Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  “It’s like being the Little Mermaid,” she said lightly, “suffering for the love of my life. I know you don’t really like Jago, but I do. And he’s a good person, he really is. Give him a chance, Dad,” she said when they had finally retired from the retail fray and were having tea and cake in Ladurée in Covent Garden.

  “You’re just so young,” he said helplessly.

  “And one day I won’t be and that’ll make you worry as well.”

  “I’ll be dead by then, I expect,” Jackson said. “Nathan thinks so, anyway.” He watched her cut a delicate religieuse in half. It was not a masculine cake.

  She was a clever girl—private education, sat the baccalaureate, law degree from Cambridge, and now she was planning a career as a barrister. She was only twenty-three, too young to settle down. Too young to buy into the whole traditional path. Degree, marriage, children. (“What in God’s name is wrong with that?” Josie had asked. The argument had spread. “Do you want her hanging about on a beach in Bali or in a drug den in Thailand?” Of course not, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want his daughter to spread her wings and live a little. Live a lot, in fact. Not constrained by other people’s expectations. By Jago’s expectations. By the in-laws’ expectations. “Well, it’s great that you’ve become a feminist so late in your life,” Josie had said sarcastically. He’d always been a feminist! He bristled at the injustice of the remark.)

  Marlee offered him a forkful of the religieuse. Despite it not being manly, it was a cake that Jackson had eaten in Paris, in a café in Belleville with Julia, and the memory made him suddenly nostalgic for the dusty summer streets and the good coffee. And for Julia, too.

  “Proust and his madeleine,” Marlee said. “That’s a cake, not a girlfriend,” she added. She always presumed his ignorance before he had a chance to prove it. “I’m crazy about Jago.”

  “Crazy doesn’t last,” Jackson said. “Trust me, I’ve been there. Also who wants to be crazy? Being crazy is the same as being mad.” And now in the space of a month she had gone from being crazy about her fiancé to dragging her feet to the altar. Which proved his point. Crazy was crazy.

  And then somehow it had gone downhill from there, the whole dad/daughter bonding experience ending up as an analysis of his politics, his character, his beliefs, all of which apparently belonged to a less enlightened age. “You’re not enlightened,” Jackson protested (foolishly). “You just think you are.”

  “You’re such a Luddite, Dad.”

  But what if the Luddites had been right all along?

  Just last-minute nerves,” he reassured as their pace slowed down even further as the entrance to the church neared. “I’m pretty sure every bride gets them.”

  He’d forgotten how much he loved Marlee. Not forgotten, you could never forget. She was pregnant, she’d informed him over the religieuse. He was horrified. One more gate snapping shut behind her on the path of life. No return.

  “You’re supposed to say congratulations.”

  “You’re too young.”

  “You really are a shit sometimes, Dad. You know that, don’t you?”

  I do, he thought. Something, it turned out, that his daughter wasn’t about to say to the groom.

  She looked so lovely. The cream silk of the dress, the delicate pink of the roses in her neat bouquet. He couldn’t see the outrageously expensive shoes beneath the dress, she could have been wearing Wellingtons for all he knew. Her lace veil was fixed with a diamond-and-pearl tiara, a family heirloom—Jago’s family, obviously.

  “Take a breath,” he said. “Ready?” Ready to run, he thought, the Dixie Chicks song. He could hear the “Wedding March” wheezing up on the organ inside, slightly out of tune as the bellows got their breath.

  His daughter faltered and then stood still, didn’t put one expensively shod foot any further forward. There was a slight Mona Lisa smile on her lips but it didn’t seem to indicate happiness, it was more like the fixed expression of someone who was paralyzed. Sleeping Beauty. The woman turned to stone, or a pillar of salt.

  Jackson could see Julia, sitting at the end of the front pew, leaning out and craning her neck to get a glimpse of the bride. She frowned questioningly at him and he gave her a little reassuring thumbs-up. A bit of stage fright on Marlee’s part, he thought. Julia of all people would understand that. He could see Nathan, who had been persuaded into chinos and a linen shirt, squashed awkwardly between Josie and Julia, and from the angle of his head he got the impression that he was looking at his phone. Jackson’s heart was suddenly flooded with love for his son, for his daughter, for his anonymous grandchild. One on his arm, one in his sight, one invisible. My family, he thought. For richer, for poorer. For better or worse.

