hear that little flutter of emotion in her voice when she said ‘until death us do part’. They had opted for the traditional wedding service. Now she was planning a tropical beach ceremony with a Maori gospel choir and home-made vows. She was going to marry that wanker and ‘start a new life’.

  Jackson wondered if he was capable of killing Josie. He was better placed than most people – he knew all kinds of ways to do it. It wasn’t doing it that was the problem – not being found out, that was the thing. He wouldn’t wait around for hours with an axe sitting in his lap. What was that Lizzie Borden rhyme? ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks.’ If he killed Josie it would have to be done in a ‘calculated, cold-blooded killing’ – fire, explosives, a gun. A gun for preference, an L96 A1 sniper with a Schmidt and Bender scope, so you could be as far away as possible – he couldn’t do an intimate killing, something close up and personal like strangling or a knife, he couldn’t be there, watching the blood stop pumping round her cheating heart, couldn’t watch the life fade from her eyes. And not poison. Poison was for psychopaths and deranged Victorian women. Had he really been mugged the other night? Nothing had been taken from him, his wallet, his watch, his car were all left behind, but then he’d fought back before the guy could take anything. In Jackson’s experience, muggers didn’t usually try to smash your skull in. ‘There’s a lot of bad people out there, sir,’ the DC (‘DC Lowther, sir’) who took his statement said. They’d sent a DC where they’d normally have sent a PC. Jackson supposed he should feel flattered. He remembered DC Lowther when he was an eager young recruit in uniform. ‘There’s been a spate of muggings recently, Inspector,’ DC Lowther said, and Jackson said, ‘It’s just plain Mr Brodie now.’ It was funny, he’d never really been Mr Brodie, he’d joined the army at sixteen and until then he’d just been Jackson, sometimes ‘Brodie!’ from the male teachers. Then it was ‘Private Brodie’ and so on up the ranks until he left the army and then he’d started again as ‘PC Brodie’. He wasn’t sure how he felt about being ‘plain Mr Brodie’.

  ‘Do you have any enemies, sir?’ DC Lowther asked hopefully.

  ‘Not really,’ Jackson said. Just about everyone he’d ever met.

  Jackson’s shirt was sticking to his skin. It was way too hot to be in an office.

  ‘I don’t know what triggered it,’ Shirley said. ‘She just went berserk.’

  There was always a trigger. There were a lot of things that the defence could have used – psychotic episodes, sleep deprivation, baby blues, shit childhood, self-defence (what about the bruise on her face?). ‘In court,’ Jackson said, ‘Michelle said that he woke the baby. The baby was asleep and Keith woke her up, that was the nearest she got to giving a motive.’ Jackson could imagine how that went down with the judge. She might as well have pleaded guilty. Michelle Fletcher hadn’t run away or made up a story, she had simply waited to be found. By her sister.

  If she had served two thirds of her sentence Michelle Fletcher would have been back on the outside in 1989, at the age of twenty-eight. The same age Laura Wyre would be if she’d lived. Jackson would lay a bet that Michelle had been a model prisoner, transferred to an open prison by ‘85, catching up on her exams probably, so she could start her ‘new life’ when she came out. Like Josie. A fresh start, wiping out the past. Just like that. What was Michelle doing now? Shirley Morrison didn’t know, of course she didn’t know. That was why she was here.

  ‘I promised Michelle I would look after Tanya,’ Shirley said, ‘and I would have done, of course I would have done, but I was only fifteen and social services decided our parents were unfit – which they were – and gave custody to Keith’s parents. But they weren’t much better. The last time I ever saw my sister was in the courtroom the day she was sentenced. She refused to see us, knocked back all our visiting orders, refused to read letters, there was nothing we could do about it. I could have understood if she didn’t want to see Mum or Dad – they both died without seeing her again. But not to see me … I mean I didn’t care that she’d killed Keith, she was still my sister, I still loved her.’ She shrugged and added, ‘Anyone’s capable of killing, given the right circumstances.’ She was looking at that faraway world again, the one that existed on the other side of the office window, and Jackson supposed he could have said, ‘Yeah, I’ve killed people,’ but that didn’t seem like the kind of dialogue he wanted to enter into at half-past eleven on a Monday morning in these temperatures, so he said nothing at all.

  ‘They told us when she was released,’ Shirley continued, ‘but she never got in touch. I don’t know where she went or what she’s doing now. In the end she got a new life and we were stuck with her old one. “Murder”, it’s such a stigma, isn’t it? It’s so … trashy. I wanted to go to medical school, be a doctor, but that was never going to happen, not after everything we went through.’

  ‘And now you want me to look for your sister?’

  Shirley laughed as if he’d said something absurd. ‘God, no. Why would I want to look for Michelle when she’s made it so obvious she doesn’t want to be found? She doesn’t care about me any more. I don’t want to find Michelle. I want to find Tanya.’

