Case Histories (21 page)

14

Jackson

“J
esus, Jackson, what happened to you?” The same note of reproach in Deborah Arnold’s voice as in Josie’s, Jackson noticed.

“Yes, thank you, I’m feeling much better,” he said, making his way into the inner sanctum where Shirley Morrison was waiting for him. She visibly flinched when she saw him (and she was a nurse so he must look bad). He had a stunning black eye thanks to David Lastingham (the bastard) and he imagined that being hit over the head and lying unconscious all night in the open air had probably not improved his appearance.

“Not as bad as it looks,” he said to Shirley Morrison although it probably was. Shirley Morrison was sitting in a neat lotus. She was straight backed and had a thin dancer’s body. She was forty but could have passed for thirty until you looked in her eyes and saw that she’d lived enough for more than one lifetime. He knew who she was, she’d never changed her name, it was before Jackson’s time in Cambridge but when he’d asked Deborah to find out about Shirley Morrison she said, “Shirley Morrison—wasn’t she Michelle Fletcher’s sister? The ax murderer?”

“. . . S
he was just sitting on the floor, still holding the ax. I don’t know how long she’d been there. Keith had been dead about an hour, according to the pathologist’s report.” Shirley Morrison held her cup of coffee with two hands as if it were providing her with warmth, although it was as hot as hell inside Jackson’s office and the coffee must have gone cold a long time ago. She stared off into the distance and Jackson got the impression that she was mentally reviewing Keith Fletcher’s autopsy. “When I walked in,” she continued, “she smiled at me and said, ‘Oh, Shirley, I’m so glad you’re here, I made you a chocolate cake.’ So I knew straight away that she’d lost it.”

“Her defense pleaded temporary insanity,” Jackson offered. Deborah had done the research for him, as well as giving him the gossip. Michelle Rose Fletcher, née Morrison, eighteen years old, sent down for life for, in the esteemed judge’s words, “the cold-blooded, calculated murder of your spouse. An entirely innocent man.” Jackson didn’t believe in the entire innocence of anyone apart from animals and children, and not all children, at that. He offered her more coffee but she just shook her head as if he were a distracting insect.

“Michelle was such a control freak, I mean I loved her to bits, she was my big sister, you know?” Jackson nodded, he knew what big sisters were like. His own big sister, Niamh.

“But everything had to be just so for Michelle, all the time. All the bloody time. I can see why, I mean the way we were brought up—it was . . .” Shirley Morrison shrugged, searching for a word. “Shambolic. Our mother couldn’t control a dog, let alone a house and kids. Dad was a drinker and Mum was not exactly capable. And so it was really important to Michelle not to be like them. But the baby did her head in. You can’t control babies.”

“So do you think she was suffering from postnatal depression?” Jackson remembered Josie after Marlee’s birth, crying all day with misery while Marlee cried all night with colic. Jackson had felt completely helpless because he didn’t know what to do for either of them. And then suddenly it was over, like the sun coming out, and Josie looked at Marlee sleeping peacefully in her cradle and laughed and said to Jackson, “She’s cute, let’s keep her.” Way back when they were happy.

Shirley Morrison gave him a look, as if she was wondering what he could know about postpartum misery, and then shrugged and said, “Maybe. Probably. She wasn’t getting any sleep, people go crazy if they don’t sleep. But they were out to get her, the press, Keith’s family. He didn’t do anything wrong, he didn’t beat her or anything. He was a nice guy, very easygoing. I liked him. Everyone liked him. And he loved Tanya.”

“Michelle had bruising to her face,” Jackson said.

Shirley looked at him blankly. “Did she?”

“It was in the arresting officer’s report, why wasn’t it used in her defense?”

“I don’t know.”

Shirley’s slender feet were very brown, as if she went around barefoot a lot outside. She was wearing Indian sandals, embossed leather, which made her feet look even better. Jackson liked women’s feet, not in a fetishistic way (he hoped) and not ugly feet, and, for some mysterious reason, a lot of lovely women had ugly feet, he just thought nice feet were attractive. (Was he trying to justify something to himself here?) Nicola Spencer had big feet, he’d noticed. She was on an overnight to Málaga, doing God knows what.

