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  Of course, at the rate he was going it wouldn’t be early retirement, just retirement. Jackson could remember when he was a kid and retired men were the old guys who tottered between the allotment and the corner of the snug. They had seemed like really old guys but maybe they weren’t much older than he was now. Jackson was forty-five but felt much, much older. He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they’re going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn’t a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn’t stop them trying, whether it’s shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated). Then there were the guys who found themselves in the rut of routine alcoholic tedium – the lost and lonesome highway of your average beta male (his father’s way). And then there was Jackson’s own chosen path that led to the everyday Zen of a French house with its white stucco walls, geraniums in pots on the windowsills, a blue door, the paint peeling because who gives a damn about house maintenance in rural France?

  He had parked in the shade but the sun had moved higher in the sky now and the temperature in the car was becoming uncomfortable. She was called Nicola Spencer and she was twenty-nine years old and lived in a neat ghetto of brick-built houses. The houses and the streets all looked the same to Jackson and if he lost his bearings for a moment he ended up in a Bermuda triangle of identical open-plan front lawns. Jackson had an almost unreasonable prejudice against housing estates. This prejudice was not unrelated to his ex-wife and his ex-marriage. It was Josie who had wanted a house on a new estate, Josie who had been one of the first people to sign up to live in Cambourne, the purpose-built Disney-like ‘community’ outside Cambridge with its cricket pitch on the ‘traditional’ village green, its ‘Roman-themed play area’. It was Josie who had moved them into the house when the street was still a building site and insisted that they furnish it with practical modern designs, who had rejected Victoriana as cluttered, who had thought an excess of carpets and curtains was ‘suffocating’ and yet now she was inhabiting ye olde curiosity shop with David Lastingham – a Victorian terrace crammed with antique furniture that he’d inherited from his parents, every available surface swathed and draped and curtained. (‘You’re sure he’s not gay then?’ Jackson had asked Josie, just to rile her – the guy had professional manicures, for heaven’s sake – and she’d laughed and said, ‘He’s not insecure with his masculinity, Jackson.’)

  Jackson could feel the ache in his jaw starting up again. He was currently seeing more of his dentist than he had of his wife in the last year of their marriage. His dentist was called Sharon and was what his father used to refer to as ‘stacked’. She was thirty-six and drove a BMW Z3, which was a bit of a hairdresser’s car in Jackson’s opinion, but nonetheless he found her very attractive. Unfortunately, there was no possibility of having a relationship with someone who had to put on a mask, protective glasses and gloves to touch you. (Or one who peered into your mouth and murmured, ‘Smoking, Jackson?’)

  He opened an out-of-date copy of Le Nouvel Observateur and tried to read it because his French teacher said they should immerse themselves in French culture, even if they didn’t understand it. Jackson could only pick out the odd word that meant anything and he could see subjunctives scatter-gunned all over the place – if ever there was an unnecessary tense it was the French subjunctive. His eyes drifted drowsily over the page. A lot of his life these days consisted of simply waiting, something he would have been useless at twenty years ago but which he now found almost agreeable. Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought. Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn’t get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place. He thought sometimes he would like to enter a monastery, that he would be good at being an ascetic, an anchorite, a Zen monk.

  Jackson had arrested a jeweller once, an old guy who’d been fencing stolen property, and when Jackson came looking for him in his workshop he’d found him sitting in an ancient armchair, smoking his pipe and contemplating a piece of rock on his workbench. Without saying anything, he took the rock and placed it in Jackson’s palm, as if it was a gift. Jackson was reminded of his biology teacher from school, who would hand you something – a bird’s egg, a leaf – and make you explain it to him rather than the other way round. The rock was a dark ironstone that looked like petrified tree-bark and sandwiched in the centre of it was a seam of milky opal, like a hazy summer sky at dawn. A notoriously tricky stone to work, the old man informed Jackson. He had been looking at it for two weeks now, he said, another two weeks and he might be ready to start cutting it and Jackson said that in another two weeks he would be in a remand prison somewhere, but the guy had a great lawyer and made bail and got away with a suspended sentence.

  A year later Jackson received a parcel addressed to him at the police station. Inside there was no note, just a box, and in a nest lined with midnight-blue velvet was an opal pendant, a little plaque of sky. Jackson knew he was being given a lesson by the old man, but it had taken him many years to understand it. He was keeping the pendant for Marlee’s eighteenth birthday.

