Case Histories (17 page)

Jesus, he’d forgotten how physically extreme this stuff was. Or “Sadomasochistic, homoerotic nonsense,” in Amelia’s caustic summary. Why was she so uptight all the time? He was sure it had nothing to do with Olivia. Or her father’s death. He knew it was the most politically incorrect thing he could think, and, God knows, he would never have voiced it out loud, not in a million years, but, let’s face it, Amelia Land needed to get laid.

“And this one is Our Lady of Krakow,” Sister Michael was explaining to Marlee, indicating a small statue in a glass case. “She was rescued from Poland by a priest during the war. At times of national crisis, she can be seen to cry.” Jackson thought it might have been better if the priest had rescued a few Jews instead of a plaster statue.

“She cries?” an awestruck Marlee asked.

“Yes, tears roll down her cheeks.” Jackson wanted to say, “It’s shite, Marlee, don’t listen,” but Sister Michael turned and looked at him, and, despite her plump, jolly face, she had nuns’ eyes, and nuns’ eyes, Jackson knew, could see right inside your head, so he nodded respectfully at the statue.
Sanguis Christi, inebria me.

“Sister Mary Luke” was expecting them, Sister Michael said, moving on, escorting them deeper into the complex corridors of the convent, her habit flapping as she marched purposively onward. Jackson remembered how nuns had a way of moving around very fast, without ever running, as if they were on wheels. Perhaps it was part of their training. He was surprised more criminals didn’t use a nun’s habit as a disguise. It was perfect misdirection—no one would ever notice your face, all they would see would be the outfit. Look at all the witnesses to Laura’s murder, all any of them had seen was the yellow golfing sweater.

J
ackson thought that Julia had said to him that Sylvia was a “greyhound” but perhaps what she’d actually said was that she
had
a greyhound, because she did. It was sitting patiently by her side when they came face-to-face with her. She was on one side of a grille and they were on the other, an arrangement that reminded Jackson partly of the charge desk in the detention cells and partly of a harem, although he wasn’t sure what part of his memory the harem bit came from. Jackson supposed that Sylvia looked like a greyhound, inasmuch as she was long and skinny, but she wasn’t bonny, as his father would have said. She was toothy and bespectacled, whereas the greyhound was a sleek, brindled creature, the kind of hound you saw in medieval paintings, accompanying a noblewoman to the hunt. Jackson wasn’t at all sure where he had conjured that image up from either. Perhaps it was just because there was something medieval in general about a convent. The dog stood up when they entered and gently licked Marlee’s fingers through the grille.

Franciscans, Jackson reminded himself. “Like some hippie order,” Julia had said. “They go around barefoot in the summer and they make their own sandals for the winter, and they keep animals as pets and they’re all vegetarians.” Amelia and Julia had briefed him at length about the convent. They seemed genuinely to despise Sylvia’s vocation. “Don’t be fooled by that holier-than-thou stuff,” Julia warned him. “Underneath all that penguin crap she’s still Sylvia.” “It’s just a form of escapism,” Amelia added dismissively. “She doesn’t have to pay bills, or think about where her next meal’s coming from. She never has to be
alone.
” Was that why Amelia frowned so much, then, because she was alone? But hadn’t Julia said something about a “Henry”? It was difficult to imagine Amelia in the arms of a man. Whoever Henry was, he wasn’t doing it for Amelia. (When did he stop calling her “Miss Land” and start calling her “Amelia”?)

Amelia said that she hardly ever visited Sylvia but they kept up a fitful, dutiful correspondence, “although Sylvia doesn’t exactly have much to write about—prayer, prayer, and more prayer—and then, of course, she does a lot of what is housework by any other name— they bake communion wafers, and starch and iron the priest’s vestments, all that kind of stuff. And she does a lot of gardening, and
knits
things for the poor,” she added disparagingly, and Julia said, “She’s making the knitting up,” and Amelia said, “No, I’m not,” and Julia said, “Yes, you are. I have visited her, you know, quite a lot,” and Amelia said, “That was when you were auditioning for a nun in
The Sound of Music,
” and Julia said, “No, it was not,” and Jackson said wearily, “Oh, shut up, the pair of you,” and they both turned and looked at him as if they’d just seen him for the first time. “Well,” he said, “really, catch yourself on,” and wondered when he’d started speaking like his mother.

