When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Quite a few people on the bus had given Reggie funny looks because of the way she was dressed, and a couple of girls on the top deck, no more than twelve, all fruity lip gloss and incredibly tedious secrets, openly sniggered at the clothes she was wearing. Reggie felt like saying, You try going through the wardrobe of a middle-aged, born-again ex-teacher to find something you could wear in public without attracting scorn. Lacking any other option, Reggie had chosen the most nondescript of Ms. MacDonald’s garments she could find — a viscose cream sweater, a nylon maroon anorak, and pair of polyester black slacks rolled over a hundred times at the waist and held up with a belt. As far as Reggie could tell, Ms. MacDonald didn’t own (hadn’t owned) a single garment that wasn’t made from synthetic fibers. It was only when she put on Ms. MacDonald’s clothes that Reggie realized just how big and tall she had been before she shrank inside her clothes so that they had draped themselves on her body as if she were no more than a coat hanger.

  “That’s a big-boned woman,” Mum said after she met Ms. MacDonald for the first time at a parents’ evening. Reggie thought of Mum, awkward and ill at ease at the horrible posh school, Ms. MacDonald rattling on about Aeschylus as if Mum had the foggiest. Now they were both dead (not to mention Aeschylus). Everyone was dead.

  Reggie didn’t put on Ms. MacDonald’s underwear; the big pants and stretched gray bras were a step too far. Her own clothes were still drying on a rack in Ms. MacDonald’s bathroom, except for her jacket, which was so saturated with the man’s blood that it was past the point of rescue. “Out, damned spot,” she said to the wheelie-bin as she threw the jacket into it. They had done Macbeth for standard grade. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? He wasn’t that old. Old enough to be her father. His name was Jackson Brodie. She’d had his blood on her hands, warm blood in the cold night. She had been washed in his blood.

  As he was being loaded onto the stretcher, she had plunged her hand into his jacket pocket, hoping to find some form of identity, and had pulled out a postcard with a picture of Bruges on the front, and on the back his address and a message: Dear Dad, Bruges is very interesting, it has a lot of nice buildings. It is raining. Have eaten a lot of chips and chocolate. Missing you! Love you! Marlee xxx.

  The postcard was still in her bag, muddy and bloody and wrinkled up. She had two postcards now, their bright messages touched with death. She supposed she should hand the man’s in to someone. She would like to give it back to the man himself. If he was still alive. The air-ambulance doctor told her they were taking him to the Royal Infirmary, but when she had phoned this morning, they had no record of a Jackson Brodie. Reggie wondered if that meant he had died.

  Adam Lay Ybounden

  Not dead then, not yet. Not exactly alive, though. In some mysterious place in between.

  He’d always imagined it, if he’d imagined it at all, as something like the Hilton at Heathrow Airport — a beige, bland limbo where everyone was in transit. If he had paid more attention during his Catholic childhood, he might have remembered Purgatory’s purifying flames. They now consumed him continually, a fire with no end as if he were some kind of everlasting fuel. Nor could he recollect any teaching that had ever referred to the continuous radio static in the head and the sensation of giant millipedes crawling all over his skin and the other, even more unpleasant feeling, that large clackety-clack cockroaches were grazing on his brains. He wondered what other surprises God’s halfway house was going to present.

  It wasn’t fair, he thought peevishly. “Who said life was fair?” his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. (“It’s not fair, Daddy.”) Parents were miserable buggers. It should be fair. It should be paradise.

  Death, Jackson noticed, had made him crabbed. He shouldn’t be here, he should be with Niamh — wherever that was — the idyllic place where all the dead girls walked, risen up and honored. Fuck. His head really hurt. Not fair.

  People came to visit him occasionally. His mother, his father, his brother. They were all dead, so Jackson knew he must be too. They were vague round the edges, and if he tried to look at them for too long, they started to wobble and fade. He supposed he was vague round the edges too.

