‘You know him, don’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘The old fat geezer.’
‘Theo?’ he guessed.
‘Yeah, is he going to be all right?’
‘He’s OK,’ Jackson said. The girl started walking away from the ICU and Jackson said, ‘Visiting time isn’t over. You can go in and see him, he’s in medical admissions.’
‘No, I saw him this afternoon, I came to find someone else.’
Jackson accompanied her out of the hospital. She shivered even though it was a balmy evening and lit up a cigarette and then said, ‘Sorry,’ and offered one to Jackson. He lit up and said, ‘You’re too young to smoke,’ and she said, ‘And you’re too old. And anyway I’m twenty-five, old enough for anything.’ Jackson thought she looked about seventeen, eighteen tops. She retrieved her dog from where it was tied to a bench outside. ‘Are you a friend of his?’ she asked him.
‘Theo? Sort of.’ Was he a friend of Theo’s? Maybe he was. Was he a friend of Amelia and Julia? God forbid. (Was he?) And he wasn’t a friend of Shirley Morrison no matter what they’d done under the cloak of darkness the other night. ‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘I’m a friend of Theo’s. My name’s Jackson.’
‘Jackson,’ she repeated as if she was trying to lodge it in her memory. He took a handful of his cards out of his pocket, ‘Jackson Brodie – Private Investigator’, and gave one to her.
‘This is the bit when you tell me your name,’ he said, and she said, ‘Lily-Rose.’ Close up, she didn’t look so much like a druggie, more a victim of neglect and malnutrition. She seemed insubstantial enough to blow away on the wind and Jackson wanted to take her to the nearest Pizza Express and watch her eat. She had a little bowl of a belly like the starving African children you saw on television. Jackson wondered if she was pregnant.
‘I found him,’ she said, ‘in the park. Christ’s whatever.’
‘Pieces.’
‘Stupid name.’
Very stupid,’ Jackson agreed.
‘He was having an attack.’
‘He said someone gave him an inhaler.’
‘That wasn’t me,’ Lily-Rose said, ‘it was some woman. He’s going to be all right?’ she persisted.
‘Absolutely fine,’ Jackson said and then realized he was talking to her as if she was Marlee’s age. He couldn’t believe she was twenty-five. ‘No, he’s not really all right,’ Jackson said. ‘His daughter was murdered ten years ago and he can’t get over it.’
‘Why should he?’
* * *
Stan Jessop taught at a different school now but lived in the same small 1930s semi-detached as he had done ten years ago. ‘Stan’ made him sound like an old allotment guy but he was only thirty-six. When Laura died Stan Jessop was only twenty-six. Twenty-six sounded incredibly young to Jackson – just a year older than Lily-Rose, two years younger than Emma Drake (he had to stop doing this). There was a well-worn Vauxhall Vectra in the driveway with a baby-seat in the back, the floor littered with toys and sweet wrappers and general domestic grunge. Stan Jessop had one child, Nina, ten years ago, according to Emma Drake; now he seemed to have a zoo of them – the front garden looked like a battleground for a war being fought with the contents of Toys ‘R’ Us. ‘Kids.’ Stan Jessop shrugged. ‘What can you do?’ And Jackson thought, well, tidy up for a start, but he shrugged in return and accepted the mug of weak instant coffee that Stan made him and took a seat in the living room. The mug had drip marks down the side as if it hadn’t been washed properly. Jackson put it down on the coffee table and didn’t drink from it.
Emma Drake said Stan Jessop was ‘really cute’ ten years ago and he still had a handsome, boyish air about him. ‘I’m looking into some aspects of the Laura Wyre case,’ Jackson said, and Stan said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ in an offhand way that didn’t convince Jackson somehow.
From upstairs came the thunderous noise of small children resisting bedtime and the increasingly frustrated voice of a woman. It sounded like an old routine. ‘Three boys,’ Stan said, as if that explained everything. ‘It’s like trying to put the barbarian hordes to bed. I should help really,’ he added and slumped down on the sofa. He looked like the barbarian hordes had defeated him long ago. ‘What about her?’ he asked irritably.