“The smell was incredible, awful, that’s what I remember most, just . . . revolting. Tanya was in her playpen and she was screaming, really screaming, I’ve never heard a baby cry like that before or since. I’m a pediatric nurse,” she added, “in the ICU,” but Jackson already knew that, he’d phoned up the hospital and asked, “Shirley Morrison, what ward is she on again?” and they’d told him. It was much easier to get information than most people thought. Ask a question and people give you the answer. Not the big questions, obviously, like who killed Laura Wyre and where were the remains of Olivia Land. Big questions like why the woman he had once promised to love and protect as long as there was breath in his body had decided to remove their only child to the opposite side of the world. Just like that. (“Yes, Jackson, ‘just like that.’”)

“The first thing I did was pick Tanya up but she still wouldn’t stop screaming. She was filthy, God knows when she’d last been changed, and, there was blood spattered all over her.” This image, and all it implied, tripped her up for a moment, breaking her composure. Shirley Morrison stared out the office window but she wasn’t looking at anything to be found outside.

“She was wearing these new dungarees I’d bought her. OshKosh. I had a job working in a corner shop, after school, on Saturdays. Michelle and I had always worked, we’d never have had anything if we hadn’t. I remember thinking how much those dungarees had cost and how the blood was never going to come out. My brother-in-law had just been killed by my sister and I was thinking about stain removal.”

“The brain disassociates to stop us from going mad.”

“You think I don’t know that, Mr. Brodie?”

Shirley Morrison’s toenails were painted with a pale polish and she was wearing a delicate gold chain around one ankle. Jackson remembered a time when only tarts and whores wore chains around their ankles. There used to be a prostitute who lived on the same street as Jackson when he was young. She wore emerald green eye shadow and red stilettos and had white, veiny legs. Did she wear an anklet? Did she have a name? Jackson used to run past her house in terror in case she came out and caught him because his mother told him that she was “a servant of Satan,” which had confused him because “Satan” was the name of a dog—a big rottweiler—owned by a guy on the allotments.

Jackson hadn’t thought about that street for a long time, a gloomy terrace with passages like tunnels that went through to a back alley. They’d moved to a better class of street when Jackson was nine. No whores hanging around on the doorstep, smoking their lungs out. Was Shirley Morrison married? She had a ring on her finger but it was neither a wedding ring nor an engagement ring, it was silver, Celtic or Scandinavian, what did that mean?

“When I picked Tanya up, Michelle laughed and said, ‘She does go on, doesn’t she?’ Now
that’s
disassociation.”

“She must have had
some
reason for killing him,” Jackson puzzled, “even if it wasn’t premeditated. Something must have triggered it.”

It felt as if all the air in the office had been used up. It wasn’t midday yet but it was already sweltering. Shirley’s light brown hair was screwed up carelessly on top of her head and the fine hairs at the nape of her neck were dark with sweat. He wondered what she’d do if he invited her to lunch, a nice pub with a garden, or buy a sandwich and go for a walk by the river. It wouldn’t be unprofessional, it would just be moving this appointment outside. Who was he kidding? His motives were entirely unprofessional.

If Josie died Jackson would get sole custody. Marlee wouldn’t go to the other side of the world (
“Lord of the Rings,”
she’d said to him, quite thrilled, as if Bilbo and Gandalf and the rest of their crew actually lived in New Zealand and were waiting for her to join their fellowship. She hadn’t read the books, only seen the DVDs, which were far too scary for an eight-year-old in Jackson’s opinion, but not in the opinion of David Lastingham apparently).

For her part, of course, Josie had failed to keep any of the promises she had made—to love and honor him, to be faithful to him—he could still hear that little flutter of emotion in her voice when she said, “Until death us do part.” They had opted for the traditional wedding service. Now she was planning a tropical beach ceremony with a Maori gospel choir and homemade vows. She was going to marry that wanker and “start a new life.”

