Case Histories

Chapter 11. Jackson

Your soft palate looks very inflamed," Sharon murmured. "Does it hurt?"

"Nugh, nurnh."

"I suspect you're blowing out an abscess, Jackson."

Officially she was "Miss S. Anderson, BDS, LDS," and he'd never been invited to call her by her Christian name, although she was free enough with his own first name. Doctors, bank managers, complete strangers, all used first names now. It was one of Binky Rain's bugbears. "And I said to the man in the bank ["men in the benk"] – a cashier – 'Excuse me, young man, but I don't recall us having been introduced. As far as you're concerned, my name is Mrs. Rain, and I don't give a damn what yours is.'" Binky Rain made "cashier" sound like something you wouldn't want to pick up on the sole of your shoe.

He felt absurdly vulnerable, lying there in the chair, prostrate and helpless, subject to the whims of Sharon and her silent dental nurse. Both Sharon and the dental nurse had dark, enigmatic eyes, and they had a way of looking at him indifferently over their masks as if they were contemplating what they might do to him next, like sadistic belly dancers with surgical instruments.

Jackson tried not to think about this, nor about that scene in Marathon Man, and instead worked on conjuring up a picture of France. He could grow vegetables, he'd never grown a vegetable in his life, Josie had been the gardener, he'd carried out her orders, Dig this, move that, mow the lawn. In France, the vegetables would probably grow themselves anyway. All that warm fertile soil. Tomatoes, peaches. Vines, could he grow vines? Olives, lemons, figs – it sounded biblical. Imagine watching the tendrils creeping, the fruit plumping, oh God, he was getting an erection (at the idea of vegetables, what was wrong with him?). Panic made him swallow and gag on his own saliva. Sharon returned the chair to an upright position and said, "All right?" her head cocked to one side in an affectation of concern while he choked noisily. The silent dental nurse handed him a plastic cup of water.

"Soon be done now," Sharon lied, tilting him backward again, Jackson concentrated on something unpleasant this time. Laura Wyre's body. Felled in her tracks, like an animal, like a deer.

Mr. Wyre, where is he? It was an odd-sounding question – wouldn't it be more normal to say, "Where's Mr. Wyre?" Did the killer actually say that? What if he'd said, "Miss Wyre" or "Ms. Wyre"? Could Moira Tyler (the only person the killer spoke to) have misheard him? In the chaos of the moment – but then the moment wasn't chaotic at that point. He was just a guy in a yellow golfing sweater asking the whereabouts of one of the solicitors.

And Laura's own private life, was it as transparent as it appeared to be? A sacrificial virgin. Was she a virgin? Jackson couldn't remember reading that in the autopsy report. Theo believed she was, of course. Jackson could imagine that Marlee could be married and divorced three times and have ten children and he would still believe that she was a virgin.

The press had loved Laura's blamelessness. It was always so much better when it was a nice middle-class girl with sound habits and educational aspirations who got topped rather than some prostitute or tarty unemployed teenager (the Kerry-Anne Brockleys of this world). But who was to say that Laura Wyre didn't have secrets? An affair with a married man that she didn't want to hurt her father with, perhaps. Or had she innocently acquired a stalker, some shitty little pervert who'd become fixated on her? Maybe she was pleasant to him (sometimes that was all it took) and he'd become deluded, imagining that she was in love with him, that they had some cosmic thing going on between them. There was a word for that but Jackson couldn't remember it, some syndrome, not Munchausen. There were only four options. The guy either knew Theo personally or was a stranger to him. He either knew Laura personally or was a stranger to her. Erotomania – that was it. It sounded like a bad Dutch porn movie.

There was that survey, years ago, that found that women didn't feel threatened by a man carrying the Guardian or wearing a CND badge. Jackson had wondered at the time how many rapists started carrying a Guardian around with them. Look at Ted Bundy. Stick your arm in a plaster cast and women think you're safe. No woman was ever truly safe. It didn't matter if you were as tough as Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. because wherever you went there were men. Crazy men. The thing he liked about tough women such as Ripley and Sarah Connor (and yes, he knew they were fictional) was that it didn't matter how kick-ass they were, their motives stemmed from a kind of maternal love, a maternal love for the whole world. No, don't go there, Jackson, don't think about Sarah Connor. Think about something bad, think about the exhaust on your car that needs fixing, think about something boring. Golf.

