J
ackson smoked the last cigarette. Nicola hadn’t done anything the least suspicious on Jackson’s watch, so if she was having an affair then she must be literally playing away from home—all those stopovers in midrange hotels, warm evenings, and cheap alcohol provided the perfect conditions for fostering bad behavior. Jackson had tried to explain to Steve that he was going to have to pay for Jackson to fly with Nicola if he really wanted to find out if anything was going on, but Steve wasn’t keen to fund what he seemed to think would be a free holiday abroad for Jackson. Jackson thought he might just go anyway and then do some creative accounting when it came to the bill, a return trip to almost anywhere in Europe could easily disappear into the catchall heading of “Sundries.” Maybe he would wait until she was on a flight to France and tag along. Jackson didn’t want a holiday, he wanted a new life. And he wanted to be finished with Nicola Spencer and her own dull life.
When Jackson set up as a private investigator two years ago he had no expectation of it being a glamorous profession. He’d already been a member of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary for twelve years and before that he was in the military police, so he had no illusions about the ways of the world. Investigating other people’s tragedies and cock-ups and misfortunes was all he knew. He was used to being a voyeur, the outsider looking in, and nothing, but nothing, that anyone did surprised him anymore. Yet despite everything he’d seen and done, inside Jackson there remained a belief—a small, battered and bruised belief—that his job was to help people be good rather than punishing them for being bad.
He left the police and set up the investigation agency after his marriage disappeared in front of his eyes. “What about your pension?” Josie said to him. “What about it?” Jackson said, a cavalier attitude he was beginning to regret.
For the most part, the work he undertook now was either irksome or dull—process serving, background checking and bad debts, and hunting down the odd rogue tradesman that the police would never get round to (“I gave him £300 up front for materials and I never saw him again.” Surprise, surprise). Not to forget missing cats.
On cue, Jackson’s mobile rang, a tinny rendition of “Carmen Burana,” a ring tone reserved exclusively for Binky Rain (“Binky”—what kind of a name
was
that? Really?). Binky Rain was the first client Jackson had acquired when he set up as a private investigator and he supposed he would never be rid of her until he retired and even then he could imagine her following him to France, a string of stray cats behind her, pied piper-like. She was a catwoman, the mad, old-bat variety that kept an open door for every feline slacker in Cambridge.
Binky was over ninety and was the widow of “a Peterhouse fellow,” a philosophy don (despite living in Cambridge for fourteen years, Jackson still thought of the mafia when he heard that word). “Doctor Rain”—Julian—had long gone to rest in the great Senior Common Room in the sky. Binky herself had been brought up in colonial Africa and treated Jackson like a servant, which was how she treated everyone. She lived in a bungalow in Newnham on the way to Grantchester Meadows in what must have once been a perfectly normal between-the-wars redbrick, but years of neglect had transformed it into an overgrown Gothic horror. The place was crawling with cats, hundreds of the damn things. Jackson got the heebie-jeebies just thinking about the smell—cat urine, tomcat spray, saucers of tinned food on every surface, the cheap stuff that was made from the parts of animals that even the burger chains shunned. Binky Rain had no money, no friends, and no family and her neighbors avoided her, and yet she effortlessly maintained the facade of aristocratic hauteur, like a refugee from some ancien régime, living out her life in tatters. Binky Rain was exactly the kind of person whose body lay undiscovered in her house for weeks, except that her cats would probably have eaten her by the time she was found.
Her complaint, the reason she had originally engaged Jackson’s services, was that someone was stealing her cats. Jackson couldn’t work out whether cats really did go missing or whether she just thought they went missing. She had this thing about black cats in particular. “Someone’s taking them,” she said in her clipped little voice, her accent as anachronistic as everything else about her, a remnant, a leftover from another time, another place, long turned into history. The first cat to go missing was a black cat (“bleck ket”) called Nigger—and Binky Rain thought that was all right! Not named after a black man (“bleck men”), she said dismissively when his jaw dropped, but after Captain Scott’s cat on the
Discovery.