“W
ell, that was interesting,” Jackson said, addressing Marlee via the rearview mirror. She looked as if she were nodding off to sleep. Sister Michael had taken her off to feed her, once she’d made the acquaintance of Sister Mary Luke’s dog (“Jester”—his racing name apparently. He was a rescue dog). The other interns had fussed around Marlee as if they’d never seen a child before and she seemed more than happy with the beans on toast, angel cake, and ice cream they had rustled up for her. If they’d given her chips they would probably have had a convert for life on their hands.

“Don’t mention to your mother that I took you to a convent,” he said.

Actually it hadn’t been that interesting. Sylvia knew he was coming, Amelia had telephoned ahead and explained that Jackson was looking into Olivia’s disappearance again but didn’t tell her what had prompted this. After Marlee had been taken away by Sister Michael, Jackson produced the blue mouse from where it had been squashed into his pocket (“enclosed”) and showed it to Sylvia. He wanted the shock factor. He remembered Julia saying that Amelia fainted when she saw it, and Amelia, after all, was not a fainter. Sylvia looked at the blue mouse, her dry, thin lips compressed together, her small, mud-colored eyes not wavering in their gaze. After a few seconds, she said, “Blue Mouse,” and reached a finger through the grille. Jackson moved the blue mouse closer to her and she touched its old, infirm body tenderly with one finger. A tear rolled silently down her cheek. But no, she hadn’t seen it since the day Olivia disappeared and she couldn’t even begin to imagine why it would be in among her father’s possessions.

“I was never close to Daddy,” she said.

“T
he angel cake was nice,” Marlee said sleepily.

Jackson’s phone rang. He looked at the number—Amelia and Julia—and groaned. He let his voice mail pick it up, but when he played the message back he was so alarmed at what he heard that he had to pull the car to the side of the road to listen to it again. Amelia was sobbing, a primal inchoate kind of lamentation that was grief, raw and untempered. Jackson wondered if Julia were dead.

“Breathe, Amelia, for God’s sake,” he said. “What is it? Is it Julia?” but all she said was, “Please, Jackson [‘Jackson?’ He’d never heard her call him that. It sounded way too intimate for Jackson’s liking], please, Jackson, please come, I need you.” And then she was cut off, or she cut herself off more likely so that he would have to go to Owlstone Road and find out what had happened (not Julia, surely?).

“What is it, Daddy?”

“Nothing, sweetheart. We’re just going to take a little detour on the way home.” Sometimes Jackson felt as if his whole life were a detour.

“W
e went to a convent!” Marlee shouted as she ran through the front door.

“A convent?” David Lastingham laughed, catching Marlee as she ran past him and lifting her high in the air and then hugging her to his body. Jackson thought, I’ll wait until he puts her down and then I’ll deck him, but then Josie came out of the kitchen, wearing an apron for God’s sake. Jackson had never seen Josie in an apron. “A convent?” she echoed. “What were you doing in a convent?”

“They had angel cake,” Marlee said.

Josie looked to Jackson for an explanation but he just shrugged and said, “As they do.”

“And the dog was dead,” Marlee said, suddenly crestfallen at the memory.

“What dog?” Josie asked sharply. “Did you run over a dog, Jackson?” and Marlee said, “No, Mummy. The dog was old and now he’s happy in heaven. With all the other dead dogs.” Marlee looked as if she were going to cry again (there had already been a lot of crying) and Jackson reminded her that they had seen a live dog as well. “Jester,” she remembered happily. “He was in prison with a nun, and they had a statue that cried, and Daddy’s got a tin in his car with a dead man in it.”

Josie gave Jackson a disgusted look. “Why do you always have to get her overexcited, Jackson?” and before he could say anything, Josie turned to David and said, “Will you take her upstairs, darling, and get her in the bath?” Jackson waited until Marlee and David—the usurper in his life, the man who now conducted his daughter’s bedtime routines and fucked his wife—had gone upstairs before saying, “Do you really think that’s wise?”

“Wise? What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about some man you hardly know being left alone with your naked daughter. Our naked daughter. Oh, and by the way, do you think it’s really a good idea to allow her to dress like a child prostitute?”

Swift as a snake, she punched his face. He reeled, more with astonishment than pain—it was a girly kind of jab—because not once while they were married had they ever been violent toward each other.

“What the fuck was that for?”

“For being disgusting, Jackson. That’s the man I live with, the man I love. Do you honestly think that I would live with someone I didn’t trust with my daughter?”

“You’d be amazed how many times I’ve heard that.”

