"Case Histories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atkinson Kate)

Chapter 4. Jackson

Jackson switched on the radio and listened to the reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one because he had run out of matches, and faced with a choice between chain-smoking or abstinence, he'd taken the former option because it felt like there was enough abstinence in his life already. If he got the cigarette lighter on the dashboard fixed he wouldn't have to smoke his way through the packet, but there were a lot of other things that needed fixing on the car and the cigarette lighter wasn't high on the list. Jackson drove a black Alfa Romeo 156 that he'd bought secondhand four years ago for.Ј13,000 and that was now probably worth less than the Emmelle Freedom mountain bike he had just given his daughter for her eighth birthday (on the proviso that she didn't cycle on the road until she was at least forty).

When he'd come home with the Alfa Romeo, his wife took one dismissive look at it and said, "You bought a policeman's car then." Four years ago Josie was driving her own Polo and was still married to Jackson, now she was living with a bearded English lecturer and driving his Volvo V70 with a child on board sign in the rear window, testifying both to the permanence of their relation-ship and to the smug git's need to show the world that he was protecting another man's child. Jackson hated those signs.

He was a born-again smoker, only starting up again six months ago. Jackson hadn't touched a cigarette for fifteen years and now it was as if he'd never been off them. And for no reason. "Just like that," he said, doing an unenthusiastic Tommy Cooper impression to his reflection in the rearview mirror. Of course it wasn't "just like that." Nothing ever was.

She'd better hurry up. Her front door remained determinedly closed. It was made of cheap varnished wood, with a mock-Georgian fanlight, and was the spit of every other door on the estate in Cherry Hinton. Jackson could have kicked it in without breaking a sweat. She was late. Her flight was at one and she should have been on her way to the airport by now. Jackson cracked the car window to let in some air and let out some smoke. She was always late.

Coffee was no good for punctuating the tedium, unless he was prepared to piss into a bottle, which he wasn't. Now that he was divorced he was free to use words like "piss" and "shit" – elements of his vocabulary almost eliminated by Josie. She was a primary-school teacher and spent much of her working day modifying the behavior of five-year-old boys. When they were married she 'would come home and do the same to Jackson ("For God's sake, Jackson, use the proper words. It's a penis") during their evenings together, cooking pasta and yawning their way through crap on television. She wanted their daughter, Marlee, to grow up "using the correct anatomical language for genitalia." Jackson would rather Marlee grew up without knowing genitalia even existed, let alone informing him that she had been "made" when he "put his penis in Mummy's vagina," an oddly clinical description for an urgent, sweatily precipitate event that had taken place in a field somewhere off the A1066 between Thetford and Diss, an acrobatic coupling in his old F Reg BMW (320i, two-door, definitely a policeman's car, much missed, RIP). That was in the days when a sudden desperate need to have sex was commonplace between them, and the only thing that had made this particular incidence memorable had been Josie's uncharacteristically Russian roulette attitude toward birth control.

Later she blamed the consequence (Marlee) on his own unpre-paredness, but Jackson thought Marlee was a winning result and anyway what did Josie expect if she started Fondling his – and let's be anatomically correct here – penis while all he was trying to do was get to Diss, although for what reason was now lost to time. Jackson himself was conceived during the course of a guesthouse holiday in Ayrshire, a fact that his father had always found inexplicably amusing.

He shouldn't have thought about coffee because now there was a dull ache in his bladder. When Woman's Hour finished he put Allison Moorer's Alabama Song on the CD player, an album that he found comfortingly melancholic. Bonjour Tristesse. Jackson was going to French classes with a view to the day when he could sell up and move abroad and do whatever people did when they retired early. Golf? Did the French play golf? Jackson couldn't think of the names of any French golfers, so that was a good sign because Jackson hated golf. Maybe he could just play boules and smoke himself to death. The French were good at smoking.

Jackson had never felt at home in Cambridge, never felt at home in the south of England if it came to that. He had come here more or less by accident, following a girlfriend and staying for a wife. For years, he had thought about moving back north, but he knew he never would. There was nothing there for him, just bad memories and a past he could never undo, and what was the point anyway when France was laid out on the other side of the channel like an exotic patchwork of sunflowers and grapevines and little cafes where he could sit all afternoon drinking local wine and bitter espressos and smoking Gitanes, where everyone would say, Bonjour, Jackson, except they would pronounce it "zhaksong," and he would be happy. Which was exactly the opposite of how he felt now.

