Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

“Yes, he does that. You know—mindfulness.”

  There was the sound of a car drawing up and driving off again and seconds later Sophie said, “Oh, here’s Ida,” and beamed as a small, rather put-upon-looking girl slouched sulkily into the kitchen. She was outfitted in jodhpurs and was carrying a riding helmet. She scowled at everyone, lasagne included. Reggie judged that she had missed out on the bland-mannered genes of the other Mellorses.

  “Good hack?” her mother asked.

  “No,” Ida said grumpily. “It was an awful day.”

  I hear you, sister, Reggie thought, I hear you.

  You know what that field is, don’t you?” Reggie said to Ronnie when they were back in the car.

  “One of Carmody’s old trailer parks?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Let’s go and see if he’s there, then,” Ronnie said. “What is hacking?”

  “I’ve no idea. I actually don’t know everything.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  Angel of the North

  They drove south, tracing the beacon of hope that was Harry’s location on Crystal’s phone. The star of Bethlehem had not been followed with such devotion.

  “It was Harry that put the app on my phone,” she said. “One of those family things—I can see him, he can see me. I don’t bother with it much, but Harry worries about things like that—after what happened to his mum, I suppose. They didn’t find her for a couple of days. He likes to know where everyone is. He’s a bit of a sheepdog.”

  “Me too,” Jackson said.

  The signal had been stuttering in and out of range for the whole journey and Crystal stared at the phone clutched in her hand, as if sheer willpower could keep it from disappearing altogether.

  Jackson could see a nasty bruise already formed on her cheek. A black eye was blooming, she was going to have an admirable shiner in an hour or two, he reckoned. She had taken a couple of brutal blows but she didn’t go down without a fight—fueled by adrenaline, Jackson supposed. She had given almost as good as she got, a couple of ninja moves, one-two straight punches and some good elbow work that she must have learned somewhere. She was an Amazonian but unfortunately her opponent was a fighting machine. Ex-military, by the look of him, Jackson was thinking as he had sprinted toward the fray. Too late, unfortunately. It was over in seconds and by the time Jackson was on the scent the guy had knocked Crystal to the ground, wrenched the Evoque’s key fob off her, and was driving off up the road. Some fucking sheriff you are.

  Crystal pulled down the sun visor and peered at herself in the vanity mirror. She peeled off her false eyelashes, one after the other, flinching when the one attached to her blackening eye got stuck. It seemed to Jackson that she had perfectly good eyelashes without adding to them, but what did a Luddite know?

  “What a fucking mess,” she muttered to the mirror before retrieving a pair of spectacles from her bag. “Can’t see shit without them,” she said. Whither the woman who had seemed to be making such an effort earlier not to swear? “And the bastard broke my prescription sunglasses when he hit me.” Kidnapped kids trumped vanity, apparently. It was a different woman sitting next to him from the one he had first met a few hours ago. It was as if she was slowly deconstructing, she even seemed to have less hair, although he wasn’t sure how that could be. Jackson wouldn’t have been surprised if she removed a false leg next.

  “There’s a first-aid kit in the trunk, if you want,” he offered. “I can stop.”

  “No. Keep going. I’ll be fine. Can’t this thing go any faster?” She was almost feral with worry. “Do you want me to drive?”

  Jackson treated the question with the silent contempt it deserved and instead admitted, “I looked in the envelope on your windscreen. I saw the photo of your daughter and the message on the back. Keep your mouth shut. And not say what, exactly?”

  “People are asking questions,” she said vaguely.

  “Who? What people?”

  She shrugged, fixated on her phone. “The police,” she said grudgingly after a while. “The police are asking questions.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “Stuff.”

  Jackson had experienced enough unforthcoming conversations with Nathan to know that dogged perseverance was the only way forward. “And have they questioned you?”

  “No,” Crystal said. “They haven’t.”

  “And would you answer their questions? If they asked them?” Enigmatic didn’t cover the half of her. He gave Crystal a sideways glance and she said, “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  “Do you know what they’re asking questions about?”

  She shrugged again. He supposed this was what was meant by keeping your mouth shut. “They’ve just passed the turning for Reighton Gap,” she said, looking at the phone.