"I've cleaned out the pus, Jackson," Sharon whispered softly, "and I'm going to put a dressing on, but we can't keep on treating the symptoms. We have to eliminate the cause. The root."

Laura's closest friends at sixth-form college had been Christina. Ayshea, Josh, Joanna, Emma, Eleanor, Hannah, and Pansy. Jackson knew this because Theo had a handy wall chart with the heading STUDENTS at laura's college, as opposed to another chart, laura's FRIENDS outside OF college (scuba-diving club, people from the pub she'd worked with, and so on), and yet a third chart for LAURA'S casual acquaintances (which was basically anyone whose path had ever crossed hers).

students at laura's college was a numbered list, the numbers indicating the closeness of the friendship – number one being her best friend and so on. Every student at the college was listed. How much time had Theo spent trying to decide if someone should be ranked 108 or 109 on the list? He hadn't even done the list on a computer but had laboriously handwritten all the names. The guy was crazy.

The friends were also color coded by sex – blue ink for the girls, red for the boys, which made it easy to see that Laura's closest friends were mostly girls. The top ten were all blue with only two exceptions – Josh and Tom. Laura Wyre had obviously been a girl's girl, one destined never to become a woman's woman. Toward the end of the list there was an almost solid phalanx of red names – great clusters of boys, most of whom Laura Wyre had probably never even noticed, let alone spoken to. The use of the red ink made the boys stand out and look more dangerous, or incorrect somehow. Jackson had a sudden image of his essays at school, spiderwebbed with the angry red-ink annotations of his teachers. It was only after he left school and joined the army that he discovered he was intelligent.

The police had interviewed all the students at Laura's college, except that unfortunately most of the top ten were missing. "Gap year." Theo had said to Jackson. He had worried that Laura would want to take a gap year, visit the dangerous corners of the world, but she would have been safer in a flea-infested, heroin-filled doss-house in Bangkok than she was in her father's office. "Mea culpa," Theo said to Jackson with his sad, dog smile.

Throughout the whole investigation the police never really believed that Laura was anything more than an unfortunate bystander, that it was Theo who was the real target. Jackson suddenly remembered Bob Peck in Edge of Darkness – they really didn't make TV like that anymore, in fact it might have been the last good BBC drama that Jackson had seen. 1984? 1985? He tried to remember 1985. Three years after the Falklands. Howell left the army and Jackson signed on for another five years. He was going out with a girl called Carol but then she joined the CND and announced her political views were "incompatible" with her relationship with Jackson. Jackson pointed out that he wasn't exactly in favor of nuclear warfare himself, but she was more interested in chaining herself to things and shouting abuse at the Thames Valley Police.

In 1985 Laura Wyre would have been nine years old and Olivia Land was fifteen years' missing. In Edge of Darkness, Craven, the Bob Peck character, had also been obsessed with his daughter – Emma, that was her name, the same name as the number-five-ranked girl on Theo's red-and-blue list and the only one of the top-ranking girls who lived within easy reach of Cambridge. Christina, the number-one best friend, was married and living in Australia, Ayshea was a teacher in Dorset, Tom worked for the EC in Strasbourg, Josh seemed to have disappeared off the map, Joanna was a doctor in Dublin, Eleanor a solicitor in Newcastle, Pansy was working for a publisher in Scotland. A hejira of girls. Were they in flight from something? ("If you run forever you come back to where you started from, Jackson.") He wanted to speak to someone who knew a different Laura from the one Theo knew. It wasn't that Theo's Laura wasn't genuine, but no matter how close he'd been to his daughter there were going to be things about her that he didn't know or wouldn't understand. That was how it was supposed to be. It didn't matter how much you hated it, they were always going to have secrets.

Emma Drake lived in Crouch End and worked for the BBC. When he phoned her she said she'd be happy to speak to Jackson and arranged to meet him after work, across the road from Broadcasting House, at the Langham, "For cocktails."

