“Where’ve you been?” Jackson shouted at her. He glared at Theo. What a cheek, when all Theo was doing was looking after the girl, which was more than her parents were doing.
“I’m babysitting,” Theo said to Jackson, “not cradle snatching.”
“Right,” Jackson said, “Of course, I’m sorry, I was worried.”
“Theo’s looking after me,” Marlee said, taking a huge bite out of her burger, “and he bought me fries. I like him.”
W
hen Theo returned along St. Andrews Street the girl with the custard-yellow hair was no longer there and he worried that she might never be there again. Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.
Jackson
“Y
our 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.”
L
aura’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.
E
mma 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 Webbermedley. “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 clichés. I mean, I thought about her when I was standing in front of Hobbs Pavilion, because I knew there was a chance that 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.
”