Jackson wondered if he was capable of killing Josie. He was better placed than most people—he knew all kinds of ways to do it, it wasn’t doing it that was the problem, not being found out, that was the thing. He wouldn’t wait around for hours with an ax sitting in his lap. What was that Lizzie Borden rhyme? “Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks.” If he killed Josie it would have to be done in a “calculated, cold-blooded killing”—fire, explosives, a gun. A gun for preference, an L96 A1 sniper with a Schmidt and Bender sight, so you could be as far away as possible—he couldn’t do an intimate killing, something close-up and personal like strangling or a knife, he couldn’t be there, watching the blood stop pumping round her cheating heart, couldn’t watch the life fade from her eyes. And not poison. Poison was for psychopaths and deranged Victorian women. Had he really been mugged the other night? Nothing had been taken from him, his wallet, his watch, his car, were all left behind, but then he’d fought back before the guy could take anything. In Jackson’s experience, muggers didn’t usually try and smash your skull in. “There’s a lot of bad people out there, sir,” the DC (“DC Lowther, sir”) who took his statement said. They’d sent a DC where they’d normally have sent a PC. Jackson supposed he should feel flattered. He remembered DC Lowther when he was an eager young recruit in uniform. “There’s been a spate of muggings recently, Inspector,” DC Lowther said, and Jackson said, “It’s just plain ‘Mr. Brodie’ now.” It was funny, he’d never really been Mr. Brodie, he’d joined the army at sixteen and until then he’d just been Jackson, sometimes “Brodie!” from the male teachers. Then it was “Private Brodie” and so on up the ranks until he left the army and then he’d started again as “PC Brodie.” He wasn’t sure how he felt about being “plain Mr. Brodie.”

“Do you have any enemies, sir?” DC Lowther asked hopefully.

“Not really,” Jackson said. Just about everyone he’d ever met.

Jackson’s shirt was sticking to his skin, it was way too hot to be in an office.

“I don’t know what triggered it,” Shirley said. “She just went berserk.”

There was always a trigger, there was a lot of things that the defense could have used—psychotic episodes, sleep deprivation, baby blues, shit childhood, self-defense (what about the bruise on her face?). “In court,” Jackson said, “Michelle said that he woke the baby.
The baby was asleep and Keith woke her up,
that was the nearest she got to giving a motive.” Jackson could imagine how that went down with the judge. She might as well have pleaded guilty. Michelle Fletcher hadn’t run away or made up a story, she had simply waited to be found. By her sister.

If she had served two-thirds of her sentence Michelle Fletcher would have been back on the outside in 1989, at the age of twenty-eight. The same age Laura Wyre would be if she’d lived. Jackson would lay a bet that Michelle had been a model prisoner, transferred to an open prison by ’85, catching up with her exams probably, so she could start her “new life” when she came out. Like Josie. A fresh start, wiping out the past. Just like that. What was Michelle doing now? Shirley Morrison didn’t know, of course she didn’t know. That was why she was here.

“I promised Michelle I would look after Tanya,” Shirley said, “and I would have done, of course I would have done, but I was only fifteen and social services decided our parents were unfit—which they were—and gave custody to Keith’s parents. But they weren’t much better. The last time I ever saw my sister was in the court the day she was sentenced. She refused to see us, knocked back all our visitor’s orders, refused to read letters, there was nothing we could do about it. I could have understood if she didn’t want to see Mum or Dad, they both died without seeing her again. But not to see me . . . I mean I didn’t care that she’d killed Keith, she was still my sister, I still loved her.” She shrugged and added, “Anyone’s capable of killing, given the right circumstances.” She was looking at that faraway world again, the one that existed on the other side of the office window, and Jackson supposed he could have said, “Yeah, I’ve killed people,” but that didn’t seem like the kind of dialogue he wanted to enter into at half past eleven on a Monday morning in these temperatures, so he said nothing at all.

“They told us when she was released,” Shirley continued, “but she never got in touch. I don’t know where she went or what she’s doing now. In the end she got a new life and we were stuck with her old one. ‘Murder’—it’s such a stigma, isn’t it? It’s so . . . trashy. I wanted to go to medical school, be a doctor, but that was never going to happen, not after everything we went through.”

“And now you want me to look for your sister?”

Shirley laughed as if he’d said something absurd, “God, no. Why would I want to look for Michelle when she’s made it so obvious she doesn’t want to be found? She doesn’t care about me anymore. I don’t want to find Michelle. I want to find Tanya.”

I
t was teatime in Binky’s garden. Everything was so wildly overgrown that a machete would have been a more fitting accompaniment at the tea table instead of the extensive array of tarnished butter knives and jam spoons that formed part of Binky’s complex tea ceremony. “Darjeeling,” Binky announced, but it was a gray washy brew that hadn’t seen a tea plantation in years and which tasted like old socks. The cups didn’t look as if they had been cleaned for a long time. “We are being joined today by a guest,” she announced like a rather grand chat-show hostess, “my great-nephew, Quintus.” What kind of a name was that to get stuck with for life, for God’s sake?