Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  He was about to go to the online checkout when he thought twice about it and went into the pet-food section instead and ordered six cans of ‘premium dog food’. Just in case. He paid and signed out and turned the computer off.

  Then he waited.

  16

  Caroline

  SHE HADN’T TOLD ANYONE YET. SHE WAS FOUR MONTHS gone but she wasn’t showing. Good abdominal muscles. She’d had a scan and everything was ‘normal’ – she wasn’t carrying twins or an alien. The midwife was a tight-lipped, superior cow and Caroline had considered lying when it came to the ‘any previous pregnancies’ question but she would be easily found out so she just said, ‘Yes, twenty-five years ago, the baby was adopted’ (which was true). She could see the midwife doing the maths in her head: twenty-five years ago ‘Caroline Edith Edwards’ would have been twelve. The midwife raised an eyebrow and Caroline felt like saying, ‘Fuck off, bitch,’ but she didn’t because that would have been Michelle speaking, not Caroline Edith Edwards.

  Caroline would have liked to talk about the increased risks of having a baby at forty-three but she could hardly say, ‘Actually I’m six years older than you think,’ could she? And anyway, this baby felt anchored in, it felt whole and healthy, it felt like it had intentions.

  She tried to imagine announcing to Hannah and James that they were going to have a baby sister (or brother, but she was sure it was a girl); she could just see their expressions of disgust and jealousy, then the sly little conspiratorial smiles as they planned the horrors they could perpetrate on it. Caroline put a protective hand on her stomach and felt the cold jelly that the midwife cow hadn’t bothered to wipe off. And Jonathan – how could she tell Jonathan? ‘Darling, guess what, you’re going to be a daddy again,’ and he would puff up with pride at having his seed proved good, because it wouldn’t be a baby, a person, it would be another thing, like the new John Deere, or Hannah’s bay gelding, a dressage pony that was much too big for her, so with any luck she’d fall off and break her neck. (She really mustn’t think things like that, it might be bad for the baby.) Dressage, that was Rowena’s new plan for Hannah: ‘Never too early to start learning control,’ she’d said over ‘a luncheon’ that she’d invited Caroline to in ‘my cosy little cottage’, i.e., not the bloody great house you’ve taken away from me. Dressage. It was so English, so anal. Jemima, needless to say, was an expert.

  ‘You don’t mind me asking you this, dear, do you?’ Rowena said, leaning closer to her over the remains of a poached salmon that someone else must have cooked because Rowena could barely find the bread knife. ‘But, how shall I put this …’ Her pale-blue eyes were distant, almost visionary, and Caroline thought, I can’t stand this. ‘Am I knocked up?’ she intervened helpfully and Rowena gave a little twitch of unease at Caroline’s vernacular. ‘No, I’m not.’ Caroline was very, very good at lying.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ And she watched Rowena struggle to suppress a smile of relief as she said, ‘Shall we take coffee in the garden?’

  It was the first time she’d been to a service in St Anne’s, the first time she’d heard him preach a sermon. He looked less like himself in his starched white Sunday surplice and she wondered who made it so white and starched. Was it some ‘lady’ he paid? He didn’t mention God very much, which Caroline was grateful for, and he rambled a bit, but the general tenor of the piece was that people should all be nicer to each other and Caroline thought, fair enough, and the ten people in the congregation, including Caroline, all nodded genially at this message and when the service ended everyone shook hands, which struck Caroline as quite Quakerly. She had gone to religious services all the time when she was in prison, just because they provided a break in the routine, and the chaplains were always particularly pleasant to her, which was probably because of what she’d done. The worse the crime, the more the chaplains tended to like you if you turned up in the chapel. One lost lamb and all that.

  He stood at the door and shook everyone’s hands again as they left and he had a kind word for everyone, of course. She made sure she was the last person to leave the church and half expected him to invite her for a cup of coffee, or even lunch, but he didn’t, he just said, ‘It’s nice to see you here, Caroline,’ as if she was a new convert and she felt absurdly disappointed, but she smiled and said something inconsequential before wandering off round the churchyard, hoping that maybe he would follow, but he went back inside St Anne’s.

