Case Histories - Страница 46

It was almost morning and they had only just gone to bed. She could still hear the police, cars departing and arriving, the sound of their radios. At least Sylvia's room was at the front of the house, away from the arc lights. She didn't even have the cat now because it had followed Julia to her room. She was never going to sleep, not unless she took something. Julia kept her sleeping tablets in the bathroom. Julia always had prescription drugs of one kind or another, it was part of the drama of her life. Amelia couldn't read the bottle without her glasses, but then what did it matter? Did two send you to sleep, four into a deeper sleep? How about ten, where would they send you? They were so tiny! Like children's pills.

Rosemary used to give them a junior aspirin every day, even when there was nothing wrong with them. That must be where Julia got it from. Rosemary had always had a medicine chest of drugs, even before she was dying. How about twenty? That would be a long sleep. Nothing had saved Rosemary, of course, but then nothing would save any of them, would it? Thirty? What if they just made you groggy? Jackson thought she was ridiculous and she was never going to find Olivia and now Julia had a cat and nothing was fair.

No one wanted her, even her own father didn't find her attractive enough to want her. Not fair. Not one little bit. Not fair, not fair, not fair. The whole bottle? Because it wasn't fair. Not fair, not fair, not fair. Can you help me? No.

Notfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnot fairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfairnotfair -

"Milly, are you alright? Milly? Milly?"

Chapter 19. Jackson

You forgot it was colder up north. Britain was such a small country you wouldn't think you'd notice a climate change over a couple hundred miles. It was still warm enough to sit in the beer garden though, warm enough for northerners anyway. Jackson got the drinks in. They were at an old coaching inn, in the middle of nowhere in Northumberland. There was a lot of nowhere in Northumberland. Jackson wondered about buying a cottage there. Itwould be cheaper than Cambridge, where he no longer had a home. His house was still standing but he had lost more or less everything in it – clothes and CDs and books, all of Theo's files on Laura – if not to the explosion then to the water in the fire hoses. Well, it was one way of getting a fresh start, a new life: just blow up the old one.

"Gas?" he'd said hopefully to the fire investigation officer.

"Dynamite," the fire officer said. (A short, manly kind of ex-change.) Who had access to dynamite? People who worked in mines, obviously. Jackson fished in his wallet for DC Lowther's card and phoned him. "The plot thickens," he said, and wished he hadn't said that because it sounded like something from a bad de-tective novel. "I think we have a suspect." That didn't sound much better. "My house has just exploded, by the way." At least that was novel.

("Quintus Rain," DC Lowther ruminated, "what kind of a name is that?" "A bloody stupid one," Jackson said.)

He carried the drinks outside, an orange juice for himself, a Coke for Marlee, and a gin and tonic for Kim Jessop, except she was called Kim Strachan now because at some point in the last ten years she had married and then divorced a "mad Scottish head case" called George Strachan. Now she owned a bar in Sitges and a restaurant in Barcelona and was partnered up with a Russian "businessman." She was still blond and sported the deep leathery tan of someone who thought skin cancer happened to other people, although, judging by her smoker's cough, it was going to be a race with lung cancer. As befitted a mafia mistress, she was wearing enough gold to furnish an Indian wedding. She hadn't lost any of the Geordie in her – Kim Strachan, nee Jessop, didn't have a single drop of soft southern DNA in her body. Jackson warmed to her immediately.

"It was lucky you got hold of me," she said, taking a deep drag on a Marlboro. "I'm only in the country for a couple of weeks, seeing Mum, she's bad on her legs these days, I'm trying to persuade her to move out to Spain."

Stan Jessop had reluctantly given Jackson his first wife's mobile number, complaining sullenly that he hardly ever saw his daughter, Nina, because "the bitch" had put her in a Quaker boarding school in York, and Jackson thought to himself that a Quaker boarding school in York sounded pretty accessible compared to a school of any denomination in New Zealand.

Kim Strachan and her family were taking a "farmhouse holiday" somewhere in the vicinity. "A sheep farm," she said. "Bloody noisy things, sheep. The silence of the lambs, my arse." Her "family" seemed to include not only Nina and the mother who was bad on her legs but also " Vladimir " and any number of Vladimir 's "associates," one of whom was driving Kim and was currently sipping a Fanta two tables away and scrutinizing every passerby as if he or she might be a potential assassin. "Oh, he's a teddy bear, really." Kim laughed. She'd come a long way since her days in the little thirties semi she had once shared with Stan Jessop.

