Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  No mention was made of the third safe beneath the filing cabinet. It had a spare key too—the safe installer, full of the joys of coffee and a KitKat, had given it to her when she’d asked for it. He didn’t seem to know that husbands kept secrets from their wives. Or indeed that wives kept secrets from their husbands.

  “Did you watch him fitting the safes in here?” Tommy asked casually, finally satisfied with the position of Sails at Dawn.

  “Nah, he took hours. I’ve been getting the nursery ready.” She had loved that word “nursery.” It implied so much—love, care, money. “I’m going upstairs to finish off, okay, babe?” They already knew Candy was a girl. “Sugar and spice and all things nice,” Crystal murmured as she arranged the cradle in the nursery. It had cost an arm and a leg, a proper old-fashioned one like you got in fairy tales, draped with lace and silk. She’d made the mistake of watching Rosemary’s Baby recently on TV, late at night on a horror channel, and now she was having a sudden disturbing flashback to the scene where Mia Farrow peers into the crib—a black version of their baby-to-be’s—and realizes she’s given birth to Satan’s baby. Candy would be an angel, not the devil, Crystal reminded herself. And Tommy wasn’t Satan, she thought. (She’d changed her mind about that now.)

  She had put the spare key to the third safe beneath the crib mattress. It seemed unlikely that Tommy would be changing the little sheets when they were stained with vomit and shit. Babies weren’t really made of sugar and spice, Crystal knew that, they were flesh and blood and should be cherished accordingly. Since then, the third key (it was like a mystery novel, The Third Key) had traveled around the house to whatever place Crystal deemed the most Tommy-proof, although it had come to rest for some time now inside a bag of frozen edamame beans in the Meneghini, because the day that Tommy looked inside that would be the day hell itself froze.

  “All right?” Tommy had said, coming into the nursery just as she’d finished smoothing the sheet on the crib’s mattress. He’d fiddled with a mobile of sheep above the crib, sending them spinning around dizzily.

  Crystal had been knocked up when she was with the Bassani and Carmody show and they’d given her money for an abortion in Leeds. Fee had gone with her. Not a memory to cherish. She’d been so relieved when it was out of her. “Devil’s spawn,” Fee said, passing her a fag as they waited for the train back. They had enough money left over from what Mick had given them to buy a curry and a half-bottle of vodka. They were fourteen years old. She wondered afterward why no one in the clinic had asked her age or what had happened to her. Why no one cared. She would care so much about her daughter that no harm would ever come to her.

  The sheep had finally stopped spinning and she said, “Yeah, everything’s good, Tommy. But we need more pink in here. Lots more pink.”

  The filing cabinet was a bugger to move and Crystal had to shuffle and tilt, shuffle and tilt, as if it were a particularly clumsy dance partner, or an upended coffin that she was having to maneuver around the floor. She knew what was in it, or at least what was in it the last time she’d looked, because this wasn’t the first time she had done this particular dance with her awkward metal partner. Tommy liked his money to look like money, not like plastic. “Keep it liquid,” he said. The trouble with liquid money was that it could get washed down the drain when someone mopped it up. And there was lots of it in the safe. Lots and lots of mopping to do. Mrs. Mopp, Crystal thought.

  She was sweating by the time she had heaved the cabinet far enough to uncover the brass ring. She pulled on the ring until a neatly glued-together section of floorboards lifted. “Open sesame,” she murmured to herself. Of course, Tommy—Tommy, who had barely seen the inside of his home in days—would choose that moment to return to it, so she had to hastily reprise the dance with the filing cabinet, shoving it hard into place, and by the time she heard him enter the house (“Crystal! Where the fuck are you?”) it was back, more or less, in place and she was in the conservatory.

  He gave her a peck on the cheek and said, “Have you been smoking again?” but didn’t seem particularly interested in the answer. He looked exhausted and she said, “Why don’t you put your feet up and I’ll pour you a drink?”

  “Nah,” he replied. “Thanks, love, but I’ve got stuff to do.”

