Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
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 colours. In St Petersburg once, Theo had visited the Church of Our Saviour 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 enamelled 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 they 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.
The trolley was on wheels and Theo had been on the point of moving 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 of 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, rugbytackling 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.
Afterwards, 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 and 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.
‘Closure’, 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.
Theo read a copy of the Reader’s Digest while he waited. Waiting rooms seemed to be the only place you ever saw the 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. Theo remembered how at Holroyd, Wyre and Stanton that used to be a standing joke amongst 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 sing-song 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 was 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 sometimes saw Cheryl. 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 p
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.
A man hurried into the office and Deborah Arnold said, ‘There you are at last,’ without looking up from the keyboard. ‘Sorry,’ the man – Theo presumed this was Jackson Brodie – said to Theo, ‘I had to go to the dentist.’ Deborah gave a bark of laughter as if this was a risible excuse. The man shook Theo’s hand and said, ‘Jackson, Jackson Brodie, please come and have a seat,’ and ushered him towards the inner office. As Jackson closed the door, Deborah’s sarcastic tones could be heard singing out, ‘Mr Brodie will see you now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jackson said to Theo, ‘she’s delusional. She thinks she’s a woman.’
7
Caroline
THE CHURCH WAS CALLED ST ANNE’S. CAROLINE HAD NO idea who St Anne was, she had been brought up without religion, had never even been to a proper church service, not one in a regular church anyway, not even for her wedding to Jonathan which had taken place in a register office because Jonathan’s first wife was alive and well, although, thankfully, living in Argentina with a horse-breeder. The church was on a back road, small and very old with a squat Saxon tower and a graveyard that had closed its gates to business years ago and was now overgrown, in a picturesque way, with wild flowers and briar. She couldn’t identify any of the flowers and thought maybe she would get a book, order it online from Amazon, because of course they lived miles away from any bookshop.
The church was midway between their own small village and another even smaller one so Caroline supposed that at some time in the medieval past the Church had decided to economize and make the two villages share a priest. And of course in those days no one thought anything about walking long distances. Country children used to walk five miles to school in the morning and five miles home at night without complaining. Or perhaps they did complain but no one ever recorded their comments for posterity. That was how history worked, wasn’t it? If it wasn’t written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewellery and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artefacts could express how you felt. The dead under her feet in St Anne’s old graveyard were tongue-less and dumb. She couldn’t imagine James and Hannah walking any distance to school; they seemed to have no idea what feet were for.
Caroline had driven past the church several times but it had never struck her until now that she could actually go inside. She knew the vicar, of course, or at least she had known him: he died last year and his replacement hadn’t arrived yet. The new incumbent wouldn’t just have the two villages to look after, there were four or five denuded parishes under his care nowadays (or perhaps it would be a woman?) because no one went to church any more, not even Jonathan’s mother.
It had nothing to do with religion, Caroline was just sheltering from the rain. She’d taken the dogs for a walk – the church was about a mile from their own house (which was an estate, really) – and the dogs had got into the graveyard and were now moving like hoovers across the ground, their noses down, their tails up, their small dog brains consumed with the idea of uncharted territory and a thousand new scents. Caroline could only smell the one scent – the sour, melancholy smell of greenery.
The dogs had already urinated on several gravestones and Caroline hoped no one was spying on her. Watching, not spying. ‘God, you’re so paranoid, Caro,’ Jonathan said. ‘That’s what comes from being a townie.’ The dogs were Labradors and they belonged to Jonathan. That’s what he brought to the marriage, two dogs and two children. James and Hannah, Meg and Bruce. Meg and Bruce were the dogs. The dogs and the children behaved well for Jonathan, less well for Caroline, although the dogs were better than the children. When it had started to rain she tied the dogs up in the porch (it would be good if she could do that with the children). She hadn’t realized that ‘Caro’ was a diminutive of Caroline until she met Jonathan. It sounded very Regency, like in all those old-fashioned historical novels she used to read when she was younger. Much younger. Of course, he came from the kind of background – county – where people were called ‘Caroline’. And Lucy and Amanda and Jemima, so he should know.
