Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  They had spent a lot of time on that sofa together, watched a lot of television on it, eaten a lot of takeaways on it, drunk a lot of tea, not to mention wine, on it. The dog used to lie flopped between them like an armrest. Yes, it was a dull and pedestrian existence, but there was something to be said for that. Better than starving or being shot at or being swept away by a tsunami. Better than being a murder suspect. Definitely better than being dead.

  Afterward, after he was ejected from the self-same sofa, Wendy told him that their home life together had become “a living death,” which Vince thought was going a bit far. Now she’d probably happily settle for a living death instead of, well, a dead death. Vince missed that sofa. He had felt safe and comfortable on it. It had been a lifeboat and now he was drowning.

  “You don’t remember being at Ms. Easton’s house—Thisldo—last night at about eleven p.m.?” the Spanish Inquisitor pressed on relentlessly. “You were seen on a neighbor’s security camera.”

  “My house as well, not just Wendy’s,” he corrected dully. “I’m still paying the mortgage. And I’m not not living there by choice.” Was that a double negative? he wondered.

  “Or,” she said, ignoring this remark, “do you remember speaking to a man who lives in the neighboring house, a Mr.…”—she consulted her notes—“a Mr. Benjamin Lincoln?”

  “Benny. Yes. It slipped my mind. Sorry.”

  “Slipped your mind?”

  Vince had half expected Inspector Marriot to arrest him on the spot, but he was told he was free to go. “We’d like you to come back in tomorrow, if you don’t mind, Mr. Ives.”

  “How was she killed?” he asked. “I mean I know it was a head injury, but how? What did they use as a weapon?”

  “A golf club, Mr. Ives. A golf club.”

  What was he supposed to do now? he wondered. Perhaps he could go for a walk, he thought, clear his head. They wouldn’t let him have the dog, it was “being tested for DNA.” Did they think Sparky had killed Wendy? No, the inspector said, looking at him sadly as if she felt sorry for him being such a fool. “In case the dog attacked the killer.”

  He didn’t walk, he caught a bus. By chance he was hovering indecisively next to a stop when a bus drew up and, in an uncharacteristic act of spontaneity, he simply stepped on board. It was the first time he’d been on a bus in twenty years. Who was driving his company car now? he wondered as he settled in the seat. He had given it no thought when it was his, now he thought of it fondly, almost the way he thought of Sparky.

  The bus said Middlesbrough on the front but it may as well have said The First Circle of Hell. And what did it matter anyway? He just needed to get away, leave it all behind. If only he could leave himself behind. Vince supposed that if he disappeared the police would presume he was guilty, but he was past caring. Perhaps they would issue one of those things they had on American cop shows? BOLOs, that’s what they were called, wasn’t it? Be on the lookout for. Running for the border, he thought, like a man in a book or a film, although he was neither, he was a man in his own life, and that life was falling apart. And there was no border to run for, unless you counted the invisible administrative one between North Yorkshire and Teesside. Vince didn’t even get that far. He got off the bus in Whitby in case he fell asleep and ended up in limbo, or Middlesbrough, which was much the same thing, and then walked along the beach as far as he could before the tide started chasing him and he climbed up a set of steps slippery with seaweed onto the sidewalk that ran along the front.

  He passed a small hotel overlooking the sea and, to his surprise, realized that it was the Seashell—Andy Bragg’s place. He’d only been here a couple of times, and in the car. Everything seemed different when you were on foot. (Much slower, for a start.) He wondered about going in and drowning his sorrows, unburdening his problems to a sympathetic ear (You’ll never guess what happened to me today, Andy), but he knew that Andy didn’t have much of a sympathetic ear, his wife, Rhoda, even less of one. Times like this you needed a (friend) friend, but he couldn’t think of a single one. He had tried Tommy’s house phone, hoping that perhaps Crystal would be there, but only the answering machine spoke to him, or rather Harry, Tommy’s son, whose voice announced, “You have reached the number for the Holroyd family.” He had tried Tommy’s mobile too, but that just rang out, didn’t even go to voicemail. He had no one he could talk to. Not even the dog.

