Case Histories

"I don't think so," Julia said, after having mulled over the dog question (did they ever agree about anything?). "No, not a pointer. And certainly not an English one. Perhaps an Old Danish pointer. That's 'Old' with a capital 'O,' Mr. Brodie, in case you think I'm referring to your age. Or perhaps a Large French one. Ditto with the 'L' there, Mr. Brodie. But you know, Milly, I think Mr. Brodie is a German shepherd. You can just tell he would drag you out of a burning building or a river in flood. He would save you!" She turned to Jackson and gave him the benefit of a brilliant theatrical smile. "Wouldn't you?"

"Would I?" Jackson said.

Amelia stood up abruptly and announced, "That was lovely but we can't spend all day enjoying ourselves," and Julia roused herself and said, "Yes, come on, Milly, chop-chop, we have shopping to do. Mystery shopping," she added, and Amelia groaned and said, "I hate mystery shopping."

Jackson took out his wallet to pay the bill. He had been keeping the photograph of Olivia in his wallet and every time he opened it to prize out one of his almost-exhausted credit cards, he saw her face, grinning at him. Not really grinning at him, of course, but at whoever was behind the camera.

"Mummy," Julia said. "Daddy never took photographs." All three of them stared sadly at the photograph.

"Julia and I are the only ones left," Amelia said. "We're the only two people left in the whole world who remember Olivia. We can't go to our grave not knowing what happened to her."

"Why now, after all this time?" Jackson asked.

"It's not 'after all this time,'" Amelia bristled. "We never forgot about Olivia. It's just that finding Blue Mouse, I don't know, it's as if it found us."

"Three of us," Julia corrected Amelia. "Sylvia remembers Olivia."

"Sylvia?" Jackson puzzled.

"Our eldest sister," Amelia said dismissively. Jackson waited, let-ting his silence ask the question for him. Eventually, Julia answered, "She's a nun."

"And when exactly were you going to tell me about her?" Jackson asked, trying not to sound as annoyed as he felt.

"We're telling you now," Julia said as if she were the embodiment of reason. "Don't be a crosspatch, Mr. Brodie. You're a much nicer person than you pretend to be, you know."

"No, I'm not," Jackson said.

"Yes, you are," Julia said. (Why didn't they just go, for God's sake?) Suddenly, to Jackson 's surprise, Julia stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you," she said, "for coming to the funeral and everything."

Jackson started to worry about being late. On the way back to the car park he had to fight his way against a herd of foreign-language students, all entirely oblivious to the existence of anyone else on the planet except other adolescents. Cambridge in summer, invaded by a combination of tourists and foreign teenagers, all of whom were put on earth to loiter, was Jackson 's idea of hell. The language students all seemed to be dressed in combats, in khaki and camouflage, as if there were a war going on and they were the troops (God help us if that were the case). And the bikes, why did people think bikes were a good thing? Why were cyclists so smug? Why did cyclists ride on pavements when there were perfectly good cycle lanes? And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.

And as for the tourists… enthralled by the colleges, by history, they didn't want to see what was behind all that, the money and power. The vast tracts of land they owned, not just in Cambridge, they owned most of Cambridge anyway. The colleges still yielded influence over licenses and leases and God knows what else. Someone had once told him that they used to say that you could walk the length of England and never leave land owned by Trinity. And all those beautiful gardens they had that you had to pay to go into. All that wealth and privilege in the hands of a few while the streets were full of the dispossessed, the beggars, the jakies, the mad. Cambridge seemed to have a particularly high incidence of insanity.

Still – and it was a close call – Jackson preferred the summer population to the yahs and hooray Henrys of term time. Was it just the envy of the underclass? Was it his father's voice in his head that he could hear? Jackson worried that he was turning into a grumpy old man. Perhaps being a grumpy old man wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Having a permanent toothache didn't help, of course. ("En-dodontic treatment," Sharon had murmured seductively in his ear during his last appointment.)