Case Histories

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."

I hey drove to Bamburgh and he took Marlee for a long walk on the beach. He kept his shoes and socks on (like an old man, like his father), but Marlee rolled up her gingham pedal pushers and ran in and out of the waves. They didn't bother going to look round the castle, even though he thought it had some kind of Harry Potter link that Marlee had been excited about initially. Jackson tended to close his ears to her incessant Harry Potter chatter (he had a wizard-free childhood himself and failed to see the attraction), in the same way he closed his ears to Christina and Justin and the cloned pu-bescent boy bands that she had brought with her and insisted on alternating with his own CDs. She was more interested in playing with the mobile phone he'd bought for her. It was a kind of Barbie pink and she spent her whole time texting her friends. He couldn't imagine what they said to each other. Instead of going in the castle, they ate vinegary fish-and-chips in front seats of the car, looking at the sea (like pensioners), and Marlee said, "This is nice, Daddy," and Jackson said. "Isn't it just?"

He was supposed to have taken Marlee for the last two weeks of the school holiday, but Josie had phoned him and said, "Look, we've been offered this gite in the Ardeche for a week by friends of David, and we thought it would be nice if just the two of us went."

"So you can fuck each other without your child being present?" Jackson asked and Josie put the phone down on him. It took them another two phone calls before they managed a semicivilized exchange on the subject. Of course, David would have "friends who had a gite in the Ardeche," wouldn't he? He was sure it wasn't coincidence that "git" and "gite" were almost the same word.

Jackson shook their chip papers out for the gulls, instantly recreating a scene from The Birds, and then drove away as quickly as possible before the Punto got covered in gull shit.

Are we going home now?" Marlee was eating a Cornetto that was melting faster than she could eat it. It dripped on the upholstery of the Punto. There was something to be said for hired cars after all.

"Daddy?"

"What?"

"I said are we going home now?"

"Yes. No."

"Which, Daddy?"

Jackson found them a ropy-looking B and B, which nonetheless seemed to be the best one available in his old hometown. It had a red neon vacancies sign in the window that made him feel he was checking into a brothel. The drive had taken longer than he expected and had brought them through a series of depressing post-industrial wastelands that made Cambridge seem positively paradisial in comparison. "Never forget this is what Margaret Thatcher did to your birthright," Jackson said to Marlee, and she said, "Okay, I won't," and popped the top on a tube of Smarties. Kim Strachan's five-pound note had been fully utilized in the last Shell Shop they visited.

The B and B was run by a sharp-faced woman called Mrs. Brind who looked dubiously at Marlee before glaring at Jackson and in-forming him that she had "no twins left, only doubles." Jackson half expected her to call the vice squad the minute he was inside the gloomy room, with its years of nicotine impregnated into the wall-paper and curtains. It was like smoking-aversion therapy. He would give up smoking, he would give up tomorrow. Or the next day.