Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  Maybe they were situationists, creating their own bizarre piece of art, indifferent as to whether anyone viewed it or not. Or some kind of cult? A nudist coven? Most of them looked as if they were over forty and they had imperfect bodies – jodhpur thighs and drooping bottoms, grey pubic hair and moles and freckles and old operation scars and some of them were as wrinkled as a Neapolitan mastiff. They were tanned all over so whatever it was they were doing they must be doing it frequently. And then they were gone, beyond a bend in the river, vanishing like a dream.

  Amelia stomped off ahead of Julia because she was annoyed with her about everything but particularly for flirting so much with Jackson yesterday on the river. Julia ran to keep up but then they heard the chimes of an ice-cream van and Julia said, ‘Hark the chimes of midnight,’ and Amelia said, ‘Hardly an appropriate analogy,’ but Julia had responded as obediently as a Pavlovian dog to the sound of the chimes and had trotted off to find ice cream.

  Amelia strode on, across Christ’s Pieces, past the Princess Diana Memorial Rose Garden, in whose direction she threw a contemptuous glance, what nonsense (dead or alive) the whole Princess Diana thing was. There was no memorial to Olivia anywhere on earth, not a rose garden or a bench, not even a headstone on an empty grave. And then, suddenly, out of the blue, Amelia was accosted by the homeless girl with the canary-coloured hair. She grabbed Amelia by one arm and started pulling her back along the path and Amelia thought, I’m being mugged, how ludicrous, and tried to cry out but found she’d fallen into the voiceless state of nightmares. She struggled to look round, to see where Julia was – Julia would save her from the yellow-haired girl, Julia had always been a scrapper when they were children – but the girl was dragging her along the path as if she was a recalcitrant child. It was absurd because Amelia was at least twice the size of her captor, but the yellow-haired girl was unnervingly and uncharacteristically animated, besides which she was filthy and homeless and addicted to drugs and possibly retarded in some way and Amelia was frightened of her.

  The yellow-haired girl’s dog ran along beside them, jumping up and down like an excitable accomplice. If the girl would just loosen her grip on Amelia for a second she would give over her purse or her handbag, or whatever it was she wanted. The words ‘stand and deliver’ suddenly came into Amelia’s mind (the brain really did do the oddest things under stress). Highwayman girl – highwaygirl – you never heard of ‘highwaywomen’, did you? Did they exist? Were highwaymen like pirates and robber barons – more myth than fact? What was a robber baron? The highwaygirl wasn’t saying, ‘Stand and deliver,’ she was saying what she usually said – ‘Help me.’

  No, she wasn’t. She was saying, ‘Help him, help him,’ pointing at a fat man on a bench who was wheezing the same death wheeze as Victor except that Victor had suffocated passively and the fat man on the bench was fighting the air around him, as if he could scoop up oxygen with his hands. ‘Help him,’ the yellow-haired girl said again but Amelia stood paralysed, staring at the dying fat man. For the life of her she couldn’t think of a single thing she could do that would be of any help to him.

  Fortunately for the fat man, Julia appeared at that moment, triumphantly bearing aloft two cones like someone (an actress perhaps) carrying flaming torches. When she saw what was happening she dropped the ice creams and ran towards the bench, pulling her Ventolin inhaler from her handbag and holding it to the fat man’s gaping fish mouth. Then she produced her mobile and thrust it at Amelia, shouting, ‘Phone an ambulance,’ as if she was back in Casualty, but Amelia couldn’t even put out a hand to take the phone from her. ‘For fuck’s sake, Milly,’ Julia snapped and gave the phone instead to the yellow-haired girl, who might be retarded and stupid and filthy and homeless and addicted to drugs but at least, unlike Amelia, she was capable of dialling 999 and saving someone’s life.

  Julia scrambled eggs for their supper and after they had eaten she phoned the hospital and reported back to Amelia, ‘He’s all right apparently,’ and Amelia said, ‘Really?’ and Julia said, ‘Don’t you care?’ and Amelia said, ‘No.’ Because she didn’t, not really, maybe in theory but not in her heart because why should she care for someone else (how could she care for someone else) when nobody cared about her? And Julia said, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Amelia, pull yourself together’ (which, everyone knew, was something you weren’t supposed to say to depressed people), and Amelia ran into the back garden in tears and flung herself down on the grass and sobbed.

