Free Case Histories by Kate Atkinson Page B

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.
    “Let