Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  He hired a woman to come in and clean twice a week and a girl, a student, to pick them up from school and look after them until he got home from work. Otherwise he did everything himself – housework, childcare, he went to PTA meetings, parents’ evenings, took the girls to birthday parties, threw birthday parties in return. The other children’s mothers treated him as an honorary woman and said he would make someone a wonderful wife, which he took as a compliment.

  The girl said she was eight but she was dressed more like a teenager. But that was how it was nowadays. In the past, children used to be dressed as small adults so there was nothing new in that. When Laura was eight she wore dungarees and jeans and nice dresses for best. ‘Frocks’, Valerie would have called them, if she’d been around. White ankle socks, sandals, T-shirts and shorts. He bought Laura her own clothes and didn’t make her wear Jennifer’s cast-offs. A lot of people thought Theo spoiled his girls but how could you spoil a child? By neglect, yes, but not by love. You had to give them all the love you could, even though giving that much love could cause you pain and anguish and horror and, in the end, love could destroy you. Because they left, they went to university and husbands, they went to Canada and they went to the grave.

  Theo declined a second sweet. ‘It’s polite to offer one to everyone,’ Deborah Arnold said to the girl. Rather reluctantly, Theo thought, the girl slid off her seat and went over to Deborah’s desk and without a word offered the tube of sweets to her. Deborah took three. There was something oddly admirable about the woman. Terrifying but admirable.

  ‘What’s your job?’ the girl asked him.

  ‘I’m retired,’ Theo said, wondering if she knew what that meant.

  ‘Because you’re old,’ she said, nodding sagely.

  Theo agreed with her. ‘Yes, because I’m old.’

  ‘My daddy’s going to retire,’ the girl said. ‘He’s going to live in France.’ Deborah Arnold laughed derisively.

  ‘France?’ Theo said. He couldn’t imagine Jackson in France somehow. ‘Have you been to France?’

  ‘Yes, on holiday. Some people ate thrushes.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Deborah Arnold said. ‘Neither of you are supposed to be here,’ she added, as if they were jointly responsible for the French habit of dining on innocent songbirds.

  ‘I just wanted a quick chat with Mr Brodie – to see how things were going,’ Theo said apologetically. Deborah Arnold seemed extraordinarily busy – typing, filing and copying like a woman possessed. Did Jackson Brodie really generate this much business? He seemed a little too laid-back to keep an assistant so fully occupied. She’d called herself his assistant, he’d called her his secretary.

  ‘So, Mr Brodie’s out on a case?’ Theo asked, to make conversation more than anything.

  Deborah gave him a pitying look over the top of her spectacles as if she couldn’t believe he could be duped into thinking that Jackson actually worked. After five minutes, she said, ‘He’s at the dentist. Again.’

  ‘Dad fancies the dentist,’ the girl said, popping another sweet into an already overloaded mouth. It seemed sad that such little girls knew about ‘fancying’, knew anything at all about sex. Perhaps they didn’t, perhaps they just knew the words. The girl, Marlee, did seem very precocious though, more like an eighteen-year-old than an eight-year-old. Not like his eighteen-year-old (because Laura would always be eighteen): Laura had had a freshness about her, an innocence, like a light shining from within. Jackson had never mentioned having a daughter, but then you didn’t, did you? Bank managers, bus drivers, they didn’t spend their time saying, ‘I have a daughter, by the way.’

  ‘Have you got children?’ Marlee asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ Theo said. ‘I have a daughter called Jenny, she lives in Canada. She’s grown-up.’ Of course, he felt like he was denying Laura, expected to hear a cock crow every time he made this answer, but people didn’t want to hear him say, ‘Yes, I have two, one alive and well and living in Toronto and one dead and in the earth.’

  ‘Grandchildren?’ Marlee asked.