  He went in the study and shut the door. Listening at the door, she heard the unmistakable sound of the filing-cabinet waltz.

  “Shit,” Crystal said, because he was about to discover that his larder was bare. She caught sight of Candy standing in the doorway, clutching her unicorn and dressed as Belle. She looked worried—she was worried, had been upset ever since the kidnapping. As you would be.

  “Naughty word, Mummy,” she reprimanded.

  “Yeah, you’re right, it is,” Crystal said. “Sorry.”

  “Mummy? You all right?”

  “Top of the Pops, sweetheart. Top of the Pops.”

  That’s All, Folks

  “Crystal? Are you all right?” Vince had found the front door of High Haven wide open and no sign of any occupants apart from Candy, who was in the kitchen watching Frozen. He knew it was Frozen because he’d watched it with Ashley last Christmas. She told him it was a feminist film, but it just looked like Disney to Vince.

  “Hello, darling,” he said to Candy. She had her headphones on and took them off when he spoke to her. “Are Mummy and Daddy here?” he asked.

  “The pool,” she said and replaced her headphones.

  Vince no longer had his gun, of course. He had intended to shoot Tommy with it and now he would have to improvise. He had Steve’s baseball bat, though, and was intending to crack Tommy’s skull open like an egg. He thought of Wendy. A golf club had done the same for her.

  Steve was dead, Vince was pretty sure of that, so all bets were off now. He was disappointed that he hadn’t killed him himself, but he supposed there was a certain justice in the way it happened, killed by one of the girls. And with any luck Andy might bleed to death before the ambulance got to him. That just left Tommy to be dealt with. All hell had broken loose after the girl shot Steve, and Vince had slipped out of Silver Birches and was back in the Honda and driving away before you could say “Just like that.” On the other side of the road the first police car, all sirens blaring, was sprinting toward Silver Birches.

  Crystal was standing on the edge of the pool, dressed in shorts and a strappy top. She was soaking wet so she must have been swimming like that rather than in a costume. Tommy’s dog, Brutus, was sitting placidly next to her. She was smoking a cigarette and looking thoughtful. “Oh, hi, Vince,” she said when she saw him. “How are you?”

  He hesitated, unable to think of an answer that could encompass his day so far, then said, “Did you know your front door’s open?”

  “That’d be Tommy, I’m always asking him to make sure he’s closed it when he comes in. He never does. He’s a careless so-and-so, Vince.”

  Distracted by the sight of Crystal’s breasts in her wet top, it took Vince a moment to realize that there was someone in the pool. Not just someone, but Tommy—and he wasn’t swimming, he was floating, facedown.

  “Jesus Christ, Crystal,” he said, dropping the baseball bat and pulling off his shoes, preparing to jump in and save Tommy. So he could kill him later.

  Crystal put a hand on his arm and said calmly, “Don’t bother, Vince. He’s gone.” She took a final long drag on her cigarette and threw the stub into the pool.

  Gone? What had happened here? “What’s going on, Crystal?”

  “Just cleaning up a bit, Vince. How about you?”

  Don’t Just Fly

  The water looked so inviting, but she wasn’t here to swim, attractive though that idea seemed.

  She had knocked on the door of the study when she heard the filing cabinet being moved and said in an urgent voice, “Tommy, you need to come and see this, babe. Down at the pool. There’s something wrong. Can you hurry up?” And then she’d parked Candy in front of the TV with her little pink headphon
es on and run down to the echoing chamber that contained the pool. The artificial daylight was reflecting off the blue water and the gold mosaic. She inhaled the smell of chlorine. She loved it here.

  By the time Tommy got there, Crystal was standing at the edge of the pool. “Here, over here,” she said, gesturing to him. “Stand next to me and then you’ll be able to see it.”

  “See what? Where? I don’t see—”

  She slipped swiftly behind him and gave him an almighty push that left him thrashing around in panic in the water. He made a grab for the side of the pool, he could easily haul himself out, but that was something Crystal had already considered and so she jumped in beside Tommy, getting behind him and holding him up in the water as if she was performing a lifesaving maneuver. He said something to her, but he was choking on water and it was hard to decipher the words. It could have been “Thanks” or “Help” or “What the fuck, Crystal?” for all she knew. Instead of helping him to the side, she towed him further out, into the deep end, and then she swam swiftly away, carving her efficient breaststroke through the water. By the time she was out of the pool he had slipped beneath the water.

