Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

Her complaint, the reason she had originally engaged Jackson's services, was that someone was stealing her cats. Jackson couldn't work out whether cats really did go missing or whether she just thought they went missing. She had this thing about black cats in particular. "Someone's taking them," she said in her clipped little voice, her accent as anachronistic as everything else about her, a remnant, a leftover from another time, another place, long turned into history. The first cat to go missing was a black cat ("bleck ket") called Nigger – and Binky Rain thought that was all right! Not named after a black man ("bleck men"), she said dismissively when his jaw dropped, but after Captain Scott's cat on the Discovery. (Did she really go around the quiet streets of Newnham shouting out "Nigger!"? Dear God, please not.) Her brother-in-law had been a stalwart of the Scott Polar Research Institute on Lensfield Road and had spent a winter camped on the ice of the Ross Shelf, making Binky an expert on antarctic exploration, apparently. Scott was "a fool," Shackleton "a womanizer," and Peary "an American," which seemed to be enough of a condemnation in itself. The way Binky talked about polar expeditions ("Horses! Only an idiot would take horses!") belied the fact that the most challenging journey she had undertaken was the voyage from Cape Town to Southampton in first class on the Dunnottar Castle in 1938.

Jackson's best friend, Howell, was black, and when Jackson told him about Binky having a cat called Nigger, he roared with laughter. Howell dated from Jackson's army days – they had started out as squaddies together. "Bleck men," Howell laughed, doing a disturbing impression of an old white lady, disturbing given that Howell was six-foot-six and the blackest black man Jackson had ever met. After his discharge, Howell had returned to his native Birmingham and was currently working as a doorman for a large hotel, a job that required him to wear a ridiculous pantomime costume – a royal blue frock coat covered in gold braid and, even more ridiculously, a top hat. Howell had such an imposing presence that rather than losing dignity in this flunky's outfit he actually made it seem strangely distinguished.

Howell must be at a dangerous age as well. What was he doing about it? It must be more than six months since they had spoken. That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers. Jackson missed Howell. Somewhere along the line Jackson had managed to lose not only his wife and child but all his friends as well. (Although had he had any friends other than Howell?) Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn't notice that they were alone, so they wouldn't die without a living soul noticing. Jackson hoped that wouldn't happen to him. Anyway, he was going to die in France, in a chair, in the garden, after a good meal. Perhaps Marlee would be there on a visit, and she would have her children with her so that Jackson could see that part of him carried on into the future, that death wasn't the end of everything.

Jackson let his voice mail pick up Binky's message and then listened back to her imperial tones commanding him to visit her as soon as possible on "a matter of some urgency" to do with "Frisky."

Binky Rain had never paid Jackson in the two years he had known her, but he supposed this was fair as, for his part, he had never found a single missing cat in those two years. He saw his visits to her more as a social service: no one else ever visited the poor old cow and Jackson had a tolerance for her idiosyncrasies that surprised even himself. She was an old Nazi boot but you had to admire her spirit. Why did she think people were taking her cats? Jackson thought it would be vivisection – the usual paranoid belief of cat lovers, but no, according to Binky they took them to make gloves out of them. (Bleck gloves, obviously.)

Jackson was just debating with himself whether to give up on tardy Nicola and obey Binky's summons when the front door flew open. Jackson slid down in the driver's seat and pretended to be concentrating on Le Nouvel Obsetvateur. He could see from fifty yards away that Nicola was in a bad mood, although that was more or less her default setting. She looked hot, already tightly buttoned into the airline's ugly uniform. The uniform didn't show off her figure, and the heels she was wearing – like the Queen's shoes – made her ankles look thick. The only time Jackson saw Nicola without makeup was when she was running. Au naturel. She ran like someone training for a marathon. Jackson was a runner – he ran three miles every morning, up at six, out on the street, back for coffee, before most people were up. That was what army training did for you. Army, the police, and a hefty dose of Scottish Presbyterian genes. ("Always running, Jackson," Josie said. "If you run forever you come back to where you started from – that's the curvature of space for you, did you know that?")

Nicola looked much better in her running clothes. In her uniform she looked frumpy but when she ran around the maze of streets where she lived, she looked athletic and strong. For running, she wore tracksuit bottoms and an old Blue Jays T-shirt that she must have picked up in Toronto, although she hadn't flown across the Atlantic during the time that Jackson had been watching her. She had been to Milan three times, Rome twice, and once each to Madrid, Dusseldorf, Perpignan, Naples, and Faro.

Nicola got in her car, a little girly Ford Ka, and took off like a rocket for Stansted. Jackson wasn't exactly a slow driver but Nicola went at terrifying speeds. When this was over he was considering alerting someone in traffic. Jackson had done a stint in traffic before plainclothes and there were times when he would have liked to pull Nicola over and arrest her.

His phone rang again as the traffic slowed in a holding pattern around Stansted. This time it was his secretary, Deborah, who snapped, "Where are you?" as if he was supposed to be somewhere else.

"I'm fine, thank you. How are you?"

"Someone phoned. You may as well go and see them while you're out and about." Deborah said "out and about" as if Jackson were getting drunk or picking up women.

"Do you want to enlighten me further?" he asked.

"No," Deborah said. "Something about finding something."

Once Nicola arrived at the airport her movements followed their usual routine. She parked her car and went inside the terminal, and Jackson watched her until she disappeared from view. After that he went to the toilets, had a double espresso from a paper cup that did nothing to cool down the heat of the day, purchased cigarettes, read the headlines in a newspaper that he didn't buy, and then drove away again.

By the time Nicola's plane to Prague was climbing steeply away from the flat countryside below, Jackson was walking up the path of a large house on Owlstone Road, frighteningly close to where Binky Rain lived. The door was answered by a woman stranded somewhere in her forties who squinted at Jackson over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles. Academic, he thought to himself.

"Mrs. Land?" Jackson said.

" Miss Land," she said. "Amelia Land. Thank you for coming."

Amelia Land made a terrible cup of coffee. Jackson could already feel its corrosive effect on his stomach. She was wandering around the neglected kitchen, searching for biscuits, even though Jackson had told her twice that he didn't want one, thank you. Finally, she retrieved a packet of damp digestives from the depths of a cupboard and Jackson ate one just to keep her happy. The biscuit was like soft, stale sand in his mouth, but Amelia Land seemed satisfied that her duty as a hostess had been done.

She seemed very distracted, even mildly deranged, but, living in Cambridge, Jackson had got used to university types, although she said she lived in " Oxford, not Cambridge. It's a completely different place," and Jackson had thought, "Yeah, right," but said nothing. Amelia Land kept babbling on about blue mice, and when he'd said gently to her, "Start at the beginning, Miss Land," she'd carried on with the blue-mice theme and said that was the beginning, and "Please call me Amelia." Jackson sighed inwardly, he sensed this tale was going to take a lot of coaxing.