  The catalogue of the dead seemed full of random choices. His old geography teacher, an antagonistic, apoplectic sort who had a fatal stroke in the staff room. Jackson’s first-ever girlfriend, a nice, straightforward girl called Angela who died of an aneurysm in her husband’s arms on her thirtieth birthday. Mrs. Patterson, an old neighbor who used to sit drinking tea and gossiping with his mother when Jackson was small. Jackson hadn’t thought about her in decades, would have been hard put to name her if she hadn’t turned up at his bedside, smelling of camphor and carrying an old leatherette shopping bag. Julia’s sister, Amelia, came once (as recalcitrant as ever) to sit at his bedside. He wondered if her presence meant that she had died on the operating table. The woman in red from the train appeared one afternoon, distinctly less vivacious than the last time he saw her. The dead were legion. He wished they would stop coming to see him.

  It was exhausting being dead. He had more of a social life than when he was alive. It wasn’t as if they had any conversations, the most he had got out of them was a vague mumbling, although Amelia had, to his bafflement, suddenly shouted, “Stuffing!” to him, and a middle-aged woman he had never seen before bent down to whisper in his ear to ask if he had seen her dog. His brother never visited, and his sister never came back. She was the only person he really wanted to see.

  He was woken by a small terrier barking at the foot of the bed. He knew he wasn’t really awake, not by any previous definition of the word. The voice of Mr. Spock (or Leonard Nimoy, depending on how you looked at it) murmured in his ear, “It’s life, Jackson, but not as we know it.”

  He’d had enough. He was getting out of this madhouse, even if it killed him. He opened his eyes.

  “You’re back with us, then?” a woman’s voice said. Someone loomed in and out of his vision. Fuzzy round the edges.

  “Fuzzy,” he said. Maybe he said it only in his head. He was in hospital. The fuzzy person was a nurse. He was alive. Apparently.

  “Hello, soldier,” the nurse said.

  Outlaw

  What were they doing up at this unearthly hour? All four of them back at the dining-room table, breakfasting together this time. Patrick had made French toast, served it with crème fraîche and out-of-season raspberries, the Wedgwood plates snowy with icing sugar as if they were in a restaurant. The raspberries had been flown all the way from Mexico.

  Bridget and Tim had slept undisturbed, but Louise had been up for hours at the train-crash site. She felt drained of her lifeblood, but Patrick, who had operated throughout the night as one accident victim after another was wheeled into theater, was his usual chipper self. Mr. Fix-It.

  Louise poured a cup of coffee and contemplated the red raspberries on the white plate, drops of blood in the snow. A fairy tale. She felt sick with tiredness. She was trapped in a nightmare, it was like that Buñuel film where they all sit down to eat but never get any food, only in this case she was constantly being faced with food she couldn’t stomach.

  Bridget had once been a fashion buyer for a department-store chain, although you would never have guessed it to look at her. She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.

  Tim had been the head honcho in a big accountancy company and had taken “the luxury of early retirement.” “I’m a golf widow,” Bridget said with an expression of mock bereavement. Bridget didn’t say what she did with her time now and Louise didn’t ask because she suspected that the answer would irritate her. Patrick was good Irish, Bridget was bad Irish.

  “Mexican raspberries,” Louise said. “How absurd is that? Talk about leaving a carbon fo
otprint.”

  “Oh, too early in the day, Louise,” Tim said, holding a hand to his forehead effetely. “Let’s leave the food miles off the breakfast table.”

  “Where else do they belong?” Louise said. Guess who was the bolshy kid in this family?

  “Louise didn’t have a rebellious phase when she was a teenager,” Patrick said. “She’s making up for it now, apparently.” He laughed and Louise gave him a long look. Was he patronizing her? Of course it was true, she hadn’t had a mutinous youth because it was hard to kick against the pricks when your own mother was coming in late (if at all) and puking her guts up like the best of badly behaved teenagers. Louise had been a grown-up for longer than most people her age. “Making up for it now.” Apparently. She’d never had a father to speak of — one night on Gran Canaria hardly counted — and she wondered if that was Patrick’s appeal — had she subconsciously seen him as the father figure she had never had, was that how he had got past her defenses and under her duvet? What did that make her — a complex Electra?