‘Who?’
‘Laura – what about her? Is the case being reopened?’
‘It was never closed, Mr Jessop. I’ve been speaking to some of her friends. They think you had a crush on her.’
‘A crush?’ Jackson thought he saw a shadow cross Stan Jessop’s face. ‘Is that why you’re here, because I had a “crush” on Laura Wyre?’
‘Did you?’
‘You know -’ he sighed, as if whatever it was he was about to explain wasn’t really worth the effort – ‘when you’re a young guy and you’re put in that position, sometimes things can get out of hand.’ He grew sullen. ‘All those girls, intelligent, pretty girls, their hormones are off the scale, they come on to you all the time.’
‘You’re supposed to be the grown-up.’
‘They’re all little prick-teasers, they’re screwing all the time, they open their legs for anyone at that age. Don’t tell me you’d act differently. If it was offered to you on a plate, what would you do?’
‘I’d refuse.’
‘Oh, don’t give me that holier-than-thou crap. At the end of the day you’re just a man.’ (What had Shirley said, ‘What are you, Jackson, the last good man standing?’ Was he? He hoped not.) ‘Put any man in that position and they’d be tempted. You would.’
‘I would refuse,’ Jackson said, ‘because I’ve got a daughter. As you have.’
Stan Jessop got up from the sofa as if he was about to punch Jackson (Why not? Everyone else did.) but his wife came into the room at that moment and glared at both of them suspiciously. She didn’t conform to Emma Drake’s description of ‘blond and tarty’ (‘common’). She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and had short dark hair. Emma said that she and Laura got on well together yet no one had ever interviewed Kim Jessop. (Why not?) Jackson held out his hand and said, ‘How d’you do, Mrs Jessop, my name’s Jackson Brodie. I’m looking into some aspects of the death of Laura Wyre,’ and she looked at him blankly and said, ‘Who?’
Jackson phoned Deborah Arnold at home from the car and said, ‘Can you write a standard kind of letter to Miss Morrison and tell her that we’re unable to act for her any more.’
‘Have you ever heard of office hours?’
‘Have you?’
Was he being petty? OK, so Shirley was married and she’d slept with him, adultery happened all the time (look at his own wife) – did that explain the bad feeling he’d had about her? Did that explain why there was something wrong with her story about Michelle? Perhaps if Tanya wanted to find Shirley she would already have done so? Jackson didn’t want to help Shirley. He didn’t want to see Shirley. He rooted around in the glove compartment for a Lee Ann Womack CD and jumped to the ‘Little Past Little Rock’ track. Every other country song was about women leaving – leaving town, leaving the past, but mostly leaving men. After his own woman left, Jackson made a compilation tape of all the women in pain, the Lucindas and Emmylous and Trishas, singing their sad songs about departing on trains and planes and buses, but mainly driving off in cars, of course. Another hejira.
When he got home Jackson heated up something tasteless in the microwave. It was only nine o’clock but he was dog-tired. There was only one message on his answering machine, from Binky. He’d meant to swing by her house to check on her but now he didn’t think he had the energy. He played the message. ‘Mr Brodie, Mr Brodie, I really need to see you, it’s urgent,’ and then nothing, not even goodbye. He phoned her back but there was no answer. The second he replaced the receiver the phone rang and he snatched it up.
It was Amelia. An hysterical Amelia. Again.
‘Who’s dead now, Amelia?’ he asked when she paused for breath. ‘Because if it’s anything smaller than a large horse I?
??d appreciate it if you took care of it yourself.’ Unfortunately, this response had the effect of making her twice as hysterical. Jackson cut her off, counted to ten and then hit ‘caller redial’ button and watched as Binky Rain’s number came up. He had a bad feeling. (Did he ever have good ones?) ‘What is it?’ he said when Amelia answered and she managed to calm herself long enough to say, ‘She’s dead. The old witch is dead.’
