Case Histories - Страница 20

Well," John Burton said, "I suppose I should be going." They had been sitting on a pew, side by side, quite companionably, but not speaking to each other. That was the thing about a church, you could be quiet and no one questioned why. The rain had almost stopped, although you could still smell it – green and summery – through the open door. "The rain's easing off," he said, and Caroline said, "Yes, I think it is." He stood up and escorted her outside. The dogs had been asleep and now made a great performance of welcoming Caroline's reappearance, although she knew they couldn't care less really.

"Good-bye, then," John Burton said and shook her hand again. She felt a little flutter, something long dormant coming back to life. He climbed on his bike and cycled off, turning once to wave, an action that made him wobble ridiculously. She stood and watched him moving away from her, ignoring the overexcited dogs. She was in love. Just like that. How totally, utterly insane.

Chapter 8. Jackson

Victor's last rites took minimalism to a new level of austerity. Jackson, Julia, and Amelia were the only people present, unless you counted Victor himself, quietly decomposing in a cheap veneered oak coffin that remained starkly unadorned by any farewell flowers. Jackson had expected, if nothing else, a sense of occasion. He had imagined that Victors funeral would take place in the chapel of St. John's, his old college, where he would be lauded by his ex-colleagues in a tedious high Anglican service punctuated by hymns sung badly to the accompaniment of a pained-sounding organ.

Amelia and Julia were sitting in the front pew of the crematorium chapel. Jackson had managed to resist their invitation to sit between them, in the place of Victor's nonexistent son. Jackson leaned forward and whispered to Julia, "Why is there no one else here?" Nominally, he was there in a professional role: he wanted to know who would turn up at Victor's funeral, and he supposed in the event nobody was as interesting as somebody.

"No one is here because we didn't tell anyone," Amelia said as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

Amelia was not dressed in black for her father's funeral, not a hint of it, quite the opposite in fact as she was sporting ribbed woolen tights in a bright scarlet that was quite alarming. Jackson wondered if there were a symbolic significance to this – there was probably some ancient Cambridge custom that dictated a bluestocking replaced her legwear with red on the death of her father. There seemed to be ancient Cambridge customs for most things (sorry, Oxford ). Why would anyone wear woolen tights in the middle of summer? The crematorium chapel was chilled by the air-conditioning, but outside it was hot. Julia was just as bad, rejecting the black of bereavement and muffling herself from head to toe in a vintage coat in grass-green velvet (were they cold-blooded, like reptiles?). Her mad hair looked as if it had been groomed by a troupe of circus dogs. Jackson, in his black funeral suit and severe black tie, was the only one who appeared to be mourning Victor.

Amelia's brazen legs reminded him of the legs of a bird he'd seen recently in a National Geographic in his dentist's waiting room.

Julia twisted round to face Jackson. "I always think on these occasions," she said, "well, not so much these occasions" – she indicated the coffin in an offhand way – "as, you know, family stuff, birthdays, Christmas, that Olivia might turn up."

"That's ridiculous," Amelia said.

"I know." They both lapsed into sadness but then Julia rallied herself and said, "You look very handsome in a suit, Mr. Brodie." Amelia gave Julia a disparaging look. Julia's eyes were watering and she sounded choked up but she declared it was hay fever rather than grief "in case you get the wrong idea." She swallowed a Be-cotide and offered one to Jackson, which he refused. Jackson had never had an allergy in his life (except to people, perhaps). He considered his constitution to be robustly northern. He'd watched a documentary recently on the Discovery Channel that showed how northerners still had hardy Viking DNA and southerners had something else, something softer, Saxon or French.

"The decor in here is so dreary," Julia whispered loudly, and Amelia tutted as if she were at the theater and Julia were an annoying stranger. "What?" Julia said to her crossly. "He's not going to leap out of his coffin and object, is he?" A brief spasm of horror gripped Amelia's features at this idea, but at least the notion of a resurrected Victor shut them both up, even if only momentarily. Even a tedious Anglican service would have been preferable to the squabbling Land sisters.