  She’d never been in love with anyone since Keith and that had just been some crazy teenage thing that, in the normal way of things, should have petered out into an indifferent divorce. It was good to be in love again. She felt it gave her back some of the personality she’d lost. She loved the bug, of course. Tanya. But that was a different kind of love, an elemental kind. She hadn’t loved her then, not in a way she understood anyway, it was something she’d learned since, in the intervening years of absence. And even though it had come to her too late it still helped to fill all those missing years. Retroactive love. It wouldn’t feel like that for Tanya, of course. She wouldn’t know about all the love her mother had for her, not unless Shirley told her (‘Your mummy loved you so much, but she just couldn’t be with you’). She had made Shirley promise to treat her as if she was dead and to look after the bug. She’d loved Shirley in that elemental way too or she wouldn’t have done what she did. A fresh start. That’s what she’d said to Shirley: ‘Take Tanya away, give her a fresh start, be the mother to her that I can’t be.’ Although obviously not as articulate as that because of the circumstances—

  ‘I thought you had a very lovely home to go to.’ He looked amused. He’d removed his surplice and put on his old grey cardigan again. It was very womanish garb, a cardigan over what was basically, let’s face it, a dress, and she couldn’t help but idly wonder what he would look like underneath those black skirts, but was pleasantly surprised to realize that, although she would have quite liked to drop on to her knees on the grass and suck him off right then and there in the graveyard, what she really wanted to do was to look after him, do something good for him, make scrambled eggs and toast and tea, rub his back, read out loud to him from an English classic. She was definitely insane. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, congratulations. That’s wonderful.’ He scanned her features for clues. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ She laughed. ‘It is wonderful. Please don’t tell anyone yet.’

  ‘Oh gosh, of course not.’

  How could she be in love with a man who said ‘gosh’? Quite easily, it seemed.

  She had him in her sights. She followed him along the ridge of the hill and then down to the empty lambing pens at the bottom where he rested with his elbows on a wooden gate, his own gun crooked over his arm. He was such a cliché in his green wellingtons and blue Barbour, the dogs running around at his feet. He referred to Meg and Bruce as ‘gun dogs’ but they were useless. He must have been out looking for rabbits. What right did he have to kill a rabbit? What made his life more valuable than a rabbit’s? Who decided these things? She cocked the trigger. His head really was the perfect target. From here she could take a shot that would smash right into the back of it – bullseye. Like a pumpkin, or a melon or a turnip. Bang, bang. Of course, she wouldn’t do it, she’d never killed anything in her life, not even an insect, not intentionally anyway. He set off again, left the field and rounded the wood and disappeared out of sight. Caroline looked at her watch – time for tea.

  17

  Jackson

  JACKSON WASHED DOWN A COUPLE OF CO-CODAMOL WITH a cup of foul-tasting coffee. He was waiting in the terminal for Nicola and the rest of her flight crew to disembark from their aircraft. It was seven in the morning, which seemed a particularly hellish time to be in an airport. If an unknown assassin didn’t kill him he supposed his tooth would.

  The plane had already emptied its bedraggled, disoriented passengers. Jackson had never been to Malaga. When they were married Josie had insiste
d that they take an expensive holiday every year, villa holidays, ‘villas with private pools’ in ‘lovely’ places, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete, Tuscany. All he could do now was conjure up a kind of generic Mediterranean memory – Marlee slippery with suntan cream and buoyant with armbands, splashing in the shallow end of the pool; Josie lying on a recliner, reading a novel, while Jackson himself lapped the pool, his body a dark shape under the blue water, like a restless, obsessive shark.

  Watching Nicola was just displacement activity, trying to keep his mind off the fact that someone was trying to kill him (although, let’s face it, it was quite hard to forget something like that).