  The ground was hard and uncomfortable beneath her body, although it was still warm from the day’s heat, and she suddenly remembered what it had felt like sleeping in the tent. In fact this was almost the exact spot where the tent had been pitched that fateful night. Amelia sat up and looked around. Here was where Olivia had slept. She ran her hand over the grass, as if Olivia’s shape might have flattened it. Here Olivia had said, ‘Night-night, Milly,’ full of sleep and happiness, clutching Blue Mouse in her arms. Amelia had watched her fall asleep and had felt wise and grown-up and responsible because she was the one who had been put in charge by Rosemary, the only one allowed to sleep outside in the tent. With Olivia. Was ‘Milly’ the last word Olivia had ever said? Or were there other words before the silence, dreadful words of fear and mortal terror that Amelia could never, would never, bring herself to imagine? Her heart started beating fast at the thought of the terror Olivia must have endured. No, don’t think.

  Olivia was close, she was palpable. Where was she? Amelia stood up too quickly and felt dizzy as she stumbled around in the grass trying to sense a direction, as if her body was a divining rod. No, she had to stop and listen. If she listened she would hear her. And then very faintly she did hear something, a tiny mewling from the other side of the wall, a cat, not Olivia, but a sign surely. She tried opening the wooden gate in the wall, tugging off the ivy that was binding it shut. She pulled hard on its rusty old hinges until she managed to squeeze through an opening and found herself in the lane.

  The cat, tiny, half-cat, half-kitten, looked cowed when it saw her but it didn’t run away and Amelia bent down and tried to make herself smaller and friendlier (fat chance) and held out her hand to it and said, ‘Here, kitty, kitty, good kitty,’ until it advanced cautiously towards her and she was able to stroke its small, bony body. Eventually, after much cajoling, it allowed her to pick it up and she pressed her face into its fur and wondered if maybe she could keep it.

  The gate opposite, the one that led into Mrs Rain’s garden, was open. They used to climb over a broken-down part of the wall and hide in that garden when they were small. Amelia never thought of Mrs Rain as still being alive. Sylvia had fallen out of her beech tree and broken her arm.

  ‘Shall we take a little look?’ Amelia whispered to the cat.

  Yes, this had been an orchard. They used to steal the apples and plums. And they knocked on the door and shouted, ‘Is the witch at home?’ and then ran away, terrified. Sylvia, Sylvia was always the ringleader, of course. Sylvia the tormentor. Sylvia had just been Sylvia then but looking back Amelia thought what an odd, powerful child Sylvia was, always leading them into trouble.

  It was a huge garden, out of proportion to the size of the house. The garden had been overgrown when they were children, and now it had reverted to nature. How wonderful if she could get her hands on all that untamed wilderness. She could replant the orchard, put in a wildlife pond, an arch of roses, perhaps a herbaceous border to rival Newnham’s.

  The sense of Olivia was even stronger in here. Amelia imagined her hiding behind a tree, like a sprite, leading her on. Amelia’s feet caught on the couch grass and sticky willow, she was stung by nettles and scratched by briars but she was being drawn onward by an invisible hand until she almost stumbled over the dark shape on the ground, a bundle of rags and twigs dropped beneath a tree—

  * * *

  ‘Frisky,’ Jackson said, nodding at the kitten in Amelia’s arms. Amelia couldn’t let go of the kitten. A policewoman had walked Amelia home and
made her a cup of tea. (Why was it always the women? Still?) There were a lot of police in Victor’s kitchen, which they seemed to be using as a makeshift command centre (was that the word?). Woken by the commotion, a sleepy Julia wandered into the kitchen and looked astonished. She was half-naked, of course, wearing just her knickers and a T-shirt and completely unbothered by the fact. Oh, Mr Brodie, we can’t keep meeting like this.

  When Amelia had touched old Mrs Rain’s dead body she had felt as fragile and bony as the cat in her arms. The police had put a little marquee over her body and had erected arc lights and you wouldn’t do that for an old woman who had died of natural causes, which meant that Amelia had not just discovered a dead body, she had discovered a murdered body. A shiver spasmed her body and woke the cat. It jumped out of her arms and Julia went into full Kitty, kitty, kitty mode, picking it up and holding it against her obvious breasts, and Amelia said, ‘For God’s sake, Julia, put some clothes on,’ and Julia made a face at her and sauntered out of the kitchen, the cat still in her arms, while all the policemen watched her bottom; thank God, she wasn’t wearing a thong – which was surely the most ridiculous piece of underwear ever invented, apart from crotchless knickers, of course, because it was all about sex—

  ‘Amelia, do you want more tea?’ Jackson was regarding her with concern, as if she was a mental patient.

