"Case Histories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atkinson Kate)Chapter 8. JacksonVictor's last rites took minimalism to a new level of austerity. Jackson, Julia, and Amelia were the only people present, unless you counted Victor himself, quietly decomposing in a cheap veneered oak coffin that remained starkly unadorned by any farewell flowers. Jackson had expected, if nothing else, a sense of occasion. He had imagined that Victors funeral would take place in the chapel of St. John's, his old college, where he would be lauded by his ex-colleagues in a tedious high Anglican service punctuated by hymns sung badly to the accompaniment of a pained-sounding organ. Amelia and Julia were sitting in the front pew of the crematorium chapel. Jackson had managed to resist their invitation to sit between them, in the place of Victor's nonexistent son. Jackson leaned forward and whispered to Julia, "Why is there no one else here?" Nominally, he was there in a professional role: he wanted to know who would turn up at Victor's funeral, and he supposed in the event nobody was as interesting as somebody. "No one is here because we didn't tell anyone," Amelia said as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. Amelia was not dressed in black for her father's funeral, not a hint of it, quite the opposite in fact as she was sporting ribbed woolen tights in a bright scarlet that was quite alarming. Jackson wondered if there were a symbolic significance to this – there was probably some ancient Cambridge custom that dictated a bluestocking replaced her legwear with red on the death of her father. There seemed to be ancient Cambridge customs for most things (sorry, Amelia's brazen legs reminded him of the legs of a bird he'd seen recently in a Julia twisted round to face Jackson. "I always think on these occasions," she said, "well, not so much these occasions" – she indicated the coffin in an offhand way – "as, you know, family stuff, birthdays, Christmas, that Olivia might turn up." "That's ridiculous," Amelia said. "I know." They both lapsed into sadness but then Julia rallied herself and said, "You look very handsome in a suit, Mr. Brodie." Amelia gave Julia a disparaging look. Julia's eyes were watering and she sounded choked up but she declared it was hay fever rather than grief "in case you get the wrong idea." She swallowed a Be-cotide and offered one to Jackson, which he refused. Jackson had never had an allergy in his life (except to people, perhaps). He considered his constitution to be robustly northern. He'd watched a documentary recently on the Discovery Channel that showed how northerners still had hardy Viking DNA and southerners had something else, something softer, Saxon or French. "The decor in here is so dreary," Julia whispered loudly, and Amelia tutted as if she were at the theater and Julia were an annoying stranger. "What?" Julia said to her crossly. "He's not going to leap out of his coffin and object, is he?" A brief spasm of horror gripped Amelia's features at this idea, but at least the notion of a resurrected Victor shut them both up, even if only momentarily. Even a tedious Anglican service would have been preferable to the squabbling Land sisters. On his way to Victor's funeral, Jackson had paid a visit to the old offices of Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton, now a beauty parlor called Bliss. "Beauty Therapists" – that's how they styled themselves, which made Jackson think of psychiatry rather than facials and manicures. Healing people with beauty. How would you do that? Music? Poetry? Landscape? Sex? What did he turn to when he needed healing? "From Boulder to Birmingham," Emmylou Harris. His daughter's face. That was corny, but it was true. There was a room in Theo's house. Theo had invited him to his house to show him the room. Jackson could not have lived with a room like that in his house. An upstairs bedroom that looked like a police incident room – photographs and maps pinned to the wall, flowcharts and whiteboards, timetables of events. Two metal filing cabinets, bursting with files, boxes on the floor containing yet more files. Anything that could possibly have been relevant to his daughter's death was in that room. And a good number of those things Theo shouldn't have been in possession of- the scene-of-crime photographs, for example, not tacked up on the wall (for which small mercy Jackson gave thanks) but that Theo produced from the filing cabinet. Ghastly pictures of his daughter's body that Theo handled with a kind of professional detachment, as if they were holiday snaps that might interest Jackson. He knew it wasn't like that, that time had somehow inured Theo to every horror, but Jackson was shocked nonetheless. "I've got a few