  ‘No,’ Theo said. Jennifer and her husband, Alan – New York Jewish, avuncular, heart surgeon – had decided not to have children and it had seemed to Theo to be indelicate to ask why. Jennifer had a career, of course, she was an orthopaedic consultant, and they had a good life, a nice house in the suburbs, a place on Lake Ontario, a ‘cottage’ as the Torontians quaintly called their huge lakeshore houses. Theo had gone to stay one summer. The house was surrounded on three sides by trees and at night it was the quietest, darkest place he had ever been, the only illumination coming from the fireflies that danced outside his bedroom window all night long. It was a great place, they had a canoe that they took out on the lake, there were hiking trails through the ancient woods, they had a barbecue every day on their lakeside terrace – it would have been a paradise for kids. Of course, you never missed what you never had. And once you’d had it you missed it all the time. Perhaps Jennifer was being sensible. If she didn’t have a child she couldn’t lose it.

  ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘No. Yes. A little, sometimes.’ (A lot, all the time.)

  ‘Have another sweet.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  After ten years Theo had suddenly become impatient. Ten years of garnering evidence, of doggedly accumulating every last scrap of anything, and now he wanted to know. Jackson had removed all his client files, loading up the back seat and the boot of his car with box after box of other people’s life histories – their divorces, their house purchases, their last wills and testaments. Had Jackson discerned something yet from all this information, like a soothsayer, like those clairvoyants they brought in, that Theo himself had brought in? Even the police had brought in a clairvoyant, but they hadn’t briefed him properly and he had thought they were looking for a body when of course they already had one. The clairvoyant said the girl’s body was ‘in a garden, within walking distance of a river’, which pretty much narrowed it down to half of Cambridge, if anyone was going to go and look for her, which they weren’t. How many girls were out there, unturned by the plough, unseen by the passer-by? If only you could lock girls away, in towers, in dungeons, in convents, in their bedrooms, anywhere that would keep them safe.

  There was a girl he passed all the time. Sometimes she was on Regent Street, she was often on Sydney Street and he’d seen her at the Grafton Centre, sitting on an old sheet, a blanket around her shoulders. A ‘beggar girl’: it was like something from history, from the eighteenth century. This morning she was on St Andrew’s Street and Theo gave her five pounds, which was all the change he had on him.

  The girl looked ill but the dog with her always looked well cared for, a nice glossy black lurcher, still young. The beggar girl had custard-yellow hair, cut raggedly short, and no one ever seemed to give her money, perhaps because she never asked for it, never made eye contact or said something cheery to make people feel good about themselves, good about her being a beggar. Or perhaps because she looked as if she might spend it all on drugs. Theo thought she would probably buy dog food before drugs. Theo always gave her money but he felt there must be something better he could do – buy her a good meal, find her a room, ask her name, anything, before she slipped through the cracks, but he always felt too shy, too worried that any interest might be misconstrued, that she would turn on him and snarl, ‘Fuck off, granddad, you old pervert.’

  ‘Does your father know you’re here?’ Deborah Arnold asked Marlee.

  ‘Mum left him a message on his mobile.’

  ‘Well, I have to go out,’ Deborah said. ‘I have to catch the post.’ This last remark was addressed to Theo, who wondered what he was supposed to do about it. ‘Can you keep an eye on her?’ Deborah said, nodding in the direction of Marlee, and Theo wanted to say, ‘But I’m an almost complete stranger, how do you know I’m not going to do something dreadful to her?’ Misinterpreting his hesitation, Deborah said, ‘It’s just for fifteen minutes, or until his nibs comes back.’ Marlee c
lambered on his knee and put her arms around his neck, and said, ‘Please, please, nice man, say yes,’ and Theo thought, dear God, hasn’t anyone told her to be cautious around strangers? Just because he looked like Father Christmas didn’t make him benign, although he was, of course. But Deborah Arnold was out of the door and down the stairs before Theo could protest.

  ‘My daddy’ll be back soon,’ Marlee reassured him. ‘My daddy’. The very words brought a lump to his throat. Laura’s second favourite film, after Dirty Dancing, was The Railway Children and he’d bought a copy on video a couple of years before she died. They had watched it together several times and they both always cried at the end when the train stops and the steam and smoke slowly clear around the figure of Bobbie’s father and Jenny Agutter (who always reminded him a little of Laura) cries out, ‘Daddy, my daddy,’ and it was odd because it was such a happy moment for Bobbie and yet it always seemed unbearably sad. Of course, he’d never watched the film since Laura’s death, it would kill him to watch it. Theo never doubted for a moment that when he died he would be reunited with Laura and, in his mind, it was just like The Railway Children – he would walk out of a fog and Laura would be there and she would say, ‘Daddy, my daddy.’ It wasn’t that Theo believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife, he just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.