She was a nice girl, polite and chatty, and she drank three manhattans, one after the other, in a way that suggested she liked to take the edge off the day as quickly as possible. She wasn't really a girl, Jackson reminded himself. She was a twenty-eight-year-old woman.

"I remember thinking that could have been me," she said, tossing a nut into her mouth. "I haven't eaten all day," she added apologetically. "Been locked in a studio. I suppose that was a selfish thing to think, wasn't it?"

"Not really," Jackson said.

"I mean it couldn't, not really, I wasn't there, in that office, at that moment in time, but there's something about random violence…"

"Was it? Random?" Jackson said. "You don't think that maybe the guy who killed Laura meant to, that she was his target, not her father?" A man in a dinner jacket sat down at a piano in the corner of the room and lifted his fingers above the keys with a Liberace kind of flourish before beginning to play a loud, florid version of "Some Enchanted Evening." "Oh dear." Emma Drake made a face and laughed. "Maybe she'd met someone, I don't know. Everyone seemed to be traveling or working abroad. Laura was one of the few people who was going straight to university after the summer holidays. I was in Peru, I didn't hear about her death until weeks afterward. That seemed worse somehow, it was already consigned to history for everyone else."

"The tiniest scrap of something that no one thought to mention," Jackson persevered. He wondered if another manhattan would help or hinder, and whether he should be plying young women with alcohol and then letting them go and fend for themselves out on the mean streets of London. Was Marlee going to do this, get a good education, go to university and end up in a crappy job with the BBC, drink too much and go home alone on the tube all the way to a rented flat in Crouch End? He suggested coffee to Emma Drake and was relieved when she agreed.

"I'm sorry, I really can't think of anything," she said, frowning at the pianist who had moved on to an Andrew Lloyd Webber medley. "I suppose there was that thing with Mr. Jessop."

"Mr.Jessop?"

"Stan." Her frown grew deeper but it didn't seem to be related to The Phantom of the Opera. "Her biology teacher."

"A thing? As in a relationship?" He had seen the name of Stan Jessop before, it was written on another of Theo's wall charts – teachers at laura's college. He had been interviewed by the police two days after Laura's murder and eliminated from their inquiries.

Emma Drake bit her lip and swirled the dregs of her manhattan round the glass. "I don't know, you'd have to ask Christina. She was much closer to Laura than me, she was in Mr. Jessop's class as well."

"She's on a sheep farm in the middle of the Australian outback."

"Is she?" Emma said, brightening up for a moment. "That's amazing. We all seem to have lost touch. You wouldn't think you would, would you?" Oh, you do, Jackson thought. You lose touch with everyone eventually.

The coffee arrived and Jackson thought he should have ordered a sandwich for her as well. What did girls like her eat when they finally made it home? Did girls like her eat at all?

"We all promised to meet up ten years to the day after we left school," she said. "Outside the Hobbs Pavilion, a couple of weeks ago. Of course, no one came."

"You went?"

She nodded and her eyes filled up with tears. "Stupid. I felt stupid, standing there, waiting. I never thought anyone would come, not really, but I thought I should, you know, just in case. It wasn't that no one turned up, it was that Laura didn't turn up. I mean I know she's dead, and I didn't expect her to appear, it was just that it brought it home to me – there was no 'ten years' time' for Laura, no future. Everything stopped for her. Just like that."

Jackson handed her a tissue (he always carried tissues, half the people he met seemed to end up in tears). "And Mr. Jessop?"

"It was a rumor, really. Laura wasn't secretive, exactly, but she was very discreet, kept herself to herself. God, I sound like my mother. I don't think about Laura. That's awful, isn't it? Awful that you end up being forgotten and when people do remember you they talk about you in cliches. I mean, I thought about her when I was standing in front of Hobbs Pavilion, because I knew there was a chance mat the others might come, but there was no hope at all that Laura would turn up. But the rest of the time…" She chewed on her lip and Jackson wanted to stop her because she was going to make it bleed. "It's as if she didn't exist," she concluded flatly.

"You know, she wasn't a virgin," Jackson said tentatively, and Emma sighed and said, "Well, no one was. She wasn't a saint. She was just like everyone else, she was normal."