contacts," Theo said, without expounding. He'd been a lawyer, and lawyers, in Jackson 's experience, always had contacts. Theo had spent the last ten years of his life doing nothing but investigating his daughter's death. Was that the right thing to do or was it the crazy thing to do? The room was like something a psychopath might have kept, not any psychopath Jackson had ever come across, of course, but the psychopaths who inhabited crime novels and television programs. Jackson thought they should make more television drama about car crime committed by fourteen-year-old boys high on glue and cider and boredom – it would be a lot more realistic, just not very interesting. Looking at Victor's coffin made Jackson wonder about Laura Wyre's funeral. Hundreds of people had attended, according to the press reports. Theo had hardly any memory of it, even though he had all the press clippings. When Jackson asked Theo about his daughter's funeral his eyes had flickered from side to side as if his brain were disassociating from the memory. Weren't there stages of bereavement you were supposed to go through – shock, denial, guilt, anger, depression – and then acceptance, when you were supposed to come out the other end and be okay, move on. Jackson had received grief counseling once. His school had arranged for someone to come in, from the "West Yorkshire Adolescent Psychiatric Unit," an overblown title to place on the hunched shoulders of the short, red-haired psychologist whose breath smelled of raw onions and who consulted with Jackson in the makeshift cupboard that passed for a sickroom at his school. The red-haired, bearded psychologist told Jackson that he had to move on, to get on with his own life, but Jackson was twelve years old and had nowhere left to move on from and nowhere obvious to go. Jackson wondered how many times people had suggested to Theo that he had to get on with his life. Theo Wyre was stuck somewhere near the beginning of the bereavement process, at a place he'd made all his own, where if he fought hard enough he might be able to bring his daughter back. It wasn't going to happen – Jackson knew that the dead never came back. Ever. The yellow golfing sweater. That was the thing, the thing that should have led them to the murderer. None of Theo's clients had expressed any interest in golf (was golf the "royal game" or was chat tennis?). This indifference to the game stemmed from the fact that most of Theo's clients were women – his caseload was almost entirely matrimonial and domestic. (So why was he in Peterborough on a boundary dispute the day his daughter died?) It was a depressing business going through his files, containing as they did an endless parade of women who were being battered, abused, and defeated, not to mention the string of ones who were just plain unhappy, who couldn't stand the sight of the poor schmuck they were married to. It was an education (although one Jackson had already been subject to) because Theo was extraordinarily good at documenting the banal details of failure, the litany of tiny flaws and cracks that were nothing to an outsider but looked like canyons when you were on the inside – "He buys me carnations, carnations are crap, every woman knows that so why doesn't he?" "He never thinks to run a bit of Toilet Duck round the bowl, even though I leave it out where he can't miss it and I've asked him, I've asked him a hundred times." "If he ever does any ironing it's 'Look at me, I'm ironing, look how well I'm doing it, I iron much better than you, I'm the best, I do it properly.'" "He'd get me my breakfast in bed if I asked him to, but / Jackson had always been good, never left the toilet seat up and all that cliched stuff, and anyway he'd been outnumbered, two women to one man. Boys took a long time to become men but daughters were women from the kickoff. Jackson had hoped they would have another baby, he would have liked another girl, he'd have liked five or six of them, to be honest. Boys were all too familiar but girls, girls were extraordinary. Josie had shown no interest at all in having another baby, and on the one occasion Jackson had suggested it, she gave him a hard look and said, "You have it then." Did anyone wear a golfing sweater who wasn't interested in golf? And if it came to that what made it a golfing sweater as opposed to merely a sweater? Jackson had searched through the police photographs until he found the one of a yellow sweater that the eyewitnesses were agreed was "very like" the one worn by Laura Wyre's killer. As eyewitnesses went, they were rubbish. Jackson peered closely at the logo on the sweater, a small applique of a golfer swinging a club. "Would you wear that if you weren't a golfer? You might buy it in a secondhand shop and not care