  The organ was in full-throated Mendelssohn mode now and he glanced at Marlee to see if she was ready. The smile had gone, he noticed. She turned to him and said, with so little drama that he thought he must have misheard her, “I’m serious, Dad. I’m not doing this. I can’t. It’s wrong.”

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. There was only one side in this scenario and he was on it. He was there to support his daughter, not anyone else. Not a churchload of people in their finery with all their expectations. Not a groom who was a “good man” and who was about to be devastated, not to mention publicly humiliated. Keep calm and don’t carry on. “What we’ll do,” he said, “is we’ll just turn around and walk back down the path as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

  “And then we run?”

  “And then we run.”

  Know When to Hold Them

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, honestly, thank you.”

  Crystal had offered to drive Vince to the airport or to the ferry. He was going to go abroad, he said. Grow a beard, disappear. “Get contact lenses,” she advised.

  “Borneo, maybe,” he said.

  “Borneo? What’s there, Vince?”

  “Orangutans.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. My daughter, actually, but I think she’s probably on her way home now. You know… her mother. Wendy. I didn’t kill her, you know.”

  “Never thought you did, Vince.”

  “Thanks. I thought I might try and help, you know, people. Women, girls. Maybe help build a school or something. Teach computer skills. India, Africa, Cambodia, somewhere like that. Somewhere far away from here.”

  “Good for you, Vince.”

  Vince was in the passenger seat next to her. Candy was in the back, watching a DVD. Brutus the Rottweiler was sitting next to her. He was surprisingly companionable. Anyone looking at them would have thought they were a family.

  She was going to the Palace to pick up Harry. Obviously she was going to have to tell him that his father was dead, but not yet. Right words, right time. There was no hurry. Tommy was going to be dead for a long time. She wouldn’t tell Harry what an evil bastard he’d been. He’d find out one day, but that day could wait. Candy need never know. A change of name, a change of place. A new truth or a new lie. Same thing, in Crystal’s opinion.

  Crystal had no idea where they were going to go or what they were going to do when they got there. The road was open, all the way to the horizon. Christina running.

  She would have taken Vince further but he was eager to “get on,” and when they reached the station she said, “Sure?” and he said, “Yeah, yeah, really, this’ll do, Crystal,” so she dropped him on the station forecourt and watched as he ran inside without looking back.

  We have to go,” she said to Harry.

  “Go?”

  “Yeah, go. Leave. Leave town.”

  “You’re leaving?” He looked distraught.

  “No, we’re leaving, Harry. The three of us.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “He’s going to join us later, Harry.”

  “There’s just one thing before we go, though,” Harry said.

  “What’s that, Harry?”

  Getting the Hell out of Do
dge

  They took the long way around, driving on the back roads over the wiley, windy moors. Ronnie had reclaimed her own car, no more blues and twos for a day or two. Operation Villette was over. All that was left was the paperwork. An awful lot of it. “The third man” had been arrested. Nicholas Sawyer. There was a rumor that the Intelligence Services were involved, that for years he had been selling secrets to anyone who would buy them and, failing other routes, this was their way of getting him. The wall around this rumor was impenetrable. It was “a meta–jigsaw piece,” Reggie said.

  “Eh?”

  Operation Villette and the House of Horrors case were knotted together and had still not been entirely untangled, but it was not theirs to puzzle over anymore.

  “Just let it go,” Gilmerton said at his retirement do a few days later. (A nasty booze-up from which they made their excuses and left early.) “You’ll come out of it smelling of roses, not shit. That’s the important thing.”

  “What next?” Ronnie asked Reggie.

  “Thought I might put in for an exchange abroad next year.”

  “Abroad?”

  “New Zealand.”

  “Wow.”

