When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

“Is Joanna Hunter a name I should know?” Marcus asked Louise.

  “The one that got away,” Karen said. “Gabrielle Mason, three kids? Thirty years ago?”

  Marcus shook his head.

  “Sweet. You’re so young,” Karen said. “A guy killed the mother and two of her kids in a field in Devon, Joanna ran away and hid and was found later unharmed. Joanna Hunter née Mason.”

  “The man who was convicted of her murder was called Andrew Decker,” Louise said. “He was declared fit to plead. If stabbing a mother and her two children is sane, then what’s the definition of insane? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? And now he’s getting out — is out, in fact — and someone’s leaked it. It’s going to be all over the news for at least, I dunno, two hours. Feeding the empty maw of the press. I went yesterday to warn her.”

  Karen crumpled up the Snickers wrapper and threw it in the bin. “And is she still a victim, boss?”

  “Good question,” Louise said.

  Too late now to go to Maxwell’s, she could pick up some flowers at Waitrose. She still had enough time. Just. She got into her own car, a silver 3 Series BMW that was a lot more stylish than Patrick’s über-sensible Ford Focus. He was straight as a die, right down to the car he drove.

  And then her phone rang. For a beat she thought about not answering it. Her instinct, her police sixth sense, told her — yelled loudly at her — that if she answered, there would be no sea bass, no twice-baked soufflés.

  She answered on the third ring, “Hello?”

  Sanctuary

  Sadie’s ears pricked up. The dog always heard Dr. Hunter’s car long before Reggie did. The dog’s excitement was expressed in the merest quiver of her tail but Reggie knew that if she touched her, she would find Sadie’s entire body was electric with anticipation. The baby too. When he caught sight of Dr. Hunter coming into the kitchen, Reggie could feel the thrill go through his solid torso as he prepared to catapult himself into the air, his little, fat arms reaching out towards his mother.

  “Whoa there, cowboy, steady on,” Dr. Hunter laughed, catching him in her arms and giving him a big hug. Dr. Hunter had brought in a blast of icy air with her. She was carrying, as usual, her expensive Mulberry bag (“The Bayswater — isn’t it handsome, Reggie?”) that Mr. Hunter had given her for her birthday in September and, draped over her arm, one of her black suits encased in a dry-cleaning bag. She had three identical suits that she rotated — one she wore, one in the wardrobe, one in the dry cleaners.

  “Quelle horreur,” she said, shivering theatrically. “Talk about the bleak midwinter. It’s freezing out there.”

  “Baltic,” Reggie agreed.

  “The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow, and what will poor robin do then, poor thing?”

  “I expect he’ll sit in a barn and keep himself warm, and hide his head under his wing, poor thing, Dr. H.”

  “Has everything been all right here, Reggie?”

  “Totally, Dr. H.”

  “How’s my treasure?” Dr. Hunter asked, nuzzling the baby’s neck (“He’s edible, don’t you think?”), and Reggie felt something seize in her heart, a little convulsion of pain, and she wasn’t sure why exactly except that she thought it was sad (very sad, indeed) that no one could remember being a baby. What Reggie wouldn’t have given to be a baby, wrapped in Mum’s arms again. Or Dr. Hunter’s arms, for that matter. Anyone’s arms, really. Not Billy’s, obviously.

  “It’s so sad he won’t remember this,” she said to Dr. Hunter. (Was Dr. Hunter’s sadness catching in some way?)

  “Sometimes it’s good to forget,” Dr. Hunter said. “ ‘As I went to Bonner, I met a pig without a wig, upon my word and honor.’ ”

  Reggie’s mother had been a hugger and kisser. Before Gary, and before the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary, they would sit on the sofa in the evenings, cuddled up, watching television, eating crisps or a takeaway. Reggie liked to put her arm round Mum’s waist and feel the comfortable roll of fat that girdled her middle and her squashy tummy. (“My jelly belly,” she used to call it.) That was it — Reggie’s fondest memories were of watching ER and eating a chicken chow mein and feeling her mother’s spare tire. It was a bit crap, really, if you thought about it. You would hope two lives entwined would add up to more. Reggie imagined that Dr. Hunter and her son would make amazing memories for themselves, they would canoe down the Amazon and climb up the Alps and go to the opera in Covent Garden and see Shakespeare at Stratford and spend spring in Paris and New Year’s in Vienna, and Dr. Hunter wouldn’t leave behind an album of photos in which she didn’t look anything like herself. It was funny to think of the baby growing up into a boy and then a man. He was just a baby.

