Julia embarked on a second cup of tea. It was too hot for tea; Jackson longed for an ice-cold beer. Julia’s white teacup bore the imprint of her mouth in lipstick and Jackson experienced a sudden memory of his sister. She had worn a less strident color, a pastel pink, and on every cup and glass she ever drank from she left behind the ghostly transfer of her lips. The thought of Niamh made his heart feel heavy in his chest, literally, not metaphorically.
“I don’t think so,” Julia said, after having mulled over the dog question (did they ever agree about anything?). “No, not a pointer. And certainly not an English one. Perhaps an Old Danish pointer. That’s ‘Old’ with a capital ‘O,’ Mr. Brodie, in case you think I’m referring to your age. Or perhaps a Large French one. Ditto with the ‘L’ there, Mr. Brodie. But you know, Milly, I think Mr. Brodie is a German shepherd. You can just tell he would drag you out of a burning building or a river in flood. He would
save
you!” She turned to Jackson and gave him the benefit of a brilliant theatrical smile. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Would I?” Jackson said.
Amelia stood up abruptly and announced, “That was lovely but we can’t spend all day enjoying ourselves,” and Julia roused herself and said, “Yes, come on, Milly, chop-chop, we have shopping to do. Mystery shopping,” she added, and Amelia groaned and said, “I hate mystery shopping.”
Jackson took out his wallet to pay the bill. He had been keeping the photograph of Olivia in his wallet and every time he opened it to prize out one of his almost-exhausted credit cards, he saw her face, grinning at him. Not really grinning at him, of course, but at whoever was behind the camera.
“Mummy,” Julia said. “Daddy never took photographs.” All three of them stared sadly at the photograph.
“Julia and I are the only ones left,” Amelia said. “We’re the only two people left in the whole world who remember Olivia. We can’t go to our grave not knowing what happened to her.”
“Why now, after all this time?” Jackson asked.
“It’s not ‘after all this time,’” Amelia bristled. “We never
forgot
about Olivia. It’s just that finding Blue Mouse, I don’t know, it’s as if it
found us.
”
“Three of us,” Julia corrected Amelia. “Sylvia remembers Olivia.”
“Sylvia?” Jackson puzzled.
“Our eldest sister,” Amelia said dismissively. Jackson waited, letting his silence ask the question for him. Eventually, Julia answered, “She’s a nun.”
“And when exactly were you going to tell me about her?” Jackson asked, trying not to sound as annoyed as he felt.
“We’re telling you now,” Julia said as if she were the embodiment of reason. “Don’t be a crosspatch, Mr. Brodie. You’re a much nicer person than you pretend to be, you know.”
“No, I’m not,” Jackson said.
“Yes, you are,” Julia said. (Why didn’t they just
go,
for God’s sake?) Suddenly, to Jackson’s surprise, Julia stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said, “for coming to the funeral and everything.”
J
ackson started to worry about being late. On the way back to the car park he had to fight his way against a herd of foreign-language students, all entirely oblivious to the existence of anyone else on the planet except other adolescents. Cambridge in summer, invaded by a combination of tourists and foreign teenagers, all of whom were put on earth to
loiter,
was Jackson’s idea of hell. The language students all seemed to be dressed in combats, in khaki and camouflage, as if there were a war going on and they were the troops (God help us if that were the case). And the bikes, why did people think bikes were a good thing? Why were cyclists so smug? Why did cyclists ride on pavements when there were perfectly good cycle lanes? And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.
And as for the tourists . . . enthralled by the colleges, by history, they didn’t want to see what was behind all that, the money and power. The vast tracts of land they owned, not just in Cambridge, they owned most of Cambridge anyway. The colleges still yielded influence over licenses and leases and God knows what else. Someone had once told him that they used to say that you could walk the length of England and never leave land owned by Trinity. And all those beautiful gardens they had that you had to pay to go into. All that wealth and privilege in the hands of a few while the streets were full of the dispossessed, the beggars, the jakies, the mad. Cambridge seemed to have a particularly high incidence of insanity.
