Case Histories (25 page)

“It was never closed, Mr. Jessop. I’ve been speaking to some of her friends. They think you had a crush on her.”

“A crush?” Jackson thought he saw a shadow cross Stan Jessop’s face. “Is that why you’re here, because I had a ‘crush’ on Laura Wyre?”

“Did you?”

“You know”—he sighed, as if whatever it was he was about to explain wasn’t really worth the effort—“when you’re a young guy and you’re put in that position, sometimes things can get out of hand.” He grew sullen. “All those girls, intelligent, pretty girls, their hormones are off the scale, they come on to you all the time.”

“You’re supposed to be the grown-up.”

“They’re all little prick teasers, they’re screwing all the time, they open their legs for anyone at that age. Don’t tell me you’d act differently. If it was offered to you on a plate, what would you do?”

“I’d refuse.”

“Oh, don’t give me that holier-than-thou crap. At the end of the day you’re just a man.” (What had Shirley said,
What are you, Jackson, the last good man standing?
Was he? He hoped not.) “Put any man in that position and they’d be tempted. You would.”

“I would refuse,” Jackson said, “because I’ve got a daughter. As you do.”

Stan Jessop got up from the sofa as if he were about to punch Jackson (Why not? Everyone else did), but his wife came into the room at that moment and glared at both of them suspiciously. She didn’t conform to Emma Drake’s description of “blond and tarty”
(“common”)
. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and had short dark hair. Emma said that she and Laura got on well together, yet no one had ever interviewed Kim Jessop. (Why not?) Jackson held out his hand and said, “How d’you do, Mrs. Jessop, my name’s Jackson Brodie. I’m looking into some aspects of the death of Laura Wyre,” and she looked at him blankly and said, “Who?”

F
rom the car Jackson phoned Deborah Arnold at home and said, “Can you write a standard kind of letter to Miss Morrison and tell her that we’re unable to act for her anymore?”

“Have you ever heard of office hours?”

“Have you?”

Was he being petty? Okay, so she was married, and she’d slept with him, adultery happened all the time (look at his own wife). Did that explain the bad feeling he’d had about her? Did that explain why there was something wrong with her story about Michelle? Perhaps if Tanya wanted to find Shirley she would already have done so? Jackson didn’t want to help Shirley. He didn’t want to
see
Shirley. He rooted around in the glove compartment for a Lee Ann Womack CD and jumped to the “Little Past Little Rock” track. Every other country song was about women leaving—leaving town, leaving the past, but mostly leaving men. After his own woman left Jackson made a compilation tape of all the women in pain, the Lucindas and Emmylous and Trishas, singing their sad songs about departing on trains and planes and buses, but mainly driving off in cars, of course. Another
hejira.

W
hen he got home Jackson heated up something tasteless in the microwave. It was only nine o’clock but he was dog tired. There was only one message on his answering machine; it was from Binky. He’d meant to swing by her house to check on her, but now he didn’t think he had the energy. He played the message. “Mr. Brodie, Mr. Brodie, I really need to see you. It’s urgent,” and then nothing, not even good-bye. He phoned her back but there was no answer. The second he replaced the receiver the phone rang and he snatched it up.

It was Amelia. A hysterical Amelia. Again.

“Who’s dead now, Amelia?” he asked when she paused for breath. “Because if it’s anything smaller than a large horse I’d appreciate it if you took care of it yourself.” Unfortunately, this response had the effect of making her twice as hysterical. Jackson cut her off, counted to ten, and then hit the “caller redial” button and watched as Binky Rain’s number came up. He had a bad feeling. (Did he ever have good ones?) “What is it?” he said when Amelia answered, and she managed to calm herself long enough to say, “She’s dead. The old witch is dead.”

I
t was one in the morning when Jackson got home. He felt like he’d gone beyond sleep into some other place, a gray, foggy place where all his energy was being used to keep his automatic nervous system ticking over and the rest of his brain and body had shut down long ago. He actually went up the stairs on his hands and knees. His bed hadn’t been made since the night he’d spent with Shirley Morrison. He wasn’t sure whether he’d actually slept since that night. She’d been wearing that Celtic ring on her wedding finger. It was his own fault for not asking. “Are you married?”—it would have been a straightforward enough question. Would she have lied? Probably. The woman who loved babies who couldn’t have any of her own, is that why she’d slept with him, to get pregnant? God forbid. Did her husband know? The woman who loved babies who’d lost touch with the one baby above all others that she was supposed to look after. Tanya. Something scratched at the edge of his memory, but he was so tired he could hardly remember his own name.

