Case Histories (9 page)

“Yes, you do,” Julia said. “That’s why you were so antagonistic toward him.”

“I’m antagonistic toward everyone.” Amelia could feel herself blushing and concentrated on the bread in the toaster as if it needed psychic assistance to pop up. “You like him too,” she muttered.

“I do. There’s something very attractive about Mr. Brodie. He has his own teeth, he isn’t even going bald yet,” she said. “I bags him,” and Amelia said, “Why you?” and Julia said, “Why not? And anyway, you already have a boyfriend. You have Henry.”

Amelia thought the word “boyfriend” sounded ridiculous when it was applied to a forty-five-year-old woman. When it was applied to herself.

It was a shame Julia hadn’t encountered Jackson Brodie when she was wearing her goggles and face mask. He wouldn’t have found her so attractive then. Because he
had
found her attractive, there was no doubt about it. Of course some men were into things like that, masks and bondage and God only knows what else (Rubber! Why?).

“Oh, you’re such a prude, Milly,” Julia said. “You should try something adventurous with Henry. Spice things up between you. It took you long enough to find a boyfriend, it would be a shame to lose him because you can’t get out of the missionary position.”

Amelia buttered the toast and laid it on plates. Julia tipped the beans on top. Amelia had begun to enjoy sharing domestic tasks with Julia, basic though they were. She’d lived on her own since her second year at university, that was a long time, more than two decades. Solitary life hadn’t been a choice, no one had ever wanted to live with her. She mustn’t get used to being with Julia. She mustn’t get used to waking up in a house where someone knew her, inside out.

“Handcuffs,” Julia continued airily, as if she were discussing seasonal accessories, “a little bit of leather or a whip.”

“Henry’s not a horse,” Amelia said irritably. Were accessories still seasonal? They were when their mother was around. Rosemary had worn white shoes and carried a white handbag in the summer. A little straw hat. Zip-up suede boots for winter and—was she imagining this?—a woolen tammy. If only she’d taken more notice of Rosemary when she was alive.

“There’s nothing wrong with a little light bondage,” Julia said, “I imagine Henry would like it. Men love anything filthy.” She said the word “filthy” with relish. Amelia had once, completely unintentionally, accompanied Julia into a sex shop in Soho. Upmarket, aimed at women only, as if it were a proud emblem of the triumph of feminism, when in fact it was just full of pornographic smut. Amelia had followed Julia inside under the misapprehension that it sold bath products and was stunned when Julia picked up an object that looked like a pink horse’s tail and declared admiringly, “Oh, look, a butt plug—how cute!” Sometimes Amelia wondered if women hadn’t been better off darning and sewing and baking bread. Not that she could do any of those things herself.

“Are accessories still seasonal?”

“Yes, of course,” Julia said decisively, and then, less certain, “aren’t they? You know, you’re very lucky to have a steady boyfriend, Milly,” and Amelia said, “Why, because I’m so unattractive?” and Julia said, “Don’t be a silly-Milly.” “Silly-Milly” was what Sylvia called her when they were young. Sylvia always made fun of people. She could be very cruel.

“At your age,” Julia said (would she just
shut up?
), “women are usually either on their own or stuck in tedious marriages.” Amelia slipped the poached eggs on top of the beans.

“Our age,” Amelia corrected her. “And you’re being patronizing, ‘Steady boyfriend’ and ‘Julia’ aren’t words that have ever occurred in the same sentence. If it’s not a good thing for you, why is it a good thing for me?” There was something about eating eggs that seemed wrong—swallowing something, annihilating something that contained new life. Banishing it into the inner darkness.

Julia put on a great show of being hurt. “No, really, what I mean is your Henry seems just the ticket, you’re lucky to have found someone who suits you. If I found someone who suited me I would settle down, believe me.”

“I don’t.” Amelia looked at the eggs—like sickly, jaundiced eyes—and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old and shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light —

“Come on, Milly, the food’s getting cold. Milly?”

Amelia fled the room, running awkwardly up the stairs before throwing up in the bathroom toilet. They had scrubbed and bleached the toilet but it still bore the stains of years of careless use by Victor, and the very thought of him in here made her start to retch all over again.

“Milly, are you alright?” Julia’s voice drifted up the stairs.

