Case Histories

She'd never been in love with anyone since Keith and that had just been some crazy teenage thing that, in the normal way of things, should have petered out into an indifferent divorce. It felt good to be in love again, she felt it gave her back some of the personality she'd lost. She loved the bug, of course. Tanya. But that was a different kind of love, an elemental kind. She hadn't loved her then, not in a way she understood anyway, it was something she'd learned since, in the intervening years of absence. And even though it had come to her too late it still helped to fill all those missing years. Retroactive love. It wouldn't feel like that for Tanya of course. She didn't know about all the love her mother had for her, not unless Shirley told her ("Your Mummy loved you so much, but she just couldn't be with you"). She had made Shirley promise to treat her as if she were dead and to look after the bug. She'd loved Shirley in that elemental way too or she wouldn't have done what she did. A fresh start. That's what she'd said to Shirley, "Take Tanya away, give her a fresh start, be the mother to her that I can't be." Although obviously not as articulate as that because of the circumstances -

"'I thought you had a very lovely home to go to." He looked amused. He'd removed his surplice and put on his old gray cardi-gan again. It was very womanish garb, a cardigan over what was ba-sically, let's face it, a dress, and she couldn't help but idly wonder what he would look like underneath those black skirts, but was pleasantly surprised to realize that, although she would have quite liked to drop onto her knees on the grass and suck him off right then and there in the graveyard, what she really wanted to do was to look after him, do something good for him, make scrambled eggs and toast and tea, rub his back, read out loud to him from an English classic. She was definitely insane. "I'm pregnant," she said.

"Oh, congratulations. That's wonderful." He scanned her fea-tures for clues. "Isn't it?"

"Yes." She laughed. "It is wonderful. Please don't tell anyone yet."

"Oh gosh, of course not."

How could she be in love with a man who said "gosh"? Quite easily, it seemed.

She had him in her sights. She followed him along the ridge of the hill and then down to the empty lambing pens at the bottom, where he rested with his elbows on a wooden gate, his own gun crooked over his arm. He was such a cliche in his green Wellingtons and blue Barbour, the dogs running around at his feet. He referred to Meg and Bruce as "gundogs," but they were useless. He must have been out looking for rabbits. What right did he have to kill a rabbit? What made his life more valuable than a rabbits?

Who decided these things? She cocked the trigger. His head really was the perfect target. From here she could take a shot that would smash right into the back of it – bull's-eye. Like a pumpkin, or a melon or a turnip. Bang, bang. Of course, she wouldn't do it, she'd never killed anything in her life, not even an insect, not intentionally anyway. He set off again, left the field and rounded the wood and disappeared out of sight. Caroline looked at her watch – time for tea.

Chapter 17. Jackson

Jackson washed down a couple of Co-codamol with a cup of foul-tasting coffee. He was waiting in the terminal for Nicola and the rest of her flight crew to disembark from their aircraft. It was seven in the morning, which seemed a particularly hellish time to be in an airport. If an unknown assassin didn't kill him he sup-posed his tooth would.

The plane had already emptied its bedraggled, disoriented passengers. Jackson had never been to Malaga. When they were married Josie had insisted that they take an expensive holiday every year, villa holidays, "villas with private pools" in "lovely" places, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete, Tuscany. All he could do now was con-jure up a kind of generic Mediterranean memory – Marlee slip-pery with suntan cream and buoyant with armbands, splashing in the shallow end of the pool; Josie lying on a recliner, reading a novel, while Jackson himself lapped the pool, his body a dark shape under the blue water, like a restless, obsessive shark.

Watching Nicola was just displacement activity, trying to keep his mind off the fact that someone was trying to kill him (al-though, let's face it, it was quite hard to forget something like that).