Case Histories (22 page)

“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 to flab 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 him in 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 you from 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.”

B
inky 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 tom decided it needed to spray its territory and favored Quintus’s leg as one of its outposts.

J
ackson walked down to the river and found some shade on the bank. 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 bag—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 having 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.

“Mr. Brodie! Yoo-hoo, Mr. Brodie!”

Oh, dear God, Jackson thought wearily, was there no escape from them? They were punting, for fuck’s sake, or at least Julia was punting, while Amelia watched her from beneath a big floppy sun hat that looked as if it had last seen better days on her mother’s head. She was also wearing sunglasses and gave the general impression of someone who’d just been discharged from the hospital after a particularly challenging face-lift.

“What a beautiful day!” Julia shouted to Jackson. “We’re going to Grantchester for tea, hop in. You have to come with us, Mr. Brodie.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” Julia said cheerfully. “Get in. Don’t be so curmudgeonly.” Jackson hauled himself up from the grass with a sigh and helped pull the punt into the bank. He climbed in awkwardly and Julia laughed and said, “Not a sailor, then, Mr. Brodie?” Why were they still in Cambridge? Were they ever going home? Amelia, at the other end of the vessel, gave him a vague acknowledgment without making eye contact. The last time he saw her she was distraught about the dog’s death (
“Please, Jackson, please come, I need you
”). She’d looked rough, she’d looked like a dog actually, wearing an old dressing gown, and makeup—he’d never seen her in makeup before—it looked terrible, as if she’d applied it in the dark, and she hadn’t put her hair up so that it hung in dry hanks around her face. All women come to an age when they’re just too old to wear their hair down, even beautiful women with beautiful hair, and neither Amelia nor her hair had ever been beautiful.

Jackson thought it was best if he behaved as if nothing had happened the other night. What
had
happened the other night?
“I didn’t know you were married, Mr. Brodie?”
—what the hell was that all about? As if he was an adulterous lover who’d betrayed her. He had never given Amelia Land a single reason to think there was anything between them. Had she really developed a crush on him? (Please, God, no.) Stan Jessop had a crush on Laura Wyre. Were crushes dangerous things? They sounded so harmless.

“Crikey, what happened to you, Mr. Brodie?” Julia was peering at him in a shortsighted way. “You’ve been in a fight!” Amelia looked at him for the first time, but when he caught her eye she looked away. “How exciting,” Julia said.

“It was nothing,” Jackson said. (Just someone’s trying to kill me.) “What day is it today?”

“Tuesday,” Julia said promptly.

Amelia grunted something that sounded like “Wednesday.”

“Really?” Julia said to her. “Cor lummy, how the days fly, don’t they?” (Cor lummy? Who said things like that? Apart from Julia?) “I always think,” Julia said, “that Wednesdays are violet.” Julia seemed in an exceptionally merry mood. “And Tuesdays are yellow, of course.”

“No, they’re not,” Amelia said. “They’re green.”

“Don’t be silly,” Julia said. “Anyway, today’s violet and it’s a jolly good day for the Orchard Tea Rooms. We used to go there a lot when we were children. Before Olivia. Didn’t we, Milly?”

Amelia had lapsed back into silence and waved a hand vaguely in answer. For the first time since he’d met them they were dressed suitably for the weather. Amelia was wearing a baggy cotton dress and ugly hiking sandals. If she got a good haircut and some decent clothes she’d improve 100 percent. At least Julia wasn’t hard on the eye, and she was pretty competent at the punting thing. She was wearing a skimpy top that belonged on a teenager but it revealed her neat, hard biceps (she definitely worked out) and at least she had triceps, unlike Amelia, who had the kind of swinging underarm flesh that would have made it easy for her to glide among the treetops. Despite the sunshine Amelia had remained pale and uninteresting, whereas Julia had turned the color of toasted cashews. He looked at her, hauling on the pole, fag hanging out the corner of her lipsticked mouth, and thought that she was a good sport and was surprised to realize that he was growing genuinely fond of Julia. And that “good sport” was her language, not his.

“You’re looking at my tits, Mr. Brodie.”

“I am not.”

“You are so.” Julia gave a sudden little yelp of surprise and Jackson swiveled round to see what she was looking at. A middle-aged man was climbing out of the river onto the bank—bollock-naked and skinny and tanned all over. A nudist? They called themselves naturalists now, didn’t they? The man toweled himself off and then lay down on the riverbank, completely unselfconsciously, and started reading a book.