because it was a good sweater ("60 percent lambswool, 40 percent cashmere") and you could afford it. Yellow for danger, like those tiny poisonous yellow frogs. That homeless girl this morning on St. Andrews Street, her hair was the color of poisonous frogs. He'd almost tripped over her on the way to Bliss. She had a dog with her, a whippety sort of thing. "Can you help me?" the homeless girl said to him, and he squatted on his haunches so that he wasn't towering over her and said, "What do you want me to do?" and she'd stared off into the middle distance somewhere and said, "I don't know." She had bad skin, she looked like a druggie, a lost girl. He'd been late so he'd left the girl with the frog-yellow hair and thought, On the way back I'll ask her name. And the spouses of all those disgruntled women in Theo's filing cabinet – did any of them play golf? The police had investigated every single one of them and found two who were golfers, both with cast-iron alibis. They had scoured the exes for grudges over divorces and affairs, over custody disputes, alimony and child support, and couldn't find a single likely suspect. They interviewed everyone, took alibis from everyone, they had even taken DNA and fingerprints, although there were no fingerprints at the scene and no DNA because the man had touched nothing, he hadn't even opened the door to the office – the lower door had been propped open and the receptionist (Moira Tyler) reported that he had pushed the inner door open with his elbow. And that was it, straight through to the boardroom at the back, slash, slash, and out again. No messing, no shouting, no name-calling, no anger vented. Like a contract killer rather than a crime of passion. Jackson had scrutinized the exes who'd had restraining orders taken out against them. Nada. Julia seemed to be asleep. Amelia, slumped in her seat, stared glumly at the carpet. She had terrible deportment. Jackson had been assuming that someone was going to acknowledge a death had occurred, that a vicar would appear from somewhere and say a few impersonal words before launching Victor into the unknown, and so he was astonished when Victor's coffin suddenly slid quietly away and disappeared behind the curtains with as much ceremony as if it had been a suitcase on a baggage carousel. "That's "What did you want?" Amelia asked, standing up and stalking out of the chapel on her red bird legs. Julia took Jackson 's arm and squeezed it and they walked out of the crematorium chapel together as if they'd just been married. "It's not illegal," she said brightly. "We checked." It was hot, not funeral weather at all, and Julia, who had begun to sneeze the moment they were outside, said cheerfully, "Not as hot as where Daddy is at the moment." Jackson put on his Oakleys and Julia said, "No, of course it's not," Amelia said. "Now we have tea and cake." If you were a dog, what do you think you would be?" Julia stuffed a large piece of cake into her mouth. "I don't know." Jackson shrugged. "A Labrador maybe?" and they had both, in unison, shouted, "No!" incredulously, as if he were insane even to contemplate being a Labrador. "You are so not a Labrador, Jackson," Julia said, " Labradors are "Chocolate Labs aren't so bad," Amelia said. "It's the yellow ones that are… tedious." "Chocolate Labradors." Julia laughed. "I always think you should be able to eat them." "I think Mr. Brodie is an English pointer," Amelia said decisively. "Really?" Julia said. "Golly. I wouldn't have thought of that one." Jackson hadn't realized that people still said "golly." They were very Julia embarked on a second cup of tea. It was too hot for tea; Jackson longed for an ice-cold beer. Julia's white teacup bore the imprint of her mouth in lipstick and Jackson experienced a sudden memory of his sister. She had worn a less strident color, a pastel pink, and on every cup and glass she ever drank from she left behind the ghostly transfer of her lips. The thought of Niamh made his heart feel heavy in his chest, literally, not metaphorically. "I don't think so," Julia said, after having mulled over the dog question (did they ever agree about anything?). "No, not a pointer. And certainly not an English one. Perhaps an Old Danish pointer. That's 'Old' with a capital 'O,' Mr. Brodie, in case you think I'm referring to your age. Or perhaps a Large French one. Ditto with the 'L' there, Mr. Brodie. But you know, Milly, I think Mr. Brodie is a German shepherd. You can just tell he would drag you out of a burning building or a river in flood. He would "Would I?" Jackson said. Amelia stood up abruptly and announced, "That was lovely but we can't spend all day enjoying ourselves," and Julia roused herself and said, "Yes, come on, Milly, chop-chop, we have shopping to