"But she didn't seem to have any boyfriends. The police didn't interview any."

"She never really went out with anyone. Slept with a few boys, That's all."

Was that normal behavior? Was that what girls did ten years ago? If so, what were they doing now? And what would they be doing in ten years' time? When Marlee was the age at which Laura Wyre ceased to exist. Jesus.

"She was really thick with Josh. They were at primary school together. I never liked him much. He was always full of himself. He was very clever."

"I can't find out where he is," Jackson said.

"He dropped out. Now he's a DJ in Amsterdam, apparently. Laura lost her virginity to him."

"Her father thought she was still a virgin," Jackson said, and Emma Drake laughed and said, "Fathers always do."

"Even when there's evidence to the contrary?"

"Especially then."

"And Mr. Jessop?" Jackson prompted.

"Oh, we all fancied him." Emma smiled at the memory. "He was really cute, far too good-looking to be a teacher. Laura and Christina were in his A-Level class. Laura was definitely his favorite, star pupil and all that. There was nothing in it, he had a wife and a baby." (As if that ever stopped anyone.) "Laura used to babysit for them. I used to go and keep her company. Laura didn't think she was good with babies, but she was okay with Nina – the Jessops' baby. Laura liked his wife, Kim. They got on well. I always thought that was funny. Kim was really common." Emma Drake's hand flew to her mouth in horror. "Oh, God, that's a dreadful thing to say. It's so snobbish. But, you know what I mean, she was really sort of blond and tarty. A Geordie. Oh dear. I should shut up."

This girl was a mine of information. And yet she'd never been interviewed. Kim Jessop had never been interviewed either. "No one mentioned anything about Mr. Jessop and Laura at the time,'' Jackson said.

"Well, they wouldn't. He wasn't the crazy guy who stabbed her. was he? Look – it was just a rumor, nothing more than a crush. I feel bad just talking about it."

"Having a crush on your teacher's hardly unusual. I'm sure Laura wouldn't mind us talking about it." As if she were alive, as it she were real. Laura "Wyre didn't care about anything anymore.

"Oh, no, no, I don't mean Laura had a crush. It was Mr. Jessop who had the crush. On Laura."

Jackson put Emma Drake in a cab and gave the driver a ridiculously generous twenty-five pounds to take her back to Crouch End and see her into her flat. Then he made his own, cheaper, way to King's Cross and spent the whole journey home staring out the window at nothing.

"There you go, Jackson, all patched up and ready to go." Sharon pulled her mask down and smiled at him as if he were three years old. He almost expected her to give him a badge or a sticker. "Let's make an appointment to take out the root, shall we?" He thought she'd been speaking metaphorically when she'd talked about the root of the cause, not an actual root. In his head.

Out in the street he checked his phone. There was a voice message from Josie, asking him to look after Marlee for the afternoon and informing him that his daughter was waiting in the office for him. Except that she wasn't. There was no one in the office and it was unlocked. A message on the door in handwriting that he recognized but that was neither Deborah's nor Marlee's said "Back in ten minutes." He had to think for a moment before he realized it was Theo's handwriting (God knows he'd seen enough of it in the last few days). This time it was in neutral black ink. "Back in ten minutes" meant nothing when you didn't know when the ten minutes started. Jackson felt an unexpected twinge of panic. What did he really know about Theo? He seemed like a good guy, seemed completely harmless, but evil psychopaths didn't have "evil psychopath" tattooed on their foreheads. Why did he think Theo was a good guy? Because his daughter was dead? Was that a guarantee?

Jackson ran down the stairs and onto the street. Where was she? With Theo? With Deborah? On her own? With a stranger? He'd wanted to buy Marlee a mobile phone but Josie objected (when had she become the only one who got to make decisions about their child?). Think how useful it would be now. Jackson caught a glimpse of Theo coming out of the burger bar along the street. He was so big that you couldn't miss him. And Marlee was with him. Thank you, God. She was dressed in a tiny skirt and a crop-top.

There were pictures of little girls dressed like that all over the Internet.

Jackson pushed his way with no attempt at civility through a crowd of Spanish teenagers and grasped Marlee's arm and shouted. "Where've you been?" at her. He felt like punching Theo, although he didn't know why, as it was obvious that Marlee was fine, stuffing her face with chips. She would probably follow a stranger for a single Malteser.