He opened a window. There was no air in the bedroom. Heavy weather. If a thunderstorm didn’t break the heat soon, people would start to go mad. The weather had broken after Olivia disappeared. Amelia reported that Sylvia had said it was “God crying for his little lost lamb.” Amelia had been behaving even more oddly than usual, blethering about Olivia even though it was Binky’s body she had found. Blethering. That was one of his father’s words. It was nearly a year now since the old man had died. Lonely and alone in his hospital bed. He was seventy-five and had everything possible, silicosis, emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver. Jackson didn’t want to become the man his father had been.

What had Binky wanted to tell him? He was never going to find out now, was he? He thought of Binky’s small featherweight body lying in the remains of her orchard, the long grass damp with dew, although not the grass beneath her body, which had remained as dry as her old bones. “She’s been lying here for hours,” the pathologist said, and Jackson felt his heart lurch. He had driven by her house. Maybe he could have helped her. He should have broken in, he should have climbed the wall. He should have helped her.

He was about to close the curtains when something caught his eye. Walking along the wall on the other side of the lane, weaving its way in and out of the hollyhocks that grew like weeds. A black cat. If Binky Rain were reincarnated, would she come back as a cat? A black one? How many black cats were there in Cambridge? Hundreds. Jackson opened the window wider and leaned out and—and truly he couldn’t believe he was doing this—softly shouted, “Nigger?” into the warm night air.

The cat stopped in its tracks and looked around. Jackson ran down the stairs and out of the house and then slowed himself down to a cartoon kind of tiptoe so that he wouldn’t frighten the animal. “Nigger?” he whispered again, and the cat meowed and jumped off the wall. Jackson picked it up and felt its skinny weight in his arms. He experienced an odd sense of comradeship with the bedraggled animal and said, “It’s okay, old boy, do you want to come in my house?” He didn’t have any cat food in the house—he didn’t have any food in the house—but he had some milk. He was surprised by an unexpected surge of affection for the cat. Of course, it probably wasn’t Nigger (and, dear God, that name would have to be changed by whoever took this cat on). The cat would probably have responded to anything, but the coincidence seemed too much for Jackson in his exhausted state. He turned to go back into the house. And the house exploded. Just like that.

What was it Hank Williams had sung? Something about never getting out of this world alive?

18

Amelia

A
melia was the only one who had seen that there were more of them. Julia was too busy flirting—
Mr. Brodie this, Mr. Brodie that,
and Jackson was too busy looking at Julia’s breasts. Of course, it was difficult for a man not to look at Julia’s breasts when they were on display like that. She had actually licked her lips when she’d suggested swimming naked to him! They had swum in the river when they were children, even though Rosemary always told them not to. Julia was the best swimmer out of the three of them. The four of them. Could Olivia swim? Amelia thought she could see Olivia’s little frog body, in a blue shirred swimming costume, moving through the water, but she didn’t know whether it was a real memory or not. Sometimes Amelia felt as if she had spent her whole life waiting for Olivia to come back, while Sylvia was talking to God and Julia was
fucking.
And she felt so unbearably sad when she thought of all the things Olivia had never done, never ridden a bike or climbed a tree or read a book on her own, she’d never been to school, or a theater or a concert. Never listened to Mozart or fallen in love. She had never even written her own name. Olivia would have lived her life; Amelia had merely endured hers.

You’re looking at my tits, Mr. Brodie.
Julia was such a tart sometimes. Amelia could remember Victor once, hauling a teenage Julia back into the house when she was trying to sneak out to see some boy and yelling at her that she looked like “a common tart.” (How many men had Julia slept with? Too many to keep count of undoubtedly.) Victor made her scrub her makeup off with a nailbrush. Sometimes he ignored them for days, only coming out of his study for meals. Other times he was on their case continually like some kind of religious patriarch.