Of course, at the rate he was going it wouldn't be early retirement, just retirement. Jackson could remember when he was a kid and retired men were the old guys who tottered between the allotment and the corner of the pub. They had seemed like really old guys but maybe they weren't much older than he was now. Jackson was forty-five but felt much, much older. He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn't stop them from trying, whether it's shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated). Then there were the guys who found themselves in the rut of routine alcoholic tedium – the lost and lonesome highway of your average beta male (his father's way). And then there was Jackson's own chosen path that led to the everyday Zen of a French house with its white stucco walls, geraniums in pots on the windowsills, a blue door, the paint peeling because who gives a damn about house maintenance in rural France?

He had parked in the shade but the sun had moved higher in the sky now and the temperature in the car was becoming uncomfortable. She was called Nicola Spencer and she was twenty-nine years old and lived in a neat ghetto of brick-built houses. The houses and the streets all looked the same to Jackson, and if he lost his bearings for a moment he ended up in a Bermuda Triangle of identical open-plan front lawns. Jackson had an almost unreasonable prejudice against housing estates. This prejudice was not unrelated to his ex-wife and his ex-marriage. It was Josie who had wanted a house on a new estate, Josie who had been one of the first people to sign up to live in Cambourne, the purpose-built Disneylike "community" outside Cambridge with its cricket pitch on the "traditional" village green, its "Roman-themed play area." It was Josie who had moved them into the house when the street was still a building site and insisted that they furnish it with practical modern designs, who had rejected Victoriana as cluttered, who had thought an excess of carpets and curtains was "suffocating," and yet now she was inhabiting Ye Olde Curiosity Shop with David Lastingham – a Victorian terrace crammed with antique furniture that he'd inherited from his parents, every available surface swathed and draped and curtained. ("You're sure he's not gay then?" Jackson had asked Josie, just to rile her – the guy had professional manicures, for heaven's sake – and she laughed and said, "He's not insecure with his masculinity, Jackson.")

Jackson could feel the ache in his jaw starting up again. He was currently seeing more of his dentist than he had of his wife in the last year of their marriage. His dentist was called Sharon and was what his father used to refer to as "stacked." She was thirty-six and drove a BMW Z3, which was a bit of a hairdresser's car in Jackson 's opinion, but nonetheless he found her very attractive. Unfortunately, there was no possibility of having a relationship with someone who had to put on a mask, protective glasses, and gloves to touch you. (Or one who peered into your mouth and murmured, "'Smoking, Jackson?")

He opened an out-of-date copy of Le Nouvel Observateur and tried to read it because his French teacher said they should immerse themselves in French culture, even if they didn't understand it. Jackson could only pick out the odd word that meant anything and he could see subjunctives scattergunned all over the place – if ever there was an unnecessary tense it was the French subjunctive. His eyes drifted drowsily over the page. A lot of his life these days consisted of simply waiting, something he would have been useless at twenty years ago but which he now found almost agreeable. Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place. He thought sometimes that he would like to enter a monastery, that he would be good at being an ascetic, an anchorite, a Zen monk.

Jackson had arrested a jeweler once, an old guy who'd been fencing stolen property, and when Jackson came looking for him in his workshop he'd found him sitting in an ancient armchair, smoking his pipe and contemplating a piece of rock on his workbench. Without saying anything, he took the rock and placed it in Jackson 's palm, as if it were a gift – Jackson was reminded of his biology teacher from school who would hand you something – a bird's egg, a leaf- and make you explain it to him rather than the other way round. The rock was a dark ironstone that looked like petrified tree-bark, and sandwiched in the center of it was a seam of milky opal, like a hazy summer sky at dawn. A notoriously tricky stone to work, the old man informed Jackson. He had been looking at it for two weeks now, he said, another two weeks and he might be ready to start cutting it, and Jackson said that in another two weeks he would be in a remand prison somewhere, but the guy had a great lawyer and made bail and got away with a suspended sentence.