  “So, the man in the silver BMW,” Jackson persisted, “and the men who drove off with your kids—do you know if they’re related?” How could they not be? he thought. It was surely too much of a coincidence that one person would be following you and another quite different person would snatch your kids, wasn’t it? A sudden image of Ricky Kemp flashed into his head. I know some really bad people.

  And for all Jackson knew, there was a third person who was leaving the threatening messages. Some of the little gray cells had fainted with the effort of understanding and were being fanned by other little gray cells.

  “Well…” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “They’re sort of related and they’re sort of not related.”

  “Oh, good, that makes everything really clear. Crystal clear, that is. Are they working in tandem? These people, whoever they are? Are they even aware of each other? What did you do to bring about all this, for God’s sake?”

  “Questions, questions,” Crystal said.

  “Well, how about answers, answers?” Jackson said. “Or we can go to the police, which is what any sensible, law-abiding person would have done by now if their children had been abducted.”

  “I’m not going to the police. I’m not putting my kids at risk.”

  “I would say they’re already at risk.”

  “Further risk. And anyway, for all I know the police are involved.”

  Jackson sighed. He was about to object—he didn’t have much time for conspiracy theories—but then the phone in Crystal’s hand pinged to announce the arrival of a text. “Christ,” she said. “It’s from Harry. No, not Harry,” she amended and gave a low moan of despair. She held the phone aloft so Jackson could see the photo of a furious-looking Harry holding Candy in his arms. “Same message,” she said dully.

  “Keep your mouth shut?”

  “And more.”

  “What more?”

  “Keep your mouth shut or you’ll never see your kids alive again.”

  It seemed to Jackson to be an overly melodramatic message. Kidnappers who held people hostage were rare, unless they were terrorists or pirates, neither of which seemed likely in this case. And kidnappers who killed their hostages were even rarer. And garden-variety kidnappings were about money or custody, not ensuring someone’s silence (and who on earth would want a three-year-old on their hands?), but there’d been no ransom demand, no request for anything. Just intimidation. It was all a bit Cosa Nostra. Was it possible, he wondered, that Crystal was in some kind of witness protection?

  “What about your friend?”

  “Friend?”

  “The woman you went to see today. The one who lives above the betting shop. Is she part of this whole mysterious Q-but-no-A thing you’ve got going on? And answer gave she none,” Jackson murmured as Crystal continued to gaze silently at her phone. And then he said what all good TV cops say at this point—Collier himself was particularly fond of the phrase: “If you want me to help you, you’re going to have to tell me everything.”

  “It’s not a pretty story.”

  “It never is.”

  And it wasn’t. It was a long and winding tale and it took them all the way to Fla
mborough Head.

  They were both quiet as they drove up toward the headland. Jackson was thinking about the cliffs there—very high cliffs—and he suspected that Crystal was thinking about them as well. No place to bring kidnapped kids. Flamborough Head was a known suicide spot and he supposed that a place where people jumped off cliffs was also a good place to push people off. He had a sudden picture of Vince Ives going over the edge.

  There was the lighthouse and there was a café and nothing else much, but this was where Harry’s beacon had stopped moving nearly fifteen minutes ago. There were a few cars in the car park. Walkers came here to brave the wind and take in the view. “Looks like they’re in the café,” Crystal said, peering at the phone.

  No sign of them in the café, of course. The likelihood of simply coming across the kidnappers eating toasted tea cakes and rendering up the children was remote in the extreme, but Crystal was already running toward a bloke who was sitting at a table with his back to them, nursing a mug of something.

  To the guy’s surprise, to put it mildly, before he could do anything about it Crystal had her arm around his neck and had him in a choke hold. The contents of his mug—tomato soup, unfortunately—went everywhere, but mostly in his lap.

  When Jackson had managed to prize Crystal off the guy—she had a grip like a boa constrictor—she indicated a mobile sitting on the table. It had one of those personalized covers on which Jackson could see a photo of Crystal and Candy, their faces smooshed against each other and both grinning for the photographer, who was Harry, presumably.

