Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  Jackson had been handed Chloe’s laptop and phone by Ricky and was now masquerading as her in an attempt to net Ewan. Reverse grooming in the strange world of dark justice.

  “And then when you’ve collared him just hand him over to me,” Ricky instructed. Jackson wasn’t against entrapment—it took up the bulk of his business—nor was he against clearing the streets of one more pervert, but he wasn’t at all sure about the handing-over bit. He wasn’t a vigilante, he really wasn’t, although his idea of right and wrong didn’t always conform to the accepted legal standard. Which was a nice way of saying that he had broken the law. On more than one occasion. For the right reasons.

  Ewan might be a sad loser, but did Jackson want to be responsible for him being beaten to a pulp—or worse, probably—by Chloe’s father and his underworld friends? If he did manage to rendezvous with Ewan, Jackson planned to risk the wrath of the local mafia and make a citizen’s arrest, before calling the police and letting the cold dead hand of the law take care of him.

  Hopefully it would all be resolved this afternoon at four o’clock when they met for their “date.”

  He made coffee on the Aga with the help of his faithful old friend Bialetti and sat in the morning sun on the bench outside his front door. Dido bumbled out after him and stretched at his feet on the small lawn in front of the cottage. Jackson scratched her behind her left ear, a favored spot, and her fur quivered down the length of her spine. (“You quiver if I scratch behind your ear?” Tatiana asked. She had met Dido. She liked dogs, she said. When she was “little child” she had been part of a dog troupe act. “We turn tricks together,” she told him. “Do tricks,” he corrected her. “Whatever.”)

  Jackson wondered idly how Vince was getting on. It took him a moment to retrieve his surname, proceeding methodically through the alphabet until he got to “I.” Ives. St. Ives, he thought. Jackson had never been to Cornwall, there were still large patches of the map of Britain that remained unexplored by him. (Leicestershire—a mystery. Ditto Suffolk. And many other places as well, to be honest.) Perhaps he should go on a road trip. A grand tour of the kingdom. Perhaps he’d find St. Mary Mead if he looked hard enough.

  Vince Ives probably wasn’t a saint, but Jackson didn’t feel he was a sinner either. But who knew?

  It wasn’t every day you fell off a cliff. Luckily, it turned out that there was a handy lifesaving shelf of sloping rock beneath and they had only fallen a few feet, although they had both yelled enough to start an avalanche before slithering to a halt inches from the edge.

  For fuck’s sake, Jackson had thought, lying on his back staring at the darkening sky. His heart was racing as if he’d just run a sprint and his “old” knees hadn’t been done any favors again when they had hit the unforgiving rock. He struggled to a sitting position and said to the standing man, now a lying-down man, “That’s a sheer drop and I’m not going to try and stop your acrobatics a second time. Okay?” The guy had the decency to look shamefaced.

  Jackson thought it was probably a good idea to get a guy with a death wish off a cliff. “Come on,” he said, clambering carefully to his feet and offering Vince a hand up—warily, in case he suffered another moment of madness and decided to yank him over the edge with him.

  Vince was his name, “Vince Ives,” he said, holding his hand out to shake as if they were at a party or a conference rather than teetering in a death-defying manner on the edge of a cliff. He was very sorry, he said. “A moment of madness. I just sort of reached a tipping point.”

  “How about a drink?” Jackson offered when they had come down from the cliff and hit what passed for civilization again. “That place looks like it’s still open for business,” he said, indicating the Seashell to Vince Ives. Vince didn’t seem impressed, in fact he seemed positively averse, saying, “The Seashell? No, thanks,” with what looked like a little shudder, so Jackson took him back to his cottage, like you would a stray dog. He lit the fire and offered him a whisky, which he refused. It seemed that Vince hadn’t eaten all day, so Jackson made them both tea and toast.

  It was a good day when you saved someone’s life, Jackson thought as he put the kettle on the Aga. Even better when you didn’t die saving them. He really hoped this wasn’t going to become the regular thought of the day because sooner or later he was bound to fail at one or both parts of the equation.

  Eventually Vince started to pull himself together and it turned out they had something in common. They were both from the same neck of the woods and were both alumni of the band of brothers. “We happy few,” Vince said, looking as far from happy as you could. He didn’t strike Jackson as much of a soldier.