  Marlee was bored. She had finished the sweets and they had played a game of noughts and crosses – which she was already familiar with – and hangman, which she wasn’t, so Theo taught her, but now she was getting whiny with hunger. From the first-floor window of Jackson’s office they had a tantalizing view of a sandwich shop. ‘I’m starving,’ she declared melodramatically, doubling up to demonstrate her hunger pains.

  Perhaps Deborah Arnold wasn’t coming back. Perhaps Jackson wasn’t coming back, perhaps he never got the message about his daughter. Perhaps he had reacted badly to a dental anaesthetic, perhaps he had died under the anaesthetic, or been run over on the way back from the dentist.

  Theo supposed he could leave Marlee alone while he slipped across the street to buy them both something to eat. It would take, at the most, what – ten minutes? What harm could happen to her in ten minutes? It was an absurd question to ask himself because Theo knew exactly what could happen in ten minutes – a plane could explode over a town or fly into a building, a train could derail, a maniac in a yellow golfing sweater could run into an office, wielding a knife. Leaving her in an office – what was he thinking! Offices ranked higher than planes, mountains or schools on Theo’s list of dangerous places.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said to her, ‘we’ll pop across the road and bring a sandwich back.’

  ‘What if Daddy comes and can’t find us?’

  Theo felt touched by the ‘us’. ‘Well, we’ll put a notice on the door,’ he said.

  ‘Back in ten minutes,’ Marlee said. ‘That’s what Daddy puts.’

  Of course it wasn’t as simple as that. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the sandwich shop was about to close and had hardly any sandwiches left and the ones on offer – egg mayonnaise or roast beef and horseradish – prompted Marlee to act out a vivid pantomime of vomiting. As they came out of the sandwich shop she slipped one small, dry hand into his and he gave it a reassuring squeeze. She got suddenly excited when she spotted a burger bar across the street and almost dragged Theo into it. The letters ‘CJD’ came into his mind but he tried to suppress them, and anyway she wanted something called a ‘chickinlickin burger’ which Theo hoped had chicken in it rather than mad cow, but then what part of the chicken and how old? And what had the chicken been fed on? Mad cow probably.

  He bought her a chickinlickin burger (‘with fries’, she begged) and a Coke. For fast food it seemed very slow and Theo wondered if anyone monitored the service in these places. Most of the people working here seemed to be children, Australian children at that.

  They had been gone a lot longer than ten minutes, if Jackson was back he would be sending out search parties by now. As if the very thought of his name conjured him up, Jackson suddenly appeared out of a crowd of jostling foreign students. He looked slightly wild and grabbed hold of Marlee’s arm so that she squealed in protest, ‘Daddy, mind my Coke.’

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Jackson shouted at her. He glared at Theo. What a cheek, when all Theo was doing was looking after the girl, which was more than her parents were doing.

  ‘I’m babysitting,’ Theo said to Jackson, ‘not cradle-snatching.’

  ‘Right,’ Jackson said, ‘of course, I’m sorry, I was worried.’

  ‘Theo’s looking after me,’ Marlee said, taking a huge bite out of her burger, ‘and he bought me fries. I like him.’

  When Theo returned along St Andrew’s Street the girl with the custard-yellow hair was no longer there and he worried that she might never be there again. Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. For ever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, not the trace of a smile, nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.

  11

  Jackson

  ‘YOUR SOFT PALATE LOOKS VERY INFLAMED,’ SHARON murmured. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Nugh, nurnh.’

  ‘I suspect you’re blowing out an abscess, Jackson.’

