Free Case Histories by Kate Atkinson Page A

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