  “Royal Signals,” he explained. “In another lifetime.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jackson said, “I used to be a policeman.”

  It was a familiar story. Mid-life crisis, sense of meaninglessness, depression, et cetera. He was a failure, Vince reported. “We’ve all been there,” Jackson said, although in truth he’d never allowed himself more than a glimpse over the edge of the abyss. Jackson had never really seen the point of existential angst. If you didn’t like something you changed it and if you couldn’t change it you sucked it up and soldiered on, one foot after the other. (“Remind me not to come to you for therapy,” Julia said.)

  “Trudged through my life,” Vince went on. “Never did anything interesting, anything important. I’ve led a very little life. Never been top dog, you know?”

  “Well, I don’t think being the alpha male is all it’s cut out to be,” Jackson said. “There’s nothing wrong with remaining in the ranks. They also serve, and all that.”

  Vince sighed gloomily. “It’s not just that. I’ve lost everything—my job, my wife, my home, my dog. Pretty much lost my daughter too,” he added.

  It was a long list, but a familiar one to Jackson. “My first wife divorced me,” he said in solidarity.

  “You married again, then?”

  “Well, yeah,” Jackson said, immediately regretting having mentioned Tessa, or whatever her real name was. A she-wolf. A certain manly pride stopped him from admitting to a stranger that his second wife had been a scheming, hustling conwoman who had removed him from his money with surgical precision before disappearing into the night. Instead he said, “No, well, that one didn’t work out either.”

  “Life just seems to be against me,” Vince said. “Like I’m cursed.”

  “Sometimes you’re the windshield, Vince,” Jackson said, “sometimes you’re the bug.” That was what Mary Chapin Carpenter sang anyway, pace Dire Straits.

  “I suppose,” Vince agreed, nodding slowly as he chewed on the last bit of toast. A good sign in Jackson’s book. People who were eating weren’t usually about to top themselves.

  “And there’s no point in clinging on to things if they’re over,” Jackson continued. (Julia was right, perhaps counseling really wasn’t his forte.) “You know what they say” (or what Kenny Rogers would say), “‘you’ve got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them.’” This was better, Jackson thought, all he had to do was utilize the lyrics from country songs, they contained better advice than anything he could conjure up himself. Best to avoid Hank, though—I’m so lonesome I could cry. I’ll never get out of this world alive. I don’t care if tomorrow never comes. Poor old Hank, not good mental fodder for a man who had just tried to jump off a cliff. Although had Vince known, Jackson wondered, about that lifesaving shelf of rock? Was he aware, in a way that Jackson hadn’t been, that it was a less treacherous scenario than it appeared? A cry for help rather than full-on suicide? He hoped so.

  “Wendy—my wife—was walking away with everything, treating me as if I was nothing. Nobody.”

  “She caught it by the handle, Vince, you caught it by the blade.” (Thank you, Ashley Monroe.)

  “And they made me redundant. After twenty-odd years. Nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, every cliché in the book—never complained.”

  “You’ll get another job, V
ince.” Could he? Jackson wondered. The guy was pushing fifty, nobody wanted you once you’d achieved a half-century on the pitch. (Jackson had started to watch cricket on TV. He kept that fact to himself, it felt like a secret vice.)

  “And they took the company car,” Vince said.

  “Ah, well, yeah, that is bad,” Jackson agreed. There weren’t any country songs that could deal with that catastrophe. A man couldn’t worship without a church.

  It was only when Jackson had offered Vince Ives a lift home (insisted on it, in fact, in case he decided to wander off up the cliff again) and Vince was strapping on his seat belt that he said, “My wife died today.”

  “Today? The one who’s divorcing you?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry, Vince.” So perhaps they’d finally gotten to the real reason for the guy wanting to take the high jump. Cancer, Jackson thought, or an accident—but no, apparently not.

  “Murdered.”

  “Murdered?” Jackson echoed, and felt the little gray cells snap to attention. He used to be a policeman, after all.

  “Yeah. Murdered. It sounds ridiculous just saying it.”

  “And you didn’t do it?” (Just checking.)

  “No.”

  “How? Do you know?”

  “Beaten with a golf club, the police said.”