A year later Jackson received a parcel addressed to him at the police station. Inside there was no note, just a box, and in a nest lined with midnight-blue velvet was an opal pendant, a little plaque of sky. Jackson knew he was being given a lesson by the old man, but it had taken him many years to understand it. He was keeping the pendant for Marlee's eighteenth birthday.

Nicola's husband, Steve Spencer, was convinced his wife "had taken a lover" – that's how he put it, so it sounded delicate and rather courtly to Jackson 's ears, whereas most of the suspicious spouses who came to him tended to voice their mistrust in cruder terms. Steve was the nervy, paranoid type and he couldn't understand how he'd managed to net someone like Nicola, because she was "so gorgeous." Jackson had known "gorgeous" in his time and it wasn't the Nicola Spencers of the world, although he thought that if he was married to Steve Spencer he might be tempted to "take a lover." Steve was a pharmacist in a chain of drugstores and seemed to have no hobbies or interests other than Nicola. She was "the only woman in the world" for him. Jackson had never believed that there was one person in the world that you were destined for. And if there was, knowing his luck, she'd be working in a rice field in the middle of China or be a convicted killer on the run.

When she wasn't at work, Nicola Spencer went to the gym, to Sainsbury's (and once, for no apparent reason, to Tesco's), to her mother's, to the homes of a friend called Louise and a friend called Vanessa. Vanessa was part of a married couple – Vanessa and Mike – who were also friends of "Steve and Nicola." Louise and Vanessa, as far as Jackson could tell, didn't know each other. Nicola also went regularly to the garage, for petrol obviously, and in the garage shop she sometimes bought milk and nearly always bought chocolate and a copy of Hello or Heat. She had also been to a garden center, where she bought a tray of bedding plants that she had put straight into the garden and had then failed to water, judging by the look of them when Jackson climbed up on the garden fence to have a snoop at what went on chez Spencer, or, more accurately, au jardin Spencer.

In the last four weeks Nicola had also been to a DIY superstore, where she bought a screwdriver and a Stanley knife, to Habitat, where she bought a table lamp, to Top Shop for a white T-shirt, to Next for a white blouse, to Boots (twice for cosmetics and toiletries and once with a prescription for Ponstan), to Robert Sayle's for two blue hand towels, and to a fish stall on the market, where she bought (expensive) monkfish for a meal – for the aforesaid Vanessa and Mike – which Steve Spencer later reported to have been "a disaster." Nicola was apparently not a great cook. She also led a bloody boring life, unless something fantastically interesting happened to her when she was pushing a trolley up and down the economy aisles of her airline. Is that what had happened to Josie when she "took" David Lastingham? Was she just so bored with Jackson that she couldn't bear it anymore? She met him at a party, a party that Jackson hadn't gone to because he was working, and the pair of them had "tried to control their feelings" but they obviously hadn't tried hard enough because within six months they were taking each other at every available clandestine opportunity and now David Lastingham got to put his penis in Mummy's vagina whenever he felt like it.

Josie had filed for divorce as soon as it was possible. Irretrievable breakdown – as if it were all his fault and she wasn't shagging some poncy guy with a goatee. ("David," Marlee said, not as grudgingly as Jackson would have liked. "He's alright, he buys me chocolate, he makes nice pasta." It was a six-lane motorway from that girl's stomach to her heart. "I cook nice pasta," Jackson said and heard how childish that sounded and didn't care. Jackson had got someone he knew to look up David Lastingham on the pedophile register. Just in case.)

Jackson smoked the last cigarette. Nicola hadn't done anything the least suspicious on Jackson 's watch, so if she was having an affair then she must be literally playing away from home – all those stopovers in midrange hotels, warm evenings, and cheap alcohol provided the perfect conditions for fostering bad behavior. Jackson had tried to explain to Steve that he was going to have to pay for Jackson to fly with Nicola if he really wanted to find out if anything was going on, but Steve wasn't keen to fund what he seemed to think would be a free holiday abroad for Jackson. Jackson thought he might just go anyway and then do some creative accounting when it came to the bill, a return trip to almost anywhere in Europe could easily disappear into the catchall heading of "Sundries." Maybe he would wait until she was on a flight to France and tag along. Jackson didn't want a holiday, he wanted a new life. And he wanted to be finished with Nicola Spencer and her own dull life.