do. Mystery shopping," she added, and Amelia groaned and said, "I hate mystery shopping." Jackson took out his wallet to pay the bill. He had been keeping the photograph of Olivia in his wallet and every time he opened it to prize out one of his almost-exhausted credit cards, he saw her face, grinning at him. Not really grinning at him, of course, but at whoever was behind the camera. "Mummy," Julia said. "Daddy never took photographs." All three of them stared sadly at the photograph. "Julia and I are the only ones left," Amelia said. "We're the only two people left in the whole world who remember Olivia. We can't go to our grave not knowing what happened to her." "Why now, after all this time?" Jackson asked. "It's not 'after all this time,'" Amelia bristled. "We never "Three of us," Julia corrected Amelia. "Sylvia remembers Olivia." "Sylvia?" Jackson puzzled. "Our eldest sister," Amelia said dismissively. Jackson waited, let-ting his silence ask the question for him. Eventually, Julia answered, "She's a nun." "And when exactly were you going to tell me about her?" Jackson asked, trying not to sound as annoyed as he felt. "We're telling you now," Julia said as if she were the embodiment of reason. "Don't be a crosspatch, Mr. Brodie. You're a much nicer person than you pretend to be, you know." "No, I'm not," Jackson said. "Yes, you are," Julia said. (Why didn't they just Jackson started to worry about being late. On the way back to the car park he had to fight his way against a herd of foreign-language students, all entirely oblivious to the existence of anyone else on the planet except other adolescents. Cambridge in summer, invaded by a combination of tourists and foreign teenagers, all of whom were put on earth to And as for the tourists… enthralled by the colleges, by history, they didn't want to see what was behind all that, the money and power. The vast tracts of land they owned, not just in Cambridge, they owned most of Cambridge anyway. The colleges still yielded influence over licenses and leases and God knows what else. Someone had once told him that they used to say that you could walk the length of England and never leave land owned by Trinity. And all those beautiful gardens they had that you had to pay to go into. All that wealth and privilege in the hands of a few while the streets were full of the dispossessed, the beggars, the jakies, the mad. Cambridge seemed to have a particularly high incidence of insanity. Still – and it was a close call – Jackson preferred the summer population to the yahs and hooray Henrys of term time. Was it just the envy of the underclass? Was it his father's voice in his head that he could hear? Jackson worried that he was turning into a grumpy old man. Perhaps being a grumpy old man wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Having a permanent toothache didn't help, of course. ("En-dodontic treatment," Sharon had murmured seductively in his ear during his last appointment.) Jackson double-parked outside the house. The windows had wooden Venetian blinds rolled up so that he could see inside the living room – floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, potted palms, big couches – shabby but arty, academics, probably. The street was choked with oversize SUVs, the middle-class mother's vehicle of choice, the rear windows all sporting the obligatory child on board and baby on board signs. Jackson lit up a cigarette and put on Lu-cinda Williams's He leafed through some of the many papers and files he had brought with him from Theo's house. The room – the "incident room" as he now thought of it – wasn't Laura's bedroom, that was at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. Jackson had half expected it to be preserved as it had been the day that Laura left it for the last time – he'd been in those kinds of shrines before, sadder and more faded by the year, but to his surprise Laura's bedroom showed no sign of her. It was decorated in neutral colors in the style of a hotel and was nothing more than a guest bedroom. "Not that I have guests," Theo said, with that sad, drooping smile he had. He was like one of those big melancholic dogs, a Newfoundland or a Saint Bernard. Oh no, he was thinking like Julia. What kind of a dog was he? He'd said " Labrador " because it was the first dog that came into his mind. Jackson didn't know dogs, he'd never had one, not even as a kid. His father had hated dogs. Jackson remembered what Laura Wyre's room looked like ten years ago. There'd been a patchwork quilt, a tank of tropical fish, a pile of teddy bears on the bed. Books everywhere, clothes on the floor, cosmetics, photographs. It was as untidy as you might expect an eighteen-year-old's bedroom to be. That wasn't the impression of Laura that Theo