"I'm babysitting," Theo said to Jackson, "not cradle snatching." and Jackson felt ashamed. "Right," he said. "Of course, I'm sorry I was worried."

"Theo's looking after me," Marlee said, "and he bought me fries. I like him." Jesus, was it as simple as that?

"Did your mother just dump you here?" Jackson asked when they got back to the office.

"David brought me."

"So David dumped you?" What a tosser.

"Deborah was here."

"Well she's not here now. [Where the hell was she?] You left the office open, so anyone could have walked in, and you went off with a complete stranger. Do you have any idea how dangerous that could be?"

"Don't you know Theo?"

"That's not the point. You don't."

Marlee's lip began to wobble and she whispered, "It's not my fault, Daddy," and his heart lurched with guilt and contrition. "Sorry, sweetheart," he said. "You're right, it's my fault." He put his arms round her and kissed the top of her head. She smelled of lemony shampoo and burger grease. "My bad," he murmured into her hair.

"Is it alright to come in?" A woman stood uncertainly in the doorway. Jackson loosened his grip on Marlee, who'd been letting him squeeze the air out of her in a long-suffering kind of way.

"I only came to make an appointment," the woman said. Late thirties, jeans, T-shirt, thonged sandals. She looked fit (Jackson imagined kickboxing) but she had dark shadows under her eyes. A Sarah Connor type. Or that nurse from ER that all men knew they would treat so much better than her on-screen boyfriends did. (Jackson had started to watch a lot of television since the break up of his marriage.) There was something familiar about her. Most people who looked familiar to Jackson usually turned out to be criminals, but she didn't look like a criminal.

"Well," he said, gesturing vaguely round the office, "we can talk now if you like?"

The woman glanced over at Marlee and said, "No, I think I'll make an appointment," and Jackson knew right then that it was something he didn't want to know about.

She made an appointment for eleven o'clock on Wednesday, "because I won't be on nights then," and Jackson thought, "Nurse," which was why she looked familiar because nurses and policemen saw far too much of each other professionally. He liked nurses, and not because of any Carry On films or mucky postcards or porny outfits or any of the usual reasons, and not the big, practical nurses with huge backsides and no imagination (and there were a lot of them), no, he liked ones that understood suffering, the ones that suffered themselves, the ones with dark shadows under their eyes that looked like Sarah Connor. The ones that understood pain, in the way Trisha and Emmylou and Lucinda did when they sang. And maybe when they weren't singing as well, who knew?

She definitely had a certain something. A je ne sais quoi. Her name was Shirley, she said, and he knew, without having to ask her, what she was here for. She'd lost someone. He could see it in her eyes.

Are we going home now?" Marlee asked with an extravagant sigh as she clambered into the back of the car. "I'm starving."

"No, you're not."

"Yes, I am. I'm growing," she added defensively.

"I would never have noticed."

"The car smells of cigarettes. It smells disgusting, Daddy. You shouldn't smoke."

"I'm not smoking now. Sit on the other side, not behind me."

"Why?"

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

"Why not?"

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

"What did that lady want?"

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

"Yeah."

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

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

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

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

"What thing?"

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

"Put it back, sweetheart."

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

"You're not going to cry, are you?" he said to the mirror.

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

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

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

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

"I'm bored."

"Let's play a game then." "What game?"

Good question. Jackson wasn't very good at games. "I know. If you were a dog, what dog would you be?"

"Don't know." So much for that. Marlee began to grumble in earnest. "I'm hungry, Daddy. Daddy."

"Yeah, okay. We'll get something to eat on the way."

"Say 'yes' not 'yeah.' Way to what?"

"A convent."

"What's that?"

"It's a bunch of women locked up together."

"Because they're bad?"

"Because they're good. I hope."

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

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

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

"What are you thinking, Daddy?"

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

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

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

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

Jesus, he'd forgotten how physically extreme this stuff was. Or "'Sadomasochistic, homoerotic nonsense," in Amelia's caustic summary. Why was she so uptight all the time? He was sure it had nothing to do with Olivia. Or her father's death. He knew it was the most politically incorrect thing he could think, and, God knows, he would never have voiced it out loud, not in a million years, but, let's face it, Amelia Land needed to get laid.

