Case Histories

There was that survey, years ago, that found that women didn't feel threatened by a man carrying the Guardian or wearing a CND badge. Jackson had wondered at the time how many rapists started carrying a Guardian around with them. Look at Ted Bundy. Stick your arm in a plaster cast and women think you're safe. No woman was ever truly safe. It didn't matter if you were as tough as Sigour-ney Weaver in Alien Resurrection or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. because wherever you went there were men. Crazy men. The thing he liked about tough women such as Ripley and Sarah Connor (and yes, he knew they were fictional) was that it didn't matter how kick-ass they were, their motives stemmed from a kind of maternal love, a maternal love for the whole world. No, don't go there, Jackson, don't think about Sarah Connor. Think about something bad, think about the exhaust on your car that needs fixing, think about something boring. Golf.

"I've cleaned out the pus, Jackson," Sharon whispered softly, "and I'm going to put a dressing on, but we can't keep on treating the symptoms. We have to eliminate the cause. The root."

Laura's closest friends at sixth-form college had been Christina. Ayshea, Josh, Joanna, Emma, Eleanor, Hannah, and Pansy. Jackson knew this because Theo had a handy wall chart with the heading STUDENTS at laura's college, as opposed to another chart, laura's FRIENDS outside OF college (scuba-diving club, people from the pub she'd worked with, and so on), and yet a third chart for LAURA'S casual acquaintances (which was basically anyone whose path had ever crossed hers).

students at laura's college was a numbered list, the numbers indicating the closeness of the friendship – number one being her best friend and so on. Every student at the college was listed. How much time had Theo spent trying to decide if someone should be ranked 108 or 109 on the list? He hadn't even done the list on a computer but had laboriously handwritten all the names. The guy was crazy.

The friends were also color coded by sex – blue ink for the girls, red for the boys, which made it easy to see that Laura's closest friends were mostly girls. The top ten were all blue with only two excep-tions-Josh and Tom. Laura Wyre had obviously been a girl's girl, one destined never to become a woman's woman. Toward the end of the list there was an almost solid phalanx of red names – great clus-ters of boys, most of whom Laura Wyre had probably never even noticed, let alone spoken to. The use of the red ink made the boys stand out and look more dangerous, or incorrect somehow. Jackson had a sudden image of his essays at school, spiderwebbed with the angry red-ink annotations of his teachers. It was only after he left school and joined the army that he discovered he was intelligent.

The police had interviewed all the students at Laura's college, except that unfortunately most of the top ten were missing. "Gap year." Theo had said to Jackson. He had worried that Laura would want to take a gap year, visit the dangerous corners of the world, but she would have been safer in a flea-infested, heroin-filled doss-house in Bangkok than she was in her father's office. "Mea culpa," Theo said to Jackson with his sad, dog smile.

Throughout the whole investigation the police never really be-lieved that Laura was anything more than an unfortunate bystander, that it was Theo who was the real target. Jackson suddenly remembered Bob Peck in Edge of Darkness - they really didn't make TV like that anymore, in fact it might have been the last good BBC drama that Jackson had seen. 1984? 1985? He tried to remember 1985. Three years after the Falklands. Howell left the army and Jackson signed on for another five years. He was going out with a girl called Carol but then she joined the CND and announced her political views were "incompatible" with her relationship with Jackson. Jackson pointed out that he wasn't exactly in favor of nuclear warfare himself, but she was more interested in chaining herself to things and shouting abuse at the Thames Valley Police.