  It was almost morning and they had only just gone to bed. She could still hear the police cars departing and arriving, the sound of their radios. At least Sylvia’s room was at the front of the house, away from the arc lights. She didn’t even have the cat now because it had followed Julia to her room. She was never going to sleep, not unless she took something. Julia kept her sleeping tablets in the bathroom. Julia always had prescription drugs of one kind or another, it was part of the drama of her life. Amelia couldn’t read the bottle without her glasses, but then what did it matter? Did two send you to sleep, four into a deeper sleep? How about ten, where would they send you? They were so tiny! Like children’s pills. Rosemary used to give them a junior aspirin every day even when there was nothing wrong with them. That must be where Julia got it from. Rosemary had always had a medicine chest of drugs, even before she was dying. How about twenty? That would be a long sleep. Nothing had saved Rosemary, of course, but then nothing would save any of them, would it? Thirty? What if they just made you groggy? Jackson thought she was ridiculous and she was never going to find Olivia and now Julia had a cat and nothing was fair. No one wanted her, even her own father didn’t find her attractive enough to want her. Not fair. Not one little bit. Not fair, not fair, not fair. The whole bottle? Because it wasn’t fair. Not fair, not fair, not fair. Can you help me? No.

  Notfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfair-notfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairn otfairnotfairnotfairnotfair—

  ‘Milly, are you all right? Milly? Milly?’

  19

  Jackson

  YOU FORGOT IT WAS COLDER UP NORTH. BRITAIN WAS such a small country you wouldn’t think you’d notice a climate change over a couple of hundred miles. It was still warm enough to sit in the beer garden though, warm enough for northerners anyway. Jackson got the drinks in. They were at an old coaching inn, in the middle of nowhere in Northumberland. There was a lot of nowhere in Northumberland. Jackson wondered about buying a cottage there. It would be cheaper than Cambridge, where he no longer had a home. His house was still standing but he had lost more or less everything in it – clothes and CDs and books, all of Theo’s files on Laura – if not to the explosion then to the water in the fire hoses. Well, it was one way of getting a fresh start, a new life: just blow up the old one.

  ‘Gas?’ he’d said hopefully to the fire investigation officer.

  ‘Dynamite,’ the fire officer said. (A short, manly kind of exchange.) Who had access to dynamite? People who worked in mines, obviously. Jackson fished in his wallet for DC Lowther’s card and phoned his number. ‘The plot thickens,’ he said, and wished he hadn’t said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. ‘I think we have a suspect.’ That didn’t sound much better. ‘My house has just exploded, by the way.’ At least that was novel.

  (‘Quintus Rain,’ DC Lowther ruminated, ‘what kind of a name is that?’

  ‘A bloody stupid one,’ Jackson said.)

  He carried the drinks outside, an orange juice for himself, a Coke for Marlee and a gin and tonic for Kim Jessop, except she was called Kim Strachan now because at some point in the last ten years she had married and then divorced a ‘mad Scottish head case’ called George Strachan. Now she owned a bar in Sitges and a restaurant in Barcelona and was partnered up with a Russian ‘businessman’. She was still blond and sported the deep leathery tan of someone who thought skin cancer happened to other people, although, judging by her smoker’s cough, it was going to be a race with lung cancer. As befitted a mafia mistress, she was wearing enough gold to furnish an Indian wedding. She hadn’t lost any of the Geordie in her, Kim Strachan, formerly Jessop, didn’t have a single drop of soft southern DNA in her body. Jackson warmed to her immediately.

  ‘It was lucky you got hold of me,’ she said, taking a deep drag on a Marlborough. ‘I’m only in the country for a couple of weeks, seeing Mum. She’s bad on her legs these days, I’m trying to persuade her to move out to Spain.’

  Stan Jessop had reluctantly given Jackson his first wife’s mobile number, complaining sullenly that he hardly ever saw his daughter, Nina, because ‘the bitch’ had put her in a Quaker boarding school in York, and Jackson thought to himself that a Quaker boarding school in York sounded pretty accessible compared to a school of any denomination in New Zealand.

