Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

How could she be in love with a man who said "gosh"? Quite easily, it seemed.

She had him in her sights. She followed him along the ridge of the hill and then down to the empty lambing pens at the bottom, where he rested with his elbows on a wooden gate, his own gun crooked over his arm. He was such a cliche in his green Wellingtons and blue Barbour, the dogs running around at his feet. He referred to Meg and Bruce as "gundogs," but they were useless. He must have been out looking for rabbits. What right did he have to kill a rabbit? What made his life more valuable than a rabbits?

Who decided these things? She cocked the trigger. His head really was the perfect target. From here she could take a shot that would smash right into the back of it – bull's-eye. Like a pumpkin, or a melon or a turnip. Bang, bang. Of course, she wouldn't do it, she'd never killed anything in her life, not even an insect, not intentionally anyway. He set off again, left the field and rounded the wood and disappeared out of sight. Caroline looked at her watch – time for tea.

Jackson washed down a couple of Co-codamol with a cup of foul-tasting coffee. He was waiting in the terminal for Nicola and the rest of her flight crew to disembark from their aircraft. It was seven in the morning, which seemed a particularly hellish time to be in an airport. If an unknown assassin didn't kill him he supposed his tooth would.

The plane had already emptied its bedraggled, disoriented passengers. Jackson had never been to Malaga. When they were married Josie had insisted that they take an expensive holiday every year, villa holidays, "villas with private pools" in "lovely" places, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete, Tuscany. All he could do now was conjure up a kind of generic Mediterranean memory – Marlee slippery with suntan cream and buoyant with armbands, splashing in the shallow end of the pool; Josie lying on a recliner, reading a novel, while Jackson himself lapped the pool, his body a dark shape under the blue water, like a restless, obsessive shark.

Watching Nicola was just displacement activity, trying to keep his mind off the fact that someone was trying to kill him (although, let's face it, it was quite hard to forget something like that).

And now he had Tanya to think about as well. What was it that Shirley hadn't been telling the truth about? Walter and Doreen Fletcher, Keith's parents, moved to Lowestoft after the murder and seemed to have done a pretty poor job of parenting their only son's only child. Shirley had tried, she said, to stay in touch with her niece, but the Fletchers told her to keep away from them. "The sister of the woman who murdered their only child," she said. "You can't entirely blame them." When she was twelve, Tanya started running away from home. When she was fifteen, she stopped coming back. "I've looked for her everywhere," Shirley said, "but she seems to have slipped through the cracks."

Jackson added Tanya to the grim table of calculations that he carried in his head these days. Presuming she was alive, Tanya Fletcher would be twenty-five now. Olivia Land would be thirty-seven. Laura Wyre would be twenty-eight, Kerry-Anne Brockley. twenty-six. He hoped Tanya was living her future, that she really was twenty-five and that her days rolled by unstopped, unlike the holy girls, the Kerry-Annes, Olivias, and Lauras. And Niamh. Jackson's big sister, who would have been fifty years old this week the crew appeared in the terminal, wheeling their neat little flight bags behind them, going at a cracking pace across the tarmac, focused entirely on getting home, being off duty. If any passenger had intercepted them, looking for a miniature of whiskey or a second bread roll, they would probably have knocked them down and barreled right over them with their flight bags. All the flight attendants were women, no men – not that it seemed likely that Nicola would have an affair with a male flight attendant, Jackson had yet to spot a heterosexual one. The women were wearing hats that looked as if they belonged on the heads of girls from St. Trinians. Nicola was bringing up the rear with the copilot. He looked as if he was in his thirties, good-looking (in a pilot kind of way), but not much taller than Nicola. Was he touching her? The pilot – older, more gravitas than the copilot – turned and said something that made Nicola laugh. This was more promising. Jackson couldn't recall seeing her laugh before.

Jackson followed them outside the terminal and into the car park. Nicola and the pilot had parked their cars next to each other and Jackson thought that maybe this was a sign of something, but they said good-bye nonchalantly with no kissing, no touching, no meaningful looks. No hint of adultery. Nicola got in her car, revved up, and was off in her usual grand-prix style. Jackson followed at a less suicidal pace. He had a Fiat Punto rental in place of the Alfa.

The Punto was an orange color that made him feel conspicuous. It was definitely a woman's car. His own car was still in the police garage, where forensics was doing more tests on it. "The police take sabotage like this very seriously, Mr. Brodie," a new DS (new to Jackson anyway) had said to him, and Jackson said, "Right." He hadn't mentioned Quintus's name, Jackson didn't see how the police were going to do much that he couldn't do himself.

He'd been round to Binky's house the previous evening to see if Quintus was there, but there'd been no answer when he rang the bell . The Lexus was gone and Jackson wondered if Quintus had taken Binky for a drive or out for dinner. Did that seem likely?

He lost Nicola within minutes and when he pulled up, a discreet distance from her front lawn, she had already changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and was aggressively cutting the front grass with a push-and-pull mower in a way that reminded Jackson of Deborah's combative attitude toward her computer keyboard. Or of Josie's combative attitude toward everything – before David Lastingham gave her the Stepford lobotomy. Nicola was still wearing the full protective camouflage of her makeup, incongruous against her casual clothes. Her body language may have been belligerent but her face was a mask.

He should have brought Theo something, flowers, fruit, a good book, but he hadn't thought and now it was too late. Theo seemed smaller in the hospital bed. Less of a mountain man and more of a little, motherless boy. Jackson wished there was a way of making him happy. He told him about going to London to see Emma, but he seemed too zoned out to be really interested, although he had asked Jackson if he was okay (which was ironic given Theo's circumstances), and Jackson said, "That would very much depend on your definition of 'okay,' Theo."

The real worry for Jackson was that he might actually find the man in the yellow golfing sweater (although it hardly seemed likely) and it wouldn't do a damn thing to help Theo's pain. In fact it would make things worse because then he would have the "closure" he was looking for. And Laura would still be dead.

Jackson made his way through the overheated corridors of the hospital, from the medical admissions ward to the pediatric ICU. He walked into the unit unchallenged; the nurse at the desk recognized him and didn't question him. He would have preferred it if she had. It shouldn't be this easy to walk into places.

Jackson observed Shirley through a glass wall that felt like a oneway mirror for all the attention anyone paid to him. Shirley was wearing blue surgical scrubs. Jackson didn't think there was anything much sexier than the sight of a woman in surgical scrubs and wondered if he was alone in thinking that or if most guys did There should be opinion polls on these things. Shirley was standing over an ICU cot, delicately lifting a small waxy baby. It still had an array of tubes and monitors attached to its body so that it seemed like some odd, fragile creature from outer space.