  “I don’t think it’s rebellious to want to talk about the politics of consumption,” she said to Tim. “Do you?”

  While he was searching for an answer, she turned to Patrick and said, “French toast. Or eggy bread, as we in the lower classes used to call it.” Why didn’t she just poke him with a fork?

  “My father worked for Dublin Corporation all his life,” Patrick said genially. “I hardly think that qualified us for belonging to the upper echelons of society.” He was an Irishman, his weapons were words, whereas Louise was by her nature a street fighter, and for a brief but satisfying moment she thought about throwing his precious French toast at his head. Patrick smiled at her. Positively beamish. She smiled back. Marriage — tough love.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, Paddy,” Bridget — the other half of “us” — piped up. “It wasn’t as if Dada was a dustman, he was a surveyor. The Brennans were never what you would call lower class.”

  “Huzzah for the bourgeoisie,” Louise said. “Oops, did I say that out loud? I didn’t mean to.”

  “Louise,” Patrick said gently, laying a hand on her arm.

  “Louise what?” she said, shaking his arm off.

  “There goes the diet,” Bridget said, gamely ignoring everyone and forking up her food. Louise wanted to say, “Looks to me like it went a long time ago,” but managed to zip her lips.

  “Eat something, Louise,” Patrick coaxed. There he went again, Dada knows best. Love is patient, love is kind, she reminded herself. But should she really be taking marital advice from a misogynist first-century Roman? “French bread, eggy toast, whatever you want to call it,” he said, “you should eat.”

  “Shame about last night,” Bridget said.

  “That the train crash wrecked dinner?” Louise said. “Yeah, big shame.”

  “Thank goodness we decided to come up by car,” Tim said. Louise wondered about pouring coffee on his balding head.

  “I am aware it was a terrible disaster,” Bridget said primly. “Poor Paddy was operating all night.” Louise didn’t count, of course. Patrick was a saint. He saved people, according to Bridget. “He saves their hips, usually,” Louise said, and Patrick barked a laugh.

  Nice and clean in an operating theater, only a bit of blood, patients quiet and well-behaved. Not down-and-dirty on a rail track, soaked with rain, finding severed limbs and listening to people crying out, or worse, not crying out at all. She had held a man’s hand while a doctor amputated his leg at the scene. She was still wearing her diamond ring, its facets glinting in the emergency arc lights. She hadn’t needed to go, but she was police, that’s what you did.

  “Are the transport police handling the investigation?” Tim asked, all pomp and no circumstance, as if he knew something about accident procedure.

  “They’re providing the deputy SIO,” Louise said without elaboration.

  “Senior Investigating Officer,” Patrick said helpfully when Tim looked blank. Or blanker than usual.

  “But isn’t there a — what’s it called — Rail Accident Investigation Bureau now?”

  “Branch.” Louise sighed. “It’s called the Rail Accident Investigation Branch. The transport police aren’t big enough in Scotland to handle this investigation.”

  “And sudden loss of life immediately involves the procurator fiscal,” Patrick said.

  “But why — ?”

  Christ on a bike. How boring could you get?

  Louise didn’t care what kind of shit was thrown her way, it had to be better than the company of Bridget and Tim. Patrick was taking them to St. Andrews today.

  “I hope neither of you is thinking of playing golf?” Bridget asked fretfully.

  “Oh, you never know, we might get a round in,” Patrick laughed. He was relentlessly good-humored with his sister, downright twinkly, in fact. It seemed to mollify her quite successfully, and Louise wondered if she could manage twinkly. It felt like a stretch.

