Case Histories (13 page)

“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, and it was so sexual that it turned Jackson’s heart over. She was eight years old for fuck’s sake.

“That’s nice, sweetheart.” She smelled of sugar and sweat. He remembered the first time he held her, when the whole of her head fit 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 anymore was whether or not his daughter was safe.

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

“S
he 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 “Carmen 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?” 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 sweet-talk 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 were 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 PC 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 neighboring 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.”

J
ackson 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 along behind the back of Victor’s garden. He hadn’t realized how close the two 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 that had enraptured her. No one would have had to climb anything—he or she could have just 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 again. Victor? Rosemary Land?

M
arlee 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 fur, 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 cozy 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.

L
e 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 license 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.”

When he was on his way out the door, Milanda said, “She’s not haunting the place. I’d know if she were here. I’ve got second sight, I’d feel her if she were here.”

“Really?” Jackson said—Milanda seemed like 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 color 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 thought she was actually going to say something portentous.

9

Amelia

“D
on’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 Julia. 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 Regent 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 Doberman, not a rottweiler, and certainly not a pointer—he was 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 at the poly, teaching “communication skills” (as it was so laughably called) to day-release slaters and apprentice bricklayers and other assorted riffraff. 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, that’s why you didn’t want it washing your face.

The girl had yellow hair, an odd canary color, 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 were doing Julia a favor. 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 innocent people. “Evil bastards”—that was tabloid language from the slaters’
Sun
s. She may 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.

T
hey stopped outside a burger bar. Inside it was heaving with foreign-language students, they were spilling out onto the pavement 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—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 was delighted when they discovered she was in Cambridge, where they no longer had a mystery shopper.

“Right,” Julia said, consulting a piece of paper. “We have to ask for one burger with fries and one chickinlickin burger with no fries, a large Coke, a banana milk shake, and a strawberry slurry.”

“Which is?”

“An ice cream. More or less.”

“I’m not asking for a chickinlickin burger,” Amelia said. “I wouldn’t ask for a chickinlickin burger to save your life.”

“Yes, you would. But you don’t have to. I’m going to ask for it all. And it’s not to take away. It’s to sit in.”

“That’s not even grammatical,” Amelia said.

“There’s nothing grammatical about this meal. Grammar isn’t the issue. We’re looking for attitude. We’re assessing quality of service.”

“Can’t I just have a coffee?”

“No.” Julia started sneezing again. It was always embarrassing when Julia had a sneezing fit, one after the other, explosive, uncontrollable sounds, like a cannon firing. Amelia had once heard someone say that you could tell what a woman’s orgasm would be like if you heard her sneeze. (As if you would want to know.) Just recollecting this thought made her uncomfortable. In case this was common knowledge, Amelia had made a point ever since then of never sneezing in public if she could help it. “For God’s sake, take more Zyrtec,” she said crossly to Julia.

Amelia was acutely uncomfortable in places like this. They made her feel old and elitist and she didn’t want to feel either of those things, even if they were true. Julia, on the other hand, was a chameleon, adapting immediately to whatever was in hand, shouting her order to the spotted, callow youth behind the counter (did any of them wash their hands?) in a kind of Essex accent that she probably thought was plebeian but sounded completely at odds with the way she was dressed. The coat Julia was wearing was bizarre, like something from a Beardsley drawing. Amelia hadn’t really looked at it properly until now. It was such a bright color that it would be impossible to lose sight of Julia, unless she were to lie down on a hill of green summer grass, which would have rendered her invisible. When Olivia became invisible she was wearing a cotton nightdress that had belonged to each of them in turn and had once been pink but by the time it reached Olivia was a washed-out kind of no color. Amelia could see her as clear as day, climbing into the tent in the washed-out nightdress, the pink rabbit slippers, one arm clamping Blue Mouse to her chest.

Julia’s coat was too big for her. It flapped open and trailed on the floor as she maneuvered the tray of food through an impassable wad of foreign students. Amelia kept saying, “Excuse me, excuse me,” in a pointed way but it was no good. The only way you could get them to move was by elbowing them roughly out of the way.

When they finally got a seat Julia commenced to tear into the burger with a kind of primitive gusto. “Mm, meat,” she said to Amelia.

“Are you sure?” Amelia said. She would have been sick if she’d eaten any of this food. “It’s definitely meat,” Julia said. “What animal it’s from is another question. Or what part of the animal. We used to eat tail, after all. Oxen—what kind of a plural is that?”

“Old English. I think. There must be a whole generation of children thinking ‘chicken’ is spelled ‘chickin.’”

“There are worse things.”

“Such as?”

“Meteors.”

