Case Histories - Страница 38

"Do you have any enemies, sir?" DC Lowther asked hopefully.

"Not really," Jackson said. Just about everyone he'd ever met.

Jackson 's shirt was sticking to his skin, it was way too hot to be in an office.

"I don't know what triggered it," Shirley said. "She just went berserk."

There was always a trigger, there was a lot of things that the defense could have used – psychotic episodes, sleep deprivation, baby blues, shit childhood, self-defense (what about the bruise on her face?). "In court," Jackson said, "Michelle said that he woke the baby. The baby was asleep and Keith woke her up, that was the nearest she got to giving a motive." Jackson could imagine how that went down with the judge. She might as well have pleaded guilty. Michelle Fletcher hadn't run away or made up a story, she had simply waited to be found. By her sister.

If she had served two-thirds of her sentence Michelle Fletcher would have been back on the outside in 1989, at the age of twenty-eight. The same age Laura Wyre would be if she'd lived. Jackson would lay a bet that Michelle had been a model prisoner, trans-ferred to an open prison by '85, catching up with her exams probably, so she could start her "new life" when she came out. Like Josie. A fresh start, wiping out the past. Just like that. What was Michelle doing now? Shirley Morrison didn't know, of course she didn't know. That was why she was here.

"I promised Michelle I would look after Tanya," Shirley said, "and I would have done, of course I would have done, but I was only fifteen and social services decided our parents were unfit – which they were – and gave custody to Keith's parents. But they weren't much better. The last time I ever saw my sister was in the court the day she was sentenced. She refused to see us, knocked back all our visitor's orders, refused to read letters, there was nothing we could do about it. I could have understood if she didn't want to see Mum or Dad, they both died without seeing her again. But not to see me… I mean I didn't care that she'd killed Keith, she was still my sister, I still loved her." She shrugged and added, "Anyone's capable of killing, given the right circumstances." She was looking at that faraway world again, the one that existed on the other side of the office window, and Jackson supposed he could have said, "Yeah, I've killed people," but that didn't seem like the kind of dialogue he wanted to enter into at half past eleven on a Monday morning in these temperatures, so he said nothing at all.

"They told us when she was released," Shirley continued, "but she never got in touch. I don't know where she went or what she's doing now. In the end she got a new life and we were stuck with her old one. 'Murder' – it's such a stigma, isn't it? It's so… trashy. I wanted to go to medical school, be a doctor, but that was never going to happen, not after everything we went through." "And now you want me to look for your sister?" Shirley laughed as if he'd said something absurd, "God, no. Why would I want to look for Michelle when she's made it so obvious she doesn't want to be found? She doesn't care about me anymore. I don't want to find Michelle. I want to find Tanya."

It was teatime in Binky's garden. Everything was so wildly overgrown that a machete would have been a more fitting accompaniment at the tea table instead of the extensive array of tarnished butter knives and jam spoons that formed part of Binky's complex tea ceremony. " Darjeeling," Binky announced, but it was a gray washy brew that hadn't seen a tea plantation in years and which tasted like old socks. The cups didn't look as if they had been cleaned for a long time. "We are being joined today by a guest," she announced like a rather grand chat-show hostess, "my great-nephew. Quintus." What kind of a name was that to get stuck with for life, for God's sake?

"Really?" Jackson said. Binky had never mentioned having family. "I hardly know the boy," she added, with a dismissive wave of her hand. "My nephew and I weren't close, but the boy's the only family I have." Had Binky Rain ever been close to anyone? Strange to imagine that there had once been a Dr. Rain who had shared bed and board with her. She couldn't always have been old, but it was hard to believe she had ever been a young nubile wife, compliant to "Julian's" sexual needs – ah, Jesus, Jackson, shoot that idea right out of your head. He was so alarmed by the unpalatable image he'd conjured up that he knocked over his tea, not that one more stain could make any difference to a cloth that was a palimpsest of previous tea-related accidents. "Something wrong, Mr. Brodie?" Binky inquired, mopping up the tea with the hem of her skirt, but before he could reply a cry like a huntsman's tantivy from the top end of the garden announced the arrival of Quintus Rain.