When Jackson set up as a private investigator two years ago he had no expectation of it being a glamorous profession. He'd already been a member of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary for twelve years and before that he was in the military police, so he had no illusions about the ways of the world. Investigating other people's tragedies and cock-ups and misfortunes was all he knew. He was used to being a voyeur, the outsider looking in, and nothing, but nothing, that anyone did surprised him anymore. Yet despite everything he'd seen and done, inside Jackson there remained a belief- a small, battered and bruised belief- that his job was to help people be good rather than punishing them for being bad.

He left the police and set up the investigation agency after his marriage disappeared in front of his eyes. "What about your pension?" Josie said to him. "What about it?" Jackson said, a cavalier attitude he was beginning to regret.

For the most part, the work he undertook now was either irksome or dull – process serving, background checking and bad debts, and hunting down the odd rogue tradesman that the police would never get round to ("I gave him Ј300 up front for materials and I never saw him again." Surprise, surprise). Not to forget missing cats.

On cue, Jackson 's mobile rang, a tinny rendition of "Carmen 3urana," a ring tone reserved exclusively for Binky Rain "Binky" – what kind of a name was that? Really?). Binky Rain was the first client Jackson had acquired when he set up as a private investigator and he supposed he would never be rid of her un-til he retired and even then he could imagine her following him to France, a string of stray cats behind her, pied piper-like. She was a catwoman, the mad, old-bat variety that kept an open door for every feline slacker in Cambridge.

Binky was over ninety and was the widow of "a Peterhouse fel-low," a philosophy don (despite living in Cambridge for fourteen years, Jackson still thought of the mafia when he heard that word). "Doctor Rain" -Julian – had long gone to rest in the great Senior Common Room in the sky. Binky herself had been brought up in colonial Africa and treated Jackson like a servant, which was how she treated everyone. She lived in a bungalow in Newnham on the way to Grantchester Meadows in what must have once been a perfectly normal between-the-wars redbrick, but years of neglect had transformed it into an overgrown Gothic horror. The place was crawling with cats, hundreds of the damn things. Jackson got the heebie-jeebies just thinking about the smell – cat urine, tomcat spray, saucers of tinned food on every surface, the cheap stuff that was made from the parts of animals that even the burger chains shunned. Binky Rain had no money, no friends, and no family and her neighbors avoided her, and yet she effortlessly maintained the facade of aristocratic hauteur, like a refugee from some ancien regime, living out her life in tatters. Binky Rain was exactly the kind of person whose body lay undiscovered in her house for weeks, except that her cats would probably have eaten her by the time she was found.

Her complaint, the reason she had originally engaged Jackson 's services, was that someone was stealing her cats. Jackson couldn't work out whether cats really did go missing or whether she just thought they went missing. She had this thing about black cats in particular. "Someone's taking them," she said in her clipped little voice, her accent as anachronistic as everything else about her, a remnant, a leftover from another time, another place, long turned into history. The first cat to go missing was a black cat ("bleck ket") called Nigger – and Binky Rain thought that was all right! Not named after a black man ("bleck men"), she said dismissively when his jaw dropped, but after Captain Scott's cat on the Discovery. (Did she really go around the quiet streets of Newnham shouting out "Nigger!"? Dear God, please not.) Her brother-in-law had been a stalwart of the Scott Polar Research Institute on Lensfield Road and had spent a winter camped on the ice of the Ross Shelf, making Binky an expert on antarctic exploration, apparently. Scott was "a fool," Shackleton "a womanizer," and Peary "an American," which seemed to be enough of a condemnation in itself. The way Binky talked about polar expeditions ("Horses! Only an idiot would take horses!") belied the fact that the most challenging journey she had undertaken was the voyage from Cape Town to Southampton in first class on the Dunnottar Castle in 1938.

