Case Histories

It was very cold, because of course the fire had never been lit. Michelle was sitting on the floor. The baby was asleep again. She looked exhausted, the way she did when she was left to cry herself to sleep, and every so often she gave a tiny little hiccup of grief. Michelle felt as if she had a stone inside her, something hard and unyielding that was making her feel sick. She hadn't known it was possible to feel this bad. She looked at Keith and felt sorry for him. When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.

If she could have had one wish – if her fairy godmother (noticeably absent from her life so far) were to suddenly appear in the cold living room of the cottage and offer to grant her whatever she wanted, Michelle knew exactly what she would ask for. She would ask to go back to the beginning of her life and start all over again.

She wondered if she should get up from the floor and clean up a bit but she felt so tired that she thought she might just stay there and wait until the police came. She had all the time in the world now.

Chapter 4. Jackson

Jackson switched on the radio and listened to the reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one because he had run out of matches, and faced with a choice between chain-smoking or abstinence, he'd taken the former option because it felt like there was enough abstinence in his life already. If he got the cigarette lighter on the dashboard fixed he wouldn't have to smoke his way through the packet, but there were a lot of other things that needed fixing on the car and the cigarette lighter wasn't high on the list. Jackson drove a black Alfa Romeo 156 that he'd bought secondhand four years ago for.Ј13,000 and that was now probably worth less than the Emmelle Freedom mountain bike he had just given his daughter for her eighth birthday (on the proviso that she didn't cycle on the road until she was at least forty).

When he'd come home with the Alfa Romeo, his wife took one dismissive look at it and said, "You bought a policeman's car then." Four years ago Josie was driving her own Polo and was still married to Jackson, now she was living with a bearded English lecturer and driving his Volvo V70 with a child on board sign in the rear window, testifying both to the permanence of their relation-ship and to the smug git's need to show the world that he was protecting another man's child. Jackson hated those signs.

He was a born-again smoker, only starting up again six months ago. Jackson hadn't touched a cigarette for fifteen years and now it was as if he'd never been off them. And for no reason. "Just like that," he said, doing an unenthusiastic Tommy Cooper impression to his reflection in the rearview mirror. Of course it wasn't "just like that." Nothing ever was.

She'd better hurry up. Her front door remained determinedly closed. It was made of cheap varnished wood, with a mock-Georgian fanlight, and was the spit of every other door on the estate in Cherry Hinton. Jackson could have kicked it in without breaking a sweat. She was late. Her flight was at one and she should have been on her way to the airport by now. Jackson cracked the car window to let in some air and let out some smoke. She was always late.

Coffee was no good for punctuating the tedium, unless he was prepared to piss into a bottle, which he wasn't. Now that he was divorced he was free to use words like "piss" and "shit" – elements of his vocabulary almost eliminated by Josie. She was a primary-school teacher and spent much of her working day modifying the behavior of five-year-old boys. When they were married she 'would come home and do the same to Jackson ("For God's sake, Jackson, use the proper words. It's a penis") during their evenings together, cooking pasta and yawning their way through crap on television. She wanted their daughter, Marlee, to grow up "using the correct anatomical language for genitalia." Jackson would rather Marlee grew up without knowing genitalia even existed, let alone informing him that she had been "made" when he "put his penis in Mummy's vagina," an oddly clinical description for an urgent, sweatily precipitate event that had taken place in a field somewhere off the A1066 between Thetford and Diss, an acrobatic coupling in his old F Reg BMW (320i, two-door, definitely a policeman's car, much missed, RIP). That was in the days when a sudden desperate need to have sex was commonplace between them, and the only thing that had made this particular incidence memorable had been Josie's uncharacteristically Russian roulette attitude toward birth control.