(Did she really go around the quiet streets of Newnham shouting out “Nigger!”? Dear God, please not.) Her brother-in-law had been a stalwart of the Scott Polar Research Institute on Lensfield Road and had spent a winter camped on the ice of the Ross Shelf, making Binky an expert on antarctic exploration, apparently. Scott was “a fool,” Shackleton “a womanizer,” and Peary “an American,” which seemed to be enough of a condemnation in itself. The way Binky talked about polar expeditions (“Horses! Only an idiot would take horses!”) belied the fact that the most challenging journey she had undertaken was the voyage from Cape Town to Southampton in first class on the
Dunnottar Castle
in 1938.
Jackson’s best friend, Howell, was black, and when Jackson told him about Binky having a cat called Nigger, he roared with laughter. Howell dated from Jackson’s army days—they had started out as squaddies together. “Bleck men,” Howell laughed, doing a disturbing impression of an old white lady, disturbing given that Howell was six-foot-six and the blackest black man Jackson had ever met. After his discharge, Howell had returned to his native Birmingham and was currently working as a doorman for a large hotel, a job that required him to wear a ridiculous pantomime costume—a royal blue frock coat covered in gold braid and, even more ridiculously, a top hat. Howell had such an imposing presence that rather than losing dignity in this flunky’s outfit he actually made it seem strangely distinguished.
Howell must be at a dangerous age as well. What was he doing about it? It must be more than six months since they had spoken. That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers. Jackson missed Howell. Somewhere along the line Jackson had managed to lose not only his wife and child but all his friends as well. (Although had he had any friends other than Howell?) Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn’t notice that they were alone, so they wouldn’t die without a living soul noticing. Jackson hoped that wouldn’t happen to him. Anyway, he was going to die in France, in a chair, in the garden, after a good meal. Perhaps Marlee would be there on a visit, and she would have her children with her so that Jackson could see that part of him carried on into the future, that death wasn’t the end of everything.
Jackson let his voice mail pick up Binky’s message and then listened back to her imperial tones commanding him to visit her as soon as possible on “a matter of some urgency” to do with “Frisky.”
Binky Rain had never paid Jackson in the two years he had known her, but he supposed this was fair as, for his part, he had never found a single missing cat in those two years. He saw his visits to her more as a social service: no one else ever visited the poor old cow and Jackson had a tolerance for her idiosyncrasies that surprised even himself. She was an old Nazi boot but you had to admire her spirit. Why did she think people were taking her cats? Jackson thought it would be vivisection—the usual paranoid belief of cat lovers, but no, according to Binky they took them to make gloves out of them. (Bleck gloves, obviously.)
Jackson was just debating with himself whether to give up on tardy Nicola and obey Binky’s summons when the front door flew open. Jackson slid down in the driver’s seat and pretended to be concentrating on
Le Nouvel Observateur.
He could see from fifty yards away that Nicola was in a bad mood, although that was more or less her default setting. She looked hot, already tightly buttoned into the airline’s ugly uniform. The uniform didn’t show off her figure, and the heels she was wearing—like the Queen’s shoes—made her ankles look thick. The only time Jackson saw Nicola without makeup was when she was running.
Au naturel.
She ran like someone training for a marathon. Jackson was a runner—he ran three miles every morning, up at six, out on the street, back for coffee, before most people were up. That was what army training did for you. Army, the police, and a hefty dose of Scottish Presbyterian genes. (“Always running, Jackson,” Josie said. “If you run forever you come back to where you started from—that’s the curvature of space for you, did you know that?”)
Nicola looked much better in her running clothes. In her uniform she looked frumpy but when she ran around the maze of streets where she lived, she looked athletic and strong. For running, she wore tracksuit bottoms and an old Blue Jays T-shirt that she must have picked up in Toronto, although she hadn’t flown across the Atlantic during the time that Jackson had been watching her. She had been to Milan three times, Rome twice, and once each to Madrid, Düsseldorf, Perpignan, Naples, and Faro.
Nicola got in her car, a little girly Ford Ka, and took off like a rocket for Stansted. Jackson wasn’t exactly a slow driver but Nicola went at terrifying speeds. When this was over he was considering alerting someone in traffic. Jackson had done a stint in traffic before plainclothes and there were times when he would have liked to pull Nicola over and arrest her.