  He walked past the Seashell, found a bench near the car park by the seawall. The bench had a view of the sea and Vince stared at it until his mind was as blank as the seawall itself.

  After a while he roused himself and looked around. From the car park there were steps that led up to the cliff. You could walk for miles up there, it was part of the Cleveland Way. They had come here with Ashley when she was small. Eaten a picnic in a freezing wind, sitting on a bench in the middle of Kettlewell. There had been nothing there, not even a café, and they had all been miserable, but the passage of time had transformed it into an almost pleasant memory. There were going to be no more pleasant memories, were there? Wouldn’t it be easier all around if he followed Lesley Holroyd over the cliff?

  Vince shivered. The sun had begun to dip into the sea. He needed to keep moving. He sighed and stood up stiffly from the bench and began to climb the steps up to the cliff. A man going nowhere. Trudge, trudge, trudge.

  Curtain Call

  Jackson was running. He had returned to the cottage, sans unicorn backpack, feeling rather defeated. Time to regroup the little gray cells. He tipped an invisible hat in Poirot’s direction. Jackson preferred the Belgian to Miss Marple. He was more straightforward, whereas Miss Marple was endlessly devious.

  He had Miranda Lambert on his headphones. She was his absolute favorite. She was blond and curvy and sang about drink and sex and heartbreak and nostalgia and he suspected he would be slightly nervous of her in real life. But she was still his absolute favorite. He was running in the wood near his cottage. It was shady in the wood, damp and mushroomy, the scent of autumn. A foretaste of the change in the season that was lurking threateningly around the corner. Winter was coming. Always. With neither cease, nor desist.

  The wood had two entrances. A main one, off the road, with a car park and a café, and a much smaller one close to his cottage—a path so well hidden that it seemed almost like a secret and Jackson had begun to think of it as his own private entrance. Both routes into the wood had official estate signs about respecting the wood, days of opening, warning against dogs off the lead, and so on. You weren’t allowed in every day, the estate had shooting parties, and when they didn’t have shooting parties they were raising things that could be shot. The pheasants wandered around tamely in Jackson’s front garden, completely unaware of their final destination. The males were gorgeous in their finery, but Jackson preferred the more modest speckled females.

  He was running a lot these days, despite the protests from his knees.

  “Your knees are too old to run,” his GP had bluntly informed him. She was young. Nice knees on show. Nice, young knees. She would learn.

  He ran in the wood, he ran on the beach. He ran on the clifftop. If he went north he could run to Kettlewell, Runswick Bay, Hinderwell, Staithes. He could probably have run all the way to Saltburn, but he hadn’t tried that. He could have veered away from the cliff path and run to Middlesbrough, but he definitely wasn’t going there. It wouldn’t just be his knees that would protest if he did that.

  In the other direction he could run along the cliff from Whitby Abbey to Robin Hood’s Bay. He liked Robin Hood’s Bay. There used to be a lot of smuggling going on there. Smuggling in the past seemed romantic—barrels of rum, chests of tea, bales of silk, transported from the shore through secret tunnels by the locals. Brandy galore. He seemed to remember reading a book about it when he was young (or more likely, knowing the young Jackson, it had been a comic). Contraband had lost its fanciful charm these days. Counterfeit goods, heroin, endangered animals, endangered people.

 
; The arrival of a teenage boy and an elderly dog tended to get in the way of his running. Nathan couldn’t see the point of walking, let alone running (“There is no point,” Jackson said), and although Dido would have made a game attempt to go with him, the Queen of Carthage could really only run in her sleep now.

  Running wasn’t pointless, of course. Sometimes you did it to try to outrun your thoughts, sometimes you did it to chase them and bring them down. Sometimes you did it so that you didn’t think at all. Jackson had tried meditation (he had, honestly), but he just couldn’t sit and think of nothing. Could anyone, really? He imagined the Buddha cross-legged beneath his tree with a cartoon speech balloon filled with things like “Remember to buy dog food, check tire pressures, phone my accountant.” But running—running was meditation.

