Case Histories (11 page)

Caroline, needless to say, had never been to an agricultural fair in her life and was charmed by everything. Yes, that was what had happened to her. She had been charmed, bewitched, glamorized somehow—by the combed sheep and ruffled cows and the squeaky-clean pigs, by the marquees with their displays of prizewinning jams and sponge cakes, the crocheted shawls and knitted matinee jackets, the exhibitions of marrows and potatoes and leeks and roses, by the WI serving cream teas in a warm tent that smelled of grass, by the vicar—a big man with the rosy skin of a drinker—who opened the fair and told funny jokes (nothing like his successor, John Burton). There was an ice-cream van and a children’s gymkhana and a small perfect antique merry-go-round. It was unreal. It was ridiculous. At any moment Caroline expected a steam train to pull up and the cast of bloody
Heartbeat
to alight on the platform. But instead it was Jonathan Weaver, who didn’t alight but
strode.
“He got those thighs from show jumping,” Gillian whispered. “Amateur, but he could have gone far, as they say.” Oh no, now it was like a Jilly Cooper novel.

“Untitled aristocracy,” Gillian said. “You know, ancient family, farmed-the-land-since-Domesday kind of thing, only they’re dilettantes, not real farmers—she said bitterly.”

“Why not?”

“They’ve always had other income, lots of it—London leases, land, the slave trade, wherever people get their money from, so they play at farming—a show herd of Red Devons, and their sheep are like something Marie Antoinette would have shepherded—and this is sheep country, let’s not forget, where a sheep’s a sheep, and all the farm cottages are modernized and central heated and they’re rebuilding the original kitchen garden with National Trust money, no less.”

Caroline didn’t really understand this farmer’s daughter’s diatribe so she just said, “Right,” and then Gillian laughed and said, “But, by Christ, I’d shag the daylights out of him any day.”

S
he remembered standing in front of a display for
BEST STRAWBERRY JAM,
the jars—topped with gingham mobcaps and labeled in a way that was reminiscent of
The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
—were garnered with rosettes and little “commended” cards and she was thinking that you should be able to taste the prizewinning jam, not just look at it, when suddenly he was standing beside her and introducing himself and then there was a kind of blackout here because the next thing she remembered was sitting up high in the passenger seat of his Range Rover, being driven to his house. He’d said something polite about “coming up to the house for some tea” but it must have been lust, pure and raw, and damned up for too long, which had impelled her—abandoning Gillian, who was furious with her (quite rightly) for going off in such a public manner with someone she’d only just met.

They drove on a long straight road that ran through parkland and it was only after five minutes or so that she realized that he owned this road, and the parkland, and everything—he owned
landscape,
for God’s sake. And although it was lust that had got her this far she had genuinely thought that his invitation to tea would involve an elegant, light drawing room, on the walls of which would hang paintings of horses and dogs. There would be large sofas that would be upholstered in a pale lemon damask silk and there would be a grand piano on which were displayed family photographs in heavy silver frames (this image was largely based on a childhood school visit to a stately home). She could see herself perched nervously on the edge of one of the lemon damask sofas while Jonathan’s mother presided over the tea tray—pretty, antique china—as she interrogated her politely about her “fascinating” urban life.

In reality, Jonathan’s mother was still at the fair, graciously presenting rosettes to the pony club, and neither Jonathan nor Caroline got anywhere near the drawing room (which would turn out to be nothing like she’d imagined it) because they went round the back of the house where he took her into some kind of scullery, and they were hardly in the door before he pulled her pants down around her ankles and made her bend over the old wooden draining-board while he shoved himself roughly inside her, and as she hung on to the (handy) taps of the Belfast sink, she thought
sweet Jesus Christ, now this is what you call “fucking,”
and now look at her—driving a Land Rover “Discovery” and buying clothes from Country Casuals in Harrogate and sitting opposite him at the breakfast table (mahogany, Chippendale) with his two brattish children. Could someone please tell her how the hell that had happened?

“W
ell,” John Burton said, “I suppose I should be going.” They had been sitting on a pew, side by side, quite companionably, but not speaking to each other. That was the thing about a church, you could be quiet and no one questioned why. The rain had almost stopped, although you could still smell it—green and summery—through the open door. “The rain’s easing off,” he said, and Caroline said, “Yes, I think it is.” He stood up and escorted her outside. The dogs had been asleep and now made a great performance of welcoming Caroline’s reappearance, although she knew they couldn’t care less really.