Jackson 's best friend, Howell, was black, and when Jackson told him about Binky having a cat called Nigger, he roared with laughter. Howell dated from Jackson 's army days – they had started out as squaddies together. "Bleck men," Howell laughed, doing a disturbing impression of an old white lady, disturbing given that Howell was six-foot-six and the blackest black man Jackson had ever met. After his discharge, Howell had returned to his native Birmingham and was currently working as a doorman for a large hotel, a job that required him to wear a ridiculous pantomime costume – a royal blue frock coat covered in gold braid and, even more ridiculously, a top hat. Howell had such an imposing presence that rather than losing dignity in this flunky's outfit he actually made it seem strangely distinguished.

Howell must be at a dangerous age as well. What was he doing about it? It must be more than six months since they had spoken. That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers. Jackson missed Howell. Somewhere along the line Jackson had managed to lose not only his wife and child but all his friends as well. (Although had he had any friends other than Howell?) Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn't notice that they were alone, so they wouldn't die without a living soul noticing. Jackson hoped that wouldn't happen to him. Anyway, he was going to die in France, in a chair, in the garden, after a good meal. Perhaps Mar-lee would be there on a visit, and she would have her children with her so that Jackson could see that part of him carried on into the future, that death wasn't the end of everything.

Jackson let his voice mail pick up Binky's message and then listened back to her imperial tones commanding him to visit her as soon as possible on "a matter of some urgency" to do with "Frisky."

Binky Rain had never paid Jackson in the two years he had known her, but he supposed this was fair as, for his part, he had never found a single missing cat in those two years. He saw his visits to her more as a social service: no one else ever visited the poor old cow and Jackson had a tolerance for her idiosyncrasies that surprised even himself. She was an old Nazi boot but you had to admire her spirit. Why did she think people were taking her cats? Jackson thought it would be vivisection – the usual paranoid belief of cat lovers, but no, according to Binky they took them to make gloves out of them. (Bleck gloves, obviously.)

Jackson was just debating with himself whether to give up on tardy Nicola and obey Binky's summons when the front door flew open. Jackson slid down in the driver's seat and pretended to be concentrating on Le Nouvel Obsetvateur. He could see from fifty yards away that Nicola was in a bad mood, although that was more or less her default setting. She looked hot, already tightly buttoned into the airline's ugly uniform. The uniform didn't show off her figure, and the heels she was wearing – like the Queen's shoes – made her ankles look thick. The only time Jackson saw Nicola without makeup was when she was running. Au naturel. She ran like someone training for a marathon. Jackson was a runner – he ran three miles every morning, up at six, out on the street, back for coffee, before most people were up. That was what army training did for you. Army, the police, and a hefty dose of Scottish Presbyterian genes. ("Always running, Jackson," Josie said. "If you run forever you come back to where you started from – that's the curvature of space for you, did you know that?")

Nicola looked much better in her running clothes. In her uniform she looked frumpy but when she ran around the maze of streets where she lived, she looked athletic and strong. For running, she wore tracksuit bottoms and an old Blue Jays T-shirt that she must have picked up in Toronto, although she hadn't flown across the Atlantic during the time that Jackson had been watching her. She had been to Milan three times, Rome twice, and once each to Madrid, Dusseldorf, Perpignan, Naples, and Faro.

Nicola got in her car, a little girly Ford Ka, and took off like a rocket for Stansted. Jackson wasn't exactly a slow driver but Nicola went at terrifying speeds. When this was over he was considering alerting someone in traffic. Jackson had done a stint in traffic before plainclothes and there were times when he would have liked to pull Nicola over and arrest her.

His phone rang again as the traffic slowed in a holding pattern around Stansted. This time it was his secretary, Deborah, who snapped, "Where are you?" as if he was supposed to be somewhere else.

"I'm fine, thank you. How are you?"

"Someone phoned. You may as well go and see them while you're out and about." Deborah said "out and about" as if Jackson were getting drunk or picking up women.

"Do you want to enlighten me further?" he asked.

"No," Deborah said. "Something about finding something."

Once Nicola arrived at the airport her movements followed their usual routine. She parked her car and went inside the terminal, and Jackson watched her until she disappeared from view. After that he went to the toilets, had a double espresso from a paper cup that did nothing to cool down the heat of the day, purchased cigarettes, read the headlines in a newspaper that he didn't buy, and then drove away again.