  And now he had Tanya to think about as well. What was it that Shirley hadn’t been telling the truth about? Walter and Ann Fletcher, Keith’s parents, had moved to Lowestoft after the murder and seemed to have done a pretty poor job of parenting their only son’s only child. Shirley had tried, she said, to stay in touch with her niece but the Fletchers told her to keep away from them. ‘The sister of the woman who murdered their only child,’ she said, ‘you can’t entirely blame them.’ When she was twelve Tanya started running away from home, and when she was fifteen she stopped coming back. ‘I’ve looked for her everywhere,’ Shirley said, ‘but she seems to have slipped through the cracks.’

  Jackson added Tanya to the grim table of calculations that he carried in his head these days. Presuming she was alive, Tanya Fletcher would be twenty-five now. Olivia Land would be thirty-seven. Laura Wyre would be twenty-eight, Kerry-Anne Brockley twenty-six. He hoped Tanya was living her future, that she really was twenty-five and that her days rolled by unstopped, unlike the holy girls, the Kerry-Annes, Olivias and Lauras. And Niamh. Jackson’s big sister, who would have been fifty years old this week.

  * * *

  The crew appeared in the terminal, wheeling their neat little flight bags behind them, going at a cracking pace across the hall, focused entirely on getting home, being off-duty. If any passenger had intercepted them, looking for a miniature of whisky or a second bread roll, they would probably have knocked them down and barrelled right over them with their flight bags. All the flight attendants were women, no men – not that it seemed likely that Nicola would have an affair with a steward, Jackson had yet to spot a heterosexual one. The women were wearing hats that looked as if they belonged on the heads of girls from St Trinian’s. Nicola was bringing up the rear with the co-pilot. He looked as if he was in his thirties, good-looking (in a pilot kind of way) but not much taller than Nicola. Was he touching her? The pilot – older, more gravitas than the co-pilot – turned and said something that made Nicola laugh. This was more promising: Jackson couldn’t recall seeing her laugh before.

  Jackson followed them outside the terminal and into the car park. Nicola and the pilot had parked their cars next to each other and Jackson thought that maybe this was a sign of something but they said goodbye nonchalantly with no kissing, no touching, no meaningful looks. No hint of adultery. Nicola got in her car, revved up and was off in her usual Grand Prix style. Jackson followed at a less suicidal pace. He had a Fiat Punto rental in place of the Alfa. The Punto was an orange colour that made him feel conspicuous. It was definitely a woman’s car. His own car was still in the police garage, where forensics were doing more tests on it. ‘The police take sabotage like this very seriously, Mr Brodie,’ a new DS (new to Jackson anyway) had said to him, and Jackson said, ‘Right.’ He hadn’t mentioned Quintus’s name. Jackson didn’t see how the police were going to do much that he couldn’t do himself.

  He’d been round to Binky’s house the previous evening to see if Quintus was there but there’d been no answer when he rang the bell. The Lexus was gone and Jackson wondered if Quintus had taken Binky for a drive or out for dinner. Did that seem likely?

  He lost Nicola within minutes and when he pulled up, a discreet distance from her front lawn, she had already changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and was aggressively cutting the front grass with a push-and-pull mower in a way that reminded Jackson of Deborah’s combative attitude to her computer keyboard. Or of Josie’s combative attitude to everything – before David Lastingham gave her the Stepford lobotomy. Nicola was still wearing the full protective camouflage of her makeup, incongruous against her casual clothes. Her body language might be belligerent but her face was a mask.

  He should have brought Theo something – flowers, fruit, a good book – but he hadn’t thought and now it was too late. Theo seemed smaller in the hospital bed. Less of a mountain man and more of a small, motherless boy. Jackson wished there was a way of making him happy. He told him about going to London to see Emma but he seemed too zoned out to be really interested, although he had asked Jackson if he was OK (which was ironic given Theo’s circumstances) and Jackson said, ‘That would very much depend on your definition of “OK”, Theo.’