"And this one is Our Lady of Krakow," Sister Michael was explaining to Marlee, indicating a small statue in a glass case. "She was rescued from Poland by a priest during the war. At times of national crisis, she can be seen to cry." Jackson thought it might have been better if the priest had rescued a few Jews instead of a plaster statue.

"She cries?" an awestruck Marlee asked.

"Yes, tears roll down her cheeks." Jackson wanted to say, "It's shite, Marlee, don't listen," but Sister Michael turned and looked at him, and, despite her plump, jolly face, she had nuns' eyes, and nuns' eyes, Jackson knew, could see right inside your head, so he nodded respectfully at the statue. Sanguis Christi, inebria me.

"Sister Mary Luke" was expecting them, Sister Michael said, moving on, escorting them deeper into the complex corridors of the convent, her habit flapping as she marched purposively onward. Jackson remembered how nuns had a way of moving around very fast, without ever running, as if they were on wheels. Perhaps it was part of their training. He was surprised more criminals didn't use a nun's habit as a disguise. It was perfect misdirection – no one would ever notice your face, all they would see would be the outfit. Look at all the witnesses to Laura's murder, all any or them had seen was the yellow golfing sweater.

Jackson thought that Julia had said to him that Sylvia was a "greyhound" but perhaps what she'd actually said was that she had a greyhound, because she did. It was sitting patiently by her side when they came face-to-face with her. She was on one side of a grille and they were on the other, an arrangement that reminded Jackson partly of the charge desk in the detention cells and partly of a harem, although he wasn't sure what part of his memory the harem bit came from. Jackson supposed that Sylvia looked like a greyhound, inasmuch as she was long and skinny, but she wasn't bonny, as his father would have said. She was toothy and bespectacled, whereas the greyhound was a sleek, brindled creature, the kind of hound you saw in medieval paintings, accompanying a noblewoman to the hunt. Jackson wasn't at all sure where he had conjured that image up from either. Perhaps it was just because there was something medieval in general about a convent. The dog stood up when they entered and gently licked Marlee's fingers through the grille.

Franciscans, Jackson reminded himself. "Like some hippie order," Julia had said. "They go around barefoot in the summer and they make their own sandals for the winter, and they keep animals as pets and they're all vegetarians." Amelia and Julia had briefed him at length about the convent. They seemed genuinely to despise Sylvia's vocation. "Don't be fooled by that holier-than-thou stuff," Julia warned him. "Underneath all that penguin crap she's still Sylvia." "It's just a form of escapism," Amelia added dismissively. "She doesn't have to pay bills, or think about where her next meal's coming from. She never has to be alone." Was that why Amelia frowned so much, then, because she was alone? But hadn't Julia said something about a "Henry"? It was difficult to imagine Amelia in the arms of a man. Whoever Henry was, he wasn't doing it for Amelia. (When did he stop calling her " Miss Land " and start calling her "Amelia"?)

Amelia said that she hardly ever visited Sylvia but they kept up a fitful, dutiful correspondence, "although Sylvia doesn't exactly have much to write about – prayer, prayer, and more prayer – and then, of course, she does a lot of what is housework by any other name – they bake communion wafers, and starch and iron the priest's vestments, all that kind of stuff. And she does a lot of gardening, and knits things for the poor," she added disparagingly, and Julia said, "She's making the knitting up," and Amelia said, "No, I'm not," and Julia said, "Yes, you are. I have visited her, you know, quite a lot," and Amelia said, "That was when you were auditioning for a nun in The Sound of Music," and Julia said, "No, it was not," and Jackson said wearily, "Oh, shut up, the pair of you," and they both turned and looked at him as if they'd just seen him for the first time. "Well," he said, "really, catch yourself on," and wondered when he'd started speaking like his mother.