  Kim Strachan and her family were taking a ‘farmhouse holiday’ somewhere in the vicinity. ‘A sheep farm,’ she said. ‘Bloody noisy things, sheep. The silence of the lambs, my arse.’ Her ‘family’ seemed to include not only Nina and the mother who was bad on her legs but also ‘Vladimir’ and any number of Vladimir’s ‘ associates’, one of whom was driving Kim and was currently sipping a Fanta two tables away and scrutinizing every passer-by as if they might be potential assassins. ‘Oh, he’s a teddy bear, really,’ Kim said, laughing. She’d come a long way since her days in the little 1930s semi she had once shared with Stan Jessop.

  It turned out that Kim had left Stan the week before Laura Wyre’s murder. She had already ‘taken up’ with George Strachan, and was behind the bar of a British expatriate pub in Alicante when Laura was killed. Kim had never returned to Cambridge, hadn’t even spoken to Stan for two years after she left, ‘because he was such a bloody wanker’, so that when Jackson phoned her and said he was ‘investigating certain aspects of Laura Wyre’s death,’ she said, ‘Jesus. Laura Wyre’s dead? How?’ Jackson felt his heart sink because talking about a girl who was ten years dead was a very different thing to breaking fresh news of that death. ‘She’s only twenty-eight,’ Kim said.

  Jackson sighed, thinking, no, she was only eighteen, and said, ‘Actually she died ten years ago. I’m afraid she was murdered.’ There was a silence at the other end of the phone, disturbed only by a surly rumble of Russian in the background. Jackson remembered Emma Drake saying that it was worse hearing about Laura’s death when ‘it was already consigned to history for everyone else’. It seemed like the whole world had been out of the country when Laura died.

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘I’m really, really sorry,’ Kim said, fishing the slice of lemon out of her gin and putting it in the ashtray.

  ‘Her killer was never found,’ Jackson said. ‘Laura might not even have been the intended victim.’ Jackson cast a doubtful glance at Marlee. He probably sounded like he was talking about an episode of Law and Order or CSI rather than real life. He hoped he did, he hoped she didn’t actually watch Law and Order and CSI, he hoped she watched Blue Peter and reruns of The Little House on the Prairie. He had told Marlee about Laura, that she had been killed by a ‘bad person’ because ‘sometimes bad thing
s happened to good people’ and Marlee frowned and said, ‘Theo said she was called Jennifer,’ and Jackson said, ‘That’s his other daughter.’ How did Jennifer feel, always being the other daughter, the one who got less attention than a dead sister?

  ‘Laura was a nice girl,’ Kim Strachan said. ‘She was up herself with me when I first met her, but she was just middle class, you know. You can’t hold that against a person, can you? Aye, well, you can, but not Laura. She had a good heart.’

  ‘I’m just following up on a few things, people who weren’t interviewed at the time,’ Jackson said. ‘I’m working for her father.’

  ‘Fat bloke?’

  ‘Yeah, fat bloke.’

  ‘Theo,’ Marlee said. ‘He’s nice.’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Jackson said. He looked at Marlee and said, ‘Do you want to go and get yourself a packet of crisps, sweetheart?’ He reached into his pocket for change but Kim Strachan had already opened her purse and produced a new five-pound note that she gave to Marlee, saying, ‘Here you go, pet, get what you want. Bloody stupid Brits,’ she added to Jackson, ‘why can’t they just get with the euro? Every other bloody country in Europe’s managed it.’

  Kim Strachan lit another cigarette, shaking one out for Jackson, and when he refused she said, ‘For God’s sake, you’re gagging for one, man, I can tell.’

  Jackson took a cigarette. ‘I was off them for fifteen years,’ he said.

  ‘What started you again?’

  Jackson shrugged. ‘An anniversary.’

  ‘Must have been a big one,’ Kim Strachan said.

  Jackson laughed humourlessly. ‘No, it wasn’t. A thirty-third, that’s not a significant one, is it? Thirty-three years since my sister died.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I think it was just one too many. She would have been fifty this year. This week. Tomorrow.’

  ‘There you go then,’ Kim Strachan said, as if that explained everything. She lit his cigarette with a heavy gold lighter that had something in Cyrillic engraved on it.