“Good-bye, then,” John Burton said and shook her hand again. She felt a little flutter, something long dormant coming back to life. He climbed on his bike and cycled off, turning once to wave, an action that made him wobble ridiculously. She stood and watched him moving away from her, ignoring the overexcited dogs. She was in love. Just like that. How totally, utterly insane.

8

Jackson

V
ictor’s last rites took minimalism to a new level of austerity. Jackson, Julia, and Amelia were the only people present, unless you counted Victor himself, quietly decomposing in a cheap veneered oak coffin that remained starkly unadorned by any farewell flowers. Jackson had expected, if nothing else, a sense of occasion. He had imagined that Victor’s funeral would take place in the chapel of St. John’s, his old college, where he would be lauded by his ex-colleagues in a tedious high Anglican service punctuated by hymns sung badly to the accompaniment of a pained-sounding organ.

Amelia and Julia were sitting in the front pew of the crematorium chapel. Jackson had managed to resist their invitation to sit between them, in the place of Victor’s nonexistent son. Jackson leaned forward and whispered to Julia, “Why is there no one else here?” Nominally, he was there in a professional role: he wanted to know who would turn up at Victor’s funeral, and he supposed in the event nobody was as interesting as somebody.

“No one is here because we didn’t tell anyone,” Amelia said as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

Amelia was not dressed in black for her father’s funeral, not a hint of it, quite the opposite in fact as she was sporting ribbed woolen tights in a bright scarlet that was quite alarming. Jackson wondered if there were a symbolic significance to this—there was probably some ancient Cambridge custom that dictated a bluestocking replaced her legwear with red on the death of her father. There seemed to be ancient Cambridge customs for most things (sorry,
Oxford
). Why would anyone wear woolen tights in the middle of summer? The crematorium chapel was chilled by the air-conditioning, but outside it was hot. Julia was just as bad, rejecting the black of bereavement and muffling herself from head to toe in a vintage coat in grass-green velvet (were they cold-blooded, like reptiles?). Her mad hair looked as if it had been groomed by a troupe of circus dogs. Jackson, in his black funeral suit and severe black tie, was the only one who appeared to be mourning Victor.

Amelia’s brazen legs reminded him of the legs of a bird he’d seen recently in a
National Geographic
in his dentist’s waiting room.

Julia twisted round to face Jackson. “I always think on these occasions,” she said, “well, not so much these occasions”—she indicated the coffin in an offhand way—“as, you know, family stuff, birthdays, Christmas, that Olivia might turn up.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Amelia said.

“I know.” They both lapsed into sadness but then Julia rallied herself and said, “You look very handsome in a suit, Mr. Brodie.” Amelia gave Julia a disparaging look. Julia’s eyes were watering and she sounded choked up but she declared it was hay fever rather than grief “in case you get the wrong idea.” She swallowed a Becotide and offered one to Jackson, which he refused. Jackson had never had an allergy in his life (except to people, perhaps). He considered his constitution to be robustly northern. He’d watched a documentary recently on the Discovery Channel that showed how northerners still had hardy Viking DNA and southerners had something else, something softer, Saxon or French.

“The decor in here is so dreary,” Julia whispered loudly, and Amelia tutted as if she were at the theater and Julia were an annoying stranger. “What?” Julia said to her crossly. “He’s not going to leap out of his coffin and object, is he?” A brief spasm of horror gripped Amelia’s features at this idea, but at least the notion of a resurrected Victor shut them both up, even if only momentarily. Even a tedious Anglican service would have been preferable to the squabbling Land sisters.

O
n his way to Victor’s funeral, Jackson had paid a visit to the old offices of Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton, now a beauty parlor called Bliss. “Beauty Therapists”—that’s how they styled themselves, which made Jackson think of psychiatry rather than facials and manicures. Healing people with beauty. How would you do that? Music? Poetry? Landscape? Sex? What did he turn to when he needed healing? “From Boulder to Birmingham,” Emmylou Harris. His daughter’s face. That was corny, but it was true.