Binky's use of the word "boy" had led Jackson to expect a teenager, so he was surprised when "Quintus" turned out to be a substantial forty-something with broad, bland features and floppy hair. He was built like a rugby forward but his muscle had turned toflab and he looked too soft to survive a scrum. He was wearing chinos and a blue-and-white-striped shirt with a white collar and a pink tie and had a navy blue blazer slung over his shoulder. Break himin two and you'd find "Tory" written right through him. Brought up in Herefordshire," Binky murmured to Jackson as if this somehow explained everything about Quintus. The really interesting thing about Quintus, interesting to Jackson anyway, was that Quintus was sporting a considerable plaster across a nose that looked damaged in just the way you would expect a nose to be damaged if you'd been nutted by someone who was trying to stop youfrom pistol-whipping them.

But why on earth would someone he'd never met before, with whom he had no relationship whatsoever, want to attack him like that? Quintus seemed particularly put out to see Jackson in his great-aunt's garden. Binky herself blithely ignored the fact that she was taking tea with two hostile, beat-up men and kept wittering on about Frisky.

Quintus didn't give the impression that he had been a frequent visitor to his elderly great-aunt, but then the boy had led a busy life – shipped over from the daughterland at an early age to be made into an English gentleman – Clifton, Sandhurst, a commission in the Royal Lancers (Jackson thought he'd recognized the braying tones of the officer class), then "a stint down the mines," and now something vague that occupied his time in London.

"Down the mines?" Jackson repeated doubtfully, fishing cat hair out of his teacup.

"Efrican," Binky said.

"Efrican?"

"Sarth Efrican. Diamond mines. In charge of the blecks."

Binky went inside to make a fresh pot of tea, saying, "You two should have a lot to talk about, Mr. Brodie. You're both army men, after all."

Jackson hadn't thought of himself as an army man for a long time, he wasn't sure he'd ever thought of himself as an army man "Which regiment?" Quintus asked gruffly.

"Infantry. Prince of Wales's Own," Jackson said laconically.

"What rank?"

What was this, Jackson wondered, a game of "Mine's bigger than yours?" He shrugged and said, "Private."

"Yeah, I could have guessed that," Quintus said. He pronounced all the vowels in "Yeah" and then a few extra for luck.

Jackson didn't bother saying that although he went in to the army as a private he came out as a warrant officer, class one, in the military police, because he had no intention of playing Billy Big-Dick with him. Jackson had been offered a commission before he left the army but he knew he'd never be comfortable on the other side, taking dinner in the mess with pricks like Quintus who thought of the Jacksons of this world as bottom-feeding thugs.

"I could show you my tattoos," Jackson offered. Quintus declined, which was just as well because Jackson didn't have any tattoos. Shirley Morrison had a tattoo, between the base of her neck and her shoulder blades, a black rose on the fifth vertebra. Did she have other tattoos on her body, in less visible places?

Quintus suddenly pulled his chair closer to Jackson as if he were going to tell him a secret and in a menacing voice said, "I know your game, Brodie." Jackson tried not to laugh, he had (with little enthusiasm) fitted two wars into his army career and it took more than guys like Quintus rattling their sabers to frighten him. By the look of him Quintus wouldn't last three rounds with a rabbit.

"And what game would that be exactly, Mr. Rain?" Jackson asked but never got to find out because at that moment a particularly manky torn decided it needed to spray its territory and favored Quintus's leg as one of its outposts.

Jackson walked down to the river and found some shade on the rank. He had a squashed sandwich in his pocket that he had bought in Pret a Manger and now he shared it with a group of eager ducks. There was a continual traffic of punts along the river, most of them containing tourists being chauffeured by students, or student types, dressed in straw boaters and striped blazers, the boys in flannels, the girls in unflattering skirts. The tourists were a mixed rag -Japanese, Americans (fewer than before), a lot of Europeans, some unidentifiable (a kind of generic East European), and northerners, who in the torpid air of Cambridge seemed more foreign than the Japs. They all appeared to be thrilled, as if they were hav-ing a genuine experience – as if this was how the natives spent their leisure hours – punting down the river and eating cream teas to the sound of the Grantchester clock chiming three. What a load of shite, to quote his father.