* * *
It was one in the morning when Jackson got home. He felt like he’d gone beyond sleep into some other place, a grey, foggy place where all his energy was being used to keep his automatic nervous system ticking over and the rest of his brain and body had shut down long ago. He actually went up the stairs on his hands and knees. His bed hadn’t been made since the night he’d spent with Shirley Morrison and he wasn’t sure whether he’d actually slept since that night. She’d been wearing that Celtic ring on her wedding finger. It was his own fault for not asking. ‘Are you married?’ – it would have been a straightforward enough question. Would she have lied? Probably. The woman who loved babies who couldn’t have any of her own: was that why she’d slept with him, to get pregnant? God forbid. Did her husband know? The woman who loved babies who’d lost touch with the one baby above all others that she was supposed to look after. Tanya. Something scratched at the edge of his memory but he could hardly remember his own name he was so tired.
He opened a window. There was no air in the bedroom. Heavy weather. If a thunderstorm didn’t break the heat soon, people would start to go mad. The weather had broken after Olivia disappeared. Amelia said that Sylvia had said it was ‘God crying for his little lost lamb’. Amelia had been behaving even more oddly than usual, blethering about Olivia even though it was Binky’s body she had found. Blethering. That was one of his father’s words. It was nearly a year now since the old man had died. Lonely and alone in his hospital bed. He was seventy-five and had everything possible, silicosis, emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver. Jackson didn’t want to become the man his father had been.
What had Binky wanted to tell him? He was never going to find out now, was he? He thought of Binky’s small featherweight body lying in the remains of her orchard, the long grass damp with dew, although not the grass beneath her body which had remained as dry as her old bones. ‘She’s been lying here for hours,’ the pathologist said, and Jackson felt his heart lurch. He had driven by her house, maybe he could have helped her. He should have broken in, he should have climbed the wall. He should have helped her.
He was about to close the curtains when something caught his eye. Walking along the wall on the other side of the lane, weaving its way in and out of the hollyhocks that grew like weeds. A black cat. If Binky Rain was reincarnated would she come back as a cat? A black one? How many black cats were there in Cambridge? Hundreds. Jackson opened the window wider and leaned out and – and truly he couldn’t believe he was doing this – softly shouted, ‘Nigger?’ into the warm night air.
The cat stopped in its tracks and looked round. Jackson ran down the stairs and out of the house and then slowed himself down to a cartoon kind of tiptoe so that he wouldn’t frighten the animal. ‘Nigger?’ he whispered again and the cat meowed and jumped off the wall. Jackson picked it up and felt its skinny weight in his arms. He felt an odd sense of comradeship with the bedraggled animal and said, ‘It’s OK, old boy, do you want to come in my house?’ He didn’t have any cat food in the house – he didn’t have any food in the house – but he had some milk. He was surprised by an unexpected surge of affection for the cat. Of course, it probably wasn’t Nigger (and, dear God, that name would have to be changed by whoever took this cat on). The cat would probably have responded to anything but the coincidence seemed too much for Jackson in his exhausted state. He turned to go back into the house. And the house exploded. Just like that.
What was it Hank Williams had sung? Something about never getting out of this world alive?
18
Amelia
AMELIA WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO HAD SEEN THAT THERE were more of them. Julia was too busy flirting – Mr Brodie this, Mr Brodie that – and Jackson was too busy looking at Julia’s breasts. Of course, it was difficult for a man not to look at Julia’s breasts when they were on display like that. She had actually licked her lips when she’d suggested swimming naked to him! They had swum in the river when they were children, even though Rosemary always told them not to. Julia was the best swimmer out of the three of them. The four of them. Could Olivia swim? Amelia thought she could see Olivia’s little frog body, in a blue shirred swimming costume, moving through the water, but she didn’t know whether it was a real memory or not. Sometimes Amelia felt as if she had spent her whole life waiting for Olivia to come back, while Sylvia was talking to God and Julia was fucking. And she felt so unbearably sad when she thought of all the things Olivia had never done, never ridden a bike or climbed a tree or read a book on her own, she’d never been to school, or a theatre or a concert. Never listened to Mozart or fallen in love. She had never even written her own name. Olivia would have lived her life: Amelia had merely endured hers.