  Although at the moment his mind was full, rather than empty—consumed by the girl with the backpack. Or now, of course, without the backpack. He had trawled his police contacts—fewer than he thought, most were retired now or in some cases dead—and had come up with no one. He’d been out of the real business of detecting for too long. Entrapping unfaithful boyfriends and husbands wasn’t dealing with criminals, just high-functioning morons.

  And as for image-enhancement software, he didn’t know where to start with that, so he had sent the photo of last night’s Peugeot’s number plate to Sam Tilling, his eager young apprentice. He was pretty sure he would know what to do with it. If he could decipher the number plate then Jackson could apply to the DVLA for the owner’s details—having a private investigator’s license was useful for something, although not much. Not for the first time, Jackson found himself regretting leaving the police, where he’d had all those resources at his fingertips. Why did he leave? He honestly couldn’t remember. A whim, probably.

  If he hadn’t retired from the field so prematurely he would be in clover by now. Out to pasture with a good pension, savings, lots of leisure time. He could be learning new things—hobbies, something he’d never had time for. Tree identification, for one. He was surrounded by them at the moment but he would have been hard-pressed to identify a single species. He could manage oak because the leaves were distinctive and because they had occupied such a central position in British history—all that shipbuilding, King Harry’s great navy. Heart of oak. Steady, boys, steady. The future Charles II hiding in an oak tree. When he was younger, Jackson’s politics had been on the side of the Roundheads, now he felt a certain sympathy toward the Royalists. It was the trajectory of age, he presumed.

  As for the rest of the trees in the wood, they were just generic “trees,” he couldn’t tell a birch from a beech. Someone should invent a Shazam for trees and plants. (They probably had.) Gap in the market, Jackson thought. Quite a niche market, though, National Trust members, mostly. Middle class, middle income—the frail and overburdened backbone of England. The kind of people who owned Labradors and listened to The Archers and couldn’t abide reality TV. Me, Jackson thought. Even if the Labrador was on loan and he didn’t actually listen to The Archers (“As if,” as Nathan would say), just to Julia’s endless précis of the program. Jackson was the first person in his entire family to elbow their way into the middle class and if anyone questioned his right to be there he could wave his National Trust membership card in their face as proof. Perhaps Julia was right about the class war being over but not about everyone having lost.

  He hadn’t encountered a single soul on his run. This wasn’t a popular part of the wood. You could probably die here and not be found for weeks. If ever. The same was true for a tree, he supposed. If a tree fell in the forest and there was no one to hear it, did it make a sound? Although it sounded like a Zen koan (yes, he knew the word “koan”), really it was a scientific question, to do with vibration and air pressure and the physiology of the ear. If a man fell in the forest—?

  He went flying, tripping on a tree root that had been waiting in hiding to ambush him and exact revenge for his ignorance. More punishment for his knees. At least there was no one around to see his pratfall, although if he listened carefully Jackson thought he could hear the sound of one hand clapping.

  He picked himself up, dusted himself down and so on, and continued running, out of the wood, past his own cottage, along the bank of the stream, past the Seashell and up onto the cliff.

  He’d switched to Maren Morris on his headphones. She was singing about how her car was her church. It was not a sentiment you often heard from women. If she hadn’t been young enough to be his daughter (not to mention laughing him out of court), Jackson would have tried to marry her. Hallelujah.

  The remains of a handsome sunset were still staining the sky. He was running on the old railway line. It had been built to serve the alum quarries that had given wealth to this part of the coast. The line had never been used, his little local guidebook informed him, because it was realized that it was too close to the crumbling cliff. Jackson had had no idea what alum was when he first moved here. It was obtained from shale and had been used to fix dyes, apparently, and needed quantities of urine to process it. The urine used to be shipped here in barrels. Funny business to be in. Up on the cliff you could still see the piles of shale left behind when the quarrying had finished. The old railway line had been incorporated into the Cleveland Way now and during the day Jackson encountered hearty types with backpacks and hiking sticks, but now in the late evening he was the only person up here. Once or twice he had encountered a deer, but at the moment, at bay on the cliff, was a man.