Still—and it was a close call—Jackson preferred the summer population to the yahs and hooray Henrys of term time. Was it just the envy of the underclass? Was it his father’s voice in his head that he could hear? Jackson worried that he was turning into a grumpy old man. Perhaps being a grumpy old man wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Having a permanent toothache didn’t help, of course. (“Endodontic treatment,” Sharon had murmured seductively in his ear during his last appointment.)
J
ackson double-parked outside the house. The windows had wooden venetian blinds rolled up so that he could see inside the living room—floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, potted palms, big couches—shabby but arty, academics, probably. The street was choked with oversize SUVs, the middle-class mother’s vehicle of choice, the rear windows all sporting the obligatory
CHILD ON BOARD
and
BABY ON BOARD
signs. Jackson lit up a cigarette and put on Lucinda Williams’s
Sweet Old World
as an antidote. There were balloons tied to the gatepost signaling its status as a house
en fête.
The sound of little girls’ hysterical screams rose up from the garden at the back and filled the air like the call of some terrifying prehistoric bird. The SUVs were empty, the drivers all inside, but Jackson decided to stay in the car. He didn’t feel up to facing the inquisitive female warmth that always seemed to greet him whenever he walked into the midst of a pack of mothers.
He leafed through some of the many papers and files he had brought with him from Theo’s house. The room—the “incident room” as he now thought of it—wasn’t Laura’s bedroom, that was at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. Jackson had half expected it to be preserved as it had been the day that Laura left it for the last time—he’d been in those kinds of shrines before, sadder and more faded by the year, but to his surprise Laura’s bedroom showed no sign of her. It was decorated in neutral colors in the style of a hotel and was nothing more than a guest bedroom. “Not that I have guests,” Theo said, with that sad, drooping smile he had. He was like one of those big melancholic dogs, a Newfoundland or a Saint Bernard. Oh no, he was thinking like Julia. What kind of a dog was he? He’d said “Labrador” because it was the first dog that came into his mind. Jackson didn’t know dogs, he’d never had one, not even as a kid. His father had hated dogs.
Jackson remembered what Laura Wyre’s room looked like ten years ago. There’d been a patchwork quilt, a tank of tropical fish, a pile of teddy bears on the bed. Books everywhere, clothes on the floor, cosmetics, photographs. It was as untidy as you might expect an eighteen-year-old’s bedroom to be. That wasn’t the impression of Laura that Theo gave now. In death, she had become incapable of untidiness, of flaws. Laura had become a saint in Theo’s memory, a holy girl. Jackson supposed that was natural.
Ten years ago there had been a framed photograph on the wall of her bedroom—a picture of Laura with a dog. She was pretty and had a lovely smile. She looked like a nice girl, not a saint, but a nice girl. Jackson thought of Olivia, safe in the wallet in his pocket, grinning, unseen in the darkness. “Enclosed.” That’s what Amelia had said about Sylvia when he asked her if she’d been invited to the funeral. (“Not even Sylvia?”) “Of course we
told
her,” Amelia said, “but she can’t come, she’s not allowed out. She’s
enclosed.
”
Was Olivia enclosed somewhere, under a floor, in the earth? No more than a tiny pile of leveret-thin bones waiting to be found.
Jackson had been in Laura’s bedroom by chance. He was working on another case at the time, a girl called Kerry-Anne Brockley who had disappeared from the Chesterton area of town. Kerry-Anne was sixteen years old, unemployed and certainly no virgin. She had been killed on her way home from a night out with friends—raped, strangled, and dumped in a field outside town. She had been walking home from a nightclub at two in the morning, wearing a lot of makeup and very few clothes, and there were some unspoken assumptions that she had somehow invited what had happened to her. Not on Jackson’s team. If he’d thought that any of his officers thought that, he would have hung them out to dry.
They still didn’t have a suspect in custody but Jackson was returning home for his first night’s sleep in days, cadging a lift in the back of a squad car with a family liaison officer (a woman called Alison who Jackson should have married instead of Josie). Alison was returning some photographs of Laura to Theo. Photographs, always photographs. All those poignant images of girls that had gone. The Kerry-Annes and the Olivias and the Lauras, all of them precious, all of them lost forever. All of them holy girls. Sacrifices to some unknown, evil deity. Please God, never Marlee.