  “My own little prince,” cooed Dr. Hunter to the baby.

  “We’re all kings and queens, Dr. H.,” Reggie said.

  Is Neil home yet?”

  “Mr. Hunter? No.”

  “He’s babysitting, I hope he hasn’t forgotten. I’m going to Jenners with Sheila, it’s their Christmas shopping night. You know — free glass of wine, mince pie, people singing carols, all that kind of thing. Why don’t you come, Reggie? Oh, no, I forgot, it’s Wednesday, isn’t it? You have to go to your friend’s.”

  “Ms. MacDonald isn’t really my friend,” Reggie said. “Perish the thought.”

  Dr. Hunter, with the baby in her arms, always saw Reggie off on the doorstep and watched her walk down the drive. Dr. Hunter was trying to teach the baby to wave good-bye and moved his arm from side to side as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy, all the time saying (to the baby rather than Reggie), “Bye-bye, Reggie, bye-bye.” Sadie, sitting at Dr. Hunter’s side, drummed her own farewells with her tail on the tiled floor of the porch.

  After her mother died, Reggie had tried hard to remember the last moments they had shared. Between them, with no help from the taxi driver, they had heaved her enormous, ugly suitcase into the cab, a suitcase that was stuffed with cheap, skimpy tops and thin cotton trousers and the embarrassingly revealing swimming costume in a horrible orange Lycra that would turn out to be the last outfit she ever wore, unless you counted the shroud she was buried in (because there was nothing in her wardrobe that seemed suitable for eternity).

  Reggie couldn’t remember the expression on her mother’s face as she left on holiday, although she supposed it must have been hopeful. Nor could she remember the last words Mum spoke, although they must, surely, have included “good-bye.” “Back soon” was her usual farewell. Je reviens. Reggie saw it as the first half of something that had never been completed. She had expected the second half to conclude with everything happening the same, only in reverse, vale atque ave. Mum at the airport, Mum on the plane, Mum landing in Edinburgh, getting in a taxi, arriving at the front door, stepping out of the taxi — browner and probably plumper — and saying, “Hello.” But it had never happened. Back soon, a promise never fulfilled. Her last words, and they were a lie.

  Reggie remembered waving as the taxi pulled away from the curb, but had her mother turned back to wave at her or had she been fussing still with her suitcase? The memory was murky, half made-up, with the missing bits filled in. Really, every time a person said good-bye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.

  Dr. Hunter was framed in the porch, like a portrait, the baby reaching for her hair, the dog gazing up at her in devotion. Beneath her suit she was wearing a white T-shirt. She had on her usual low-heeled black pumps and sheer tights and a thin strand of pearls round her neck, with matching pearl studs in her ears. And the baby, Reggie could see him too, in his little matelot suit, his thumb corking his mouth, clutching his scrap of green blanket in the same hand that he was strap-hanging onto Dr. Hunter’s hair with.

  And then Dr. Hunter turned away and went into the house.

  Reggie was standing at the bus stop, reading Great Expectations, when she felt a hand grip the back of her neck, and before she could even get a scre
am going, something jabbed hard into her lower back and a voice in her ear whispered, menacingly, “Don’t make a sound, I’ve got a gun.”

  “Aye, right,” Reggie whispered back. She groped behind her back before finally grabbing onto the “weapon.” “A tube of Trebor mints?” Reggie said sarcastically. “Ooh, I’m so scared.”

  “Extra strong,” Billy said with a smirky kind of grin.