  Officially she was ‘Miss S. Anderson, BDS, LDS’, and he’d never been invited to call her by her Christian name, although she was free enough with his own first name. Doctors, bank managers, complete strangers, all used first names now. It was one of Binky Rain’s bugbears: ‘And I said to the man in the bank’ (‘men in the benk’) ‘- a cashier – “Excuse me, young man, but I don’t recall us having been introduced. As far as you’re concerned, my name is Mrs Rain, and I don’t give a damn what yours is.”‘ Binky Rain made ‘cashier’ sound like something you wouldn’t want to pick up on the sole of your shoe.

  He felt absurdly vulnerable, lying there in the chair, prostrate and helpless, subject to the whims of Sharon and her silent dental nurse. Both Sharon and the dental nurse had dark, enigmatic eyes, and they had a way of looking at him indifferently over their masks as if they were contemplating what they might do to him next, like sadistic belly dancers with surgical instruments.

  Jackson tried not to think about this, nor about that scene in Marathon Man, and instead worked on conjuring up a picture of France. He could grow vegetables. He’d never grown a vegetable in his life, Josie had been the gardener, he’d carried out her orders, dig this, move that, mow the lawn. In France, the vegetables would probably grow themselves anyway. All that warm fertile soil. Tomatoes, peaches. Vines, could he grow vines? Olives, lemons, figs – it sounded biblical. Imagine watching the tendrils creeping, the fruit plumping, oh God, he was getting an erection (at the idea of vegetables, what was wrong with him?). Panic made him swallow and gag on his own saliva. Sharon returned the chair to an upright position and said, ‘All right?’ her head cocked to one side in an affectation of concern while he choked noisily. The silent dental nurse handed him a plastic cup of water.

  ‘Soon be done now,’ Sharon lied, tilting him backwards again. Jackson concentrated on something unpleasant this time. Laura Wyre’s body. Felled in her tracks, like an animal, like a deer.

  Mr Wyre, where is he? It was an odd-sounding question – wouldn’t it be more normal to say, ‘Where’s Mr Wyre?’ Did the killer actually say that? What if he’d said ‘Miss Wyre’ or ‘Ms Wyre’, could Moira Tyler (the only person the killer spoke to) have misheard him? In the chaos of the moment – but then the moment wasn’t chaotic at that point, he was just a guy in a yellow golfing sweater asking the whereabouts of one of the solicitors.

  And Laura’s own private life, was it as transparent as it appeared to be? A sacrificial virgin. Was she a virgin? Jackson couldn’t remember reading that in the autopsy report. Theo believed she was, of course. Jackson could imagine that Marlee could be married and divorced three times and
have ten children and he would still believe she was a virgin.

  The press had loved Laura’s blamelessness, it was always so much better when it was a nice middle-class girl with sound habits and educational aspirations who got topped rather than some prostitute or tarty unemployed teenager (the Kerry-Anne Brockleys of this world). But who was to say that Laura Wyre didn’t have secrets? An affair with a married man that she didn’t want to hurt her father with, perhaps. Or had she innocently acquired a stalker, some shitty little pervert who’d become fixated on her? Maybe she was pleasant to him (sometimes that was all it took) and he’d become deluded, imagining that she was in love with him, that they had some cosmic thing going on between them. There was a word for that but Jackson couldn’t remember it, some syndrome, not Munchausen’s. There were only four options. The guy either knew Theo personally or he was a stranger to him. He either knew Laura personally or he was a stranger to her. Erotomania, that was it. It sounded like a bad Dutch porn movie.

  There was that survey, years ago, that found that women didn’t feel threatened by a man carrying the Guardian or wearing a CND badge. Jackson had wondered at the time how many rapists started carrying a Guardian around with them. Look at Ted Bundy: stick your arm in a plaster cast and women think you’re safe. No woman was ever truly safe. It didn’t matter if you were as tough as Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 because wherever you went there were men. Crazy men. The thing he liked about tough women like Ripley and Sarah Connor (and yes, he knew they were fictional) was that it didn’t matter how kick-ass they were, their motives stemmed from a kind of maternal love, a maternal love for the whole world. No, don’t go there, Jackson, don’t think about Sarah Connor, think about something bad, think about the exhaust on the car that needs fixing, think about something boring. Golf.