Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

She had been walking home from a nightclub at two in the morning, wearing a lot of makeup and very few clothes, and there were some unspoken assumptions that she had somehow invited what had happened to her. Not on Jackson's team. If he'd thought that any of his officers thought that, he would have hung them out to dry.

They still didn't have a suspect in custody but Jackson was returning home for his first night's sleep in days, cadging a lift in the back of a squad car with a family liaison officer (a woman called Alison who Jackson should have married instead of Josie). Alison was returning some photographs of Laura to Theo. Photographs, always photographs. All those poignant images of girls that had gone. The Kerry-Annes and the Olivias and the Lauras, all of them precious, all of them lost forever. All of them holy girls. Sacrifices to some unknown, evil deity. Please God, never Marlee.

Theo Wyre had answered the door, a man hollowed out by grief. His face, Jackson had thought at the time, was the color of Wensleydale cheese. He offered them tea and Jackson thought – neither for the first nor the last time – how strange it was that people just kept on going, even when their world no longer existed. Theo had even produced cake from somewhere, saying, "Cherry and almond, I made it the day before she died. It keeps well." He shook his head sadly as if he couldn't believe that the cake still existed but his daughter didn't. Needless to say, neither of them ate it. Jackson said, "Do you mind if I have a look at Laura's bedroom, Mr. Wyre?" because he knew that as far as Theo Wyre was concerned he was just another detective, not someone who wasn't on this case. It wasn't much more than curiosity on Jackson's part, there was nothing to suggest that Laura Wyre's murder was linked to "his" murder, Kerry-Anne Brockley. And it was just a bedroom, an untidy bedroom that a girl was never going to enter again, never fling down her bag on the floor and kick off her shoes, never lie on the bed and read a book or listen to her stereo, never sleep the restless, innocent sleep of the living.

That was two years before Marlee was born and Jackson didn't know then what he knew now – what it was like to love a child, how you would give your own life in a heartbeat to save theirs, how they were more precious than the most precious thing. He no longer missed Josie as much as he thought he would, but he missed Marlee nearly all the time. That was why he didn't want to take on Theo Wyre. Theo terrified him, it made the death of his own child a possibility, it forced him to imagine it, to substitute Marlee for Laura Wyre. But what could he do? He could hardly say no to the poor guy, the size of a blimp, wheezing and puffing on his inhaler, nothing left but a memory – the shape of a space where a twenty-eight-year-old woman should have been.

Theo had a body; Amelia and Julia needed one. Olivia was a different kind of space than Laura, an incorporeal mystery, a question without an answer. A puzzle that could tease you until you went mad. He would never find Olivia, never find out what happened to her, he knew that and he would just have to find the right time to tell them that. He was never going to be able to bill them either, was he? Sorry, your baby sister's dead and gone forever and that will be Ј500 for services rendered. ("You're too soft to be in business," Deborah Arnold said to him every month when she did the accounting. "Too soft or too stupid.")

If it was Marlee and he had to decide – dead or missing forever – which would he choose? No, he couldn't go there, couldn't bear to imagine it, couldn't tempt fate by trying to. Either scenario depicted the worst thing that could possibly happen. What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened – how did you live your life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a kind of strength and courage that most people didn't have.

The front door opened and all the little party girls and their party mothers hit the street at top volume. Jackson hastily stuffed photographs of Laura Wyre's crime scene beneath the front passenger seat. He was about to get out of the car and go inside when Marlee ran out. Jesus, she was dressed like a hooker. What did Josie think, letting her go out looking like a pedophile's dream? She even had lipstick on. He thought of JonBenet Ramsey. Another lost girl. When he was in Bliss earlier, a girl had come in, a friend of the receptionist (Milanda – had she made her name up?), and made an appointment for a "Brazilian," and Milanda said, "Yeah?" and the girl said, "My boyfriend wants me to get one. He wants to pretend he's making love with a young girl," and Milanda said, "Yeah?" as if that were a good reason.

Jackson knew the statistics, knew how many known pedophiles would be hanging out in any one area, knew how they'd be clustered, thickly, like flies, around playgrounds, schools, swimming pools (and houses that were signposted with balloons). "Claire's Accessories" – that's where Jackson would go if he were a pedophile. What if reincarnation existed, what if you came back as a pedophile? But then what would you have had to do in the first place to deserve that? What did the holy girls come back as? Flocks of doves, groves of trees?

"Hiya, sweetheart. Good party?" (Were you just going to run out into the street, not knowing if anyone was waiting for you?) Where were you going? Did you know I was here?

"Yep."

"Did you remember to say 'thank you'?"

"Yep. I said, 'Thank you very much for having me.'"

"You're fibbing," Jackson said.

"No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are. Basic interrogation fact: people look up to the left when they're remembering and up to the right when they're inventing. You looked up to the right." Shut up, Jackson. She wasn't even listening.

"My bad," she said indifferently.

"Your bad?" What language was that? She looked exhausted, she was black under the eyes. What did they do at these parties? She was drenched with sweat.

"We were dancing," she said, "to Christina Aguilera. She's wicked." She did a little move to indicate dancing, and it was so sexual that it turned Jackson's heart over. She was eight years old for fuck's sake.

"That's nice, sweetheart." She smelled of sugar and sweat. He remembered the first time he held her, when the whole of her head fit into the palm of his hand and Josie said "be careful" (as if he wouldn't be) and he had vowed to himself that nothing bad would ever happen to her, that he would keep her safe. A solemn promise, an oath. Did Theo Wyre make that same vow when Laura was first placed in his arms? Almost certainly. (And what about Victor Land?) But Jackson couldn't make Marlee safe, he couldn't make anyone safe. The only time you were safe was when you were dead. Theo was the world's greatest worrier, but the one thing he didn't worry about anymore was whether or not his daughter was safe.

"You've got lipstick all over you," Marlee said to him. Jackson examined himself in the rearview mirror and discovered the vivid imprint of Julia's crimson mouth on his cheek. He rubbed at it aggressively but the color remained like a spot of heat on his face.

She was such a little scrap of a thing," Binky Rain was saying, although Jackson wasn't really listening. He had caved in to a flurry of "Carmen Buranas" and said to Marlee, "Do you want to go and visit an old lady on the way home?" sweetening this not-very-inviting invitation with the promise of cats so that now she was rolling around in the weed-filled jungle of Binky's garden with an assortment of reluctant felines.

"And she's your child?" Binky, looking doubtfully at Marlee. "I don't think of you as having a child."

"No?" he said absently. He was thinking about Olivia Land, she was just a scrap of a thing too. Would she have wandered off? Amelia and Julia said no, that she was very "obedient." Obedient enough to leave the tent in the middle of the night and go with someone who told her to? Go where? Jackson had tried to sweet-calk his old pal Wendy in police records to show him the evidence from Olivia's case, but even if she'd been willing it wouldn't have done any good because it was all missing. "Sorry, Jackson, it's gone AWOL," Wendy said. "It happens. Thirty-four years is a long time."