You’re looking at my tits, Mr Brodie. Julia was such a tart sometimes. Amelia could remember Victor once, hauling a teenage Julia back into the house when she was trying to sneak out to see some boy and yelling at her that she looked like ‘a common tart’. (How many men had Julia slept with? Too many to keep count of undoubtedly.) Victor made her scrub her make-up off with a nailbrush. Sometimes he ignored them for days, only coming out of his study for meals, other times he was on their case constantly like some kind of religious patriarch.
After Rosemary died Victor employed a woman to cook and clean every day. She was called Mrs Gordon and no one ever knew her first name. It was typical of Victor to employ someone who didn’t like children and was a terrible cook. Sometimes Mrs Gordon would make them the same tea every day for days on end – burnt sausages, baked beans and watery boiled potatoes was a particular favourite with her. Victor never seemed to notice. ‘Food is just fuel,’ he used to say. ‘It doesn’t matter what it is.’ What an appalling childhood they’d had.
And really Jackson had been the last person she had wanted to see. Why was he sitting on the river bank? Why him of all people? It wasn’t fair. (Nothing was fair.) The gods were taunting her with him. She hadn’t wanted to go to Grantchester, not at all, it was Julia who had persuaded her to go punting on the river, coaxing her as if she was a frail invalid or an agoraphobic: ‘Come on, Milly, you can’t sit moping in front of the television all day.’ She wasn’t moping, she was depressed, for God’s sake. And she could be depressed if she wanted to be, she could sit and watch Dogs with Jobs on the National Geographic channel and eat her way through a packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits if she felt like it because nobody cared about her. In fact, she could sit there all day, from Barney and Friends to Porn Babes Laid Bare with hours of the Landscape channel in between, and eat the contents of an entire biscuit factory until she was an obese, earthbound balloon whose dead and bloated body would have to be hydraulically lifted from the house by a fire crew, because nobody cared. I care, Milly. Yeah, right, as the slaters would say.
If Julia cared so much she wouldn’t flirt with Jackson in front of her. She imagined them in the water together, Julia swimming like an otter around Jackson’s naked body, her red lips closing around his— no! Don’t think that, don’t think that, don’t think that.
One evening Amelia found the God channel between Discovery Health and the Fashion channel and discovered that there was a programme called A Word from God that went out at midnight and she had actually watched it! To see if God had anything to say to her. But he didn’t. Obviously.
Milly, do you want honey on your scones? And now she was talking about Rupert Brooke being naked, couldn’t she just shut up about naked people? Because actually it was quite nice being here, sitting in a deckchair in the orchard, soaking in the warmth of summer – why couldn’t she be here on her own with Jackson
without Julia, why couldn’t he be pouring her tea and buttering her scones, why did Julia have to be here with her breasts almost popping out of her bra when she leaned over him, drooling honey on to his scones. And it was such a pretty bra, all white and lacy, why had Amelia never had underwear like that? It wasn’t fair.
She had made an utter fool of herself the other night (‘Are you married, Mr Brodie?’) like some ruined girl in a sentimental Victorian novel. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he thought she was delusional. (Was she?) She was so embarrassed that she couldn’t look at him, thank goodness she was wearing sunglasses and a hat. (Did they make her look even the slightest bit mysterious and enigmatic?) And his lovely face was all beaten up (because, of course, she had looked at him), and she would have liked to comfort him, to take his face and hold it between her own breasts (which were just as big as Julia’s, even if they didn’t occupy the same horizontal plane). But that was never going to happen, was it?
She had seen them though. The others. Jackson and Julia thought it was just the man who was reading Principia Mathematica but she had seen the others, seven or eight of them, all as equally naked as the Principia Mathematica man. A couple of them dived into the water but the rest chatted to each other, reclining on the bank in various positions of repose as if they were enacting an ideal pastoral scene. Were they naturists? Amelia had a sudden, unexpected memory of swimming in the river, her sun-warmed body moving smoothly through the cool, lucent water. She felt a sudden physical craving, like hunger. Why was she trapped in her clumsy, baggy body, why couldn’t she have the body of her childhood back? Why couldn’t she have her childhood back?