“Golly gosh,” Julia laughed. “Did you
see
that? Did you see that, Milly? Is that legal, Mr. Brodie?”

“Not really.”

“Wouldn’t that be lovely,” Julia said, “just to take off all your clothes and plunge into the water? The neo-pagans used to swim naked in Byron’s Pool, couldn’t you just do that, Mr. Brodie, strip off and dive in?” Julia licked her top lip with her pink cat’s tongue and Amelia made an unattractive snorting sound. Jackson suddenly remembered Binky Rain saying that the Lands were “wild girls.” It was hard to believe Amelia had ever been wild, but Julia, definitely Julia. He thought he might quite like to swim naked with Julia.

“What was he reading?” Julia asked, and Amelia, who had given no sign of having even looked at the naked man, said,
“Principia Mathematica,”
and glared at Jackson.

“M
ore tea, Mr. Brodie?” Julia asked, pouring the tea without waiting for an answer, “And is there honey still for tea? Yes, there most certainly is and we shall have it on our scones. Milly, do you want honey on your scones?”

At least the tea in the Orchard Tea Rooms was decent, unlike Binky’s. Julia’s little finger had a scar, like a thin silver ring, that ran all the way round it. She had it crooked, in a very ladylike way, as she drank her tea. She caught Jackson looking at it. “Chopped it off,” she said breezily. Amelia snorted. “Accidentally,” Julia added. Amelia snorted again. “You’ll turn into a pig if you carry on like that, Milly,” Julia said.

It struck Jackson that he’d asked Binky Rain about the Land girls but he’d never asked the Land girls about Binky Rain. “Binky Rain,” Jackson said, “your neighbor, Victor’s neighbor?” Julia looked vague. “Cats,” Jackson said.

“I was a tabby in the chorus,” Julia said, “but I only lasted a few weeks, I got bronchitis, it was a shame, it was a number-one tour.”

“No,” Jackson said patiently. “Binky Rain, she keeps cats.”

“The old witch,” Amelia said suddenly, and Julia said, “Oh,
her.
We never went anywhere near her.”

“We used to,” Amelia said. “And then we didn’t.”

“Why not?” Jackson asked, but Amelia seemed to have lapsed back into her catatonic state.

“Sylvia told us not to,” Julia said. She frowned with the effort of remembering. “That was after Olivia, I think. She said the garden was cursed and if we went in there we’d be turned into cats. That all her cats were people who’d gone into her garden. Sylvia was always a bit strange, of course. Mrs. Rain isn’t still alive, is she? She must be three hundred years old by now.”

“Almost,” Jackson said.

There was something undeniably pleasant about being sprawled in a deck chair beneath the trees. The hum of insects and tourists was soporific and Jackson could think of nothing he wanted to do more than close his eyes and drift off, but Julia kept prattling on about neo-pagans and Wittgenstein and Russell.

“Weren’t they all right-wing snobs?” Jackson asked.

“Oh don’t spoil it by being all northern and socialist,” Julia said.

Amelia remained a brooding presence, communicating in monosyllables. “Brooke used to run around with no clothes on,” Julia said. “Maybe nudism is some kind of Cambridge thing.”

“Rupert Brooke was just a protofascist,” Amelia said suddenly, from somewhere beneath her sun hat, and Julia said, “Well, he’s dead and he was a terrible poet, so he’s had his comeuppance,” and Amelia said, “That’s a specious argument if ever I heard one,” and Julia said—but Jackson was asleep by then.

J
ackson retrieved his car from where it was still parked, in front of Binky’s house. A gold Lexus, not a vehicle (nor a color) that Jackson had any time for, was parked right up against the Alfa’s bumper and Jackson felt pretty sure it belonged to Quintus. He had no idea what was going on between them. Surely Quintus hadn’t attacked him?

He drove down Silver Street, listening to Gillian Welch’s
Hell Among the Yearlings
album. His taste in music was getting more depressive by the minute, if that was possible. He was on his way to a meeting in The Eagle with Steve Spencer, not that he had anything to report about Nicola, but his mind was still on Quintus when all of a sudden he found himself driving straight into the back of a Ford Galaxie that was stationary at traffic lights by Fitzbillies on Trumpington Street.