Case Histories

"So do you think she was suffering from postnatal depression?" Jackson remembered Josie after Marlee's birth, crying all day with misery while Marlee cried all night with colic. Jackson had felt completely helpless because he didn't know what to do for either of them. And then suddenly it was over, like the sun coming out, and Josie looked at Marlee sleeping peacefully in her cradle and laughed and said to Jackson, "She's cute, let's keep her." Way back when they were happy.

Shirley Morrison gave him a look, as if she was wondering what he could know about postpartum misery, and then shrugged and said, "Maybe. Probably. She wasn't getting any sleep, people go crazy if they don't sleep. But they were out to get her, the press, Keith's family. He didn't do anything wrong, he didn't beat her or anything. He was a nice guy, very easygoing. I liked him. Everyone liked him. And he loved Tanya."

"Michelle had bruising to her face," Jackson said.

Shirley looked at him blankly. "Did she?"

"It was in the arresting officer's report, why wasn't it used in her defense?"

"I don't know."

Shirley's slender feet were very brown, as if she went around bare-root a lot outside. She was wearing Indian sandals, embossed leather, which made her feet look even better. Jackson liked women's feet, not in a fetishistic way (he hoped) and not ugly feet, and, for some mysterious reason, a lot of lovely women had ugly feet, he just thought nice feet were attractive. (Was he trying to justify some-thing to himself here?) Nicola Spencer had big feet, he'd noticed. She was on an overnight to Malaga, doing God knows what.

"The smell was incredible, awful, that's what I remember most, just… revolting. Tanya was in her playpen and she was screaming, really screaming, I've never heard a baby cry like that before or since. I'm a pediatric nurse," she added, "in the ICU," but Jackson already knew that, he'd phoned up the hospital and asked, "Shirley Morrison, what ward is she on again?" and they'd told him. It was much easier to get information than most people thought. Ask a question and people give you the answer. Not the big questions, obviously, like who killed Laura Wyre and where were the remains of Olivia Land. Big questions like why the woman he had once promised to love and protect as long as there was breath in his body had decided to remove their only child to the opposite side of the world. Just like that. ("Yes, Jackson, 'just like that.'")

"The first thing I did was pick Tanya up but she still wouldn't stop screaming. She was filthy, God knows when she'd last been changed, and, there was blood spattered all over her." This image, and all it implied, tripped her up for a moment, breaking her composure. Shirley Morrison stared out the office window but she wasn't looking at anything to be found outside.

"She was wearing these new dungarees I'd bought her. OshKosh. I had a job working in a corner shop, after school, on Saturdays. Michelle and I had always worked, we'd never have had anything it we hadn't. I remember thinking how much those dungarees had cost and how the blood was never going to come out. My brother-in-law had just been killed by my sister and I was thinking about stain removal."

"The brain disassociates to stop us from going mad."

"You think I don't know that, Mr. Brodie?"

Shirley Morrison's toenails were painted with a pale polish and she was wearing a delicate gold chain around one ankle. Jackson remembered a time when only tarts and whores wore chains around their ankles. There used to be a prostitute who lived on the same street as Jackson when he was young. She wore emerald green eye shadow and red stilettos and had white, veiny legs. Did she wear an anklet? Did she have a name? Jackson used to run past her house in terror in case she came out and caught him because his mother told him that she was "a servant of Satan," which had confused him because "Satan" was the name of a dog – a big rottweiler – owned by a guy on the allotments.

Jackson hadn't thought about that street for a long time, a gloomy terrace with passages like tunnels that went through to a back alley. They'd moved to a better class of street when Jackson was nine. No whores hanging around on the doorstep, smoking their lungs out. Was Shirley Morrison married? She had a ring on her finger but it was neither a wedding ring nor an engagement ring, it was silver, Celtic or Scandinavian, what did that mean?

"When I picked Tanya up, Michelle laughed and said, 'She does go on, doesn't she?' Now that's disassociation."

''She must have had some reason for killing him," Jackson puz-zled, "even if it wasn't premeditated. Something must have triggered it."