Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  Crystal cooked the kind of food his father liked—the “full English,” which she made every morning, the Sunday roast (“and all the trimmings”), and in between steaks and burgers, although his father spent a lot of time at work or “out and about” when he picked up takeaways. Or he came in late and took a pizza or a ready meal from the freezer (a Meneghini, the price of which would have bought Harry his first car when the time came).

  Crystal and Candace didn’t eat any of “that muck,” as Crystal called it. The arrival of Candace had made her a “convert” to healthy eating. “Clean eating,” she said. “I like those words.” She was on the internet all the time, blogs and vlogs and recipes. Salads and fruit and veg. Cashew milk, tofu. Quinoa, chia, goji berries—food that sounded as if it should be eaten by tribesmen in the Amazon, not a sixteen-year-old boy in Yorkshire. Last week Crystal had made a “chocolate” cake from black beans and avocados and yesterday she had offered Harry a “meringue,” saying, “I bet you can’t tell what that’s made from.” No, he couldn’t. Something that had died at the bottom of a well a hundred years ago, perhaps. “The water from a tin of chickpeas!” Crystal said triumphantly. “It’s called aquafaba,” which sounded to Harry’s ears like something the Romans might have built.

  Harry was generally free, however, to choose what he ate. Crystal was always pushing broccoli and sweet potatoes on him. “You’re a growing boy, Harry. You are what you eat.” Which meant he was pretty much an American hot pizza. Clean eating hadn’t stopped Crystal smoking, Harry noticed (“Just the odd one here and there, Harry. Don’t tell on me”), although she never smoked in front of Candace or in the house, just the conservatory, which they hardly ever went in. And he’d never seen her drink much, not like his father.

  If Crystal was in a fire, the first things she would save—apart from Candace, obviously—would be her Vitamix blender and her Kuvings juicer, the lares and penates of High Haven as far as she was concerned. (“How about a glass of kale and celery juice, Harry?”) Who would save him? Harry wondered. His dad, he hoped. Or perhaps Brutus. “Don’t be daft,” Crystal said. “I’d save you.”

  Crystal loved doing housework and, despite Harry’s dad’s insistence, she refused to employ a cleaner because they wouldn’t be as “thorough” as she was. “I married a dolly bird,” Tommy complained, “and I ended up with Mrs. Mopp.” “Dolly bird” and “Mrs. Mopp” were words that Tommy had learned from his own father, apparently, and were utterly mysterious to both Harry and Crystal.

  High Haven itself was Edwardian, although you could only tell from the outside as Crystal had stripped it of all its original fittings and fixtures and made it look more like the white and shiny interior of a spaceship. (“I know,” Crystal said, regarding the kitchen island fondly, “you could operate on that.”)

  High Haven had been built as the holiday retreat of a long-dead Bradford wool baron and his family, and Harry liked to imagine how it must have once looked—the ferns in brass pots, the Vaseline glass lampshades, the Arts and Crafts friezes. And the swishing of silk skirts and the tinkle of teacups instead of the built-in Miele coffee machine that sounded like a steam train when it was pumping caffeine into his father. (“Why not put in a drip?” Crystal said to Tommy.)

  Harry had a feel for the way things looked in the past. He had helped to design the set for a school production of The Importance of Being Earnest. (“That was quite an avant-garde take on the play,” he overheard the headmaster say to Miss Dangerfield.) Miss Dangerfield said to Harry that she suspected his future lay in theater design rather than acting.

  Crystal was a “neat freak,” according to his dad. “Yeah, OCD,” she said triumphantly, as though she’d worked hard to acquire it. Everything folded and sorted and lined up exactly. Tins, ornaments, clothes, everything “just so.” She had come into Harry’s room once to ask him something (she always knocked, unlike his dad) and started putting the books on his bookshelves into (not quite correct) alphabetical order, and he didn’t have the heart to point out that he had already arranged them according to subject. (“I’m not a reader, Harry. School and me didn’t really get on. Marie Claire’s my limit.”)