There was a room in Theo’s house. Theo had invited him to his house to show him the room. Jackson could not have lived with a room like that in his house. An upstairs bedroom that looked like a police incident room—photographs and maps pinned to the wall, flowcharts and whiteboards, timetables of events. Two metal filing cabinets, bursting with files, boxes on the floor containing yet more files. Anything that could possibly have been relevant to his daughter’s death was in that room. And a good number of those things Theo shouldn’t have been in possession of—the scene-of-crime photographs, for example, not tacked up on the wall (for which small mercy Jackson gave thanks) but that Theo produced from the filing cabinet. Ghastly pictures of his daughter’s body that Theo handled with a kind of professional detachment, as if they were holiday snaps that might interest Jackson. He knew it wasn’t like that, that time had somehow inured Theo to every horror, but Jackson was shocked nonetheless. “I’ve got a few contacts,” Theo said, without expounding. He’d been a lawyer, and lawyers, in Jackson’s experience, always had contacts.

Theo had spent the last ten years of his life doing nothing but investigating his daughter’s death. Was that the right thing to do or was it the crazy thing to do? The room was like something a psychopath might have kept, not any psychopath Jackson had ever come across, of course, but the psychopaths who inhabited crime novels and television programs. Jackson thought they should make more television drama about car crime committed by fourteen-year-old boys high on glue and cider and boredom—it would be a lot more realistic, just not very interesting.

Looking at Victor’s coffin made Jackson wonder about Laura Wyre’s funeral. Hundreds of people had attended, according to the press reports. Theo had hardly any memory of it, even though he had all the press clippings. When Jackson asked Theo about his daughter’s funeral his eyes had flickered from side to side as if his brain were disassociating from the memory. Weren’t there stages of bereavement you were supposed to go through—shock, denial, guilt, anger, depression—and then acceptance, when you were supposed to come out the other end and be okay, move on. Jackson had received grief counseling once. His school had arranged for someone to come in, from the “West Yorkshire Adolescent Psychiatric Unit,” an overblown title to place on the hunched shoulders of the short, red-haired psychologist whose breath smelled of raw onions and who consulted with Jackson in the makeshift cupboard that passed for a sickroom at his school. The red-haired, bearded psychologist told Jackson that he had to move on, to get on with his own life, but Jackson was twelve years old and had nowhere left to move on from and nowhere obvious to go.

Jackson wondered how many times people had suggested to Theo that he had to get on with his life. Theo Wyre was stuck somewhere near the beginning of the bereavement process, at a place he’d made all his own, where if he fought hard enough he might be able to bring his daughter back. It wasn’t going to happen—Jackson knew that the dead never came back. Ever.

The yellow golfing sweater. That was the thing, the thing that should have led them to the murderer. None of Theo’s clients had expressed any interest in golf (was golf the “royal game” or was that tennis?). This indifference to the game stemmed from the fact that most of Theo’s clients were women—his caseload was almost entirely matrimonial and domestic. (So why was he in Peterborough on a boundary dispute the day his daughter died?) It was a depressing business going through his files, containing as they did an endless parade of women who were being battered, abused, and defeated, not to mention the string of ones who were just plain unhappy, who couldn’t stand the sight of the poor schmuck they were married to. It was an education (although one Jackson had already been subject to) because Theo was extraordinarily good at documenting the banal details of failure, the litany of tiny flaws and cracks that were nothing to an outsider but looked like canyons when you were on the inside—“He buys me carnations, carnations are crap, every woman knows that so why doesn’t he?” “He never thinks to run a bit of Toilet Duck round the bowl, even though I leave it out where he can’t miss it and I’ve asked him, I’ve asked him a hundred times.” “If he ever does any ironing it’s ‘Look at me, I’m ironing, look how well I’m doing it, I iron much better than you, I’m the best, I do it properly.’” “He’d get me my breakfast in bed if I asked him to, but
I don’t want to have to ask.
” Did men know how much they got on women’s nerves? Theo Wyre certainly did.

Jackson had always been good, never left the toilet seat up and all that clichéd stuff, and anyway he’d been outnumbered, two women to one man. Boys took a long time to become men but daughters were women from the kickoff. Jackson had hoped they would have another baby, he would have liked another girl, he’d have liked five or six of them, to be honest. Boys were all too familiar but girls, girls were extraordinary. Josie had shown no interest at all in having another baby, and on the one occasion Jackson had suggested it, she gave him a hard look and said, “You have it then.”

Did anyone wear a golfing sweater who wasn’t interested in golf? And if it came to that what made it a golfing sweater as opposed to merely a sweater? Jackson had searched through the police photographs until he found the one of a yellow sweater that the eyewitnesses were agreed was “very like” the one worn by Laura Wyre’s killer. As eyewitnesses went, they were rubbish. Jackson peered closely at the logo on the sweater, a small appliqué of a golfer swinging a club. Would you wear that if you weren’t a golfer? You might buy it in a secondhand shop and not care because it was a good sweater (“60 percent lambswool, 40 percent cashmere”) and you could afford it.

