Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘I’m not smoking now. Sit on the other side, not behind me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’ (Because if for some reason the seat belt fails you’ll go straight through the windscreen, which will be marginally safer than going straight into the back of me.) Marlee moved over into the left passenger seat. The Diana seat. She locked the door. ‘Don’t lock the door, Marlee.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just not.’ (So that if the car catches fire it’ll be easier to get you out.)

  ‘What did that lady want?’

  ‘Miss Morrison?’ Shirley. It was a nice name. ‘Are you buckled in?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘ “Yes”, not “yeah.” I don’t know what Miss Morrison wanted.’ He did know. He could see it in her eyes. She’d lost something, someone, another entry to make on the debit side of the lost-and-found register.

  The most interesting case he’d had in months had been Nicola Spencer (which just about said it all really), otherwise it had been dull, routine stuff, and yet now, suddenly, in the space of a couple of weeks he had acquired a cold murder case, a thirty-four-year-old unsolved abduction and whatever fresh misery Shirley Morrison was about to lay at his feet.

  He glanced at Marlee, who was writhing around in the back seat like a miniature Houdini. She ducked down out of view. ‘What are you doing? Is your seat belt still on?’

  ‘Yes, I’m trying to reach this thing on the floor.’ Her voice was muffled with the effort.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘This!’ she said triumphantly, reappearing like a diver coming up for air. ‘It’s a tin, I think.’ Jackson looked in the rear-view mirror at the object she was holding aloft for his inspection. Oh Christ, Victor’s ashes.

  ‘Put it back, sweetheart.’

  ‘What is it?’ She was trying to open the ugly metal urn now and Jackson reached round and grabbed it off her. The car swerved and Marlee gave a scream of horror. He settled the urn in the foot well of the front passenger seat. Julia had asked him to collect it from the crematorium this morning ‘because you have a car, Mr Brodie, and we don’t’, which Jackson didn’t think was a particularly valid reason, given that he’d never known Victor. ‘But you were the only person at his funeral,’ Julia said.

  ‘You’re not going to cry, are you?’ he said to the mirror.

  ‘No,’ said very angrily. Marlee could be like a force of nature when she was angry. ‘You nearly crashed.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ He raked around in the glove compartment for sweets but all he could find were cigarettes and loose change for parking meters. He offered her the money.

  ‘What’s in the tin?’ she persisted, taking the money. ‘Is it something bad?’

  ‘No, it’s not anything bad.’ Why wouldn’t he tell her what was in the tin? She understood about life and death, she’d buried enough hamsters in her eight years on earth, and last year Josie had taken her to her grandmother’s funeral. ‘Well, sweetheart,’ he began hesitantly, ‘you know when people die?’

  ‘I’m bored.’

  ‘Let’s play a game then.’

  ‘What game?’

  Good question, Jackson wasn’t very good at games. ‘I know, if you were a dog, what dog would you be?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ So much for that. Marlee began to winge in earnest. ‘I’m hungry, Daddy. Daddy.’

  ‘Yeah, OK, we’ll get something to eat on the way.’

  ‘Say “yes”, not “yeah”. Way to what?’

  ‘A convent.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a bunch of women locked up together.’

  ‘Because they’re bad?’

  ‘Because they’re good. I hope.’

  Well, it was one way to keep women safe. Just put them in a convent. ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’ The convent smelt like every Catholic church Jackson had ever been inside – an excess of incense and Mansion House polish. People always said to him, ‘Once a Catholic always a Catholic,’ but it wasn’t true, Jackson hadn’t been inside a church for years – except for funerals (weddings and christenings never seemed to figure on his social calendar) – and he had no belief in any god. His mother, Fidelma, had done her best to raise them in the Church but somehow it had never stuck with Jackson. Sometimes there were fragments of memories, his mother’s long-forgotten voice. Anima Christi, sanctifica me.

  Their parents had somehow emigrated to the north of England, how and why, Jackson never knew. His father, Robert, was a miner from Fife and his mother was from County Mayo, a not entirely harmonious Celtic union. Jackson and his brother Francis and his sister Niamh. Francis was named for his mother’s father and Jackson himself was named for his father’s mother. Not that his grandmother was called Jackson, of course – it was a maiden name (Margaret Jackson) and it was a Scottish tradition, his father informed him.

  Jackson didn’t know who (if anyone) Niamh was named for. His big sister, a year younger than Francis and five years older than Jackson. After Niamh’s birth his mother had become a successful practitioner of the rhythm method and Jackson had been an unexpected addition to the family, conceived in that boarding house in Ayrshire. The baby of the family.

  ‘What are you thinking, Daddy?’

  ‘Nothing, sweetheart.’ They both whispered, although Sister Michael, the fat, almost boisterous nun in whose wake they were being swept along, had a booming voice that echoed along the hallway.

  Sister Michael, he knew from Amelia and Julia, was an ‘extern’. There were six externs at the convent, negotiating with the outside world on behalf of the ‘interns’ – the ones who never left, who spent their days, day after day, until they died, in prayer and contemplation. Sylvia was an intern.

  Marlee was rapt with fascination at this new world. ‘Why does Sister Michael have a man’s name?’

  ‘She’s named after a saint,’ Jackson said, ‘St Michael.’ Why did Marks and Spencer use St Michael as their trademark label? To make them sound less Jewish? Would Sister Michael know the answer to that? Not that he was about to ask her. Michael was the patron saint of paratroopers, Jackson knew that. Because of the wings? But then all angels had wings. (Not that Jackson believed in the existence of angels.) The corridor, which turned into another one, and then another one, was dotted with statues and pictures – St Francis and St Clare, naturally, and multiples of doe-eyed Christs on the cross, bleeding and broken. Corpus Christi, salva me.

  Jesus, he’d forgotten how physically extreme this stuff was. Or ‘sado-masochistic, 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 onwards. 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.

  Jackson 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, in as much 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 hippy order,’ Julia had said. ‘They go around barefoot in the summer and 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 priests’ 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 yourselves on,’ and wondered when he’d started speaking like his mother.

  ‘Well, that was interesting,’ Jackson said, addressing Marlee via the rear-view mirror. She looked as if she was 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-coloured 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 amongst her father’s possessions.

  ‘I was never close to Daddy,’ she said.

  ‘The angel cake was nice,’ Marlee said sleepily.

  Jackson’s phone rang. He looked at the number – Amelia and Julia – and groaned. He let his voicemail 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 into 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 was dead. He supposed he had no option but to call her back.

  ‘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 was a detour.

  ‘We 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 was 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, she 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 leaving some man you hardly know alone with your naked daughter. Our naked daughter. Oh, and by the way, do you really think it’s 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 towards 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.’

  D
avid Lastingham must have heard them shouting because he ran downstairs shouting 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 which 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 in Wellington and he’s accepted it and we’re going with him. So there, Jackson, how do you like that?’

  Jackson parked the Alfa in one of the lock-ups 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.

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