By the time Nicola's plane to Prague was climbing steeply away from the flat countryside below, Jackson was walking up the path of a large house on Owlstone Road, frighteningly close to where Binky Rain lived. The door was answered by a woman stranded somewhere in her forties who squinted at Jackson over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles. Academic, he thought to himself.

"Mrs. Land?" Jackson said.

" Miss Land," she said. "Amelia Land. Thank you for coming."

Amelia Land made a terrible cup of coffee. Jackson could already feel its corrosive effect on his stomach. She was wandering around the neglected kitchen, searching for biscuits, even though Jackson had told her twice that he didn't want one, thank you. Finally, she retrieved a packet of damp digestives from the depths of a cupboard and Jackson ate one just to keep her happy. The biscuit was like soft, stale sand in his mouth, but Amelia Land seemed satisfied that her duty as a hostess had been done.

She seemed very distracted, even mildly deranged, but, living in Cambridge, Jackson had got used to university types, although she said she lived in " Oxford, not Cambridge. It's a completely different place," and Jackson had thought, "Yeah, right," but said nothing. Amelia Land kept babbling on about blue mice, and when he'd said gently to her, "Start at the beginning, Miss Land," she'd carried on with the blue-mice theme and said that was the beginning, and "Please call me Amelia." Jackson sighed inwardly, he sensed this tale was going to take a lot of coaxing.

The sister appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared, holding in her hand what looked like an old doll. You would never have taken them for relatives, one tall and heavy, her hair graying and falling out of a kind of topknot, the other short and curvy and – Jackson knew this type too – flirting with anything male and still breathing. The sister wore bright red lipstick and was dressed in what looked like secondhand clothes, layers of mismatched eccentric garments, her wild hair piled haphazardly on her head and fixed with a pencil. They were both dressed for cold weather rather than the sweltering day outside. Jackson could see why – he had shivered as he crossed the threshold, leaving the sunshine behind for the wintry gloom of the interior.

"Our father died two days ago," Julia said, as if it were an everyday nuisance. Jackson looked at the doll on the table. It was made of some kind of grubby toweling material and had long thin legs and arms and the head of a mouse. And it was blue. Understanding finally dawned. He nodded at it. "A blue mouse," he said to Amelia.

"No, the Blue Mouse," she said, as if that distinction were vital. Amelia Land might as well have had "unloved" tattooed on her forehead. She was dressed in a way that suggested she'd stopped shopping for new clothes twenty years ago and that when she had shopped for clothes it had been exclusively in Laura Ashley. The way she was dressed reminded him of old photographs of fishwives – clumpy shoes and woolen tights and a cord dirndl skirt and around her shoulders some kind of shawl that she was hugging to herself as if she were freezing, which wasn't a surprise because this place was Baltic, Jackson thought. It was as if the house had its own climate.

"Our father died," Amelia said brusquely, "two days ago."

"Yes," Jackson said carefully. "Your sister just said that. I'm sorry for your loss," he added, rather perfunctorily because he could see that neither of them seemed particularly sorry.

Amelia frowned and said, "What I mean is…" She looked at her sister for help. That was the trouble with academic types, Jackson thought, never able to say what they mean and half the time never meaning what they say.

"Let me hazard a guess," he said helpfully. "Your father died -" They both nodded vigorously as if relieved that Jackson had grasped this point. "Your father died," he continued, "and you started clearing out the old family home -" he hesitated because they looked less sure of this, "This is the old family home?" he checked.

"Well, yes," Julia said. "It's just" – she shrugged – "that sounds so warm, you know. 'Old family home.'"

"Well," Jackson said, "how about we remove any emotional significance from those three words and just treat them as two adjectives and a noun. Old. Family. Home. True or false?"

"True," Julia admitted reluctantly.

"Of course, strictly speaking," Amelia said, staring out the kitchen window as if she were talking to someone in the garden, "'family' isn't an adjective. 'Familial' would be the adjective."

"No, it wouldn't," Julia said.

Jackson decided the best thing would be to carry on as if neither of them had spoken. "Not close to the old guy then?" he said to Julia.

"No, we weren't," Amelia said, turning round and giving him her full attention. "And we found this in a locked drawer in his study." The blue mouse again. The Blue Mouse.