Amelia came out of the bathroom. She paused on the threshold of Olivia’s room. It was the same as it had always been—the bed, stripped of all bedding, the small wardrobe and chest of drawers, all empty of clothing. All of the past seemed concentrated in this one little room. There was a ghost living in this house, Amelia thought, but it wasn’t Olivia. It was her own self. The Amelia she would have been—should have been—if her family hadn’t imploded.

And then suddenly, standing there in Olivia’s decrepit bedroom, Amelia had what she could only term an epiphany—she thought this must be how people who received mystical visions felt, those who, like Sylvia, thought they heard the voice of God or felt grace falling on them (although she knew it was actually evidence of an unstable temporal lobe). Amelia simply
knew,
and the knowledge was like a warm wave that passed through her body—Olivia was coming back. She might be coming back as no more than a shadow of grease and ash, but she was coming back. And someone had to be here to welcome her.

“Milly?”

6

Theo

E
very year he walked to the office in Parkside and then walked the two miles home again. The same pilgrimage for ten years now. A four-mile round-trip, each year a little more tiring because he was carrying more weight, but there was nothing any doctor could say that could scare Theo now.

When he arrived in Parkside he was out of breath and stood around on the pavement for a while before attempting the stairs. He rested with his hands on his thighs, inhaling and exhaling in slow determined breaths, like an athlete who had just run a hard race. Passersby gave him covert (and not so covert) looks indicating varying degrees of distaste, as if they were trying to imagine what terrible flaw in a person’s character could allow him to become so fat.

He had been inside the building only three times in the last ten years. The other times he had simply made a lurking kind of obeisance on the pavement.

David Holroyd didn’t die. He was still alive when the paramedics arrived and was taken to the hospital, where he was sewn up and where the blood of several strangers was pumped into him. Now he worked three days a week and the rest of the time he tended to the garden in his cottage in rural Norfolk.

The boardroom had been repainted and a new carpet laid over the indelible stain of Laura’s blood, but no one who had been there that day was comfortable with the idea of going back, and within the year Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton moved to an ugly sixties office building near the Grafton Centre, reincarnated as simply “Holroyd and Stanton” because Theo gave up his partnership after Laura’s death and never returned to work. He had enough in stocks and bonds and savings to finance his rather frugal life. The money he received from the criminal injuries compensation scheme was donated to the dogs’ home where they had obtained Poppy.

T
he front door, once a handsome bottle green, was now painted white and no one had polished the brass for a long time. There was no security on the door—no locks or entry phone or surveillance camera. Anyone could still walk in unchallenged.

The brass plaque on the door that had once read,
HOLROYD, WYRE, AND STANTON—SOLICITORS AND ATTORNEYS AT LAW
had been replaced by a plastic one that announced,
BLISS—BEAUTY THERAPY.
Before Bliss it was the mysterious “Hellier plc,” which came and went between the third and fourth anniversaries. After Hellier plc disappeared, the offices had lain empty for a long time before “JM Business Consultants” moved in. Theo went up there, on the sixth anniversary, on the pretense of asking about IT training, but the girl on reception frowned and said, “That’s not what we do,” although she didn’t elucidate what it was that they did do, which looked to Theo to be not very much at all, unless it was acting as a collection depot for the large cardboard boxes that were stacked everywhere. He’d only wanted to have a look, see the place—the spot—but as well as the boxes blocking the hallway there were flimsy partition screens everywhere and he didn’t want to make a fuss and frighten the girl.

The stairs took it out of him and he had to rest at the top before going through the new glass door that was etched with the word “Bliss” in a swooping, romantic script, like a promise, as if he might be about to enter Elysium or the Land of Cockayne.

The receptionist, dressed in a clinical white uniform, was called “Milanda,” according to her name badge, which sounded to Theo more like a brand of low-cholesterol margarine than a name. She regarded Theo with horror and he was tempted to reassure her that fat wasn’t infectious, but instead he said that he would like to surprise his wife for her birthday, with “a bit of pampering.” It was a lie but it wasn’t a lie that harmed anyone. He wished now that he
had
given Valerie more “pampering,” but it was much too late for that now.