She suspected there might be a special ecclesiastical word for porch but if there was she didn’t know it, although she knew there were all kinds of particular terms for the bones of the church, its carcass and ribs, like medieval poetry – apse, chancel, nave, transept, clerestory, sacristy, misericord – although she wasn’t too sure what any of them meant, except for misericord, because it was one of those words that once you’d come across it you always remembered it.
The misericords in St Anne’s were ancient, made of oak, not the oak of the church door, which was grey and bleached like old driftwood, as if it had been at sea for a long time, the misericords were the colour of peat or wet tea leaves. If you looked at them closely you realized they were carved with weird, pagan creatures, more like hobgoblins than men, half hidden amongst trees and leaves – here acanthus and there what looked like a palm tree. This must be the ‘green man’, only there were lots of them on the ends of the pews – all different – so green men would have been more appropriate. She didn’t know they had green men in Yorkshire as well. As well as where she had lived before. In another life, one she could hardly remember sometimes. And at other times remember only too well.
She loved that word ‘misericord’ because it sounded so wretched and yet it wasn’t, it meant tender-hearted, from the Latin for heart, cor, from which you also get core and cordial but not cardiac which came via the Latin from the Greek for heart, kardia (although they must surely be related at some ancient, ur-level). They had done neither Latin nor Greek at Caroline’s school but later, after she had left school, when she had had a lot of time on her hands, she had patiently worked her way through primers and elementary Classics textbooks so that she could at least understand the etymology of words, to follow them back down their limbs and trunks until she reached their roots. Her own name contained ‘cor’ if you moved the letters around. Caro. Cora. Cor. Like the crows, like the crows that feed on the dead. If you knelt on the hard floor, which in this church meant you couldn’t avoid kneeling on the cold stone slab of someone’s tomb (but they were probably glad of the company), and looked one of the green men in the eye, you could see the primordial gleam of madness in there and the—
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ Caroline said, ‘I think so.’ The man offered his hand because her knees were stiff from kneeling on the floor, on the dead. The man’s hand was soft and rather cold for someone who was patently alive.
‘My name’s John Burton,’ he said (cordially).
‘You’re very young,’ Caroline said, ‘or is that a sign I’m getting old – when vicars and policemen begin to look young?’ and the vicar (John Burton) laughed and said, ‘My mother always says it’s when bishops start looking young that you have to worry,’ and Caroline wondered what it was like to inhabit so easily a world where your mother made jokes about bishops, where people were called Caro.
‘You’ll be the new vicar then,’ Caroline said. He was wearing his cassock (was that what it was called?) so it was hardly a wild guess and he looked down at his vestments and gave a rueful grin and said, ‘You’ve got me bang to rights, guv,’ only he sounded faintly ludicrous because he said the words in his rather effete, upper-crust vo
‘I know who you are too,’ John Burton said, and Caroline said, ‘Do you?’ and thought, are we flirting, surely not, and John Burton – the Reverend John Burton – said, ‘Yes, of course I do, you’re the head teacher at the primary school,’ and Caroline thought, damn, because she really preferred it when no one knew who she was. No one at all.
Getting married again hadn’t been part of the plan. The plan had been to bury herself in a town somewhere and do good works, like an eighteenth-century Quaker or some Victorian gentlewoman driven by philanthropy. She’d even thought about going abroad – India or Africa – like a missionary, working on a literacy project with women or outcastes, because being outcast was something she understood.
She came north, expecting it to be gritty and industrial, but she knew that it was the novels she had read that had formed this picture in her head and, of course, instead of being like North and South or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning it was gritty and post-industrial and so much more difficult than she’d imagined. She’d spent her probationary year in Liverpool, then she did another couple of years in Oldham and finally settled in Manchester. She was a ‘super-teacher’, although they didn’t call it that, trained to be the saviour of socially excluded kids, fast-tracking through inner-city Gehennas so that one day she was destined to be head of some imploding school that she would have to try to rescue from disaster, like the captain of a sinking ship. And that was fine and good because she was atoning, but instead of joining a convent, an order of penitents (an idea she’d been tempted by), she’d become a teacher, which was probably more useful than shutting yourself away, praying every four hours, night and day, although, of course, you couldn’t be sure – it might be that cloistered women praying night and day was the only thing that was preventing some cataclysmic disaster, a meteor or global nuclear meltdown.