"And the significance of the 'Blue Mouse'?" Jackson prompted. He hoped they hadn't just discovered their old man was some kind of soft-toy fetishist.

"Did you ever hear of Olivia Land?" Julia asked.

"Rings a bell," Jackson said. A very small bell. "A relative?"

"She was our sister," Amelia said. "She disappeared thirty-four years ago. She was taken."

Taken? Oh, not alien abduction, that would really make his day. Julia took out a packet of cigarettes and offered him one. She made offering a cigarette seem like an invitation to sex. He could feel the sister's disapproval from where he sat but whether it was of the nicotine or the sex, he wasn't sure. Both probably. He declined the cigarette, he would never have smoked in front of a client anyway, but he inhaled deeply when Julia lit up.

"She was kidnapped," Julia said, "from a tent in the garden."

"A tent?"

"It was summer," Amelia said sharply. "Children sleep outside in tents in the summer."

"So they do," Jackson said mildly. Somehow he had the feeling that Amelia Land had been the one in the tent with the sister.

"She was only three," Julia said. "She was never found."

"You really don't know the case?" Amelia said. "It was very big."

"I'm not from this area," Jackson said and thought of all the girls who must have disappeared over the last thirty-four years. But, of course, as far as the Land sisters were concerned, there was only one. He felt suddenly too sad and too old.

"It was very hot," Amelia said. "A heat wave."

"Like now?"

"Yes. Aren't you going to take notes?"

"Would it make you happier if I did?" he asked.

"No," Amelia snapped.

They had obviously reached some kind of conversational impasse. Jackson looked at the Blue Mouse. It had "clue" written all over it. Jackson attempted to join the dots. "So, let's see," he ventured. "This is Olivia's and she had it with her when she was abducted? And the first time it's been seen since is when it turns up after your father's death? And you didn't call the police?"

They both frowned. It was funny because although they looked quite different they shared exactly the same facial expressions. Jackson supposed that was what was meant by "fleeting resemblance."

"What wonderful powers of deduction you have, Mr. Brodie," Julia said, and it was hard to tell whether she was being ironic or trying to flatter him. She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing.

"The police didn't find her then," Amelia said, ignoring Julia, "and they're not going to be interested now. And, anyway, maybe it's not a matter for the police."

"But it's a matter for me?"

"Mr. Brodie," Julia said, very sweetly, too sweetly. They were like good cop, bad cop. "Mr. Brodie, we just want to know why Victor had Olivia's Blue Mouse."

"Victor?"

"Daddy. It just seems…"

"Wrong?" Jackson supplied.

Jackson rented a house now, a long way from the Cambourne ghetto. It was a cottage really, in a row of similar small cottages, on a road that must once have been in the countryside, farm cottages, probably. Whatever farm they had been a part of had long since been built over by streets of Victorian working-class terraces. Nowadays even houses that were back-to-backs with their front doors opening straight onto the street went for a fortune in the area. The poor moved out to the likes of Milton and Cherry Hinton, but now even the council estates there had been colonized by middle-class university types (and the Nicola Spencers of the world), which must really piss the poor people off. The poor might always be with us, but Jackson was puzzled as to where they actually lived these days.

When Josie left for nonconnubial bliss with David Lastingham, Jackson considered staying on and living in the marital Lego house. This thought had occupied him for roughly ten minutes before he rang the estate agent and put it on the market. After they had split the proceeds of the sale, there wasn't enough money left for Jackson to buy a new place, so he had chosen to rent this house instead. It was the last in the terrace, on the run-down side, and the walls between it and the house next door were so thin that you could hear every fart and cat mewl from the neighbor's. The furnishings that came with it were cheap and it had an impersonal atmosphere, like a disappointing holiday home, that Jackson found strangely restful.