  Patrick touched the back of Louise’s hand with the back of his fingertips, gently, as if she were sick, possibly terminal. “We were thinking of driving up to Glamis tomorrow. We’d like it if you came with us. I’d like it,” he added softly. “I know you’re not working tomorrow.”

  “Actually something came up. And I am. Working.”

  Drive carefully,” Louise said as she finally escaped the breakfast table.

  “I always drive carefully.”

  “Other people don’t.”

  She could have walked round to the Hunters’ but she didn’t, she drove.

  If you had a good arm you could probably have stood on the roof of their block of flats and thrown a rock that would have landed in the Hunters’ driveway. Tuesday Joanna Hunter, today Neil Hunter. Two completely different visits with two completely different goals, but it seemed a very strange coincidence that she should need to drop in on both husband and wife in the space of three days. A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen, Jackson Brodie had said to her once, but no matter how you looked at it, there was no relation between Andrew Decker’s release and Neil Hunter’s present troubles. And just because Jackson Brodie said something didn’t make it true. He was hardly the oracle of crime solving.

  The Hunters’ house was dead-eyed and quiet. Louise parked next to Mr. Hunter’s showy beast of a black-badged Range Rover, a bigger threat to the planet than Mexican raspberries.

  Louise rang the front door bell, and when Neil Hunter answered, she showed him her warrant card and with her best rise-and-shine smile said, “Good morning, Mr. Hunter.”

  Neil Hunter looked rough, although still on the good side of haggard. Louise could see why someone like Joanna Hunter would be attracted to him. He was everything she wasn’t.

  He was wearing Levi’s and an old Red Sox T-shirt, a wolf in wolf’s clothing. She could smell last night’s whisky still breathing out from his pores. He looked rumpled enough in both face and clothes to have just got out of bed except that Louise could smell coffee and see that there were plastic files and papers scattered across the kitchen table as if he had been up all night doing his accounts. Perhaps he’d been working out if the insurance payout from the arcade fire would cover his taxes.

  The table was a big old-fashioned thing that you half expected to see a Victorian cook kneading dough on. Bridget and Tim’s wedding present to them, hauled out of the boot of the car yesterday, had been a bread maker. “A good one,” Bridget said, “not one of the cheap ones.” Louise wondered how long she would have to wait before she could drop it into a charity shop. There were not many things in life that Louise was sure of, but she would bet the house on the fact that she was going to go to her grave without ever having made a loaf of bread.

  Neil Hunter glanced at the warrant card and said, “Detective Chief Inspector,” with a sardonic lift of the eyebrow, as if there were something amusing about her rank. His voice was a gravelly Glaswegian that sounded as if he’d breakfasted on cigarettes. Twenty years ago she
too would have found his moodiness attractive. Now she just wanted to punch him. But then, she seemed to want to punch everyone at the moment.

  “Mind if I come in for a minute?” she said, no slippage in her jaunty persona. She was over the threshold before he could protest. Police weren’t like vampires, they didn’t wait to be invited in.

  “I’d like to have a word, about the arcade fire.”

  “The fire investigation report’s come back?” he said. He looked relieved, as if he’d expected her to tell him something else.

  “Yes. I’m afraid the fire was started deliberately.” He didn’t exactly throw up his hands in shock and horror. Resignation, if anything. Or maybe indifference. The house was surprisingly quiet. No sign of Dr. Hunter or her baby. Or the girl. The one good thing about the train crash, if you could say that, which you couldn’t really, was that it had got in the way of any lurid stories about Andrew Decker’s release or the current whereabouts of Joanna Mason. The dog pattered into the kitchen, sniffed her shoes, and then flopped down on the floor.

  “Do you mind if I ask where Dr. Hunter is?” Louise asked Neil Hunter.

  “Do you mind if I ask why?” The question seemed to fluster him. He hadn’t looked nervous when she talked about the fire, but he looked downright jittery at the mention of his wife. Interesting. With an impatient sigh he said, “She’s gone down to Yorkshire, an aunt of hers was taken ill. What’s Jo got to do with any of this?”