Theo Wyre had answered the door, a man hollowed out by grief. His face, Jackson had thought at the time, was the color of Wensleydale cheese. He offered them tea and Jackson thought—neither for the first nor the last time—how strange it was that people just kept on going, even when their world no longer existed. Theo had even produced cake from somewhere, saying, “Cherry and almond, I made it the day before she died. It keeps well.” He shook his head sadly as if he couldn’t believe that the cake still existed but his daughter didn’t. Needless to say, neither of them ate it. Jackson said, “Do you mind if I have a look at Laura’s bedroom, Mr. Wyre?” because he knew that as far as Theo Wyre was concerned he was just another detective, not someone who wasn’t on this case. It wasn’t much more than curiosity on Jackson’s part, there was nothing to suggest that Laura Wyre’s murder was linked to “his” murder, Kerry-Anne Brockley. And it was just a bedroom, an untidy bedroom that a girl was never going to enter again, never fling down her bag on the floor and kick off her shoes, never lie on the bed and read a book or listen to her stereo, never sleep the restless, innocent sleep of the living.
That was two years before Marlee was born and Jackson didn’t know then what he knew now—what it was like to love a child, how you would give your own life in a heartbeat to save theirs, how they were more precious than the most precious thing. He no longer missed Josie as much as he thought he would, but he missed Marlee nearly all the time. That was why he didn’t want to take on Theo Wyre. Theo terrified him, it made the death of his own child a possibility, it forced him to imagine it, to substitute Marlee for Laura Wyre. But what could he do? He could hardly say no to the poor guy, the size of a blimp, wheezing and puffing on his inhaler, nothing left but a memory—the shape of a space where a twenty-eight-year-old woman should have been.
Theo had a body; Amelia and Julia needed one. Olivia was a different kind of space than Laura, an incorporeal mystery, a question without an answer. A puzzle that could tease you until you went mad. He would never find Olivia, never find out what happened to her, he knew that and he would just have to find the right time to tell them that. He was never going to be able to bill them either, was he? Sorry, your baby sister’s dead and gone forever and that will be £500 for services rendered. (“You’re too soft to be in business,” Deborah Arnold said to him every month when she did the accounting. “Too soft or too stupid.”)
If it was Marlee and he had to decide—dead or missing forever—which would he choose? No, he couldn’t go there, couldn’t bear to imagine it, couldn’t tempt fate by trying to. Either scenario depicted the worst thing that could possibly happen. What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened—how did you live your life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a kind of strength and courage that most people didn’t have.
T
he front door opened and all the little party girls and their party mothers hit the street at top volume. Jackson hastily stuffed photographs of Laura Wyre’s crime scene beneath the front passenger seat. He was about to get out of the car and go inside when Marlee ran out. Jesus, she was dressed like a hooker. What did Josie think, letting her go out looking like a pedophile’s dream? She even had lipstick on. He thought of JonBenét Ramsey. Another lost girl. When he was in Bliss earlier, a girl had come in, a friend of the receptionist (Milanda—had she made her name up?), and made an appointment for a “Brazilian,” and Milanda said, “Yeah?” and the girl said, “My boyfriend wants me to get one. He wants to pretend he’s making love with a young girl,” and Milanda said, “Yeah?” as if that were a good reason.
Jackson knew the statistics, knew how many known pedophiles would be hanging out in any one area, knew how they’d be clustered, thickly, like flies, around playgrounds, schools, swimming pools (and houses that were signposted with balloons). “Claire’s Accessories”—that’s where Jackson would go if he were a pedophile. What if reincarnation existed, what if you came back as a pedophile? But then what would you have had to do in the first place to deserve that? What did the holy girls come back as? Flocks of doves, groves of trees?
“Hiya, sweetheart. Good party?” (Were you just going to run out into the street, not knowing if anyone was waiting for you?) Where were you going? Did you know I was here?
“Yep.”
“Did you remember to say ‘thank you’?”
“Yep. I said, ‘Thank you very much for having me.’”
“You’re fibbing,” Jackson said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Basic interrogation fact: people look up to the left when they’re remembering and up to the right when they’re inventing. You looked up to the right.” Shut up, Jackson. She wasn’t even listening.