gave now. In death, she had become incapable of untidiness, of flaws. Laura had become a saint in Theo's memory, a holy girl. Jackson supposed that was natural. Ten years ago there had been a framed photograph on the wall of her bedroom – a picture of Laura with a dog. She was pretty and had a lovely smile. She looked like a nice girl, not a saint, but a nice girl. Jackson thought of Olivia, safe in the wallet in his pocket, grinning, unseen in the darkness. "Enclosed." That's what Amelia had said about Sylvia when he asked her if she'd been invited to the funeral. ("Not even Sylvia?") "Of course we Was Olivia enclosed somewhere, under a floor, in the earth? No more than a tiny pile of leveret-thin bones waiting to be found. Jackson had been in Laura's bedroom by chance. He was working on another case at the time, a girl called Kerry-Anne Brockley who had disappeared from the Chesterton area of town. Kerry-Anne was sixteen years old, unemployed and certainly no virgin. She had been killed on her way home from a night out with friends – raped, strangled, and dumped in a field outside town. She had been walking home from a nightclub at two in the morning, wearing a lot of makeup and very few clothes, and there were some unspoken assumptions that she had somehow invited what had happened to her. Not on Jackson 's team. If he'd thought that any of his officers thought that, he would have hung them out to dry. They still didn't have a suspect in custody but Jackson was returning home for his first night's sleep in days, cadging a lift in the back of a squad car with a family liaison officer (a woman called Alison who Jackson should have married instead of Josie). Alison was returning some photographs of Laura to Theo. Photographs, always photographs. All those poignant images of girls that had gone. The Kerry-Annes and the Olivias and the Lauras, all of them precious, all of them lost forever. All of them holy girls. Sacrifices to some unknown, evil deity. Please God, never Marlee. Theo Wyre had answered the door, a man hollowed out by grief. His face, Jackson had thought at the time, was the color of Wensleydale cheese. He offered them tea and Jackson thought – neither for the first nor the last time – how strange it was that people just kept on going, even when their world no longer existed. Theo had even produced cake from somewhere, saying, "Cherry and almond, I made it the day before she died. It keeps well." He shook his head sadly as if he couldn't believe that the cake still existed but his daughter didn't. Needless to say, neither of them ate it. Jackson said, "Do you mind if I have a look at Laura's bedroom, Mr. Wyre?" because he knew that as far as Theo Wyre was concerned he was just another detective, not someone who wasn't on this case. It wasn't much more than curiosity on Jackson 's part, there was nothing to suggest that Laura Wyre's murder was linked to "his" murder, Kerry-Anne Brockley. And it was just a bedroom, an untidy bedroom that a girl was never going to enter again, never fling down her bag on the floor and kick off her shoes, never lie on the bed and read a book or listen to her stereo, never sleep the restless, innocent sleep of the living. That was two years before Marlee was born and Jackson didn't know then what he knew now – what it was like to love a child, how you would give your own life in a heartbeat to save theirs, how they were more precious than the most precious thing. He no longer missed Josie as much as he thought he would, but he missed Marlee nearly all the time. That was why he didn't want to take on Theo Wyre. Theo terrified him, it made the death of his own child a possibility, it forced him to imagine it, to substitute Marlee for Laura Wyre. But what could he do? He could hardly say no to the poor guy, the size of a blimp, wheezing and puffing on his inhaler, nothing left but a memory – the shape of a space where a twenty-eight-year-old woman should have been. Theo had a body; Amelia and Julia needed one. Olivia was a different kind of space than Laura, an incorporeal mystery, a question without an answer. A puzzle that could tease you until you went mad. He would never find Olivia, never find out what happened to her, he knew that and he would just have to find the right time to tell them that. He was never going to be able to bill them either, was he? Sorry, your baby sister's dead and gone forever and that will be Ј500 for services rendered. ("You're too soft to be in business," Deborah Arnold said to him every month when she did the accounting. "Too soft or too stupid.") If it was Marlee and he had to decide – dead or missing forever – which would he choose? No, he couldn't go there, couldn't bear to imagine it, couldn't tempt fate by trying to. Either scenario