  “Ha-fucking-ha.” Reggie never swore in Dr. Hunter’s house. Both Reggie and Dr. Hunter (who said she “used to swear like a trooper,” something Reggie found difficult to believe) used harmless substitutes, impromptu nonsense — sugar, fizz, winkle, cups and saucers — but the sight of Reggie’s brother merited more than a “Jings and help me, Bob.” Reggie sighed. If Mum had been able to have any last words for Reggie, she was pretty sure they would have been, “Look after your brother.” Reggie could remember when they were both little and Billy was still her hero and defender, someone she looked up to and relied on, someone who looked after her. She couldn’t betray her memories of Billy, even though Billy himself betrayed them every day.

  Billy was nineteen, three years older than Reggie, so although he didn’t really remember their father, he did at least have photographs of himself with him to prove that they had both existed on the planet at the same time. In most of those photos Billy was holding something from his toy arsenal — plastic sword, space gun, bow and arrows. When he was older, it was air guns and pocketknives. God knows what he was into now, rocket launchers, probably.

  Reggie supposed he got his love of weapons from their father. Mum had some faded photographs of her soldier husband with his comrades in the desert, all of them holding their big rifles. He had smuggled home a “souvenir” when he was on leave, a big, ugly Russian handgun that Mum had kept in a box on the top shelf of her closet in the absurd belief that Billy wouldn’t find it. She couldn’t think how to get rid of it (“You can hardly put it out with the bins, a bairn might find it.”), and she couldn’t hand it in to the police either, for such a law-abiding person, Mum had something of an aversion to the police, not just because they were always chapping at the door about Billy but because she was from Blairgowrie, a country girl, and her father had been a bit of a poacher apparently.

  It was no coincidence that Billy and the gun left home on the same day. “Makarov,” he said proudly, waving it around and scaring the life out of Reggie. “Don’t tell Mum.”

  “Jesus, Billy, we’re not living in the Wild West,” Reggie said, and he said, “Yes, we are.” Really, you wondered why he didn’t just join the army himself, then he could get his hands on all the weapons he wanted. Money for something and the guns for free.

  Billy in such close proximity to Dr. Hunter’s house made her uncomfortable. He had turned up at Ms. MacDonald’s house in Musselburgh a couple of times, offering to give her a lift home. (He always had a car. Always a different one.) Ms. MacDonald invited him in but only because she wanted to press religion on him and get him to fix a block in a U-shaped pipe. Billy was so not the person to ask to do DIY, even though a lot of its accoutrements (new word) would have appealed to him — hammers, Stanley knives, power drills — but not in a good way. It was funny because in another life, on another path, he would have been talented at that kind of thing. He was really good with his hands when he was still a boy. Before he went all wrong, he would spend forever meticulously gluing bits of scale models together, and his woodwork teacher said he had a future as a joiner if he wanted. That was before he drilled holes in all the workbenches and sawed the teacher’s desk in half.

  Anyone who could convert Billy these days would have to be a real miracle worker. He had been an embarrassment to Reggie, strutting around Ms. MacDonald’s cluttered house, running his fingers over the dusty books as if he were a person who knew something about cleanliness, which he most certainly wasn’t. Reggie hadn’t liked the sly look on her brother’s face, she recognized it all too well. When he was little it meant mischief, now that he was bigger it meant trouble.

  Reggie worried that one day Billy would drive by Dr. Hunter’s house and offer Reggie a lift home and she would have to introduce him to Dr. Hunter. She could just imagine how his pinched, ferrety features would light up at the sight of all the lovely things in the Hunters’ home. Or, even worse, that he would react in the same way to Dr. Hunter herself. Reggie thought she would have to deny him. (“He’s not my brother. I don’t know who he is.”) “Flesh and blood,” she could hear Mum saying. Rotten flesh.

  “What are you doing here, Billy?”

  “This and that,” he shrugged. (That was Billy, this and that, something and nothing.) “It’s a free country, isn’t it? Last time I checked, I didn’t need a passport for southwest Edinburgh.”

  “I don’t trust you, Billy.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Quidquid.” Ha.

  “What?”

  When the bus came, Billy made a performance of helping her onto it as if he were a footman helping a princess into a carriage, doffing an imaginary hat and saying, “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya,” before strolling off up the street.

  Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town.