Once Milanda had managed to get over her initial fright at the size of him, she suggested a “Half-Day Spa” package—pedicure, manicure, and a “seaweed wrap”—and Theo said that sounded “just the ticket,” but could he leaf through the brochure and see what else there was? And Milanda said, “Of course,” with a fixed smile on her face because you could see she was worried that Theo would be a very bad advertisement for a beauty salon, sitting there in reception on the (possibly too flimsy) cane-work sofa next to the fiberglass fountain whose waters competed with the “soothing sounds” of the
Meditation
CD—an odd mix of panpipes, whale song, and crashing surf.

The offices had been completely refitted since his last abortive visit, the walls were lilac now and the doors painted in a palette of purples and pinks and blues. The whole shape of the place had been changed by interior plasterboard walls, creating open spaces as well as smaller rooms—“therapy suites,” according to the signs on the doors.

Was the boardroom still there, untouched, or had it been transformed into—what? A steam room, a sauna? Or divided into cubicle-size rooms for “Thai massage” or “Brazilian waxing”? (The brochure offered extraordinary services.) A woman arrived for an appointment and Milanda escorted her into one of the therapy suites. Theo stood up—casually, as if stretching his legs—and made a pretense of sauntering down the hallway.

The door to the boardroom (painted a kind of cyanotic blue) was ajar and when Theo gave it a little nudge it swung open helpfully, giving him a view of the whole room. Theo had never made it this far before and had no idea how the room might have evolved over the past decade, but he was surprised when he found it empty of furniture and fittings, the floorboards dusty and scratched, the paintwork chipped. It had always been the beating heart of the office but now it was being used as a storeroom, stacked with boxes of oils and creams, a massage table folded and propped against one wall, a laundry basket overflowing with used white towels. The marble fireplace was still there. There were even ashes lying cold in the grate.

The spot itself, the place where his daughter had been slaughtered, was beneath some kind of trolley. The trolley looked like something that belonged on a hospital ward, but in the place of medicines, it was laden with dozens of bottles of nail varnish in different colors. In St. Petersburg, once, Theo had visited the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, built over the place where Alexander II was assassinated. It was a fantastic edifice of mosaic and gold, of spires and enameled onion domes, yet he had found the interior a soulless space, echoing with the cold. Now he realized that the atmosphere didn’t really matter, what mattered was that it existed, and its existence meant that no one could ever forget what had happened there. The place where Laura fell was marked by a trolley of nail varnish. What kind of a shrine was that? Surely a spring should have bubbled up, or a tree blossomed, on the sacred spot where his daughter’s blood was spilled?

Exsanguinated. A strange, dramatic word that seemed to belong in a revenge tragedy, but no revenge had ever been possible for Theo.
KNIFE-WIELDING MANIAC MURDERS LOCAL GIRL!
the local headlines said. The nationals too. For a few days it had been news and then everyone seemed to forget. Not the police, of course. They had really cared, Theo had never doubted that for a minute. He still saw Alison, his family liaison officer, occasionally, even now, and the police had followed up every possible lead, there had been no client confidentiality left at Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton once the police had raked through every file and item of correspondence. The media talked about it being a random crime, the work of a psychopath, but the man—the knife-wielding maniac—had entered the office looking for Theo, for “Mr. Wyre.” Theo had done something, precipitated something, he had made someone, someone in a yellow golfing sweater, so crazy that the man wanted to kill him. Had that bloodlust been assuaged, had the man in the yellow golfing sweater found some primitive satisfaction in slaying Theo’s child? His own blood.

T
he trolley was on wheels and Theo had been about to move it when one of the concealed doors in the curve of the oval wall was opened suddenly by a trim woman dressed in the same white uniform as Milanda. She frowned at Theo, but before she could protest at his presence he said, “Sorry, wrong room!” and backed out the door, performing a ridiculous kind of salaam in an attempt to calm her fears.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said breezily to Milanda, waving the brochure still clutched in his hand. He made for the stairs as rapidly as his bulk would allow, although the best he could manage was a kind of rolling waddle. He imagined Milanda at his back, rugby tackling him on Parker’s Piece. Theo’s heart was knocking uncomfortably inside his chest and he took refuge in a café on Mill Road, where he ordered a modest latte and a scone but nonetheless was subject to the disapproval of the waitress, who made it clear that she thought someone so overweight shouldn’t be eating at all.

Time did not heal—it merely rubbed at the wound, slowly and relentlessly. The world had moved on and forgotten and there was only Theo left to keep Laura’s flame alive. Jennifer lived in Canada now and although they talked on the phone and e-mailed each other, they rarely talked about Laura. Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.