On his way to Victor's funeral, Jackson had paid a visit to the old offices of Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton, now a beauty parlor called Bliss. "Beauty Therapists" – that's how they styled themselves, which made Jackson think of psychiatry rather than facials and manicures. Healing people with beauty. How would you do that? Music? Poetry? Landscape? Sex? What did he turn to when he needed healing? "From Boulder to Birmingham," Emmylou Harris. His daughter's face. That was corny, but it was true.

There was a room in Theo's house. Theo had invited him to his house to show him the room. Jackson could not have lived with a room like that in his house. An upstairs bedroom that looked like a police incident room – photographs and maps pinned to the wall, flowcharts and whiteboards, timetables of events. Two metal filing cabinets, bursting with files, boxes on the floor containing yet more files. Anything that could possibly have been relevant to his daughter's death was in that room. And a good number of those things Theo shouldn't have been in possession of- the scene-of-crime photographs, for example, not tacked up on the wall (for which small mercy Jackson gave thanks) but that Theo produced from the filing cabinet. Ghastly pictures of his daughter's body that Theo handled with a kind of professional detachment, as if they were holiday snaps that might interest Jackson. He knew it wasn't like that, that time had somehow inured Theo to every horror, but Jackson was shocked nonetheless. "I've got a few contacts," Theo said, without expounding. He'd been a lawyer, and lawyers, in Jackson 's experience, always had contacts.

Theo had spent the last ten years of his life doing nothing but investigating his daughter's death. Was that the right thing to do or was it the crazy thing to do? The room was like something a psychopath might have kept, not any psychopath Jackson had ever come across, of course, but the psychopaths who inhabited crime novels and television programs. Jackson thought they should make more television drama about car crime committed by fourteen-year-old boys high on glue and cider and boredom – it would be a lot more realistic, just not very interesting.

Looking at Victor's coffin made Jackson wonder about Laura Wyre's funeral. Hundreds of people had attended, according to the press reports. Theo had hardly any memory of it, even though he had all the press clippings. When Jackson asked Theo about his daughter's funeral his eyes had flickered from side to side as if his brain were disassociating from the memory. Weren't there stages of bereavement you were supposed to go through – shock, denial, guilt, anger, depression – and then acceptance, when you were supposed to come out the other end and be okay, move on. Jackson had received grief counseling once. His school had arranged for someone to come in, from the "West Yorkshire Adolescent Psychiatric Unit," an overblown title to place on the hunched shoulders of the short, red-haired psychologist whose breath smelled of raw onions and who consulted with Jackson in the makeshift cupboard that passed for a sickroom at his school. The red-haired, bearded psychologist told Jackson that he had to move on, to get on with his own life, but Jackson was twelve years old and had nowhere left to move on from and nowhere obvious to go.

Jackson wondered how many times people had suggested to Theo that he had to get on with his life. Theo Wyre was stuck somewhere near the beginning of the bereavement process, at a place he'd made all his own, where if he fought hard enough he might be able to bring his daughter back. It wasn't going to happen – Jackson knew that the dead never came back. Ever.

The yellow golfing sweater. That was the thing, the thing that should have led them to the murderer. None of Theo's clients had expressed any interest in golf (was golf the "royal game" or was chat tennis?). This indifference to the game stemmed from the fact that most of Theo's clients were women – his caseload was almost entirely matrimonial and domestic. (So why was he in Peterborough on a boundary dispute the day his daughter died?) It was a depressing business going through his files, containing as they did an endless parade of women who were being battered, abused, and defeated, not to mention the string of ones who were just plain unhappy, who couldn't stand the sight of the poor schmuck they were married to. It was an education (although one Jackson had already been subject to) because Theo was extraordinarily good at documenting the banal details of failure, the litany of tiny flaws and cracks that were nothing to an outsider but looked like canyons when you were on the inside – "He buys me carnations, carnations are crap, every woman knows that so why doesn't he?" "He never thinks to run a bit of Toilet Duck round the bowl, even though I leave it out where he can't miss it and I've asked him, I've asked him a hundred times." "If he ever does any ironing it's 'Look at me, I'm ironing, look how well I'm doing it, I iron much better than you, I'm the best, I do it properly.'" "He'd get me my breakfast in bed if I asked him to, but / don't want to have to ask." Did men know how much they got on women's nerves? Theo Wyre certainly did.