Case Histories

In 1985 Laura Wyre would have been nine years old and Olivia Land was fifteen years' missing. In Edge of Darkness, Craven, the Bob Peck character, had also been obsessed with his daughter – Emma, that was her name, the same name as the number-five-ranked girl on Theo's red-and-blue list and the only one of the top-ranking girls who lived within easy reach of Cambridge. Christina, the number-one best friend, was married and living in Australia, Ayshea was a teacher in Dorset, Tom worked for the EC in Strasbourg, Josh seemed to have disappeared off the map, Joanna was a doctor in Dublin, Eleanor a solicitor in Newcastle, Pansy was working for a publisher in Scotland. A hejira of girls. Were they in flight from something? ("If you run forever you come back to where you started from, Jackson.") He wanted to speak to someone who knew a different Laura from the one Theo knew. It wasn't that Theo's Laura wasn't genuine, but no matter how close he'd been to his daughter there were going to be things about her that he didn't know or wouldn't understand. That was how it was supposed to be. It didn't matter how much you hated it, they were always going to have secrets.

Emma Drake lived in Crouch End and worked for the BBC. When he phoned her she said she'd be happy to speak to Jackson and arranged to meet him after work, across the road from Broad-casting House, at the Langham, "For cocktails."

She was a nice girl, polite and chatty, and she drank three man-nattans, one after the other, in a way that suggested she liked to take the edge off the day as quickly as possible. She wasn't really a girl, Jackson reminded himself. She was a twenty-eight-year-old woman.

"I remember thinking that could have been me," she said, tossing a nut into her mouth. "I haven't eaten all day," she added apologetically. "Been locked in a studio. I suppose that was a selfish thing to think, wasn't it?"

"Not really," Jackson said.

"I mean it couldn't, not really, I wasn't there, in that office, at that moment in time, but there's something about random violence…"

"Was it? Random?" Jackson said. "You don't think that maybe the guy who killed Laura meant to, that she was his target, not her father?" A man in a dinner jacket sat down at a piano in the corner of the room and lifted his fingers above the keys with a Liber-ace kind of flourish before beginning to play a loud, florid version of "Some Enchanted Evening." "Oh dear." Emma Drake made a face and laughed. "Maybe she'd met someone, I don't know. Everyone seemed to be traveling or working abroad. Laura was one of the few people who was going straight to university after the summer holidays. I was in Peru, I didn't hear about her death until weeks afterward. That seemed worse somehow, it was already consigned to history for everyone else."

"The tiniest scrap of something that no one thought to mention," Jackson persevered. He wondered if another manhattan would help or hinder, and whether he should be plying young women with alcohol and then letting them go and fend for themselves out on the mean streets of London. Was Marlee going to do this, get a good education, go to university and end up in a crappy job with the BBC, drink too much and go home alone on the tube all the way to a rented flat in Crouch End? He suggested coffee to Emma Drake and was relieved when she agreed.

"I'm sorry, I really can't think of anything," she said, frowning at the pianist who had moved on to an Andrew Lloyd Webber medley. "I suppose there was that thing with Mr. Jessop."

"Mr.Jessop?"

"Stan." Her frown grew deeper but it didn't seem to be related to The Phantom of the Opera. "Her biology teacher."

"A thing? As in a relationship?" He had seen the name of Stan Jessop before, it was written on another of Theo's wall charts – teachers at laura's college. He had been interviewed by the police two days after Laura's murder and eliminated from their inquiries.

Emma Drake bit her lip and swirled the dregs of her manhattan round the glass. "I don't know, you'd have to ask Christina. She was much closer to Laura than me, she was in Mr. Jessop's class as well."

"She's on a sheep farm in the middle of the Australian outback."

"Is she?" Emma said, brightening up for a moment. "That's amazing. We all seem to have lost touch. You wouldn't think you would, would you?" Oh, you do, Jackson thought. You lose touch with everyone eventually.

The coffee arrived and Jackson thought he should have ordered a sandwich for her as well. What did girls like her eat when they finally made it home? Did girls like her eat at all?

"We all promised to meet up ten years to the day after we left school," she said. "Outside the Hobbs Pavilion, a couple of weeks ago. Of course, no one came."

"You went?"