“The possibility of a meteor colliding with the earth doesn’t mean that we should embrace the Americanization of our language and culture.”

“Oh, shut up, Milly, do.”

Julia ate the chickinlickin burger, but the strawberry slurry defeated even her. Amelia sniffed the milk shake tentatively. It tasted completely artificial, as if it had been made in a laboratory. “This is made entirely of chemicals.”

“Isn’t everything?”

“Is it?”

“Come on,” Julia said. “Enough of the chitchat, let’s get to work.” She took out a form and began to fill it in. “
Did your server greet you?
I’m sure he did.”

“Why don’t you wear your glasses? You can’t see a thing without them.”

“What did the server say?”

“You’re so vain, Julia.”

“I think he said, ‘G’day there.’”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention. Julia?”

“They’re all Australian. The entire British workforce is Australian.”

“Julia. Julia, listen to me. When Victor went over your homework with you in his study, did he ever, you know, do anything? Did he ever interfere with you?”

“Who’s doing their jobs in Australia, do you think? Come on, Milly, we have to get on with this. Now,
Did your server smile?
Did he? Gosh, I really can’t remember.”

S
he could tell Jackson thought she was foolish, a foolish
woman.
He had that masculine dourness about him that was so infuriating—the type that thought women were in thrall to their periods and chocolate and kittens (which was quite a good description of Julia) when Amelia really wasn’t like that—well, perhaps the kittens. She wanted him to think better of her, she wanted him to like her.
Oo-la-la, how serious you look, Mr. Brodie, like a Secret Service agent.
Julia was so
obvious.
“Oo-la-la,” for God’s sake.

“Do you want tea?” she asked Julia when she floated into the kitchen, an empty glass in her hand.

“No. I’m going to have more gin,” Julia said, searching through the kitchen cupboards for something to eat. Did Julia always drink this much? Did she drink on her own? Why was that worse than drinking with someone?

He liked Julia, of course. All men liked Julia which was no surprise since she offered herself on a plate to them. Julia had once told her that she loved giving a man oral sex (which was undoubtedly why she wore that red lipstick) and Amelia had a distressing vision of Julia on her knees in front of Jackson’s—she wanted to say “cock” but the word wouldn’t really form in her mind because it was too obscene, and “penis” always sounded so ridiculous. Amelia didn’t want to be this prudish. She felt like someone who’d lost her way and ended up in the wrong generation. She would have been much more suited to a period with structure and rank and rules, where a button undone on a glove signaled licentiousness. She could have managed quite well living within those kinds of strictures. She had read too much James and Wharton. No one in Edith Wharton’s world really wanted to be there but Amelia would have got along fine inside an Edith Wharton novel. In fact, she could have happily lived inside any nineteenth-century novel.

She could hear the bath running upstairs (it took forever) and she knew that Julia would take her gin up to the bathroom with her (and probably a joint as well) and lie there for hours. Amelia wondered what it felt like to be so self-indulgent. Julia tore a piece off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into her mouth. Why couldn’t she use the knife and cut it? How did she manage to make eating a piece of bread look sexual? Amelia wished she hadn’t had that vision of Julia giving Jackson—say it—a blow job. She’d never given anyone a blow job in her life, not that she would ever tell Julia that, as she would just start rattling on again about “Henry” and his sexual needs. Hah!

“Are you sure you don’t want one?” Julia said, waving the gin bottle around, “it might help you to relax.”

“I don’t want to relax, thank you very much.” How did this happen to her? How did she become this person she didn’t want to be?

A
melia didn’t understand how being “good at literature” had warped into teaching “communication skills.” She’d applied to Oxbridge when she was in the sixth form at school. She wanted to show her teachers and Victor—mainly Victor—that she was clever enough. Her teachers had been dubious and hadn’t helped her to prepare in any way so that she’d muddled her way through the entrance papers with their impenetrable questions about
The Faerie Queene
and
The Dunciad
—neither of which she’d read—and their absurd plots to test ingenuity in essay writing—“Imagine you are proposing the invention of the wheel”—fancy giving that to the slaters and brickies as an assignment, they would bring sex into it somehow, of course, they brought sex into everything. Amelia didn’t know whether they did that because they knew it embarrassed her (it was ridiculous to be over forty and still blushing) or because they would do it anyway.

To Amelia’s surprise, Newnham had given her an interview. It took her a long time to realize that Victor had probably pulled some strings, or the college, recognizing the name, had given her an interview as a courtesy. She’d wanted to go to Newnham as long as she could remember; when they were children they used to peer through the gates into the garden. She always imagined heaven looked like that. She didn’t believe in heaven, of course. She didn’t believe in religion. That didn’t mean that she didn’t want to believe in heaven.