  Reggie had seen Jackson take the gun from the hand of the Polish girl, Nadja, after she killed Stephen Mellors. And then he’d knelt down and said something she couldn’t hear to Andrew Bragg as the sirens drew nearer and nearer. Ronnie had managed to get out and phone for help. It was brave to run, she couldn’t have known that someone wouldn’t shoot her in the back. Shooting someone in the back never looks good to the police and the judiciary. It entrammels you in procedure, the law, the media, immigration. It takes away your choices. It taints you. Reggie knew that was why he did it. The girls had been through enough.

  And yet if Ronnie had been there and not outside on her police radio, Reggie would never have gone along with his lie. It was something between the two of them now, a barrier.

  Just before the Armed Response Unit crashed up the stairs with none of the delicacy you might expect in a hostage situation, Jackson had murmured to Reggie, “So Bragg shot Mellors.”

  And after a pause she said, “Yes, he did.”

  And without the gun no one could say for sure. There would be gunshot residue, of course, but the lack of forensic evidence on Andrew Bragg was compromised by the amount of blood he had lost. And anyway no one questioned the witness statements of a detective constable and an ex–detective inspector. Because what possible reason could there be for them to lie?

  “A righteous compromise,” Jackson said. “Truth is absolute, but the consequences of it aren’t.”

  “Sounds like a specious argument to me, Mr. B.”

  “And yet this is where we are, Reggie. You do what you think is right.”

  She hated him for doing this to her. And she loved him for it, too. Somewhere, deep down, she still yearned for him to be the father figure in her life. The dad she’d never known. She hated him for that, too.

  And they were old hands at covering up, of course. When Dr. Hunter killed the two men who had abducted her and her baby, Jackson had destroyed the evidence and Reggie had lied about what she knew to be the truth. So that it wasn’t something that would follow Dr. Hunter for the rest of her life, Jackson had said. So Reggie already knew how easy it was to step over the line from law to outlaw.

  She had a sudden flashback to seeing Dr. Hunter walking down the road, walking away from the house that contained the two men she had killed. Dr. H. had been covered in blood, her baby in her arms, and Reggie had thought how magnificent she looked, like a heroine, a warrior queen. The two Polish sisters had stood with their arms around each other, looking defiantly at the body of Stephen Mellors. They had the straight, strong backs of dancers. Heroines, not handmaids. They were beautiful. For my sister.

  When she’d saved Jackson Brodie’s life on the railway tracks all those years ago, Reggie thought that he would be in her thrall until he repaid the favor, until he saved her life in return, but that wasn’t so. It was Reggie who had been in thrall to him. And now they were joined in compromise forever. “Righteous compromise,” he reminded her.

  And as Dr. Hunter once said, “What does justice have to do with the law?”

  It was so wrong that it was right. That sounded like the title of one of Jackson Brodie’s god-awful country songs. Reggie knew that she had some thinking to do before she could walk a straight line again.

  She sifted through Ronnie’s music on her iPhone and put on Florence and the Machine. When “Hunger” came on Ronnie started singing along softly, and by the time they got to the second chorus they were both belting out We all have a hunger at the top of their lungs. And then they grabbed each other’s hands and made fists and held them up in winners’ triumph. They were like Thelma and Louise about to drive off the cliff, except they weren’t going to do that, they were driving home.

  They were Cagney and Lacey. They were the Brontë sisters. They were the Kray twins. They were police. They were women.

  “See you around, then,” Ronnie said when she dropped Reggie off in Leeds.

  “You betcha,” Reggie said.

  What Would Tatiana Do?

  “Mr. Brodie?”

  Sam Tilling reporting for duty on the phone.

  “How’s tricks, Sam?”

  “Tricky. I don’t know how to say this. Well, I do, I’m just…”

  “Spit it out, Sam.”

  “It’s our Gary, Mr. Brodie. He’s dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “His diabetes, apparently. He fell into a coma in a hotel room in Leeds and was dead when housekeeping found him the next morning.”

  “And where was Kirsty in all this?” Jackson asked.

  “Not with Gary. He was on his own. And Mrs. Trotter was at the Great Yorkshire Show with her sister and thirty thousand or so other people.”

  “Which hotel was he in?”

  “The Malmaison in Leeds. Drinking in the bar beforehand. He did have quite a bit of alcohol in his system, according to the autopsy.”

