Case Histories

Looking at Victor's coffin made Jackson wonder about Laura Wyre's funeral. Hundreds of people had attended, according to the press reports. Theo had hardly any memory of it, even though he had all the press clippings. When Jackson asked Theo about his daughter's funeral his eyes had flickered from side to side as if his brain were disassociating from the memory. Weren't there stages of bereavement you were supposed to go through – shock, denial, guilt, anger, depression – and then acceptance, when you were supposed to come out the other end and be okay, move on. Jackson had received grief counseling once. His school had arranged for someone to come in, from the "West Yorkshire Adolescent Psychiatric Unit," an overblown title to place on the hunched shoulders of the short, red-haired psychologist whose breath smelled of raw onions and who consulted with Jackson in the makeshift cupboard that passed for a sickroom at his school. The red-haired, bearded psychologist told Jackson that he had to move on, to get on with his own life, but Jackson was twelve years old and had nowhere left to move on from and nowhere obvious to go.

Jackson wondered how many times people had suggested to Theo that he had to get on with his life. Theo Wyre was stuck somewhere near the beginning of the bereavement process, at a place he'd made all his own, where if he fought hard enough he might be able to bring his daughter back. It wasn't going to happen – Jackson knew that the dead never came back. Ever.

The yellow golfing sweater. That was the thing, the thing that should have led them to the murderer. None of Theo's clients had expressed any interest in golf (was golf the "royal game" or was chat tennis?). This indifference to the game stemmed from the fact that most of Theo's clients were women – his caseload was almost entirely matrimonial and domestic. (So why was he in Peterborough on a boundary dispute the day his daughter died?) It was a depressing business going through his files, containing as they did an endless parade of women who were being battered, abused, and defeated, not to mention the string of ones who were just plain unhappy, who couldn't stand the sight of the poor schmuck they were married to. It was an education (although one Jackson had already been subject to) because Theo was extraordinarily good at documenting the banal details of failure, the litany of tiny flaws and cracks that were nothing to an outsider but looked like canyons when you were on the inside – "He buys me carnations, carnations are crap, every woman knows that so why doesn't he?" "He never thinks to run a bit of Toilet Duck round the bowl, even though I leave it out where he can't miss it and I've asked him, I've asked him a hundred times." "If he ever does any ironing it's 'Look at me, I'm ironing, look how well I'm doing it, I iron much better than you, I'm the best, I do it properly.'" "He'd get me my breakfast in bed if I asked him to, but / don't want to have to ask." Did men know how much they got on women's nerves? Theo Wyre certainly did.

Jackson had always been good, never left the toilet seat up and all that cliched stuff, and anyway he'd been outnumbered, two women to one man. Boys took a long time to become men but daughters were women from the kickoff. Jackson had hoped they would have another baby, he would have liked another girl, he'd have liked five or six of them, to be honest. Boys were all too familiar but girls, girls were extraordinary. Josie had shown no interest at all in having another baby, and on the one occasion Jackson had suggested it, she gave him a hard look and said, "You have it then."

Did anyone wear a golfing sweater who wasn't interested in golf? And if it came to that what made it a golfing sweater as opposed to merely a sweater? Jackson had searched through the police photographs until he found the one of a yellow sweater that the eyewitnesses were agreed was "very like" the one worn by Laura Wyre's killer. As eyewitnesses went, they were rubbish. Jackson peered closely at the logo on the sweater, a small applique of a golfer swinging a club. "Would you wear that if you weren't a golfer? You might buy it in a secondhand shop and not care because it was a good sweater ("60 percent lambswool, 40 percent cashmere") and you could afford it.

Yellow for danger, like those tiny poisonous yellow frogs. That homeless girl this morning on St. Andrews Street, her hair was the color of poisonous frogs. He'd almost tripped over her on the way to Bliss. She had a dog with her, a whippety sort of thing.