  “Just cleaning up a bit, Vince,” she said when she saw him. “How about you?”

  “Yeah,” Vince said as they watched Tommy’s body drifting toward them like an inflatable raft on a current. “The same.”

  “Give you a lift somewhere, Vince?”

  Just the Facts, Ma’am

  Words never actually spoken by Joe Friday in Dragnet, as any girl who knows everything knows. “You know too much,” Ronnie said.

  “No, I don’t know enough,” Reggie said.

  The third man, as he was known—although there were actually several “third men”—was finally unmasked, thanks to Operation Villette.

  Nicholas Sawyer’s Christmas card to colleagues and friends was a family portrait that featured his wife, Susan, sons Tom and Robert, and grandchildren George, Lily, Nelly Isabella, and Alfie. His daughters-in-law were absent from the photograph, as if perhaps only his direct bloodline was of any importance. Or perhaps they were just busy that day. Or camera shy. The photograph was unseasonable, taken in summer, in an unnamed field that Nicholas claimed was in his old rural constituency although it could have been anywhere.

  The photograph had the cheerful, casual feel of a family snap but had been taken by a professional photographer as Nicholas Sawyer was a man who liked to control his image. He liked to control everything. He was seventy-five and had been an MP for forty years in the same constituency in Kent, a cabinet minister, in and out of government for twenty, finishing in Defense, and ten years ago had been elevated to the House of Lords, where he had chosen to sit on the cross benches. He still introduced himself and his wife as “Nick and Susie,” although Susie herself was more inclined to use “Lady Sawyer.” Nicholas consulted with several of the Financial Times’s UK 500, defense contractors being his specialty, and Susie was on the board of many charities, the majority of which favored the arts rather than social justice.

  The couple had an apartment in Chelsea, a maison de maître in Languedoc, as well as the constituency home, Roselea, in Kent, which they had kept after Nicholas left the House of Commons and where nowadays they spent most weekends. Roselea was a picture-book thatched cottage in a covetable village and had, over the years, been featured in several lifestyle articles in the broadsheets. It was where they were when the police came and asked Nicholas to accompany them to the nearest police station, where he was interviewed under caution. Three weeks later he was arrested and charged with several offenses under the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, the offenses dating as far back as the eighties. A charge of conspiracy was thrown in for good measure. The scandal was a complete fabrication, he told everyone—he was being thrown to the dogs, a sacrifice on the altar of political correctness, it was a conspiracy by the gutter press to discredit him, they hated him because he supported curbing their freedom. And so on.

  On the same day that Nicholas Sawyer was arrested, several others were picked up by the police. Sir Quentin Gough-Plunkett was one of them, a veteran and vocal anti-Europe campaigner. Sir Quentin was also a noted chess player—he had qualified in the Western zonal round of the World Chess Championship in 1962 and for many years had been the patron of a charity that encouraged underprivileged children to learn to play chess.

  Also questioned, and eventually charged, was a retired senior police officer from Cheshire, a former circuit judge, and the aged boss of a family-run construction company. They had all once been members, it was claimed, of a shadowy group known to each other as “the magic circle.” There is no statute of limitations in the United Kingdom for sexual offenses.

  The Crown Prosecution Service praised Bronte Finch, the daughter of a High Court judge, for her evidence. Her “brave” testimony in open court had helped convict a “brutal predator.”

  Another witness, Miss Felicity Yardley, gave evidence in the cases of all of the accused. She refused anonymity and later sold her story to the tabloids for an undisclosed figure. Miss Yardley, a former prostitute and drug addict, claimed that she had been persuaded by MI5 to give evidence. She claimed that “a man in a silver BMW” had taken her to a safe house, where she had given a statement about the “foreigners” she had met when in the company of Nicholas Sawyer. She had been told that he had sold defense secrets for years to the Russians and the Chinese and anyone else prepared to pay. MI5 were very keen to find a way to “neutralize him”—their words, she said. She was offered witness protection by them, but “the bastards” had welshed on the offer.

