Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

"I was a tabby in the chorus," Julia said, "but I only lasted a few weeks, I got bronchitis, it was a shame, it was a number-one tour."

"No," Jackson said patiently. "Binky Rain, she keeps cats."

"The old witch," Amelia said suddenly, and Julia said, "Oh, her. We never went anywhere near her."

"We used to," Amelia said. "And then we didn't."

"Why not?" Jackson asked, but Amelia seemed to have lapsed back into her catatonic state.

"Sylvia told us not to," Julia said. She frowned with the effort of remembering. "That was after Olivia, I think. She said the garden was cursed and if we went in there we'd be turned into cats. That all her cats were people who'd gone into her garden. Sylvia was always a bit strange, of course. Mrs. Rain isn't still alive, is she? She must be three hundred years old by now."

"Almost," Jackson said.

There was something undeniably pleasant about being sprawled in a deck chair beneath the trees. The hum of insects and tourists was soporific and Jackson could think of nothing he wanted to do more than close his eyes and drift off, but Julia kept prattling on about neo-pagans and Wittgenstein and Russell.

"Weren't they all right-wing snobs?" Jackson asked.

"Oh don't spoil it by being all northern and socialist," Julia said.

Amelia remained a brooding presence, communicating in mono-syllables. "Brooke used to run around with no clothes on," Julia said. "Maybe nudism is some kind of Cambridge thing."

"Rupert Brooke was just a protofascist," Amelia said suddenly, from somewhere beneath her sun hat, and Julia said, "Well, he's dead and he was a terrible poet, so he's had his comeuppance," and Amelia said, "That's a specious argument if ever I heard one," and Julia said – but Jackson was asleep by then.

Jackson retrieved his car from where it was still parked, in front of Binky's house. A gold Lexus, not a vehicle (nor a color) that Jackson had any time for, was parked right up against the Alfa's bumper and Jackson felt pretty sure it belonged to Quintus. He had no idea what was going on between them. Surely Quintus hadn't attacked him?

He drove down Silver Street, listening to Gillian Welch's Hell Among the Yearlings album. His taste in music was getting more depressive by the minute, if that was possible. He was on his way to a meeting in The Eagle with Steve Spencer, not that he had anything to report about Nicola, but his mind was still on Quintus when all of a sudden he found himself driving straight into the back of a Ford Galaxie that was stationary at traffic lights by Fitzbillies on Trumpington Street.

The front of the Alfa Romeo came off a lot worse than the back of the Ford Galaxie, but things would have been more serious if Jackson hadn't already been easing up for the red light. That wasn't a fact that impressed the driver of the Galaxie, who leaped out and started yelling at Jackson that he had intentionally endangered the life of her children. Three small, inquisitive faces peered out the rear window of the Galaxie. When the traffic police rolled up, the woman was standing in the middle of the road, jabbing her finger at the child on board sticker on her rear window.

"The brakes failed," Jackson said to the older of the two traffic policemen.

"Liar! Bloody liar!" the woman shouted.

"Jeez, Jackson," the policeman said, "you really know how to pick them."

The crash had jolted something loose in Jackson's head. His tooth felt less like a tooth and more like a knife being pushed through his gum. He didn't think his body could take much more punishment.

The traffic cops breathalyzed Jackson, took down details of the accident, and sent the Galaxie and its furious driver on their way. Then they called a police tow truck and had Jackson's car taken to the police garage, where a mechanic looked it over. The older traffic cop owed Jackson a tenner from a derby sweep three years ago and Jackson reckoned it was a debt paid in full now.

"The brakes failed," Jackson said for the umpteenth time. The accident had unnerved him. He'd been in accidents before, skids and shunts, but he'd never been the one doing the shunting. He could still see himself gliding helplessly into the back of the Galaxie, magnetically drawn on by the child on board sign. "I think the brake fluid must have leaked," he said to the mechanic.

"It leaked alright," the mechanic said, "leaked through the bloody great hole that was drilled in the reservoir. I think there's someone out there who doesn't like you."

"Christ," one of the traffic policeman said cheerfully, "that'll make it hard to narrow down."

''Thanks." Perhaps he should mention Quintus Rain's name to the eager young DC Lowther who had taken his statement in the hospital.

A police car dropped him off outside his front door. He sensed he was beginning to lower the tone of the neighborhood. It was nine o'clock and the smell of barbecue was everywhere on the air. He knew without looking at his mobile that it was full of messages from Steve Spencer wondering what had happened to him. He avoided thinking that the day couldn't get any worse and was rewarded with a sight that suddenly made everything better. Shirley Morrison was sitting on his doorstep, two bottles of cold beer in her hand. "I thought maybe you could do with some nursing," she said .

Later, much later, when there was already light in the sky and the dawn chorus had struck up and it was Thursday (which was blue according to Julia and orange according to Amelia), Jackson turned and looked at Shirley's sleeping face and tried to remember why he wasn't supposed to sleep with her? Oh yes, because she was a client. Ethics. Nice one, Jackson. He wondered if he had crossed a line he was going to regret. It wasn't so much that she was a client, or that he thought there was going to be anything between them, they'd swerved out of their orbits and collided, that was all.

(Although it was nice to think there might be more.) It had been cataclysmic, extraordinary, but he didn't see a future in it. It wasn't that that was worrying Jackson, it was the fact that when Shirley was telling her awful story to him yesterday, she had spent most of her time looking up to the right.

It was very hot in the churchyard. His face was dripping with sweat, he imagined all the fat on his body was melting. Even though Little St. Mary's on Mill Lane was in the middle of everywhere, Theo had never encountered another soul, living or dead, among its gravestones and wildflowers. Laura told him that she used to come here and revise, sitting on the grass with her books scattered around her, and so he had placed a bench here with a plaque: for laura, who loved this place, and he felt closer to her – in some indefinable way – when he sat here. It was one of the stations of the cross for Theo, one of the places that was connected with Laura. Her bones rested in the City Cemetery on Newmarket Road, but the whole of Cambridge acted as a reliquary for her memory.

People scattered the ashes of their cremated relatives in the churchyard, and a chamomile lawn had been planted on the gray, gritty soil of the dead. On Laura's grave, in the characterless municipal cemetery, Theo had planted snowdrops, her favorite flower. There were trees in the cemetery and Theo wondered if their roots had found Laura yet, whether they had twined their way through her rib cage, curled around her ankles, and braceleted her wrists. Jackson had been to London to see Emma. Theo's memories of Emma were indistinct, he seemed to remember that she had been involved with a man and the whole thing had turned out badly in some way. Emma was working for the BBC, Jackson said. Theo never speculated about what Laura would be doing if she had lived. There was no future to imagine, her life was self-contained. February 15, 1976, to July 19, 1994. Her A Level results had arrived three weeks after she died, like an odd postscript. Theo had opened the big brown envelope addressed to "Laura Wyre" and seen that she had four "A" grades. He'd never thought to cancel her university place and a week into the autumn term someone rang up from the university administration office in Aberdeen and said, "Can I speak to Laura Wyre, please?" and Theo said, "No, I'm sorry, you can't," and then burst into tears.