Yellow for danger, like those tiny poisonous yellow frogs. That homeless girl this morning on St. Andrews Street, her hair was the color of poisonous frogs. He’d almost tripped over her on the way to Bliss. She had a dog with her, a whippety sort of thing.

“Can you help me?” the homeless girl said to him, and he squatted on his haunches so that he wasn’t towering over her and said, “What do you want me to do?” and she’d stared off into the middle distance somewhere and said, “I don’t know.” She had bad skin, she looked like a druggie, a lost girl. He’d been late so he’d left the girl with the frog-yellow hair and thought, On the way back I’ll ask her name.

And the spouses of all those disgruntled women in Theo’s filing cabinet—did any of them play golf? The police had investigated every single one of them and found two who were golfers, both with cast-iron alibis. They had scoured the exes for grudges over divorces and affairs, over custody disputes, alimony and child support, and couldn’t find a single likely suspect. They interviewed everyone, took alibis from everyone, they had even taken DNA and fingerprints, although there were no fingerprints at the scene and no DNA because the man had touched nothing, he hadn’t even opened the door to the office—the lower door had been propped open and the receptionist (Moira Tyler) reported that he had pushed the inner door open with his elbow. And that was it, straight through to the boardroom at the back, slash, slash, and out again. No messing, no shouting, no name-calling, no anger vented. Like a contract killer rather than a crime of passion.
Crime passionnel.
He’d taken the knife away with him and it had never been found.

Jackson had scrutinized the exes who’d had restraining orders taken out against them. Nada.
Rien.
Everyone had been interviewed, everyone had alibis that held up. And as for the killer being someone from Theo’s personal life, well, Theo didn’t seem to have a personal life, outside of his daughters, outside of Laura. He hardly ever mentioned the other one, Jennifer. (Why not?)

J
ulia seemed to be asleep. Amelia, slumped in her seat, stared glumly at the carpet. She had terrible deportment. Jackson had been assuming that someone was going to acknowledge a death had occurred, that a vicar would appear from somewhere and say a few impersonal words before launching Victor into the unknown, and so he was astonished when Victor’s coffin suddenly slid quietly away and disappeared behind the curtains with as much ceremony as if it had been a suitcase on a baggage carousel. “That’s
it?
” Jackson said to Julia.

“What did you want?” Amelia asked, standing up and stalking out of the chapel on her red bird legs. Julia took Jackson’s arm and squeezed it and they walked out of the crematorium chapel together as if they’d just been married. “It’s not illegal,” she said brightly. “We checked.”

It was hot, not funeral weather at all, and Julia, who had begun to sneeze the moment they were outside, said cheerfully, “Not as hot as where Daddy is at the moment.” Jackson put on his Oakleys and Julia said, “
Oo-la-la,
how serious you look, Mr. Brodie, like a Secret Service agent,” and Amelia had made a noise like a rooting pig. She was standing on the path, waiting for them. “That’s it?” Jackson repeated, disentangling himself from Julia’s grip.

“No, of course it’s not,” Amelia said. “Now we have tea and cake.”

“I
f you were a dog, what do you think you would be?” Julia stuffed a large piece of cake into her mouth. “I don’t know.” Jackson shrugged. “A Labrador maybe?” and they had both, in unison, shouted, “No!” incredulously, as if he were insane even to contemplate being a Labrador. “You are
so
not a Labrador, Jackson,” Julia said, “Labradors are
pedestrian.
”

“Chocolate Labs aren’t so bad,” Amelia said. “It’s the yellow ones that are . . . tedious.”

“Chocolate Labradors.” Julia laughed. “I always think you should be able to eat them.”

“I think Mr. Brodie is an English pointer,” Amelia said decisively.

“Really?” Julia said. “Golly. I wouldn’t have thought of that one.” Jackson hadn’t realized that people still said “golly.” They were very
loud,
the Land sisters. Embarrassingly loud. He wished they would be less demonstrative. Of course, madness was endemic in Cambridge, so they didn’t stick out so much. He would have hated to have been sitting with them in a café in his native northern town, where no one had ever said “golly” since the beginning of time. They both seemed remarkably skittish today, a mood apparently not unrelated to having just cremated their father.