  The man was standing on the tip of the promontory, staring out to sea as if he were waiting for his ship to come in and that ship was not only carrying his fortune but also the answer to the meaning of life. Or possibly he was contemplating flight, like a bird waiting for an updraft. He was very near the edge. Very near, considering all that crumbling. Jackson pulled his headphones off and veered off out along the promontory, running on shale that shifted underfoot. He slowed down as he neared the man. “Nice evening,” the running man said to the standing man. The standing man looked around in surprise.

  A jumper? Jackson wondered. “You should be careful,” he said, feigning casualness. “This promontory is crumbling.”

  Ignoring the advice, the man took a step nearer the edge and the shale underfoot fell away in a little shower. Yeah, Jackson thought, this one had a death wish. “You should maybe move back from the edge a bit,” he coaxed. You had to approach would-be jumpers like you would a nervous dog. Don’t alarm them, let them get the measure of you before you reach out. Most importantly of all, don’t let them take you down with them.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Jackson asked.

  “Not really,” the man said. He took another step nearer to flight. And then another. Jackson disobeyed his own rules and made a lunge for the man, grabbing him in a kind of clumsy bear hug so that the standing man and the running man became one as they went over the edge together. The falling man.

  Stage Fright

  “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Doctor!”

  Drink, please, Harry, if you would be so good,” Barclay Jack said with affected politeness as he came offstage. He was in a good mood, full of the milk of human kindness. Trevor, his manager, had been in to see the show last night without telling him beforehand (“Didn’t want to put you off your stride”) and he’d brought a TV guy in with him, from a backwater channel with a handful of viewers, but TV nonetheless, and the guy “liked what he saw,” according to Trevor.

  The phone in Barclay Jack’s pocket vibrated as Harry handed him his tumbler of gin.

  “Oo, Barclay,” Bunny Hopps said. “Is that your phone or are you just pleased to see me?”

  “Fuck off, Widow Twanky.” His good mood had been abruptly terminated, the milk of human kindness curdled by the text on the phone screen. He stared at it uncomprehendingly for a moment before understanding what it meant. His blood dropped into his boots. His legs started to shake and then collapse like columns in an earthquake. He was g
oing down. In the literal sense.

  “Harry, quick,” he heard Bunny say. “Grab the St. John’s Ambulance bloke before he leaves the theater. This stupid bugger’s having a heart attack.”

  And then it all went dark.

  Everyone Wants to Be the Wolf

  EWAN: WUU2TPM?

  CHLOE: Nothing. Meet u?

  EWAN: What time good 4u?

  CHLOE: 4?

  EWAN: Yh?? Great? Sos where?

  CHLOE: Spa?

  EWAN: Gud. Bandstand?

  CHLOE: OK

  EWAN: SYS! LOLO!

  It was like learning a foreign language. It was a foreign language. Chloe—the real Chloe—was locked in her bedroom and grounded for the rest of her life after her mother had discovered that she was being groomed online. “Ewan” purported—unlikely in the extreme—to like puppies and Hello Kitty and a slick Korean boy band that Jackson had watched on YouTube with a kind of fascinated horror. “Getting down with the kids, Dad?” Nathan said sarcastically when he spotted him watching it. In reality, Jackson supposed, Ewan was probably a pitiful fortysomething sitting in front of his computer in his underpants. (“Well, you know,” Julia said, “a large proportion of pedophiles are quite young.” How on earth did she know that? “We covered it in an episode of Collier. Didn’t you see it?” “Mm, must have missed that one,” he said. He did know that, actually, and somehow he wished he didn’t. The idea of boys not that much older than Nathan stalking girls on the internet was too disturbing.)

  Chloe’s mother, a terrifying woman called Ricky Kemp, had opted not to follow the conventional route of calling the police, mainly because her partner, Chloe’s father, was a certified member of the East Coast criminal fraternity. “I know some really bad people,” she said. Jackson didn’t doubt her.