  “Harry’s phone,” Crystal pointed out unnecessarily to Jackson.

  The guy who was covered in tomato soup turned out to be just your average idiot, the owner of the pimped-out boy-racer car that Jackson had noticed on the way in. A man had come up to him in a service station, he said—once he was able to speak—and offered him a hundred pounds to drive the phone to Flamborough and throw it off the headland. “A prank—a stag-party thing.” Crystal slammed his head into the table. Jackson glanced around to see how the rest of the café’s denizens were reacting to this, but they all seemed to have quietly disappeared. Jackson didn’t blame them. Wives and mothers, he thought, you never wanted to get on the wrong side of them. Madonnas on steroids.

  “So let me just check this,” Jackson said to the boy racer. “A complete stranger comes up to you, gives you a hundred quid to throw a phone into the sea, and this stranger then disappears and you’re unlikely to ever see him again, but you do what he asked anyway.”

  “I haven’t. I wasn’t going to,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “I was going to keep the phone, change the SIM.”

  His head renewed its acquaintance with the table. “This is assault,” he muttered when Crystal yanked him back up by the hair. He was lucky his head was still attached to his body. Boadicea, eat your heart out, Jackson thought.

  “I could sue you,” the boy racer said to Crystal.

  “Just fucking try,” she growled.

  Thanks for the help back there,” she said sarcastically when they got back in the car.

  “I thought you were doing just fine on your own,” Jackson said.

  Babes in the Wood

  “I thought we were staying the night in Newcastle? We’ve left Newcastle, haven’t we?”

  “Change of plan, love. I’m taking you to a B&B for the night—that’s a bed and breakfast to you and me.”

  “Yes, I know what a B&B is, but why?”

  Andy was surprised by how good her English was. Better than his own, really. She was the taller of the two. Nadja and Katja. They were smart—smart and pretty. Not smart enough, though. They thought they were going to work in a hotel in London. What was going to happen to them shouldn’t happen to a dog, really. He had a sudden image of Lottie’s poker face. Did dogs have a moral code? Honor among dogs and so on.

  “There was a bit of an incident, apparently,” Andy said to her. “A problem with the Airbnb you were supposed to stay in. A gas leak,” he elaborated. “In the whole building, in fact. Everyone had to be evacuated. No one allowed back in. This B&B we’re going to now means that you’ll get a bit further on the journey, further south. To London. And then, first thing in the morning, I’ll drive you to the station and you can hop on a train at Durham or York. Even Doncaster,” he added, working his way mentally down the East Coast main line. Newark? Or was that on a different line? Why was he even thinking about it? They’d be going nowhere near a station or a train. “You’ll be in London by tomorrow lunchtime. Tea at the Ritz, eh, girls?”

  He knew without turning around that they were staring at the back of his head as if he were an idiot. He was supposed to be the smooth operator, but this pair were derailing him for some reason. It was taking a tremendous effort for him to keep the whole show on the road. No one understood what a burden it was.

  Yes, there had indeed been an “incident,” but nothing to do with gas leaks or an Airbnb, although Andy still didn’t know what the actual nature of it was. Tommy had finally resurfaced on the phone just after Andy had picked the girls up at the airport. He hadn’t sounded like his usual easygoing self and he must have been out of range of a signal because whatever he was saying was lost to a hissing garble of white noise.

  Another call had followed swiftly on the heels of Tommy’s. Steve Mellors this time, saying there’d been an incident at Silver Birches.

  “What kind?” Andy asked, trying to keep his tone nonchalant in front of the Polish girls. He could tell that Nadja was paying close attention.

  “Not on the phone,” Steve said. (Why not? Was someone listening to their phones? Andy had a sick feeling of panic.) “Get your arse to Silver Birches pronto,” Steve said. “It’s all hands to the pump down here.”

  “Well, I’ve got my hands full, as it were, here, with these lovely Polish ladies that I’m chauffeuring,” Andy said blandly, smiling at the girls in the rearview mirror. He caught sight of himself. His smile was less of a smile and more of a death rictus.

