Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

"My daddy'll be back soon," Marlee reassured him. "My daddy." The very words brought a lump to his throat. Laura's second-favorite film, after Dirty Dancing, was The Railway Children, and he'd bought a copy on video a couple years before she died. They had watched it together several times and they both always cried at the end when the train stops and the steam and smoke slowly clear around the figure of Bobbie's father and Jenny Agutter (who always reminded him a little of Laura) cries out, "Daddy, my daddy," and it was odd because it was such a happy moment for Bobbie and yet it always seemed unbearably sad. Of course, he'd never watched the film since Laura's death. It would kill him to watch it. Theo never doubted for a moment that when he died he would be reunited with Laura, and, in his mind, it was just like The Railway Children – he would walk out of a fog and Laura would be there and she would say, "Daddy, my daddy." It wasn't that Theo believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.

Marlee was bored. She had finished the sweets and they had played a game of tic-tac-toe – which she was already familiar with – and hangman, which she wasn't, so Theo taught her, but now she was getting whiny with hunger. From the first-floor window of Jackson's office they had a tantalizing view of a sandwich shop. "I'm starving," she declared melodramatically, doubling up to demonstrate her hunger pains.

Perhaps Deborah Arnold wasn't coming back. Perhaps Jackson wasn't coming back, perhaps he never got the message about his daughter. Perhaps he had reacted badly to a dental anesthetic, perhaps he had died under the anesthetic, or been run over on the way back from the dentist.

Theo supposed he could leave Marlee alone while he slipped across the street to buy them both something to eat. It would take, at the most, what – ten minutes? What harm could happen to her in ten minutes? It was an absurd question to ask himself because Theo knew exactly what could happen in ten minutes – a plane could explode over a town or fly into a building, a train could derail, a maniac in a yellow golfing sweater could run into an office, wielding a knife. Leaving her in an office – what was he thinking! Offices ranked higher than planes, mountains, or schools on Theo's list of dangerous places.

"Come on then," he said to her. "We'll pop across the road and bring a sandwich back."

"What if Daddy comes and can't find us?" Theo felt touched by the "us." "Well, we'll put a notice on the door," he said.

"Back in ten minutes," Marlee said. "That's what Daddy puts."

course it wasn't as simple as that. It was three o'clock in the afternoon and the sandwich shop was about to close and had hardly any sandwiches left and the ones on offer – egg mayonnaise or roast beef and horseradish – prompted Marlee to act out a vivid pantomime of vomiting. As they came out of the sandwich shop she slipped one small, dry hand into his and he gave it a reassuring squeeze. She got suddenly excited when she spotted a burger bar across the street and almost dragged Theo into it. The letters "CJD" came into his mind but he tried to suppress them and anyway she wanted something called a "chickinlickin burger," which Theo hoped had chicken in it rather than mad cow, but then what part of the chicken and how old? And what had the chicken in turn been fed on? Mad cow probably.

He bought her a chickinlickin burger ("with fries," she begged) and a Coke. For fast food it seemed very slow and Theo wondered if anyone monitored the service in these places. Most of the people working here seemed to be children – Australian children at that.

They had been gone a lot longer than ten minutes. If Jackson was back he would be sending out search parties by now. As if the very thought of his name conjured him up, Jackson suddenly appeared out of a crowd of jostling foreign students. He looked slightly wild and grabbed hold of Marlee's arm so that she squealed in protest, "Daddy, mind my Coke."

"Where've you been?" Jackson shouted at her. He glared at Theo. What a cheek, when all Theo was doing was looking after the girl, which was more than her parents were doing.

"I'm babysitting," Theo said to Jackson, "not cradle snatching."

"Right," Jackson said, "Of course, I'm sorry, I was worried."

"Theo's looking after me," Marlee said, taking a huge bite out of her burger, "and he bought me fries. I like him."

When Theo returned along St. Andrews Street the girl with the custard-yellow hair was no longer there and he worried that she might never be there again. Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.

Your soft palate looks very inflamed," Sharon murmured. "Does it hurt?"

"Nugh, nurnh."

"I suspect you're blowing out an abscess, Jackson."

Officially she was "Miss S. Anderson, BDS, LDS," and he'd never been invited to call her by her Christian name, although she was free enough with his own first name. Doctors, bank managers, complete strangers, all used first names now. It was one of Binky Rain's bugbears. "And I said to the man in the bank ["men in the benk"] – a cashier – 'Excuse me, young man, but I don't recall us having been introduced. As far as you're concerned, my name is Mrs. Rain, and I don't give a damn what yours is.'" Binky Rain made "cashier" sound like something you wouldn't want to pick up on the sole of your shoe.

He felt absurdly vulnerable, lying there in the chair, prostrate and helpless, subject to the whims of Sharon and her silent dental nurse. Both Sharon and the dental nurse had dark, enigmatic eyes, and they had a way of looking at him indifferently over their masks as if they were contemplating what they might do to him next, like sadistic belly dancers with surgical instruments.

Jackson tried not to think about this, nor about that scene in Marathon Man, and instead worked on conjuring up a picture of France. He could grow vegetables, he'd never grown a vegetable in his life, Josie had been the gardener, he'd carried out her orders, Dig this, move that, mow the lawn. In France, the vegetables would probably grow themselves anyway. All that warm fertile soil. Tomatoes, peaches. Vines, could he grow vines? Olives, lemons, figs – it sounded biblical. Imagine watching the tendrils creeping, the fruit plumping, oh God, he was getting an erection (at the idea of vegetables, what was wrong with him?). Panic made him swallow and gag on his own saliva. Sharon returned the chair to an upright position and said, "All right?" her head cocked to one side in an affectation of concern while he choked noisily. The silent dental nurse handed him a plastic cup of water.

"Soon be done now," Sharon lied, tilting him backward again, Jackson concentrated on something unpleasant this time. Laura Wyre's body. Felled in her tracks, like an animal, like a deer.

Mr. Wyre, where is he? It was an odd-sounding question – wouldn't it be more normal to say, "Where's Mr. Wyre?" Did the killer actually say that? What if he'd said, "Miss Wyre" or "Ms. Wyre"? Could Moira Tyler (the only person the killer spoke to) have misheard him? In the chaos of the moment – but then the moment wasn't chaotic at that point. He was just a guy in a yellow golfing sweater asking the whereabouts of one of the solicitors.

And Laura's own private life, was it as transparent as it appeared to be? A sacrificial virgin. Was she a virgin? Jackson couldn't remember reading that in the autopsy report. Theo believed she was, of course. Jackson could imagine that Marlee could be married and divorced three times and have ten children and he would still believe that she was a virgin.