Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

"Milly?"

Every year he walked to the office in Parkside and then walked the two miles home again. The same pilgrimage for ten years now. A four-mile round-trip, each year a little more tiring because he was carrying more weight, but there was nothing any doctor could say that could scare Theo now.

When he arrived in Parkside he was out of breath and stood around on the pavement for a while before attempting the stairs. He rested with his hands on his thighs, inhaling and exhaling in slow determined breaths, like an athlete who had just run a hard race. Passersby gave him covert (and not so covert) looks indicating varying degrees of distaste, as if they were trying to imagine what terrible flaw in a person's character could allow him to become so fat.

He had been inside the building only three times in the last ten years. The other times he had simply made a lurking kind of obeisance on the pavement.

David Holroyd didn't die. He was still alive when the paramedics arrived and was taken to the hospital, where he was sewn up and where the blood of several strangers was pumped into him. Now he worked three days a week and the rest of the time he tended to the garden in his cottage in rural Norfolk.

The boardroom had been repainted and a new carpet laid over the indelible stain of Laura's blood, but no one who had been there that day was comfortable with the idea of going back, and within the year Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton moved to an ugly sixties office building near the Grafton Centre, reincarnated as simply "Holroyd and Stanton" because Theo gave up his partnership after Laura's death and never returned to work. He had enough in stocks and bonds and savings to finance his rather frugal life. The money he received from the criminal injuries compensation scheme was donated to the dogs' home where they had obtained Poppy.

The front door, once a handsome bottle green, was now painted white and no one had polished the brass for a long time. There was no security on the door – no locks or entry phone or surveillance camera. Anyone could still walk in unchallenged.

The brass plaque on the door that had once read, HOLROYD, WYRE, AND STANTON–SOLICITORS AND ATTORNEYS AT LAW had been replaced by a plastic one that announced, bliss – beauty therapy. Before Bliss it was the mysterious "Hellier plc," which came and went between the third and fourth anniversaries. After Hellier plc disappeared, the offices had lain empty for a long time before "JM Business Consultants" moved in. Theo went up there, on the sixth anniversary, on the pretense of asking about IT training, but the girl on reception frowned and said, "That's not what we do," although she didn't elucidate what it was that they did do, which looked to Theo to be not very much at all, unless it was acting as a collection depot for the large cardboard boxes that were stacked everywhere. He'd only wanted to have a look, see the place – the spot – but as well as the boxes blocking the hallway there were flimsy partition screens everywhere and he didn't want to make a fuss and frighten the girl.

The stairs took it out of him and he had to rest at the top before going through the new glass door that was etched with the word "Bliss" in a swooping, romantic script, like a promise, as if he might be about to enter Elysium or the Land of Cockayne.

The receptionist, dressed in a clinical white uniform, was called "Milanda," according to her name badge, which sounded to Theo more like a brand of low-cholesterol margarine than a name. She regarded Theo with horror and he was tempted to reassure her that fat wasn't infectious, but instead he said that he would like to surprise his wife for her birthday, with "a bit of pampering." It was a lie but it wasn't a lie that harmed anyone. He "wished now that he had given Valerie more "pampering," but it was much too late for that now.

Once Milanda had managed to get over her initial fright at the size of him, she suggested a "Half-Day Spa" package – pedicure, manicure, and a "seaweed wrap" – and Theo said that sounded "just the ticket," but could he leaf through the brochure and see what else there was? And Milanda said, "Of course," with a fixed smile on her face because you could see she was worried that Theo would be a very bad advertisement for a beauty salon, sitting there in reception on the (possibly too flimsy) cane-work sofa next to the fiberglass fountain whose waters competed with the "soothing sounds" of the Meditation CD – an odd mix of panpipes, whale song, and crashing surf.

The offices had been completely refitted since his last abortive visit, the walls were lilac now and the doors painted in a palette of purples and pinks and blues. The whole shape of the place had been changed by interior plasterboard walls, creating open spaces as well as smaller rooms – "therapy suites," according to the signs on the doors.

Was the boardroom still there, untouched, or had it been transformed into – what? A steam room, a sauna? Or divided into cubicle-size rooms for "Thai massage" or "Brazilian waxing"? (The brochure offered extraordinary services.) A woman arrived for an appointment and Milanda escorted her into one of the therapy suites. Theo stood up – casually, as if stretching his legs – and made a pretense of sauntering down the hallway.

The door to the boardroom (painted a kind of cyanotic blue) was ajar and when Theo gave it a little nudge it swung open helpfully, giving him a view of the whole room. Theo had never made it this far before and had no idea how the room might have evolved over the past decade, but he was surprised when he found it empty of furniture and fittings, the floorboards dusty and scratched, the paintwork chipped. It had always been the beating heart of the office but now it was being used as a storeroom, stacked with boxes of oils and creams, a massage table folded and propped against one wall, a laundry basket overflowing with used white towels. The marble fireplace was still there. There were even ashes lying cold in the grate.

The spot itself, the place where his daughter had been slaughtered, was beneath some kind of trolley. The trolley looked like something that belonged on a hospital ward, but in the place of medicines, it was laden with dozens of bottles of nail varnish in different colors. In St. Petersburg, once, Theo had visited the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, built over the place where Alexander II was assassinated. It was a fantastic edifice of mosaic and gold, of spires and enameled onion domes, yet he had found the interior a soulless space, echoing with the cold. Now he realized that the atmosphere didn't really matter, what mattered was that it existed, and its existence meant that no one could ever forget what had happened there. The place where Laura fell was marked by a trolley of nail varnish. What kind of a shrine was that? Surely a spring should have bubbled up, or a tree blossomed, on the sacred spot where his daughter's blood was spilled?

Exsanguinated. A strange, dramatic word that seemed to belong in a revenge tragedy, but no revenge had ever been possible for Theo. KNIFE-WIELDING MANIAC MURDERS LOCAL GIRL! the local headlines said. The nationals too. For a few days it had been news and then everyone seemed to forget. Not the police, of course.

They had really cared, Theo had never doubted that for a minute. He still saw Alison, his family liaison officer, occasionally, even now, and the police had followed up every possible lead, there had been no client confidentiality left at Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton once the police had raked through every file and item of correspondence. The media talked about it being a random crime, the work of a psychopath, but the man – the knife-wielding maniac – had entered the office looking for Theo, for "Mr. Wyre." Theo had done something, precipitated something, he had made someone, someone in a yellow golfing sweater, so crazy that the man wanted to kill him. Had that bloodlust been assuaged, had the man in the yellow golfing sweater found some primitive satisfaction in slaying Theo's child? His own blood.