It turned out that Kim had left Stan the week before Laura Wyre's murder. She had already "taken up" with George Strachan and was behind the bar of a British expatriate pub in Alicante when Laura was killed. Kim had never returned to Cambridge, hadn't even spoken to Stan for two years after she left, "because he was such a bloody wanker," so that when Jackson phoned her and said he was "investigating certain aspects of Laura Wyre's death," she said, "Jesus. Laura Wyre's dead? How?" Jackson felt his heart sink because talking about a girl who was ten years' dead was a very different thing to breaking fresh news of that death. "She's only twenty-eight," Kim said.

Jackson sighed, thinking, No, she was only eighteen, and said, Actually she died ten years ago. I'm afraid she was murdered." There was a silence at the other end of the phone, disturbed only by a surly rumble of Russian in the background. Jackson remem-bered Emma Drake saying that it was worse hearing about Laura's death when "it was already consigned to history for everyone else." It seemed like the whole world had been out of the country when Laura died.

"Murdered?"

"I'm really, really sorry," Kim said, fishing the slice of lemon out of her gin and putting it in the ashtray.

"Her killer was never found," Jackson said. "Laura might not evenhave been the intended victim." Jackson cast a doubtful glimpse at Marlee. He probably sounded like he was talking about an episode of Law and Order or CSI rather than real life. He hoped he did, he hoped she didn't actually watch Law and Order and CSI, he hoped she watched Blue Peter and reruns of Little House on the Prairie. He had told Marlee about Laura, that she had been killed by a "bad person" because "sometimes bad things happened to good people," and Marlee frowned and said, "Theo said she was called Jennifer," and Jackson said, "That's his other daughter." How did Jennifer feel, always being the other daughter, the one that got less attention than a dead sister?

"Laura was a nice girl," Kim Strachan said. "She was stuck-up when I first met her, but she was just middle class, you know. You can't hold that against a person, can you? Aye, well, you can, but not Laura. She had a good heart."

"I'm just following up on a few things, people who weren't interviewed at the time," Jackson said. "I'm working for her father."

"Fat bloke?"

"Yeah, fat bloke."

"Theo," Marlee said. "He's nice."

"Yes, he is," Jackson said. He looked at Marlee and said, "Do you want to go and get yourself a packet of crisps, sweetheart?" He reached into his pocket for change but Kim Strachan had already opened her purse and produced a new five-pound note that she gave to Marlee, saying, "Here you go, pet, get what you want. Bloody stupid Brits," she added to Jackson. "Why can't they just get with the euro? Every other bloody country in Europe 's managed it."

Kim Strachan lit another cigarette, shaking one out for Jackson, and when he refused she said, "For God's sake, you're gagging for one, man, I can tell."

Jackson took a cigarette. "I was off them for fifteen years," he said.

"What started you again?"

Jackson shrugged. "An anniversary."

"Must have been a big one," Kim Strachan said.

Jackson laughed humorlessly "No, it wasn't. A thirty-third, that's not a significant one, is it? Thirty-three years since my sister died."

"I'm sorry."

"I think it was just one too many. She would have been fifty this year. This week. Tomorrow."

"There you go, then," Kim Strachan said, as if that explained everything. She lit his cigarette with a heavy gold lighter that had something in Cyrillic engraved on it.

"Don't tell me," Jackson said. "From Russia with love."

Kim Strachan laughed and said, "Much filthier than that."

"You wouldn't have any idea who might have wanted to kill Laura, would you?" Jackson asked her. "Any idea, however unlikely."

"Like I said, she was a nice middle-class girl. They don't usually have many enemies."

Jackson produced the photograph of the yellow golfing jumper and held it out to her. She took it from him and studied it carefully. Then her face sort of fell apart. "Jesus Christ," she said.

"You recognize it?" Jackson asked.

Kim downed the rest of her gin and took a long drag on her cigarette before stubbing it out. She had tears in her eyes but her voice was raw with anger. "I should have known," she said. "I should have fucking known it would be him."