After Rosemary died Victor employed a woman to cook and clean every day. She was called Mrs. Gordon and no one ever knew her first name. It was typical of Victor to employ someone who didn’t like children and was a terrible cook. Sometimes Mrs. Gordon would make them the same tea every day for days on end—burned sausages, baked beans, and watery boiled potatoes were a particular favorite with her. Victor never seemed to notice. “Food is just fuel,” he used to say. “It doesn’t matter what it is.” What an appalling childhood they’d had.

And really Jackson had been the last person she had wanted to see. Why was he sitting on the riverbank? Why him of all people? It wasn’t fair. (Nothing was fair.) The gods were
taunting
her with him. She hadn’t wanted to go to Grantchester, not at all, it was Julia who had persuaded her to go punting on the river, coaxing her as if she were a frail invalid or an agoraphobic. “Come on, Milly, you can’t sit moping in front of the television all day.” She wasn’t moping. She was
depressed,
for God’s sake. And she could be depressed if she wanted to be, she could sit and watch
Dogs with Jobs
on the National Geographic Channel and eat her way through a packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits if she felt like it because nobody cared about her. In fact, she could sit there all day, from
Barney and Friends
to
Porn Babes Laid Bare,
with hours of the Landscape Channel in between, and eat the contents of an entire biscuit factory until she was an obese, earthbound balloon whose dead and bloated body would have to be hydraulically lifted from the house by a fire crew
because nobody cared.
“I care, Milly.” Yeah, right, as the slaters would say.

If Julia cared so much she wouldn’t flirt with Jackson in front of her. She imagined them in the water together, Julia swimming like an otter around Jackson’s naked body, her red lips closing around his—no! Don’t think that, don’t think that, don’t think that.

One evening Amelia found the God Channel between DiscoveryHealth and the Fashion Channel and discovered that there was a program called
A Word from God
that went on at midnight and she had actually watched it! To see if God had anything to say to her. But he didn’t. Obviously.

Milly, do you want honey on your scones?
And now she was talking about Rupert Brooke being naked. Couldn’t she just shut up about naked people? Because actually it was quite nice being here, sitting in a deck chair in the orchard, soaking in the warmth of summer—why couldn’t she be here on her own with Jackson, without Julia, why couldn’t
he
be pouring her tea and buttering her scones, why did Julia have to be here with her breasts almost popping out of her bra when she leaned over him,
drooling
honey onto his scones. And it was such a pretty bra, all white and lacy. Why had Amelia never had underwear like that? It wasn’t fair.

She had made an utter fool of herself the other night
(“Are you married, Mr. Brodie?”),
like some ruined girl in a sentimental Victorian novel. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he thought she was delusional. (Was she?) She was so embarrassed that she couldn’t look at him. Thank goodness she was wearing sunglasses and a hat. (Did they make her look even the slightest bit mysterious and enigmatic?) And his lovely face was all beaten up (because, of course, she
had
looked at him), and she would have liked to comfort him, to take his face and hold it between her own breasts (which were just as big as Julia’s, even if they didn’t occupy the same horizontal plane). But that was never going to happen, was it?

S
he had seen them though. The others. Jackson and Julia thought it was just the man who was reading
Principia Mathematica
but she had seen the others, seven or eight them, all as equally naked as the
Principia Mathematica
man. A couple of them dived into the water, but the rest chatted to one another, reclining on the bank in various positions of repose as if they were enacting an ideal pastoral scene. Were they naturalists? Amelia had a sudden, unexpected memory of swimming in the river, her sun-warmed body moving smoothly through the cool, lucent water. She felt a sudden physical craving, like hunger. Why was she trapped in her clumsy, baggy body? Why couldn’t she have the body of her childhood back? Why couldn’t she have her childhood back?

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 more than forty, and they had imperfect bodies—jodhpur thighs and drooping bottoms, gray 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.

A
melia 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 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, neither a rose garden nor 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-colored 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 around, 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 were 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 paralyzed, 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 cream and ran toward 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 were 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 dialing 999 and saving someone’s life.

J
ulia scrambled eggs for their supper, and after they had eaten she phoned the hospital and reported back to Amelia, “He’s alright 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 who was 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 were 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 door 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 toward 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 door 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 —