"Well, that was interesting," Jackson said, addressing Marlee via the rearview mirror. She looked as if she were nodding off to sleep. Sister Michael had taken her off to feed her, once she'd made the acquaintance of Sister Mary Luke's dog ("Jester" – his racing name apparently. He was a rescue dog). The other interns had fussed around Marlee as if they'd never seen a child before and she seemed more than happy with the beans on toast, angel cake, and ice cream they had rustled up for her. If they'd given her chips they would probably have had a convert for life on their hands.

"Don't mention to your mother that I took you to a convent," he said.

Actually it hadn't been that interesting. Sylvia knew he was coming, Amelia had telephoned ahead and explained that Jackson was looking into Olivia's disappearance again but didn't tell her what had prompted this. After Marlee had been taken away by Sister Michael, Jackson produced the blue mouse from where it had been squashed into his pocket ("enclosed") and showed it to Sylvia. He wanted the shock factor. He remembered Julia saying that Amelia fainted when she saw it, and Amelia, after all, was not a fainter. Sylvia looked at the blue mouse, her dry, thin lips compressed together, her small, mud-colored eyes not wavering in their gaze. After a few seconds, she said, "Blue Mouse," and reached a finger through the grille. Jackson moved the blue mouse closer to her and she touched its old, infirm body tenderly with one finger. A tear rolled silently down her cheek. But no, she hadn't seen it since the day Olivia disappeared and she couldn't even begin to imagine why it would be in among her father's possessions.

"I was never close to Daddy," she said.

"The angel cake was nice," Marlee said sleepily.

Jackson's phone rang. He looked at the number – Amelia and Julia – and groaned. He let his voice mail pick it up, but when he played the message back he was so alarmed at what he heard that he had to pull the car to the side of the road to listen to it again. Amelia was sobbing, a primal inchoate kind of lamentation that was grief, raw and untempered. Jackson wondered if Julia were dead.

"Breathe, Amelia, for God's sake," he said. "What is it? Is it Julia?" but all she said was, "Please, Jackson [' Jackson?' He'd never heard her call him that. It sounded way too intimate for Jackson's liking], please, Jackson, please come, I need you." And then she was cut off, or she cut herself off more likely so that he would have to go to Owlstone Road and find out what had happened (not Julia, surely?).

"What is it, Daddy?"

"Nothing, sweetheart. We're just going to take a little detour on the way home." Sometimes Jackson felt as if his whole life were a detour.

We went to a convent!" Marlee shouted as she ran through the front door.

"A convent?" David Lastingham laughed, catching Marlee as she ran past him and lifting her high in the air and then hugging her to his body. Jackson thought, I'll wait until he puts her down and then I'll deck him, but then Josie came out of the kitchen, wearing an apron for God's sake. Jackson had never seen Josie in an apron. "A convent?" she echoed. "What were you doing in a convent?"

"They had angel cake," Marlee said.

Josie looked to Jackson for an explanation but he just shrugged and said, "As they do."

"And the dog was dead," Marlee said, suddenly crestfallen at the memory.

"What dog?" Josie asked sharply. "Did you run over a dog, Jackson?" and Marlee said, "No, Mummy. The dog was old and now he's happy in heaven. With all the other dead dogs." Marlee looked as if she were going to cry again (there had already been a lot of crying) and Jackson reminded her that they had seen a live dog as well. "Jester," she remembered happily. "He was in prison with a nun, and they had a statue that cried, and Daddy's got a tin in his car with a dead man in it."

Josie gave Jackson a disgusted look. "Why do you always have to get her overexcited, Jackson?" and before he could say anything. Josie turned to David and said, "Will you take her upstairs, darling, and get her in the bath?" Jackson waited until Marlee and David – the usurper in his life, the man who now conducted his daughter's bedtime routines and fucked his wife – had gone upstairs before saying, "Do you really think that's wise?"

"Wise? What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about some man you hardly know being left alone with your naked daughter. Our naked daughter. Oh, and by the way, do you think it's really a good idea to allow her to dress like a child prostitute?"

Swift as a snake, she punched his face. He reeled, more with astonishment than pain – it was a girly kind of jab – because not once while they were married had they ever been violent toward each other.

"What the fuck was that for?"

"For being disgusting, Jackson. That's the man I live with, the man I love. Do you honestly think that I would live with someone I didn't trust with my daughter?"

