Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

Superintendent Marian Foster had moved to Filey on her retirement from the force and was still doggedly unpacking cardboard boxes in her kitchen when Jackson and Marlee arrived on her doorstep. Jackson had phoned her from the car to tell her he was coming, and she seemed pleased to be interrupted, as if she already realized that burying herself in a small seaside town might not be the best way to spend her nonworking life. "I expect I'll find a committee or two that needs a firm hand." She laughed. "Finally do that OU degree, join an evening class." She sighed and added, "It's going to be fucking awful, isn't it, Inspector?"

"Oh, I don't know, ma'am," Jackson said. "I'm sure you'll get used to it." Try as he might, Jackson couldn't think of anything more positive to say. He could see his own future reflected only too clearly back at him.

Marian Foster could obviously recognize a sugar junkie when she saw one, and she sat Marlee down in front of the television with a can of Coke and a plate of chocolate biscuits. She made a mug of achingly strong tea for herself and Jackson. "Gone soft?" she said when she saw him flinch at the taste. "You're back in Yorkshire now, boy."

"Don't I know it."

"So," Marian Foster said, suddenly businesslike, "Olivia Land? What can I tell you? I was a lowly PC, and a woman to boot. I interviewed the Land girls, but I doubt whether there's anything I can add to what you know."

"I'm not so sure," Jackson said. "Feelings, impressions, instincts, anything. Tell me what you would have done differently if you'd been in charge."

"Knowing everything I know now about the world?" She sighed, a weighty sigh. "I would have looked at the father more closely. I would have suspected abuse."

"Really? Why?"

"There was something wrong with Sylvia, the eldest. There were things she was hiding, things she wasn't saying. She would start to disassociate if you questioned her too closely. And she was… I don't know – strange." Strange – the same word Binky Rain had used about Sylvia.

"And the father was a cold fish," Marian Foster continued. "Controlled and controlling. The rest of them were a mess – the mother, the other girls. I've forgotten their names."

"Amelia and Julia."

"Of course. Amelia and Julia. You want my honest opinion?"

"More than anything," Jackson said.

"I think the father did it. I think Victor Land killed Olivia."

Jackson removed the crucial evidence from his pocket and laid it down on Marian Foster's kitchen table. Tears welled in her eyes, and for a moment she couldn't speak. "Blue Mouse," she said finally. "After all this time. Where did you find him?"

The thing about Sylvia was that she hadn't really been surprised to see Blue Mouse. It was as if she'd been waiting for him to turn up eventually. And she hadn't been curious as to where Jackson had found it – Jackson had told her, but she hadn't asked. Wouldn't that be your first question? It was Marian Foster's first question. "Where did you find him?"

Jester wagged his tail when he saw Jackson, but Sylvia looked less pleased to see him on the other side of the grille in the visiting room. She frowned and said, "What do you want?" and Jackson thought he caught a glance of a different Sylvia, a less spiritual one.

Jackson's painkillers were wearing off. He would have liked to have taken his head off and given it a rest. How was he going to go about this? He took a deep breath and looked into Sylvia's mud-colored eyes.

"Sister Mary Luke," he said. "Sylvia." Her eyes narrowed when he spoke her real name but her gaze didn't waiver. "Sylvia, think of me as a priest in the confessional. Whatever you say to me will never go beyond me. Tell me the truth, Sylvia. That's all I want." Because in the end that was what it came down to, didn't it? "Tell me the truth about what happened to Olivia."

He had to push hard on the gate to open it. He felt like an intruder. He was an intruder. There was a piece of crime tape caught on one of the branches of Binky's apple trees. It wasn't a crime scene anymore. Binky had died of natural causes – "old age really," the pathologist said to Jackson. Jackson supposed it was pretty much a triumph if you went that way. He hoped Marlee died of old age, under an apple tree somewhere, long after Jackson himself had gone.

The place was like some kind of nature conservation area. There were bats flitting in and out of the eaves of the house, and a frog lolloped lazily away from him as he approached, and, despite sweeping the path with his big police-issue Maglite, he almost stood on a baby hedgehog as he worked his way round the thorns and weeds to the corner of the garden. The brambles were almost impenetrable and Jackson could see how something could get overlooked here. Something precious. It wasn't going to be as easy as simply raking through grass and dead leaves. In fact, Jackson didn't actually expect to find anything. It wasn't just that there was so much wildlife around – you could hardly walk into one of these gardens without encountering a fox – it was just that it was so rare when you went searching for something precious that had been lost that you actually found it.

In the corner, Sylvia said, beyond the apple trees, beyond the big beech. Jackson couldn't tell a beech from a birch, couldn't do tree identification at all, so he followed the wall round until it turned into another wall and reckoned that must be the corner.

He dug with his hands, an inefficient, filthy way of doing it, but a spade seemed too brutal. He didn't dig, he excavated. Delicately. The ground was hard and dry and he had to scrape at the soil. It was pitch black by the time he uncovered the first sign of her. His face and forearms were prickling with dirt and sweat. He kept thinking about Niamh, about the two days he and Francis had searched for her, in every stinking bin and rubbish heap, every corner of every piece of waste ground until Jackson felt like a feral animal, a creature that had moved far beyond the normal bonds and bounds of society. He had watched the police dragging the canal and had seen them lifting out his sister's body, sluicy with mud and water. He remembered that the first feeling he had, before all the other more complex feelings flooded in, was one of relief that they had found her, that she wouldn't be out there, lost forever.

Sylvia said Olivia had simply been left, more or less, where she died, covered up with some branches and grass. Every square inch of this garden should have been searched on hands and knees, that was how Jackson would have done it, a fingertip search of the immediate vicinity. He remembered Binky saying something about seeing the officers off her property, giving them "short shrift." Was that all it took, one domineering old Tory to tell you to get lost and you did? And all this time Olivia had simply been lying here, patiently waiting for someone to come and find her. Jackson thought about Victor, covering his smallest child up with weeds and garden rubbish as if she wasn't worth anything, leaving her behind in a strange place while her body was still warm. Not taking her home. Victor, who then went back to his bed, locking the back door, leaving Amelia outside alone to discover her sister gone. Victor, who for thirty-four years had kept Blue Mouse locked up like the truth. The Land girls used to play in Binky's garden and then Sylvia told them to keep out. Because she knew Olivia was here.

The first thing he found was a clavicle and then what looked like an ulna. He stopped his excavating and moved the Maglite around until it caught the small, pale moon of the skull. Jackson took out his phone and called the station at Parkside.

He sat back on his heels and examined the clavicle, brushing the soil off it with the tenderness of an archaeologist finding something rare, something unique, which it was, of course. The clavicle was tiny and fragile, like an animal's, a rabbit or a hare, the broken wishbone of a bird. Jackson kissed it reverently because he knew it was the holiest relic he would ever find. It started to rain, Jackson couldn't remember when it had last rained. Aqua lateris Christi, lava me. Jackson wept. Not for Niamh, or Laura Wyre or Kerry-Anne Brockley or any of the other lost girls – he wept for the little girl with gingham ribbons in her hair, the little girl who had once held Blue Mouse in her arms and told him to smile for the camera.