Afterward, after it happened ten years ago, Theo didn’t want to speak to anyone, didn’t want to speak, didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of a world that went on without Laura in it, but when he got home from the hospital, he forced himself to phone Jennifer. When she answered the phone and heard his voice she said, “What?” in that impatient way she had, as if he only phoned her to annoy her. And then she grew even more impatient because he couldn’t speak at all and it was only after the most extraordinary act of will that he was able to say, “Jenny, a bad thing has happened, a very bad thing,” and all she said was “Laura,” in a flat voice.

Theo would have committed suicide, perhaps not that day, not until after the funeral, after he had put all his affairs in order, but he couldn’t kill himself because then Jennifer would know (although she must always have known, surely?) that he loved Laura more than her. Because if it had been Jennifer who had died and not Laura, Theo knew he wouldn’t have even thought about killing himself.

Even now, Theo hoped that one day the stranger who had come looking for him and who had found his child instead would return. Theo imagined opening his front door to the man in the yellow golfing sweater and opening his arms wide to embrace the knife, embracing the death that would reunite him with Laura. He had buried her, not cremated her. He needed a grave to go to (all the time) somewhere where she felt tangible, within arm’s reach, just six feet away. There had been times when the grief had been so bad that he had thought about digging her up, exhuming her poor rotting body, just so he could cradle her one last time, reassure her that he was still here, still thinking about her, even if no one else was.

Theo paid for his coffee, leaving a tip that was bigger than the bill. The worse the service, the more Theo tended to tip. He supposed it was a character weakness. He thought of himself as a person made almost entirely out of weaknesses rather than strengths. He had to fight his way upstream against a tide of tourists, all enraptured by the colleges, the tangible fabric of history—scholarship and architecture and beauty. When Theo had first come to Cambridge as a student he thought it was the most beautiful place on Earth. He had been brought up in a prosaic suburb in Manchester, so Cambridge had seemed like the architecture of transcendence. When he first glimpsed inside the courts of the colleges it had been like seeing visions of paradise. He hadn’t known anything so beautiful existed, yet now he hadn’t even looked at a college for ten years. He walked past the gorgeous frontages of Queens’ and Corpus Christi and Clare and King’s and saw nothing but stone and mortar and, eventually, dust.

“C
losure,” that was what they called it. It sounded so Californian. He had avoided the word, avoided the act, but he knew he couldn’t go to his grave not knowing who the man in the yellow golfing sweater was. He checked his watch. He didn’t want to be late.

T
heo read a copy of
Reader’s Digest
while he waited. Waiting rooms seemed to be the only place you ever saw
Reader’s Digest
these days. The woman on reception said Mr. Brodie was “tied up at the moment” but would be able to see him in ten minutes if he’d like to wait. “I’m his assistant, Deborah,” she added, “but you can call me Mrs. Arnold.” Theo couldn’t tell whether or not she was trying to be funny. He remembered how at Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton that used to be a standing joke among the staff—he’d heard them on the phone saying to clients, “I’m sorry, Mr. Holroyd is all tied up in his office just now,” in that singsong secretary voice they all used and then when they came off the line they always burst into laughter. Mr. Brodie’s secretary didn’t look as if she were deriving any amusement from the idea of her boss in some bondage scenario beyond the closed door of his office. Instead she was taking her aggression out on her computer keyboard in a way that suggested that, like Cheryl, his own secretary, she had been trained on upright typewriters, built like tanks. He still saw Cheryl sometimes—she was retired now but Theo had visited her in her overheated bungalow and had (rather awkwardly) drunk tea and eaten her All-Bran tea loaf.

Cheryl was the last person that Laura had ever spoken to—“Would you like more than one copy of this form?”—a prosaic note to end a life on.

Deborah Arnold paused in her attempt to destroy her keyboard and offered him a coffee, which he declined. He was beginning to suspect that Mr. Brodie, far from being tied up in his office, wasn’t even in there at all.

If the police had never found the man who killed Laura then it seemed absurd to think that some backstreet private eye could, but Theo thought that the merest chance of that happening was better than no chance at all. And if he did find the man perhaps he wouldn’t open his arms and embrace his death; perhaps instead it would be Theo who would be the maniac wielding the knife.