David Lastingham must have heard them shouting because he ran downstairs yelling at Jackson, “What are you doing to her?” which Jackson thought was rich, and Josie, helpfully, said, “He accused you of interfering with Marlee.”

“Interfering?”
Jackson sneered at her. “Is that what the middle classes call it?” but by this time David Lastingham had reached the bottom of the stairs and aimed a sloppy but enraged right hook that Jackson didn’t see coming but that he certainly felt when it landed. In fact he could have sworn he actually heard his cheekbone crack. Jackson thought, That’s it, now I kill him, but Marlee suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs and said, “Daddy?”

Josie spat at him, “Get out of our fucking house, Jackson, and, oh and by the way, did I tell you—we’re moving to New Zealand. I was going to sit you down and do the tea-and-sympathy thing, break it to you gently, but you don’t deserve that. David’s been offered a job at Wellington, and he’s accepted it and we’re going with him. So there, Jackson, how do you like that?”

J
ackson parked the Alfa in one of the lockups he rented at the top of the lane, experiencing his usual momentary guilt about the noise his exhaust made. He was thinking about Sylvia, giving up her life to be shut up in that place. She knew more than she was telling—he was sure of that. But right now he didn’t want to think about Sylvia. He wanted to think about a hot bath and a cold beer. He was furious that he’d let David Lastingham land a punch. He was thinking that the day couldn’t get much worse, even though he knew from experience that the day can always get worse, and to prove that thesis a dark figure slipped out from the shadows behind the garage and hit him over the head with something that felt horribly like the butt of a gun.

“Y
eah, but really, you should have seen the other guy,” Jackson joked weakly but Josie didn’t laugh. She smelled of fruit and sunshine and he remembered that another berry-picking expedition had been planned for today. Her brown forearms were scratched as if she’d been wrestling with cats. “Gooseberry bushes,” she said when he pointed them out.

“Sorry,” Jackson said. “They found my donor card. It had you down as my next of kin. It was only a mild concussion, they shouldn’t have bothered.”

“You were lying there most of the night, Jackson. You were lucky it was so warm. Imagine if it had been winter.” She said this accusingly rather than compassionately, as if it were his own fault that he’d been mugged. Actually, he really would like to see the other guy because he was pretty sure he’d done some damage back. Jackson had been lucky, his reactions had been fast and he had moved intuitively when he saw the figure coming at him, enough to deflect the blow so that it only gave him a concussion rather than smashing his skull like an egg. And he’d got one back in, nothing as considered as a good right hook or a roundhouse kick, or any of the more refined tactics and moves he’d been taught at one time or another. Instead it had been the automatic brute response of the hard man out on a drunken Saturday night, and he had nutted the guy full in the face. He could still hear the nose squelching as his forehead connected with the soft tissue. It hadn’t done his concussion much good, of course, and he must have passed out at that point because the next thing he remembered was the milkman trying to rouse him sometime before dawn.

Josie drove him home. “They want someone to stay with me for twenty-four hours,” he said apologetically to Josie, “in case I lapse back into unconsciousness.”

“Well, you’ll just have to find someone else,” she said as she pulled up at the top of the lane, not even driving down it. He realized he was still waiting for sympathy that wasn’t going to come. He climbed awkwardly out of the Volvo’s passenger seat. All the bones in his skull seemed to have been rearranged like tectonic plates slipping and sliding against one another. Every movement reverberated around his skull. He felt seriously damaged.

Josie rolled down the window so she could speak to him. For a second he thought she was going to lean out and give him a wifely kiss farewell or offer to stay and look after him, but instead she said, “Perhaps it’s time you got another next of kin, Jackson.”

W
hen he got home Jackson propped Blue Mouse on the mantelpiece. He’d known that sooner or later he would start to capitalize the damn thing. He put Victor’s urn (he’d forgotten to return it to Amelia and Julia amid all the hysteria) between Blue Mouse and the only ornament that adorned the mantelpiece—a cheap pottery wishing well that had
WISHING YOU WELL FROM SCARBOROUGH
written on the side of it. After the split the marital property had been divided up in a way that Josie considered fair—Jackson took his “crap” (Josie’s term for his country CDs and the little souvenir wishing well) and Josie took everything else. Perhaps Blue Mouse would watch over him, seeing as there was no one else who would. Jackson swallowed two of the Co-codamol that the hospital had given him (although what he wanted was morphine) and lay down on the sofa and listened to Emmylou singing “From Boulder to Birmingham,” but there was too much pain going on for even Emmylou to heal.