  The bricks in the wall of frozen food in the Meneghini, Harry had realized one day when he was looking for oven chips, were arranged in a complex categorical system that could have put a librarian to shame. He’d had Olivia and Amy around to the house one afternoon and Olivia had opened up the fridge to get a juice and she had screamed, actually screamed, when she saw the inside of the fridge. Harry had to admit he felt a certain amount of pride in being the stepson of a woman whose ranks of labeled Tupperware and glass could impress a sixteen-year-old girl that much. Wait until she saw the bathroom, he thought.

  His friend Amy appeared, to take over the World from him, as Harry had to get to the Palace in time for the evening performance.

  “There’s someone in,” he said, indicating the entrance to the dark tunnel. “Mum, dad, one kid.” The “kid” was about ten years old, a lumpish scowling boy who had been gnawing on a stick of rock candy like a dinosaur chomping on a bone. “He won’t be scared, will he?” his timid mother had asked.

  “Unlikely,” Harry said.

  “Archie isn’t here,” he said to Amy. “You’ll have to put the mask on.”

  “No way,” Amy said. “It’s disgustingly unhygienic. They can do without a vampire.”

  Amy had an eating disorder and Harry had read a lot about it online so that he’d know the kinds of things he shouldn’t say to her—like “Eat up, you need some meat on your bones,” or “At least finish what’s on your plate, for heaven’s sake,” which were things Amy’s mother said to her all the time. Harry, on the other hand, said things like, “I’m not going to be able to eat all of this apple, would you like half of it?” Half an apple didn’t alarm Amy the way a big plate of pasta did.

  “They’ve been in there a long time—longer than usual, anyway.”

  “Maybe they’ve been scared to death. That’ll be the day. You’re going to be late, Harry.”

  “Oh, by the way,” Harry said casually as he was going out the door, “there’s a hummus and salad sandwich here I couldn’t eat. Crystal made it so it’s all good. Just toss it if you don’t want it.”

  “Thanks, Harry.”

  The Kray Twins

  Reggie had brought in coffee in a thermos flask. The coffee at the station was bogging, more like brown water than actual coffee. Ronnie drank hers black, but Reggie had brought a little jar of soy milk to put in hers. She’d been a vegan for quite a long time, nearly ten years, before celebrities made it fashionable. People always seemed to want to quiz her about her diet and she found the best response was a vague “Oh, you know—allergies,” because everyone was allergic to something these days. What she really would have liked to say was “Because I don’t want to put dead animals inside my body” or “Because cow’s milk is for baby cows” or “I don’t want to add to the death of the planet,” but for some reason people didn’t like it when you said that. Mind you, it was hard work being a vegan and Reggie was no cook. She’d probably be dead of starvation by now if it wasn’t for her go-to meal of beans on toast. Reggie was twenty-six, but she didn’t think that she had ever been the right age.

  “Thanks,” Ronnie said when Reggie poured her a coffee. They had their own mugs. They had already had coffee that morning, “at home,” as they had already started calling it, although they had so far only spent two nights in the little tumbledown Airbnb cottage in Robin Hood’s Bay that had been rented for a week—which was how long this part of the investigation was expected to take.

  They perched side by side on the one desk they had been allotted in a sparse office that was on the top floor of the station. There was a computer on the desk and that was pretty much it apart from a pile of boxes that had appeared out of nowhere yesterday and contained paperwork pertaining to the original investigation into Bassani and Carmody. It was a chaotic jumble of receipts and bills and
mysterious notes that their DI, Rod Gilmerton, had asked the local force to sweep up for them. “Paperwork” would be an obsolete word one day. Reggie very much hoped so, anyway. Another reason for not partaking of the station coffee was that Gilmerton had instructed them to keep themselves to themselves. “Discretion’s the better part of whatever,” he said.

  “Valor,” Reggie supplied. “Although what Shakespeare actually said is ‘The better part of valor is discretion.’ People always misquote.”

  “You need to get a life, Reggie,” Gilmerton said.

  “Contrary to popular opinion, I do have one,” Reggie said.

  There had been no flags and bunting out for them when they arrived. They were interlopers from another force and they had not been exactly welcome in this neck of the woods. The case they had been tasked with had originated here over ten years ago now. It had been closed for some time—the guilty punished, the innocent compensated, the stain scrubbed away, although, as any SOCO will tell you, there’s always a trace left behind. Nonetheless, everyone behaved as if it were closed, and not just closed, but put in a locked box on a high shelf where everyone involved had tried to forget about it and move on, and now here were Ronnie and Reggie breaking the locks and opening the box again.