  These shadowy figures in the Security Service told her that the magic circle was like “the Illuminati” (it took her several attempts to pronounce the word) and had tentacles that reached far and wide. They were prepared to kill anyone who might reveal their secrets. She herself, she claimed, had been threatened with serious harm if she talked to anyone who was investigating the magic circle, as had a friend who had also been a victim of the same men and had been similarly threatened and even had her children kidnapped, Miss Yardley said. The prosecution was unable to produce this witness. “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?” Fee said, in an unconscious echo of another scapegoat of the great and the good.

  The team for the defense said Miss Yardley was an unreliable witness and her evidence was that of a publicity-seeking fantasist who was hawking her story around to anyone who would listen. Nicholas Sawyer was a patriot who would never betray his country, let alone abuse underage children.

  After three days’ deliberation, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty.

  “This is a travesty of justice,” Nicholas’s wife, Lady Susan Sawyer, said, adding that an appeal had already been mounted.

  Gough-Plunkett died in mysterious circumstances before his case came to trial. The senior officer with the Met killed himself by jumping off the top of a multistory car park. The CEO of the construction company suffered a massive heart attack at his desk and was dead before his PA could run to him with the defibrillator that was kept next to the women’s washroom.

  Andy Bragg was arrested while still in hospital, on charges arising from the Modern Slavery Act—human trafficking into the UK for sexual exploitation, arranging travel with a view to sexual exploitation, and controlling prostitution for gain—as well as on suspicion of association with criminal organizations and money-laundering offenses. If he was convicted he would never see the outside world again.

  “Seems fair,” he said to Rhoda.

  “Stupid plonker” was her own guilty verdict. She only came to visit him once in hospital.

  While in the hospital, Andy Bragg managed to convey to Rhoda where the money was hidden and she was able to relocate to Anguilla, where she bought citizenship and a villa with a pool. She drank a lot of piña coladas. Lottie got a passport and a new life which she disliked intensely, although you would never have known from her expression.

  Andy Bragg’s “little black book,�
� full of incriminating evidence against the magic circle, was sent anonymously to Bronte Finch (although the envelope containing the memory stick was stamped with an Anguilla postmark), to be used in evidence against Nicholas Sawyer’s appeal. It did nothing to mitigate Andy Bragg’s case as he died of complete organ failure due to sepsis a week after he was admitted to hospital. “Blood poisoning,” the sister said when she told Rhoda. The cause might well have been the dirt on Maria’s filthy scarf he had stanched his wound with. Reggie liked to think so, anyway. Justice served.

  Thomas Holroyd drowned in the swimming pool at his home. The coroner ruled an open verdict. Mr. Holroyd was unable to swim and it was believed that he had slipped into the pool and was unable to get out, but the possibility that he’d died by his own hand was not ruled out.

  Darren Bright, forty-one, was caught in a sting by the self-appointed “pedophile hunter” group Northern Justice. A spokesman for the group, Jason Kemp, said they had formed the group after there had been an online attempt to groom his daughter. The men posed as an underage girl, Chloe, and arranged to meet Bright, whose online profile was that of a teenage boy called Ewan. Using stock photographs from the internet, Ewan was “a very convincing avatar,” the court was told. The encounter was filmed by another member of the group and the video later appeared on YouTube.

  After the video was uploaded to the internet, Mr. Bright’s home was surrounded by a baying mob shouting “Kill the pedo!” and he had to be rescued by the police.

  A police spokesman said, “We do not approve of vigilante groups as it is easy to compromise evidence or attack wrongly identified victims, but we are happy that Mr. Bright has been brought to justice.”

  Vincent Ives is no longer being sought by the police for the murder of his wife, although they would still like to question him about his involvement in the siege at the House of Horrors (not their term). He is believed to have moved abroad.