  It was teatime in Binky’s garden. Everything was so wildly overgrown that a machete would have been a more fitting accompaniment at the tea table instead of the extensive array of tarnished butter knives and jam spoons that formed part of Binky’s complex tea ceremony. ‘Darjeeling,’ Binky announced, but it was a grey washy brew that hadn’t seen a tea plantation in years and which tasted like old socks. The cups didn’t look as if they had been cleaned for a long time. ‘We are being joined today by a guest,’ she announced like a rather grand chat-show hostess, ‘my great-nephew, Quintus.’ What kind of a name was that to get stuck with for life, for God’s sake?

  ‘Really?’ Jackson said. Binky had never mentioned having family.

  ‘I hardly know the boy,’ she added, with a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘My nephew and I weren’t close, but the boy’s the only family I have.’ Had Binky Rain ever been close to anyone? Strange to imagine that there had once been a Dr Rain who had shared bed and board with her. She couldn’t always have been old, but it was hard to believe she had ever been a young nubile
wife, compliant to ‘Julian’s’ sexual needs – ah, Jesus, Jackson, shoot that idea right out of your head. He was so alarmed by the unpalatable image he’d conjured up that he knocked over his tea, not that one more stain could make any difference to a cloth that was a palimpsest of previous tea-related accidents. ‘Something wrong, Mr Brodie?’ Binky enquired, mopping up the tea with the hem of her skirt, but before he could reply a cry like a huntsman’s tantivy from the top end of the garden announced the arrival of Quintus Rain.

  Binky’s use of the word ‘boy’ had led Jackson to expect a teenager, so he was surprised when Quintus turned out to be a substantial forty-something with broad, bland features and floppy hair. He was built like a rugby forward but his muscle had turned to flab and he looked too soft to survive a scrum. He was wearing chinos and a blue-and-white-striped shirt with a white collar and a pink tie and had a navy-blue blazer slung over his shoulder. Break him in two and you’d find ‘Tory’ written right through him. ‘Brought up in Herefordshire,’ Binky murmured to Jackson, as if this somehow explained everything about Quintus. The really interesting thing about Quintus, interesting to Jackson anyway, was that Quintus was sporting a considerable plaster across a nose that looked damaged in just the way you would expect a nose to be damaged if you’d been nutted by someone who was trying to stop you pistol-whipping them.

  But why on earth would someone he’d never met before, with whom he had no relationship whatsoever, want to attack him like that? Quintus seemed particularly put out to see Jackson in his great-aunt’s garden. Binky herself blithely ignored the fact that she was taking tea with two hostile, beat-up men and kept wittering on about Frisky.

  Quintus didn’t give the impression that he had been a frequent visitor to his elderly great-aunt, but then the boy had led a busy life – shipped over from the daughterland at an early age to be made into an English gentleman – Clifton, Sandhurst, a commission in the Royal Lancers (Jackson thought he’d recognized the braying tones of the officer class), then ‘a stint down the mines’ and now something vague that occupied his time in London.

  ‘Down the mines?’ Jackson repeated doubtfully, fishing cat hair out of his teacup.

  ‘Efrican,’ Binky said.

  ‘Efrican?’

  ‘Sarth Efrican. Diamond mines. In charge of the blecks.’

  Binky went inside to make a fresh pot of tea, saying, ‘You two should have a lot to talk about, Mr Brodie. You’re both army men, after all.’

  Jackson hadn’t thought of himself as an army man for a long time; he wasn’t sure he’d ever thought of himself as an army man. ‘Which regiment?’ Quintus asked gruffly.

  ‘Infantry. Prince of Wales’s Own,’ Jackson said, laconically.

  ‘What rank?’

  What was this, Jackson wondered, a game of ‘Mine’s bigger than yours’? He shrugged and said, ‘Private.’

  ‘Yeah, I could have guessed that,’ Quintus said. He pronounced all the vowels in ‘Yeah’ and then a few extra for luck.

  Jackson didn’t bother saying that although he went into the army as a private he came out as a warrant officer, class one, in the military police because he had no intention of playing Billy Big-Dick with him. Jackson had been offered a commission before he left the army but he knew he’d never be comfortable on the other side, taking dinner in the mess with pricks like Quintus who thought of the Jacksons of this world as bottom-feeding thugs.

  ‘I could show you my tattoos,’ Jackson offered. Quintus declined, which was just as well because Jackson didn’t have any tattoos. Shirley Morrison had a tattoo, between the base of her neck and her shoulder blades, a black rose on the fifth vertebra. Did she have other tattoos on her body, in less visible places?

  Quintus suddenly pulled his chair closer to Jackson as if he was going to tell him a secret and in a menacing voice said, ‘I know your game, Brodie.’ Jackson tried not to laugh. He had (with little enthusiasm) fitted two wars into his army career and it took more than guys like Quintus rattling their sabres to frighten him. By the look of him Quintus wouldn’t last three rounds with a rabbit. ‘And what game would that be exactly, Mr Rain?’ Jackson asked but never got to find out because at that moment a particularly manky tom decided it needed to spray its territory and favoured Quintus’s leg as one of its outposts.