  “Jesus, that sounds violent,” Jackson said. Not to mention personal. Although he had seen worse. (How many dead bodies have you seen? Like in the whole of your life?)

  “I’m a golfer,” Vince said. “The police were very interested in that.”

  Cricket was one thing, but golf was a quite different enigma as far as Jackson was concerned. He was prepared to bet the future of the universe on the fact that he would never play the game. He had never even set foot on a golf course, except for once when he’d been a detective in Cambridge and a dead body had been discovered in the rough at the Gog Magog golf course. (Was there a more bizarrely named golf course anywhere? he wondered.)

  “Plenty of people play golf,” Jackson said to Vince. “That doesn’t make them killers. Not usually, anyway.” Vince Ives played golf, his wife was killed with a golf club, therefore Vince Ives killed her. Wasn’t that called something—a logical fallacy? (Was he just making that up? His little gray cells put their thinking caps on, but—unsurprisingly—came up with nothing.)

  “And where are your golf clubs, Vince?”

  “Can we just drive? I’ve been answering questions all day.”

  “Okay.”

  “Christ, I’ve just remembered,” Vince said. “I had a putter, a spare one, I kept it in the garage. Used it to practice on the lawn. Wendy hated me doing that. I’m surprised she didn’t put a ‘Keep Off the Grass’ sign on the lawn.” He sighed. “My fingerprints will be all over it, I suppose.”

  “I suppose they will.”

  It was late by the time they hit the road. Jackson had been up and down the A171 so much lately that he was beginning to feel as though he knew every inch of the tarmac. It hardly seemed worth going home again as he had to be back here again first thing tomorrow to pick up Nathan and resume the burden of parental duties. He wondered about staying in the Crown Spa overnight—he could sleep on the floor of Julia’s hotel room. Perhaps she would even let him sleep in her bed. Was that a good idea or a bad idea? Tide in or tide out? He didn’t know.

  He offered to drop Vince off at his flat, but somewhere in a wasteland of back streets he said, “No, leave me here. This’ll do.” He laughed grimly and Jackson wondered what the joke was.

  Jackson had phoned Julia from outside the Crown but her groggy response hadn’t been exactly encouraging (“Sod off, Jackson”), and he was about to wend his weary way back when his phone lit up. He thought she had changed her mind, but it was only to tell him that Nathan had decamped to stay with a school friend for the night whose family was camping nearby, but would he still take Dido?

  “I’ll come up,” he said, but Julia said, “No, I’ll come down,” and he had to wonder at that. Did she have someone up there with her? Or was she worried that she would be so overwhelmed by lust at his proximity to her bed that she would swoon into his arms? Fat chance of that.

  She appeared in the hushed reception area barefoot, her hair all over the place and wearing a pair of pajamas so old that he recognized them from when they had been together. She was not in the mood for seduction. “Here,” she said, handing him the dog lead, the dog at the other end of it. Then she turned tail and said “Night” sleepily and padded back up the stairs. (“When you last sleep with woman?” Tatiana demanded of him a few evenings ago. “With real woman?” He took the Fifth on that.)

  “Tails between our legs, eh?” he said to Dido in the rearview mirror as they drove away, but she was already asleep.

  So now he had the dog but not the boy, and surprised himself with how disappointed he felt about the absence of the latter.

  He drained his coffee and checked his phone and found that Sam Tilling had gotten back to him with that number plate for the Peugeot. It was nice and readable and Jackson got an email off to DVLA, applying for the owner’s details. He wasn’t expecting a swift response. He phoned Sam and thanked him. “How’s Gary and Kirsty?” he asked.

  “Same old, same old,” Sam replied. “Chicken burritos in All Bar One Greek Street yesterday.”

  “Photos?”

  “Yep. Sent them to Mrs. Trotter. She says to say hello to you.”

  “Keep up the good work. There’ll be a sherbet fountain in this for you when you finish.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  Penny Trotter had amassed an enormous dossier of evidence proving Gary’s adultery. Is this What Jesus Wanted Her to Do? Seemed unlikely, but his not to reason why. Wronged wives were a law unto themselves. And they paid the bills and kept the wolf from his door. (“Have you ever considered that you might be the wolf?” Julia said. “Yeah, the lone wolf,” he said. “I know you like to think so, but there’s nothing heroic about a lone wolf, Jackson. A lone wolf is just lonely.”)