His phone rang again as the traffic slowed in a holding pattern around Stansted. This time it was his secretary, Deborah, who snapped, “Where are you?” as if he was supposed to be somewhere else.
“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”
“Someone phoned. You may as well go and see them while you’re out and about.” Deborah said “out and about” as if Jackson were getting drunk or picking up women.
“Do you want to enlighten me further?” he asked.
“No,” Deborah said. “Something about finding something.”
O
nce Nicola arrived at the airport her movements followed their usual routine. She parked her car and went inside the terminal, and Jackson watched her until she disappeared from view. After that he went to the toilets, had a double espresso from a paper cup that did nothing to cool down the heat of the day, purchased cigarettes, read the headlines in a newspaper that he didn’t buy, and then drove away again.
By the time Nicola’s plane to Prague was climbing steeply away from the flat countryside below, Jackson was walking up the path of a large house on Owlstone Road, frighteningly close to where Binky Rain lived. The door was answered by a woman stranded somewhere in her forties who squinted at Jackson over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles. Academic, he thought to himself.
“Mrs. Land?” Jackson said.
“Miss Land,” she said. “Amelia Land. Thank you for coming.”
A
melia Land made a terrible cup of coffee. Jackson could already feel its corrosive effect on his stomach. She was wandering around the neglected kitchen, searching for biscuits, even though Jackson had told her twice that he didn’t want one, thank you. Finally, she retrieved a packet of damp digestives from the depths of a cupboard and Jackson ate one just to keep her happy. The biscuit was like soft, stale sand in his mouth, but Amelia Land seemed satisfied that her duty as a hostess had been done.
She seemed very distracted, even mildly deranged, but, living in Cambridge, Jackson had got used to university types, although she said she lived in “Oxford, not Cambridge. It’s a
completely
different place,” and Jackson had thought, “Yeah, right,” but said nothing. Amelia Land kept babbling on about blue mice, and when he’d said gently to her, “Start at the beginning, Miss Land,” she’d carried on with the blue-mice theme and said that
was
the beginning, and “Please call me Amelia.” Jackson sighed inwardly, he sensed this tale was going to take a lot of coaxing.
The sister appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared, holding in her hand what looked like an old doll. You would never have taken them for relatives, one tall and heavy, her hair graying and falling out of a kind of topknot, the other short and curvy and—Jackson knew this type too—flirting with anything male and still breathing. The sister wore bright red lipstick and was dressed in what looked like secondhand clothes, layers of mismatched eccentric garments, her wild hair piled haphazardly on her head and fixed with a pencil. They were both dressed for cold weather rather than the sweltering day outside. Jackson could see why—he had shivered as he crossed the threshold, leaving the sunshine behind for the wintry gloom of the interior.
“Our father died two days ago,” Julia said, as if it were an everyday nuisance. Jackson looked at the doll on the table. It was made of some kind of grubby toweling material and had long thin legs and arms and the head of a mouse. And it was blue. Understanding finally dawned. He nodded at it. “A blue mouse,” he said to Amelia.
“No,
the
Blue Mouse,” she said, as if that distinction were vital. Amelia Land might as well have had “unloved” tattooed on her forehead. She was dressed in a way that suggested she’d stopped shopping for new clothes twenty years ago and that when she had shopped for clothes it had been exclusively in Laura Ashley. The way she was dressed reminded him of old photographs of fishwives—clumpy shoes and woolen tights and a cord dirndl skirt and around her shoulders some kind of shawl that she was hugging to herself as if she were freezing, which wasn’t a surprise because this place was
Baltic,
Jackson thought. It was as if the house had its own climate.
“Our father died,” Amelia said brusquely, “two days ago.”
“Yes,” Jackson said carefully. “Your sister just said that. I’m sorry for your loss,” he added, rather perfunctorily because he could see that neither of them seemed particularly sorry.
Amelia frowned and said, “What I mean is . . .” She looked at her sister for help. That was the trouble with academic types, Jackson thought, never able to say what they mean and half the time never meaning what they say.