When he moved out of the house he had shared with his wife and daughter, Jackson went round to every room in the house to check that nothing had been left behind, apart from their lives, of course. When he walked into the bathroom he realized that he could still smell Josie's perfume – L'Air du Temps - a scent she had worn long before he had ever met her. Now she wore the Joy by Patou that David Lastingham bought her, a scent so old-fashioned that it made her seem like a different woman, which she was, of course. The Josie he had known had rejected all the wifely attributes of her mother's generation. She was a lousy cook and didn't even possess a sewing basket, but she did all the DIY in their little box house. She said to him once that when women learned that wall anchors weren't the mysterious objects they thought they were, they would rule the world. Jackson had been under the impression that they already did and made the mistake of voicing this opinion, which resulted in a statistical lecture about global gender politics – "Two-thirds of the world's work is done by women, Jackson, yet they only own one-tenth of the world's property – do you see any problem with that?" (Yes, he did.) Now, of course, she had turned into retro woman, a kind of Stepford wife, who baked bread and was going to knitting classes. Knitting! What kind of a joke was that?

When he moved into the rented house he bought a bottle of L'Air du Temps and sprayed the tiny bathroom with it, but it wasn't the same.

Amelia and Julia had given him a photograph, a small, square, faded color photograph from another time. It was a close-up of Olivia, grinning for the camera, all her regular little teeth on show. There were freckles on her snub nose and her hair was looped up in short plaits, tied with green-and-white gingham ribbons, although all the colors in the photograph had acquired a yellow tint with age. She was wearing a dress that matched the ribbons, the smocking on the dress partly concealed by the blue mouse that she was clutching to her chest. Jackson could tell she was making the blue mouse pose for the camera – he could almost hear her telling it to smile, but its features, appliqued in black wool, carried the same air of gravity then that they did now, except that time had robbed the blue mouse of half an eye and a nostril.

It was the same photograph that the papers had used. Jackson had looked up the microfiche files on his way home. There were pages and pages about the search for Olivia Land, the story ran for weeks, and Amelia was right – the big story before Olivia had been the heat wave. Jackson tried to remember thirty-four years ago. He would have been eleven years old. Had it been hot? He had no idea. He couldn't remember eleven. The important thing about it was that it wasn't twelve. All the years before he was twelve shone with an unblemished and immaculate light. After twelve it was dark.

He listened to the messages on his answering machine. One from his daughter, Marlee, complaining that her mother wouldn't let her go to an open-air concert on Parker's Piece "and would Jackson talk to her, please, please?" (Marlee was eight, no way was she going to an open-air concert.) Another "Frisky" message from Binky Rain and one from his secretary, Deborah Arnold, berating him for not coming back into the office. She was ringing from home – he could hear two of her loutish teenagers talking in the background over the blare of MTV Deborah had to shout in order to inform him that there was "a Theo Wyre" trying to get in touch with him and she didn't know what it was about except that he "seemed to have lost something." The name "Theo Wyre" sounded startlingly familiar but he couldn't place it. Old age, he supposed.

Jackson fetched a Tiger Beer from the fridge, pulled off his boots (Magnum Stealths, the only boot as far as Jackson was concerned), lay down on the uncomfortable couch, and reached over to his CD player (the good thing about living in a tiny house was that he could touch almost everything in the room without getting up) and put on Trisha Yearwood's 1995 Thinkin' About You album, now unavailable for some reason. Trisha might be mainstream, but that didn't mean she wasn't good. She understood pain. He opened An Introduction to French Grammar and tried to focus on the correct use of the past using etre (although when he lived in France there would be no past and no future, only present), but it was difficult to concentrate because the gum above his rogue tooth was throbbing.

Jackson sighed and retrieved the blue mouse from the mantelpiece and placed it against his shoulder and patted its small, soft back, in much the same way he had once comforted Marlee when she was small. The blue mouse felt cold, as if it had been in a dark place for a long time. Not for a moment did Jackson think that he could find that little girl with the gingham ribbons in her plaits.

Jackson closed his eyes and opened them again immediately because he'd suddenly remembered who Theo Wyre was. Jackson groaned. He didn't want to remember Theo Wyre. He didn't want anything to do with Theo Wyre.

Trisha was singing "On a Bus to St. Cloud." Sometimes it seemed to him as if the entire world consisted of one accounting sheet – lost on the left-hand side, found on the right. Unfortunately the two never balanced. Amelia and Julia Land had found something, Theo Wyre had lost something. How easy life would be if it could be one and the same thing.