  “Just bring them with you, for Christ’s sake,” Steve said. “It’s where they’re going to end up anyway.”

  Andy stretched his death-rictus grin even further in case the girls were suspicious. Should have been on the stage, he thought. Mr. Congeniality. He could have done a turn at the Palace. He’d been to see the summer-season show, the eighties revival thing—Barclay Jack et al. It had plumbed new depths of mediocrity. Andy had been unwillingly dragged there by Rhoda because, apparently, she used to date the magician. “A lifetime ago,” she said. “Nothing for you to worry about, Andrew.” He hadn’t been worried. Not until she said that, anyway. Rhoda and the magician had greeted each other with air kisses and theatrical “Hello, darling”s—which was not the Rhoda that Andy knew. He had felt jealous for a moment, although he suspected it was the jealousy of ownership rather than passion.

  “Nice handbag,” the magician said to Rhoda, spotting her Chanel bag.

  “It’s a fake,” Rhoda said to the magician. “Can’t you tell?”

  “Dunno,” the magician said. “Everything looks fake to me.”

  Angel of the North,” Andy said automatically as they passed the great rusted wings, looming over them in the dark. There was silence in the back of the car and when he glanced behind he saw that both girls had fallen asleep. The smaller one had her head on the shoulder of the taller one. It was a touching picture. They were the right age to be his daughters, if he’d had daughters. Anyone looking at them might think he was their dad, driving them home. From a concert. Or a holiday. He felt momentarily blindsided by the loss of something he’d never known.

  The girls didn’t stir until they were turning in to the driveway of Silver Birches.

  “We’re here?” Nadja asked sleepily.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’re here.” The place was in darkness apart from the porch light that was casting a dim glow over the front door. Andy drew the car to a halt. No sign of life unless you counted the pale moths throwing th
emselves suicidally against the light. No trace of an incident, unless it was something that had killed everyone in Silver Birches without any mess. A sound wave or a silent alien force.

  “This is a B&B?” Nadja asked, giving her sister a shake to wake her.

  “Yes, love,” Andy said. “It doesn’t look like much from the outside, I know. But it’s nice and cozy inside.”

  She gave her sister another shake and said, “Wake up, Katja, we’re here.” The girl’s tone was sharper this time, with a note of urgency to it that made Andy uneasy. She tried to open her door but there were child locks fitted at the back. “Can you let us out, please?” she said crossly.

  “Hang on, love,” Andy said, hitting Tommy’s number on the phone. “I’ll just find out where the reception committee is.”

  Tommy didn’t answer the phone, but the front door flew open suddenly and Vasily and Jason appeared. With a practiced move they sprinted to the car, opened the back doors, and pulled out a girl each.

  The Poles were fighters, Andy could have predicted that. They kicked and struggled and screamed. The younger one in particular—Katja—was like a wild animal, a spitfire, he thought. Watching from the car, Andy was surprised to find that there was a part of him that was willing the girls to win. No chance of that—the battle was over when Jason put Katja’s lights out by punching her in the head. He slung her over his shoulder like a sack of coal and carried her inside, followed by Vasily dragging a yowling Nadja along by her hair.

  Andy had been so absorbed by the scene in front of him that he nearly jumped out of his skin when there was a loud knock on the car window.

  “We’ve got a problem, Foxy,” Tommy said.

  Hansel and Gretel

  The last thing that Harry had seen was Crystal standing in the road screaming as the Evoque accelerated away from her. Then the man in the passenger seat leaned over and told Harry to give him his phone and get down on the floor and keep his eyes shut, so Harry supposed that they didn’t want him to see where they were going, or maybe they were afraid that he would try to signal out the car window for help. At least they didn’t put a hood over his head or blindfold him—and if they had intended to abduct him they would probably have come prepared with something like that, wouldn’t they? So surely that meant this was just a carjacking gone wrong? After all, the Evoque was a high-end car, it wouldn’t be a total surprise if someone wanted to steal it. And, Harry reasoned further (he was doing a lot of reasoning, it was keeping him just this side of sane), after they’d gone a few miles they would let him and Candace out and everyone would go on their way. A happy ending for all concerned.