Case Histories

"Your bad?" What language was that? She looked exhausted, she was black under the eyes. What did they do at these parties? She was drenched with sweat.

"We were dancing," she said, "to Christina Aguilera. She's wicked." She did a little move to indicate dancing, and it was so sexual that it turned Jackson 's heart over. She was eight years old for fuck's sake.

"That's nice, sweetheart." She smelled of sugar and sweat. He remembered the first time he held her, when the whole of her head fit into the palm of his hand and Josie said "be careful" (as if he wouldn't be) and he had vowed to himself that nothing bad would ever happen to her, that he would keep her safe. A solemn promise, an oath. Did Theo Wyre make that same vow when Laura was first placed in his arms? Almost certainly. (And what about Victor Land?) But Jackson couldn't make Marlee safe, he couldn't make anyone safe. The only time you were safe was when you were dead. Theo was the world's greatest worrier, but the one thing he didn't worry about anymore was whether or not his daughter was safe.

"You've got lipstick all over you," Marlee said to him. Jackson examined himself in the rearview mirror and discovered the vivid imprint of Julia's crimson mouth on his cheek. He rubbed at it aggressively but the color remained like a spot of heat on his face.

She was such a little scrap of a thing," Binky Rain was saying, although Jackson wasn't really listening. He had caved in to a flurry of "Carmen Buranas" and said to Marlee, "Do you want to go and visit an old lady on the way home?" sweetening this not-very-inviting invitation with the promise of cats so that now she was rolling around in the weed-filled jungle of Binky's garden with an assortment of reluctant felines.

"And she's your child?" Binky, looking doubtfully at Marlee. "I don't think of you as having a child."

"No?" he said absently. He was thinking about Olivia Land, she was just a scrap of a thing too. Would she have wandered off? Amelia and Julia said no, that she was very "obedient." Obedient enough to leave the tent in the middle of the night and go with someone who told her to? Go where? Jackson had tried to sweet-calk his old pal Wendy in police records to show him the evidence from Olivia's case, but even if she'd been willing it wouldn't have done any good because it was all missing. "Sorry, Jackson, it's gone AWOL," Wendy said. "It happens. Thirty-four years is a long time."

"Not that long," Jackson said. Although Olivia's case had never been officially closed, there was hardly anyone left alive who had worked it. Before the days of sophisticated DNA testing and police profiling, before computers for God's sake. If she were abducted now there would be a better chance of finding her. Maybe. All the senior detectives who had worked the case were dead and the only person Jackson could find any trace of was a female PC called Marian Foster who seemed to have done most of the interviews with the Land girls. She had just retired as a superintendent from a northern force that was too close to Jackson 's old home for him to reel excited about the prospect of a visit. Of course, nowadays the parents would be the first people you thought about, especially the father. How aggressively had the police gone after Victor when they interviewed him? If it had been Jackson 's case, Victor Land would have been his prime suspect.

Out of earshot of Marlee, Jackson asked Binky, "Do you remember the disappearance of Olivia Land? Little girl abducted from around here thirty-four years ago?"

"Frisky," Binky said, sticking to her own agenda. "She's hardly more than a kitten."

"The Land family," Jackson persisted. "Did you know them? He was a maths lecturer at St. John's. They had four little girls." You didn't forget the disappearance of a child in a neighboring street, did you?

"Oh, those girls," Binky said. "They were wild children, completely undisciplined. In my opinion, children should be neither seen nor heard. Really, families like that deserve what happens to them." Jackson thought of several responses to this remark, but in the end he kept them all to himself. "And, of course," Binky continued, "he was the son of Oswald Land, the so-called polar hero, and I can assure you that he was a complete charlatan."

"Do you remember seeing anyone who didn't belong, a stranger?"

"No. The police were such a nuisance, going from house to house, asking questions. They even searched my garden, can you believe. I gave them short shrift, I can tell you. She was very strange."

"Who was strange? Mrs. Land?"

"No, that eldest one, long white streak of a thing."

"Strange how?"

"Very sly. And you know, they used to break into my garden, shout things, and steal from my lovely apple trees. This was such a lovely orchard." Jackson looked around at the "epple" trees, now as gnarled and ancient as Binky Rain.

"Sylvia?"

"Yes, that was her name."