  The real worry for Jackson was that he might actually find the man in the yellow golfing sweater (although it hardly seemed likely) and it wouldn’t do a damn thing to help Theo’s pain, in fact it would make things worse because then he would have the ‘closure’ he was looking for. And Laura would still be dead.

  Jackson made his way through the overheated corridors of the hospital from the medical admissions ward to the paediatric ICU. He walked into the unit unchallenged; the nurse at the desk recognized him and didn’t question him. He would have preferred it if she had, it shouldn’t be this easy to walk into places.

  Jackson observed Shirley through a glass wall that felt like a one-way mirror for all the attention anyone paid to him. Shirley was wearing blue surgical scrubs. Jackson didn’t think there was anything much sexier than the sight of a woman in surgical scrubs, and wondered if he was alone in thinking that or if most guys did. There should be opinion polls on these things. Shirley was standing over an ICU cot, delicately lifting a small waxy baby. It still had an array of tubes and monitors attached to its body so that it seemed like some odd, fragile creature from outer space.

  ‘Give me a sec and I’ll let her know you’re here,’ a young Australian male nurse said to him. (Who was running Australia? They were all over here. God knows why.)

  Jackson watched a doctor walk over to Shirley and touch her on the shoulder and say something to her. There was something indefinably intimate about the gesture, and from the way she turned to him and smiled Jackson instantly knew that they’d slept with each other. They both gazed down at the baby. Jackson felt even more like a voyeur than usual. The nurse who had recognized him (what was her name? Elaine? Eileen?) came and stood by his side and said, ‘Ah, sweet.’

  ‘Sweet?’ Jackson said, wondering what could be sweet about this little tableau. A woman he’d recently spent a night of unfettered lust with cooing over a sick baby with another lover.

  ‘Well, sad really, I suppose,’ Elaine/Eileen said. ‘They can’t have children of their own.’

  ‘They? They’re a couple? Shirley Morrison and the doctor guy?’

  Elaine/Eileen frowned at him. ‘Yes, Professor Welch is her husband. He’s the head of paediatrics.’

  ‘They’re married?’

  ‘Yes, Inspector Brodie. Are you investigating Shirley?’

  ‘It’s Mr Brodie. I left the force two years ago, Eileen.

  ‘Elaine.’

  ‘Why would I be investigating her?’

  Elaine shrugged. ‘The way you’re interrogating me, maybe.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Elaine moved closer to him, her tone more confidential. ‘You know, don’t you, that she’s the sister of—’

  ‘Yes, ‘ Jackson interrupted her. ‘I know.’ Shirley Morrison hadn’t changed her name after her sister’s conviction, she hadn’t changed it when she got married. He had asked her, somewhere in the drug-like haze of their morning after, ‘You never changed your identity?’ and she said, ‘It was the only thing I had left.’ Her husband moved on to inspect another alien baby and Shirley put the one she was holding back into its little spaceship cot.

&nb
sp; The Australian nurse entered the ICU and said something to Shirley Morrison, who looked up and frowned when she saw Jackson. He shrugged at her and made a helpless face. He pointed at his own naked ring finger and then pointed at her. She raised her eyes heavenward as if she couldn’t believe he was communicating in this ridiculous way. She signalled to him to go to the entrance of the unit. She opened the door a fraction as if Jackson posed a threat.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were married?’ he asked her.

  ‘Would it have made a difference?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Christ, Jackson, what are you, the last good man standing? It was just sex, get over it.’ She closed the door on him. He’d had a bad feeling about her, he should have gone with it. Was she a good liar or was she just good at avoiding the truth? Was there a difference? He liked to think truth was an absolute but maybe that made him into a tight-arsed moral fascist.

  On his way out of the unit, Jackson almost bumped into the yellow-haired homeless girl who was lurking in the corridor. She was muttering under her breath, as if she was saying the rosary, and Jackson wanted to say hello to her because he’d seen her around so much recently that he felt he knew her but of course he didn’t and so he was surprised when she did.