  It was still early and it was relatively quiet, although down below at the front of the house a small knot of last night’s drunks were being processed by the desk sergeant so they could be released back into society and become tonight’s drunks. Reggie and Ronnie spent a few rather futile minutes looking over their notes from yesterday. They had spent the previous afternoon interviewing a pro at the Belvedere Golf Club whose memory might as well have been wiped clean by aliens. In fact, the aliens seemed to have been quite busy in the amnesia business around here.

  Ronnie was usually based in Bradford and Reggie in Leeds, and although they had only been working together for a couple of weeks, out of Reggie’s station in Leeds, they had already discovered how harmonious they were. Reggie could imagine them being friends outside of work, but had kept that thought to herself as she didn’t want to appear too eager.

  They had been brought in as part of a small outside task force that went by the name Operation Villette. Actually they pretty much were Operation Villette. Gilmerton was bouncing on and off other investigations as well. He was pleasant enough and at first Reggie had liked the way he made light of things, and then after a while he had begun to seem more lightweight than light.

  Reggie and Ronnie had been recruited to interview potential witnesses and contacts. Some new accusations had recently come to light and the accuser herself lived on their patch. Their job was to talk to people who had been mentioned by other people who in turn had been mentioned by other people, a bit like a game of Chinese whispers. It was an ever-expanding jigsaw, one with a lot of missing pieces as it dialed all the way back to the seventies and many of the people mentioned were dead. Unfortunately. The new accusations involved establishment figures—big cheeses, “head yins,” in Reggie’s native patois—and yet the investigation couldn’t be more low-profile. Perhaps for good reason. Or perhaps not.

  Gilmerton was on the edge of retirement, demob happy, and was pretty much leaving them to “get on with things” on their own. He wasn’t expecting much in the way of results, he said (“We’re just dotting some ‘i’s and crossing some ‘t’s”), which made Ronnie and Reggie more determined than ever to solve the puzzle.

  “We’ll find all the pieces,” Reggie said. “They’ll be under a carpet or down the back of a sofa. But we’ll finish it.”

  “Perhaps they’ve been swept under the carpet on purpose,” Ronnie said.

  Ronnie liked to be organized almost as much as Reggie did, and that was saying something. They were both newly promoted, fast-tracking “all the way to the top,” Ronnie said. Two years in uniform and then a training period in CID. Keen as mustard. Reggie planned to apply for a job with the National Crime Agency. Ronnie wanted to join the Met.

  Reggie was Scottish, but did not have the exile’s longing for her homeland. Some of the worst years of her life had been spent in Edinburgh, where she came from. And anyway, her family were all dead now, so there was no one to go back to. At eighteen, she’d flown south and landed in Derby, where she did a degree in Law and Criminology. Before she went there she couldn’t have found Derby on the map. She hadn’t really minded where she went as long as it wasn’t where she came from.

  Ronnie had studied for a master’s in Forensic Science from the University of Kent. Her name was Veronika, spelled Weronika. Her parents were Polish and her mother called her Vera, which she hated. She was second generation. Her parents talked a lot about going back, but Ronnie wasn’t interested. Yet one more thing she had in common with Reggie.

  They were the same height—short. (“Petite,” Ronnie amended.) Reggie wore her hair bobbed to her ears and Ronnie wore hers in a bun held tidily in place by a scrunchy. The older female detectives were, on the whole, a sartorial mess—jeans or ill-fitting skirts, washed-out shirts, and unfashionable jackets on bodies softened by too many takeaways and packets of crisps. Reggie and Ronnie were spick and span. Today Ronnie was wearing a white shirt and a pair of navy-blue trousers. Despite the warm weather, Reggie was wearing a black suit in “summer-weight wool” (no such thing, she had discovered—wool was wool).

  When she was younger, Reggie had hoped that one day she would have a life that involved a black suit. Her mentor and employer at that time, Joanna Hunter, had gone to work every day as a GP in a black suit. Reggie had worked as Dr. Hunter’s nanny and they still kept in regular contact, even though Dr. Hunter had moved to New Zealand with her son Gabriel for a “fresh start.” (You could hardly blame her when you thought about what had happened to her.) “Why don’t you come, Reggie? Come for a visit. You might even think about getting a job here.” New Zealand seemed to Reggie to be awfully far away. “Well, not when you’re actually here,” Dr. Hunter wrote. “Then it’s not far away at all. Then it’s just where you are. You’re here.” Not so much a mentor as a guru.