  More photos popped up on his phone. He had a shared album with Sam Tilling specially dedicated to Gary and Kirsty. They were all over each other in public places—“Canoodling,” Julia would have called it. (“I love that word,” she said.) It seemed Julia wasn’t prepared to canoodle with him anymore in either public or private. Perhaps she wanted commitment. Perhaps he should ask her to marry him. (Did he really just think that?)

  He finished his coffee. He had a lot of time on his hands until his tryst with Ewan and was wondering what to do with it—a run? He regarded Dido doubtfully, snoring gently in the sun at his feet. A slow stroll was probably the best they would manage together.

  His phone buzzed. He wondered if it might be Julia, apologizing for being offhand last night. It wasn’t. It was a client. A new one.

  Girls, Girls, Girls

  “Did you hear the news?” Rhoda asked when Andy entered the Seashell’s kitchen the next morning. She was busy with the breakfasts, juggling pans and spatulas in a way that looked surprisingly threatening. She was ruthlessly efficient in the morning. Well, every hour of the day, really. He supposed she was annoyed with him for not coming straight home from Newcastle last night. He had taken a detour via the Belvedere instead, where he had indulged in some solitary drinking. Better to drink than think sometimes. Often, in fact. Rhoda had been fast asleep and snoring louder than Lottie when he finally stumbled through the door.

  “News?” Andy said, reaching for the lifebuoy of the coffeepot. He inhaled the scent of frying bacon as if it were oxygen. His brain was still bleary with sleep, not to mention a slow-developing hangover. “News about what?” News was rarely good, in Andy’s opinion. News invariably carried consequences with it.

  He tried to pinch some bacon from the frying pan to make a sandwich but Rhoda slapped his hand away. She was already bombarding him with a list of commands. “Can you keep an eye on the sausages? I’ve got eggs three ways to see to. And get
some toast on, will you? The couple in Fastnet are having the full English—fried eggs for him, scrambled for her. The man in Lundy is having the full English as well, but his wife only wants poached eggs. And the vegetarian lesbians in Rockall are now claiming to be vegans. There’s veggie sausages in the freezer—get four out. And open a tin of baked beans.”

  “What news?” Andy persisted, resisting Rhoda’s onslaught.

  “About Wendy,” she said, cracking eggs into a pan of spluttering fat.

  “Wendy. Wendy Ives?” Andy puzzled. “Or Easton, or whatever she’s taken to calling herself. What’s she done now?”

  “Only gone and joined the dead wives’ club.”

  “The what?”

  “Murdered,” Rhoda said, making a meal of the word.

  “Murdered?” Andy’s alcohol-addled brain wandered around the word, trying to make sense of it. “Murdered?” Repeating it didn’t seem to help much.

  “Yes, murdered. Killed.” Rhoda took a moment to consult her inner thesaurus. “Butchered,” she retrieved, slicing through a black pudding. “Slaughtered,” she added with some satisfaction. “Don’t just stand there, get the sausages.”

  “How was she murdered?” Andy asked. The bacon no longer smelled so appetizing. (Slaughtered?) “When? And who by, for heaven’s sake? I don’t understand.” He vaguely remembered hearing something on the local news on the car radio on the way home last night. A woman has been murdered… But not a name, not Wendy—Vince’s wife, for God’s sake! He got the sausages out of the freezer and read the ingredients on the packet. “Says they contain egg white,” he said.

  “Too bad, that’s all I’ve got. The lezzies won’t be able to tell.” Rhoda had quite a few gay friends, of both denominations, but it didn’t stop her using derogatory language about them behind their backs. She wore the men of that persuasion on her arm like designer handbags—of which she had several criminally expensive ones that Andy had bought her for birthdays and Christmases. A couple of watches, too. It was a way (pretty insignificant in the bigger picture) of spending the money that was piling up. There was only so much cash he felt safe hanging on to. It was in the roof space in the attic. And there was only so much he could pass through the business or offload on a nail bar. He didn’t think of the bags and watches as laundering, just a kind of safekeeping, and they had resale value if push came to shove. He told Rhoda that the Rolexes and the Chanel bags were fakes, when in fact they were genuine. It was a topsy-turvy world he inhabited these days.