  Jackson walked down to the river and found some shade on the bank. He had a squashed sandwich in his pocket that he had bought in Pret A Manger and now he shared it with a group of eager ducks. There was a continual traffic of punts along the river, most of them containing tourists being chauffeured by students, or student types, dressed in straw boaters and striped blazers, the boys in flannels, the girls in unflattering skirts. The tourists were a mixed bag – Japanese, Americans (fewer than before), a lot of Europeans, some unidentifiable (a kind of generic East European) and northerners, who in the torpid air of Cambridge appeared more foreign than the Japs. They all seemed thrilled, as if they were having a genuine experience – as if this was how the natives spent their leisure hours, punting down the river and eating cream teas to the sound of the Grantchester clock chiming three. What a load of shite, to quote his father.

  ‘Mr Brodie! Yoo-hoo, Mr Brodie!’

  Oh dear God, Jackson thought wearily, was there no escape from them? They were punting, for fuck’s sake, or at least Julia was punting, while Amelia watched her from beneath a big floppy sunhat that looked as if it had last seen better days on her mother’s head. She was also wearing sunglasses and gave the general impression of someone who’d just been discharged from hospital after a particularly challenging facelift.

  ‘What a beautiful day!’ Julia shouted to Jackson. ‘We’re going to Grantchester for tea, hop in. You have to come with us, Mr Brodie.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Julia said cheerfully. ‘Get in. Don’t be so curmudgeonly.’ Jackson hauled himself up from the grass with a sigh and helped pull the punt into the bank. He climbed in awkwardly and Julia laughed and said, ‘Not a sailor, then, Mr B.?’ Why were they still in Cambridge? Were they ever going home? Amelia, at the other end of the vessel, gave him a vague acknowledgement without making eye contact. The last time he saw her she was distraught about the dog’s death (‘Please, Jackson, please come, I need you’). She’d looked rough, wearing an old dressing gown, and make-up. He’d never seen her in make-up before – it looked terrible, as if she’d applied it in the dark, and she hadn’t put her hair up so that it hung in dry hanks around her face. All women come to an age when they’re just too old to wear their hair down, even beautiful women with beautiful hair, and neither Amelia nor her hair had ever been beautiful.

  Jackson thought it was best if he behaved as if nothing had happened the other night. What had happened the other night? ‘I didn’t know you were married, Mr Brodie’ – what the hell was that all about? As if he was an adulterous lover who’d betrayed her. He had never given Amelia Land a single reason to think there was anything between them. Had she really developed a crush on him? (Please, God, no.) Stan Jessop had a crush on Laura Wyre. Were crushes dangerous things? They sounded so harmless.

  ‘Crikey, what happened to you, Mr Brodie?’ Julia was peering at him in a short-sighted way. ‘You’ve been in a fight!’ Amelia looked at him for the first time but when he caught her eye she looked away. ‘How exciting,’ Julia said.

  ‘It was nothing,’ Jackson said. (Just someone’s trying to kill me.) ‘What day is it today?’

  ‘Tuesday,’ Julia said promptly.

  Amelia grunted something that sounded like ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Really?’ Julia said to her. ‘Cor lummy, how the days fly, don’t they?’ (Cor lummy? Who said things like that? Apart from Julia?) ‘I always think,’ Julia said, ‘that Wednesdays are violet.’ Julia seemed in an exceptionally merry mood. ‘And Tuesdays are yellow, of course.’

  ‘No, they’re not,’ Amelia said, ‘they’re green.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Julia said. ‘Anyway,
today’s violet and it’s a jolly good day for the Orchard Tea Rooms. We used to go there a lot when we were children. Before Olivia. Didn’t we, Milly?’

  Amelia had lapsed back into silence and waved a hand vaguely in answer. For the first time since he’d met them they were dressed suitably for the weather. Amelia was wearing a baggy cotton dress and ugly hiking sandals. If she got a good haircut and some decent clothes she’d improve a hundred per cent. At least Julia wasn’t hard on the eye, and she was pretty competent at the punting thing. She was wearing a skimpy top that belonged on a teenager but it revealed her neat, hard biceps (she definitely worked out) and at least she had triceps, unlike Amelia, who had the kind of swinging underarm flesh that would have made it easy for her to glide amongst the treetops. Despite the sunshine Amelia had remained pale and uninteresting, whereas Julia had turned the colour of toasted cashews. He looked at her, hauling on the pole, fag hanging out of the corner of her lipsticked mouth, and thought that she was a good sport and was surprised to realize that he was growing genuinely fond of Julia. And that good sport was her language, not his.

  ‘You’re looking at my tits, Mr Brodie.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘You are so.’ Julia gave a sudden little yelp of surprise and Jackson swivelled round to see what she was looking at. A middle-aged man was climbing out of the river on to the bank – bollock-naked and skinny and tanned all over. A nudist? They called themselves naturists now, didn’t they? The man towelled himself off and then lay down on the river bank, completely unselfconscious, and started reading a book.