depicted the worst thing that could possibly happen. What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened – how did you live your life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a kind of strength and courage that most people didn't have. The front door opened and all the little party girls and their party mothers hit the street at top volume. Jackson hastily stuffed photographs of Laura Wyre's crime scene beneath the front passenger seat. He was about to get out of the car and go inside when Mar-lee ran out. Jesus, she was dressed like a hooker. What did Josie think, letting her go out looking like a pedophile's dream? She even had lipstick on. He thought of JonBenet Ramsey. Another lost girl. When he was in Bliss earlier, a girl had come in, a friend of the receptionist (Milanda – had she made her name up?), and made an appointment for a "Brazilian," and Milanda said, "Yeah?" and the girl said, "My boyfriend wants me to get one. He wants to pretend he's making love with a young girl," and Milanda said, "Yeah?" as if that were a good reason. Jackson knew the statistics, knew how many known pedophiles would be hanging out in any one area, knew how they'd be clustered, thickly, like flies, around playgrounds, schools, swimming pools (and houses that were signposted with balloons). "Claire's Accessories" – that's where Jackson would go if he were a pedophile. What if reincarnation existed, what if you came back as a pedophile? But then what would you have had to do in the first place to deserve that? What did the holy girls come back as? Flocks of doves, groves of trees? "Hiya, sweetheart. Good party?" (Were you just going to run out into the street, not knowing if anyone was waiting for you?) Where were you going? Did you know I was here? "Yep." "Did you remember to say 'thank you'?" "Yep. I said, 'Thank you very much for having me.'" "You're fibbing," Jackson said. "No, I'm not." "Yes, you are. Basic interrogation fact: people look up to the left when they're remembering and up to the right when they're inventing. You looked up to the right." Shut up, Jackson. She wasn't even listening. "My bad," she said indifferently. "Your bad?" What language was that? She looked exhausted, she was black under the eyes. What did they do at these parties? She was drenched with sweat. "We were dancing," she said, "to Christina Aguilera. She's wicked." She did a little move to indicate dancing, and it was so sexual that it turned Jackson 's heart over. She was eight years old for fuck's sake. "That's nice, sweetheart." She smelled of sugar and sweat. He remembered the first time he held her, when the whole of her head fit into the palm of his hand and Josie said "be careful" (as if he wouldn't be) and he had vowed to himself that nothing bad would ever happen to her, that he would keep her safe. A solemn promise, an oath. Did Theo Wyre make that same vow when Laura was first placed in his arms? Almost certainly. (And what about Victor Land?) But Jackson couldn't make Marlee safe, he couldn't make anyone safe. The only time you were safe was when you were dead. Theo was the world's greatest worrier, but the one thing he didn't worry about anymore was whether or not his daughter was safe. "You've got lipstick all over you," Marlee said to him. Jackson examined himself in the rearview mirror and discovered the vivid imprint of Julia's crimson mouth on his cheek. He rubbed at it aggressively but the color remained like a spot of heat on his face. She was such a little scrap of a thing," Binky Rain was saying, although Jackson wasn't really listening. He had caved in to a flurry of "Carmen Buranas" and said to Marlee, "Do you want to go and visit an old lady on the way home?" sweetening this not-very-inviting invitation with the promise of cats so that now she was rolling around in the weed-filled jungle of Binky's garden with an assortment of reluctant felines. "And she's your child?" Binky, looking doubtfully at Marlee. "I don't think of you as having a child." "No?" he said absently. He was thinking about Olivia Land, she was just a scrap of a thing too. Would she have wandered off? Amelia and Julia said no, that she was very "obedient." Obedient enough to leave the tent in the middle of the night and go with someone who told her to? Go where? Jackson had tried to sweet-calk his old pal Wendy in police records to show him the evidence from Olivia's case, but even if she'd been willing it wouldn't have done any good because it was all missing. "Sorry, Jackson, it's gone AWOL," Wendy said. "It happens. Thirty-four years is a long time." "Not that long," Jackson said. Although Olivia's case had never been officially closed, there was hardly anyone left alive who had worked it. Before the days of sophisticated