  Nicola’s husband, Steve Spencer, was convinced his wife ‘had taken a lover’ – that’s how he put it, so it sounded delicate and rather courtly to Jackson’s ears, whereas most of the suspicious spouses who came to him tended to voice their mistrust in cruder terms. Steve was the nervy, paranoid type and he couldn’t understand how he’d managed to net someone like Nicola, because she was ‘so gorgeous’. Jackson had known gorgeous in his time and it wasn’t the Nicola Spencers of the world, although he thought that if he was married to Steve Spencer he might be tempted to ‘take a lover’. Steve was a pharmacist in a chain of chemists and seemed to have no hobbies or interests other than Nicola. She was ‘the only woman in the world’ for him. Jackson had never believed that there was one person in the world that you were destined for. And if there was, knowing his luck, she’d be working in a rice field in the middle of China or be a convicted killer on the run.

  When she wasn’t at work, Nicola Spencer went to the gym, to Sainsbury’s (and once, for no apparent reason, to Tesco’s), her mother’s, a friend called Louise and a friend called Vanessa. Vanessa was part of a married couple – Vanessa and Mike – who were also friends of ‘Steve and Nicola’. Louise and Vanessa, as far as Jackson could tell, didn’t know each other. Nicola also went regularly to the garage, for petrol obviously, and in the garage shop she sometimes bought milk and nearly always bought chocolate and a copy of Hello! or Heat. She had also been to a garden centre, where she bought a tray of bedding plants which she put straight into the garden and then failed to water, judging by the look of them when Jackson climbed up on the garden fence to have a snoop at what went on chez Spencer, or, more accurately, au jardin Spencer.

  In the last four weeks Nicola had also been to a DIY superstore where she bought a screwdriver and a Stanley knife, to Habitat where she bought a table lamp, to Top Shop for a white T-shirt, Next for a white blouse, to Boots (twice for cosmetics and toiletries and once with a prescription for Ponstan), Robert Sayle’s for two blue hand towels, and to a fish stall on the market where she bought (expensive) monkfish for a meal, for the aforesaid Vanessa and Mike, which Steve Spencer later reported to have been ‘a disaster’. Nicola was not a great cook apparently. She also led a bloody boring life, unless something fantastically interesting happened to her when she was pushing a trolley up and down the economy aisles of her airline. Is that what had happened to Josie when she ‘took’ David Lastingham, was she just so bored with Jackson that she couldn’t bear it any more? She met him at a party, a party that Jackson hadn’t gone to because he was working, and the pair of them had ‘tried to control their feelings’ but they obviously hadn’t tried hard enough because within six months they were taking each other at every available clandestine opportunity and now Da
vid Lastingham got to put his penis in Mummy’s vagina whenever he felt like it.

  Josie had filed for divorce as soon as it was possible. Irretrievable breakdown – as if it was all his fault and she wasn’t shagging some poncy guy with a goatee. (‘David,’ Marlee said, not as grudgingly as Jackson would have liked. ‘He’s all right, he buys me chocolate, he makes nice pasta.’ It was a six-lane motorway from that girl’s stomach to her heart. ‘I cook nice pasta,’ Jackson said and heard how childish that sounded and didn’t care. Jackson had got someone he knew to look up David Lastingham on the paedophile register. Just in case.)

  Jackson 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 mid-range hotels, warm evenings and cheap alcohol provided the perfect conditions for fostering bad behaviour. 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 catch-all 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 had 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 any more. 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 punish 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 Carmina Burana, a ringtone 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). ‘Dr 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 Newnham, on the way to Grantchester Meadows, in a bungalow which must once have been a perfectly normal between-the-wars redbrick but which years of neglect had transformed 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, tom-cat 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 neighbours avoided her and yet she effortlessly maintained the façade 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 their 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, ‘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, thus 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, when 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 over 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 of 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 voicemail 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, a
ccording 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 courts she was wearing – like the Queen’s shoes – made her ankles look thick. When she was running was the only time Jackson saw Nicola without make-up. 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 for ever 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 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 plain-clothes and there were times when he would have liked to pull Nicola over and arrest her.