  “And there’s been an autopsy already?” Jackson was surprised at the speed with which Gary had been all done and dusted for eternity.

  “Yep. Already done, according to Mrs. Trotter. Death due to hypoglycemia. They ruled it as natural causes.”

  And I say, you buy lady drink? If you lady, he say, pleased with himself. Oh, funny man, I see, I say. I like funny men. My father was great circus clown, although, true, not funny. Not in Russia. Vodka for me. Pozhaluysta.

  “You’re not from around these parts, are you? he say. Ha, ha. Yes, you real comedian. I can tell, I say. I ask him if he have wife, he say nyet. I ask him if he have mistress, he say nyet.

  “A couple more drinks and I lead him by tie up to room—executive suite, nice, thank you—like dog on lead. More drinks from minibar. We watch TV, I say I can’t miss Collier. He lie down on bed and start turn white and say, Love, I’m not feeling great. Blood sugar’s dropped. I’m a diabetic, you see. Shouldn’t have drunk so much. Let’s just stop a minute.

  “Oh, and interrupt our fun? I say, straddling him on bed like I’m rider and he horse. (No sex, don’t worry!) No, please, love, really, he say. His voice fade. He really not well. And then I pull medicine into syringe and jab him—jab! jab!—with needle and he saying no, no, what is that, it’s not insulin, is it? That’s the last thing I need, love, and then he pass out and I get off bed and wipe everything clean. Put his insulin in my bag. Then sit with him. Vigil. Until sure he gone.

  “Da, Mrs. Trotter, definitely. Dead. Final curtain. Show over. Bye-bye! Condolences, blah, blah, blah. Pleasure doing business with you, Mrs. Trotter. Recommend me to your friends.”

  Kill the Buddha

  “You’ll have to give the tiara back,” Jackson said.

  “I suppose. And it’s a shame about the honeymoon. The Maldives. Would have been nice,” she said wistfully.

  “Maybe Jago can take Waldo?”

  “Or Lollo?”r />
  “The future’s in your hands,” Jackson said. “That’s what Madame Astarti says.”

  “Who?”

  They had hidden out for a couple of days at a hotel in Harrogate. “So I can get my head together,” she said. “I feel like a criminal.”

  “Me too,” Jackson said, although of course he actually technically was a criminal as he had covered up an unlawful killing. Twice. First when Dr. Hunter killed her abductors and next when the Polish girl killed Stephen Mellors. He had no regrets. None. He wasn’t a vigilante. He really wasn’t.

  He was saying goodbye to Marlee on the platform of York station. She was going back to London to “face the music.” He wanted to urge her to tell Jago about the baby, but he was working very hard at not giving his daughter advice. He thought of how Julia had kept Nathan a secret from him. History repeating itself. But then that was all that history ever did, wasn’t it?

  She was going to keep the baby, she said. He hadn’t even known there was a question on the table. She was going to bring up a baby on her own at the same time as pursuing an incredibly demanding career?

  “Listen to yourself, Granddad,” she laughed. “You’re such a Luddite.” But at least this time it was said with affection. “Besides which, I’ll have great child care. The almost-in-laws will fork out huge sums of money to keep their broodmare close.” She gave him a dig in the ribs (quite painful) and said, “Here’s my train coming.” And then she was gone. She was brave, he thought. He must keep her close too from now on.

  He checked into a budget hotel for the night. He didn’t need anything fancy, just clean sheets and no hairs in the shower. He needed to be fresh for the fight tomorrow.

  Jackson set off early next morning. He put on Miranda Lambert. “Runnin’ Just in Case.” There’s trouble where I’m going but I’m gonna go there anyway. Sounded like the story of his life. He made a phone call from the road. He didn’t have a number for her anymore. She had moved jobs and he googled her new workplace and asked the switchboard at her station to put him through, which they did, although it took some persuading on his part—she was senior now, she didn’t just take phone calls from strangers, because that was what he was now. A stranger to her. There’d been something between them once—a spark, a possibility. They could have been great together, but they were never together. He wondered if she still had the dog. He had given it to her instead of giving himself. (“Fair exchange,” Julia said.) It seemed a long time ago now.