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 was 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. Jackson watched her until she disappeared from view. After that he went to the toilets, had a double espresso 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, sensing 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 sisters, one tall and heavy, her hair greying 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 short one wore bright-red lipstick and was dressed in what looked like second-hand 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 was an everyday nuisance. Jackson looked at the doll on the table. It was made of some kind of grubby towelling 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 was 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 woollen tights and a cord dirndl skirt and around her shoulders some kind of shawl that she was hugging to herself as if she was 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?’
‘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 of the kitchen window as if she was talking to someone in the garden, ‘ “family” isn’t an adjective. “Familial” would be the adjective.’
Jackson decided the best thing would be to carry on as if she hadn’t 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 diff
erent 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 was 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 back-to-backs with their front doors opening straight on to 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 non-connubial 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 neighbours. 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 every room 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 rawlplugs weren’t the mysterious objects they thought they were, they would rule the world. Jackson had been under the impression 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 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 colour 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 colours 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 which 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, appliquéd 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 deleted 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 formation of the past tense using être (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 the 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.
5
Amelia
VICTOR DIED AS HE WISHED, IN HIS OWN BED, IN HIS own home, of nothing much more than old age. He was eighty-four and for as long as they could remember had been adamant that he wanted to be buried rather than cremated. Thirty-four years ago, when their baby sister Annabelle died, Victor had bought a ‘family plot’ for three people in the local cemetery. Amelia and Julia hadn’t really considered the arithmetic of this until Victor himself died, by which time the plot was two thirds full – their mother having joined Ann
abelle with gratuitous haste – leaving just enough room for Victor but excluding his remaining children.
Julia said it demonstrated typically inconsiderate behaviour on Victor’s part but Amelia said their father had probably deliberately planned it this way in case it turned out that there was an afterlife and he might be forced to spend it with them. Amelia didn’t really think this was likely – Victor was a staunch atheist and it wasn’t in his stubborn, abrasive character to suddenly start hedging his bets at the end – it was just that proposing a contradictory viewpoint to Julia’s came automatically to her. Julia was as tenacious (and as yappy) as a terrier when it came to disputes, so that they both constantly found themselves arguing the case for opinions that neither of them really cared about one way or the other, like a pair of bickering, jaded courtroom lawyers. Some days it felt as if they had returned to their turbulent childhood selves and any moment now would resort to the covert pinching, hair-pulling and name-calling of those earlier years.
They had been summoned. ‘Like attending the deathbed of a king,’ Julia said resentfully and Amelia said, ‘You’re thinking of King Lear, and Julia said, ‘What if I am?’ and Amelia said, ‘You can only relate to life if you’ve seen it on the stage,’ and Julia said, ‘I never even mentioned fucking Lear,’ and so they were arguing before the train had even pulled out of King’s Cross. Victor died a few hours after they arrived. ‘Thank fuck,’ Julia said, as they had been suspicious that Victor was trying to finesse them back into the family home to look after him. They both resented the word ‘home’ – it was decades since either of them had lived there, yet they couldn’t stop using the word.
Amelia said, ‘Sorry,’ but Julia was staring out of the train window at suburban London passing by and didn’t speak again until they were travelling through the full summer fields of East Anglia, when she said, ‘Lear wasn’t dying, he was abdicating power,’ and Amelia said, ‘Same thing sometimes,’ and was glad they’d made peace.