  Reggie did Tae kwon do, Ronnie boxed. You had to do something when you were small and you were female and you were police. A triple whammy. Reggie was fast-tracking in Tae kwon do as well as CID, already a third dan. Reggie harbored a daydream. The dark night, the sinister alley, the unexpected attack—and the surprise of her assailant when he was knocked to the ground. Hi-yah! Not that anyone said that in her class. And not that she was violent, but if you’d spent your life being referred to as a “wee lass,” or as “poor little Reggie Chase,” you were allowed the occasional fierce fantasy.

  Reggie had been offered a scholarship to Cambridge but hadn’t taken it up. She knew she’d have sunk among all that privilege and entitlement, and even if they had accepted her they would still have looked at her and seen her unfortunate background every day of her time there. Her father had been killed before she was born in a “friendly fire” incident (not very friendly at all, in Reggie’s opinion) in a futile war that everyone had pretty much forgotten now. And her mother had drowned in a swimming-pool accident when Reggie was fifteen, leaving just a brother for her to lose to drugs.

  Derby had been a revelation: people her own age who liked her (She had friends!) and a relationship (Sex! Not embarrassing!) with a funny, polite boy who had studied Computer Science and was now working as an anti-hacker for the same evil multinational corporation that he had hacked when he was a postgrad, because of course that was what happened to every good hacker—coerced to work for the devil under threat of a long jail sentence or extradition. He was called Sai and had Asian good looks and they no longer saw each other because he was having an arranged marriage and had been poached by the FBI and was going off to work at Quantico, all of which seemed to Reggie to be an excessively dramatic way of ending a relationship.

  Her heart wasn’t shattered, just cracked, although cracked was bad enough. And she had her career, and the black suit, as a comfort. “That’s the i
mportant thing,” Ronnie said. Ronnie herself was “between girlfriends.” Reggie often found herself wishing that she was gay too, it might make life simpler, but Ronnie laughed her head off and said, “And how exactly?”

  Reggie had started with the Tae kwon do at uni. There were clubs for anything you fancied learning. Dr. Hunter had been in the running club at her university—as well as shooting—and Reggie knew how useful those two things could be because Dr. Hunter had demonstrated how.

  Dr. Hunter had been the nicest, kindest, most sympathetic person that Reggie had ever known, and Reggie knew for a fact that Dr. Hunter had murdered two men with her bare hands (literally) and only Reggie and one other person knew about it. So it just went to show. “Justice has nothing to do with the law,” Dr. Hunter had told her once, and Reggie understood what she meant, as would that one other person who knew about Dr. Hunter’s short career as an assassin.

  Ronnie and Reggie drained their coffee cups, both finishing at the same time. They left a message for Gilmerton to tell him what their plans were for today, ditto with Control here. More of an operational issue, really, as Reggie got the feeling that no one actually cared.

  “Right, then,” Ronnie said. “We’d better get started.”

  They had their warrant cards ready when Ronnie rang the doorbell of the Seashell. A woman answered and Ronnie said, “Good morning, I’m DC Ronnie Dibicki and this is DC Reggie Chase.” Reggie smiled at the woman and held her warrant card higher for scrutiny, but the woman barely glanced at it. “We’re looking for a Mr. Andrew Bragg?” Ronnie said.

  “Andy? What do you want him for?”

  “Are you Mrs. Bragg?” Reggie asked.

  “Maybe,” the woman said. Well, you either are or you aren’t, Reggie thought. You’re not Schrödinger’s cat.

  “And is Mr. Bragg here?” Ronnie asked. “We just need a quick word,” she mollified. “Tidying up a few loose ends in a historic case. Paperwork, really.” Ronnie raised a questioning eyebrow at the woman. She was very good at the raised-eyebrow thing. Reggie had tried it, but she just ended up looking as though she were trying to do a poor (really poor) impression of Roger Moore. Or Groucho Marx.