  To Brig o’ Dread Thou Com’st at Last

  Jackson eventually found himself crammed into a late-running and oversubscribed cattle truck of a train that buzzed and hummed with exhaustion. The buffet couldn’t make hot drinks, and the heating had failed, so some people looked as if they might soon be dying from hypothermia. Bags and suitcases blocked the aisles, and anyone wanting to move about the carriage had to perform a slow-motion hurdle race. This obstacle course didn’t prevent several small children, feral with sugar and boredom, from screaming up and down the aisle. It felt like a train returning from a war, one that had been lost, not won. There were, in fact, a couple of burned-out squaddies in desert camouflage fatigues squatting on their rucksacks between the carriages. That had been Jackson once, in another lifetime.

  When Jackson left the army, he swore he would not do what so many had done before and go into security. Half the squaddies who had served under him could be found at the grunt end of the business — in black overcoats, shivering outside the doors of pubs and clubs. So he joined the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, he’d been a Class One Warrant Officer in the military police and it felt like a natural move. When he left the police, he swore he wouldn’t do what so many had done before and go into security — Marks & Spencer security guards, Tesco store detectives — half of them were guys he’d served with in the force. He left the police with the rank of detective inspector, which seemed a good basis for setting himself up in a one-man private agency, and he didn’t need to swear anything when he gave that up, thanks to an elderly client who left him a legacy in her will.

  Now, ironically, if people asked him what he did, he said, “Security,” in a cryptic don’t-ask-me-anything-else tone of voice that he’d learned in the army and perfected in the police. In Jackson’s long experience, security covered a multitude of sins, but actually it was pretty straightforward — he had a card in his wallet that said “Jackson Brodie — Security Consultant” (consultant, now there was a word that covered an even greater multitude of sins). He didn’t need the money, he needed the self-respect. A man couldn’t lie idle. Working for Bernie might not be a righteous cause (in his heart Jackson was a crusader, not a pilgrim), but it was better than kicking his heels at home all day long.

  And being in security was better than saying, “I live off an old woman’s money,” because, of course, the money that his client had left him in her will had in no way been deserved and it hung as heavily on him as if he carried it in a sack on his back. He owned a money tree, it seemed; having invested most of the two million, his returns grew incrementally all the time. (It was true what they said, money made money.)

  What’s more, he’d managed, more or less, to keep to the ethical side of the street. Jackson reckoned there was enough misery in the world without it being
funded by him, although he had such a big spread of alternative-energy portfolios that when the oil ran out, he was going to profit from the end of the-world-as-we-know-it. “Like Midas,” Julia said. “Everything you touch turns to gold.”

  In his previous life, when bad luck dogged his heels like a faithful hound and when everything he touched turned to shit, he had barely made the mortgage each month and the occasional lottery ticket was the only investment he made. And you could be sure that if he had put money into stocks and shares (laughably unlikely), the global market would have collapsed the next day. Now he couldn’t give the stuff away. Well, no, that wasn’t strictly true, but Jackson wasn’t quite ready to go all Zen and divest himself of his worldly assets. (“Then quit whining,” his ex-wife said.)

  Jackson had managed to get an uncomfortable seat at a table for four, near the end of the carriage. Next to him, at the window, was a man in a tired suit, intent on his laptop. Jackson expected the screen to be full of tables and statistics, but instead there were screeds of words. Jackson looked away; numbers were impersonal things to cast an eye over, but another man’s words had an intimacy about them. The man’s tie was loosened and he gave off a faint smell of beer and perspiration as if he’d been away from home too long. There were two women seated on the other side of the table: one was old and armed with a Catherine Cookson novel; the other, leafing indifferently through a celebrity magazine, was a fortyish blonde, buxom as an overstuffed turkey. She was wearing siren-red lipstick and a top to match that was half a size too tight and that burned like a signal fire in front of Jackson’s eyes. Jackson was surprised she didn’t have “Up for It” tattooed on her forehead. The old woman looked blue with cold, despite wearing a hat, gloves, and scarf and a heavy winter coat. Jackson was glad of the North Face jacket that he’d donned as part of his disguise and then felt guilty and offered it to the old woman. She smiled and shook her head as if someone long ago had warned her not to speak to strangers on trains.