DNA testing and police profiling, before computers for God's sake. If she were abducted now there would be a better chance of finding her. Maybe. All the senior detectives who had worked the case were dead and the only person Jackson could find any trace of was a female PC called Marian Foster who seemed to have done most of the interviews with the Land girls. She had just retired as a superintendent from a northern force that was too close to Jackson 's old home for him to reel excited about the prospect of a visit. Of course, nowadays the parents would be the first people you thought about, especially the father. How aggressively had the police gone after Victor when they interviewed him? If it had been Jackson 's case, Victor Land would have been his prime suspect. Out of earshot of Marlee, Jackson asked Binky, "Do you remember the disappearance of Olivia Land? Little girl abducted from around here thirty-four years ago?" "Frisky," Binky said, sticking to her own agenda. "She's hardly more than a kitten." "The Land family," Jackson persisted. "Did you know them? He was a maths lecturer at St. John's. They had four little girls." You didn't forget the disappearance of a child in a neighboring street, did you? "Oh, "Do you remember seeing anyone who didn't belong, a stranger?" "No. The police were such a nuisance, going from house to house, asking questions. They even searched "Who was strange? Mrs. Land?" "No, that eldest one, long white streak of a thing." "Strange how?" "Very "Sylvia?" "Yes, that was her name." Jackson left Binky's by way of the back garden gate. He'd never exited that way before and was surprised to find himself in the lane that ran along behind the back of Victor's garden. He hadn't realized how close the two actually were to each other – he was standing only a few yards from where the fateful tent was pitched. Had someone climbed over the wall here, plucked Olivia from sleep? And then left the same way? How easy would it be to climb a wall with a three-year-old slung over your shoulder? Jackson could have managed it with no bother. The wall was smothered in ivy, providing plenty of hand- and footholds. But that mode of entry implied an intruder and that wouldn't explain why the dog didn't bark in the night. Rascal. And it was the kind of dog that would have barked, according to Amelia and Julia, so it must have known Olivia's captor. How many people would the dog He tugged at the ivy and discovered a gate in the wall, the spit of Binky's. He thought of Marlee was almost asleep by the time they reached David Last-ingham's house. Would he ever call it David and Josie's house? (No.) The sugar high Marlee had been riding had long since turned into irritability. She was covered in grass seeds and cat fur, which would undoubtedly cause a row with Josie. Jackson suggested that she sleep at his house tonight, at least that way he could get her cleaned up, but she declined because "We're going berry picking in the morning." " Berry picking?" Jackson said as he rang David Lastingham's doorbell. He thought of hunter-gatherers and peasants. "So Mummy can make jam." "Jam? Your mother?" The born-again wife, the jam-making peasant mother, came out of the kitchen, licking something off her fingers. The woman who was previously too busy to cook – the queen of Iceland – who now spent her evenings making cozy casseroles and carelessly tossing together salads for her new, recon-stituted family. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who used to give him blow jobs while he was driving, who would pin him up against any available surface and groan, "You're late," she said to him now, "Where have you been?" "We went to see a witch," Marlee said. " In Bliss, Jackson had shown Milanda his license and asked if he could see the place where Laura Wyre was killed. "Morbid" was her only comment. The boardroom, as Theo had reported, was now used as a storeroom. The nail-varnish trolley had been moved and was no longer acting as her cenotaph. Laura's blood was in plain sight, a washed-out (but not washed-out enough) stain on the bare floorboards. "Christ," Milanda said, finally roused out of her torpor, "I thought that was paint or something. That's disgusting." When he was on his way out the door, Milanda said, "She's not haunting the place. I'd know if she were here. I've got second sight, I'd feel her if she were here." "Really?" Jackson said – Milanda seemed like an unlikely recipient of second sight – and she said, "Oh, yes, seventh daughter of a seventh daughter," and Jackson thought, "Yeah," Milanda said. "Black cats are very lucky for you." And Jackson felt an unexpected disappointment because for one weird, unnerving moment he thought she was actually going to say something portentous. |
||
|