"You'd be amazed how many times I've heard that."

David Lastingham must have heard them shouting because he ran downstairs yelling at Jackson, "What are you doing to her?" which Jackson thought was rich, and Josie, helpfully, said, "He accused you of interfering with Marlee."

"Interfering?" Jackson sneered at her. "Is that what the middle classes call it?" but by this time David Lastingham had reached the bottom of the stairs and aimed a sloppy but enraged right hook that Jackson didn't see coming but that he certainly felt when it landed. In fact he could have sworn he actually heard his cheekbone crack. Jackson thought, That's it, now I kill him, but Marlee suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs and said, "Daddy?"

Josie spat at him, "Get out of our fucking house, Jackson, and, oh and by the way, did I tell you – we're moving to New Zealand . I was going to sit you down and do the tea-and-sympathy thing, break it to you gently, but you don't deserve that. David's been offered a job at Wellington, and he's accepted it and we're going with him. So there, Jackson, how do you like that?"

Jackson parked the Alfa in one of the lockups he rented at the top of the lane, experiencing his usual momentary guilt about the noise his exhaust made. He was thinking about Sylvia, giving up her life to be shut up in that place. She knew more than she was telling – he was sure of that. But right now he didn't want to think about Sylvia. He wanted to think about a hot bath and a cold beer. He was furious that he'd let David Lastingham land a punch. He was thinking that the day couldn't get much worse, even though he knew from experience that the day can always get worse, and to prove that thesis a dark figure slipped out from the shadows behind the garage and hit him over the head with something that felt horribly like the butt of a gun.

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

"Sorry," Jackson said. "They found my donor card. It had you down as my next of kin. It was only a mild concussion, they shouldn't have bothered."

"You were lying there most of the night, Jackson. You were lucky it was so warm. Imagine if it had been winter." She said this accusingly rather than compassionately, as if it were his own fault that he'd been mugged. Actually, he really would like to see the other guy because he was pretty sure he'd done some damage back Jackson had been lucky, his reactions had been fast and he had moved intuitively when he saw the figure coming at him, enough to deflect the blow so that it only gave him a concussion rather than smashing his skull like an egg. And he'd got one back in, nothing as considered as a good right hook or a roundhouse kick, or any of the more refined tactics and moves he'd been taught at one time or another. Instead it had been the automatic brute response of the hard man out on a drunken Saturday night, and he had nutted the guy full in the face. He could still hear the nose squelching as his forehead connected with the soft tissue. It hadn't done his concussion much good, of course, and he must have passed out at that point because the next thing he remembered was the milkman trying to rouse him sometime before dawn.

Josie drove him home. "They want someone to stay with me for twenty-four hours," he said apologetically to Josie, "in case I lapse back into unconsciousness."

"Well, you'll just have to find someone else," she said as she pulled up at the top of the lane, not even driving down it. He realized he was still waiting for sympathy that wasn't going to come. He climbed awkwardly out of the Volvo's passenger seat. All the bones in his skull seemed to have been rearranged like tectonic plates slipping and sliding against one another. Every movement reverberated around his skull. He felt seriously damaged.

Josie rolled down the window so she could speak to him. For a second he thought she was going to lean out and give him a wifely kiss farewell or offer to stay and look after him, but instead she said, "Perhaps it's time you got another next of kin, Jackson."

When he got home Jackson propped Blue Mouse on the mantelpiece. He'd known that sooner or later he would start to capitalize the damn thing. He put Victor's urn (he'd forgotten to return it to Amelia and Julia amid all the hysteria) between Blue Mouse and the only ornament that adorned the mantelpiece – a cheap pottery wishing well that had wishing you well from Scarborough written on the side of it. After the split the marital property had been divided up in a way that Josie considered fair – Jackson took his "crap" (Josie's term for his country CDs and the little souvenir wishing well) and Josie took everything else. Perhaps Blue Mouse would watch over him, seeing as there was no one else who would. Jackson swallowed two of the Co-codamol that the hospital had given him (although what he wanted was morphine) and lay down on the sofa and listened to Emmylou singing "From Boulder to Birmingham," but there was too much pain going on tor even Emmylou to heal.