When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  “Nothing. I was here Tuesday, didn’t she tell you? I came to tell her about Andrew Decker’s release.”

  “That,” he said with a grimace. “He’s out?”

  “Yes, that, I’m afraid. She didn’t tell you?” Wasn’t that what marriage was for? The sharing of your deepest, darkest secrets? Perhaps she had more in common with Joanna Hunter than she had first thought. “The news of his release has been leaked to the press. I wanted to warn Dr. Hunter that the past was about to be dredged up again. She really didn’t say anything?”

  “She was in a hurry to get away. Happy coincidence, I suppose — if she’s in Yorkshire, she might be able to avoid all the fuss.”

  “I don’t think Yorkshire’s a no-go area for the press,” Louise said. “But I suppose it might throw them off the scent.” Unless they came looking for the aunt, of course. “An aunt by marriage or by blood?” she asked. “On the mother’s side or the father’s?”

  “Is that relevant in some way?”

  Louise shrugged. “Just curious.”

  “Her father’s sister, Agnes Barker. Happy?”

  “Cheers,” Louise said. She grinned at him. He had liar written all the way through him, like a stick of rock. “She did say something about escaping for a bit.”

  Neil Hunter seemed suddenly tired and he gestured to her to take a seat at the table and said, “Coffee?,” pouring beans into a hopper in an expensive espresso machine that did the whole process, from grinding the beans to steaming the milk, and looked as if it would grow the beans as well if you asked it nicely. The smell was too good to resist, Louise would sooner give up an arm than coffee in the morning. That was an unfortunate thought. She had a flashback to last night, picking up an arm from the track and searching desperately for the owner. A small arm.

  “Where in Yorkshire?”

  “Hawes,” Neil Hunter said.

  “Whores?”

  “H-a-w-e-s. In the Dales.”

  Joanna hadn’t mentioned an aunt when Louise met her a couple of days ago (although why should she?). Perhaps he was right, the aunt’s illness had happened serendipitously, at just the right time for her escape. A very handy aunt.

  So . . . ,” Louise said brightly, “can you think of anyone who might have wanted to burn down your property, someone with a grudge against you, perhaps?”

  “Plenty people I’ve pissed off in my time,” Neil Hunter said.

  “Perhaps you could draw up a list for us?”

  “You’re joking?”

  “No. We’re also going to need all your accounts, business and personal. And your insurance policies as well.”

  “You think I burned it down for the insurance money,” he said wearily, a statement rather than a question.

  “Did you?”

  “Do you think I’d tell you if I had?”

  “Someone will be back later this morning with a warrant for your documentation,” Louise said. “It’s not going to be a problem for you, is it? The documentation?” She liked it when guys like Neil Hunter got touchy with her because at the end of the day she was police and they weren’t. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, warrant. Trumps.

  “No,” he said. “Nae problem, doll.” Ironically self-referential Glaswegians, what were they like?

  The phone rang and Neil Hunter stared at it as if he’d never seen one before.

  “Problem, doll?” Louise said.

  He snatched up the phone just as it went to the answer machine and said, “Do you mind if I take this?” and without waiting for her to answer left the room with the phone. Before he closed the door, she caught a glimpse of the living room across the hall. She could see the winter honeysuckle and Christmas box still in the blue-and-white jug. From here they looked dead.

  She took her coffee over to Joanna Hunter’s notice board and studied it. She had looked at it the last time she was here and afterwards had driven out to Office World at Hermiston Gate and bought one for their own kitchen, but she had been unable to think of anything that she wanted to put on it.

  On Joanna Hunter’s notice board, there were lots of pictures of the baby and the dog but only one of Neil Hunter, taken with Joanna Hunter on holiday. They both looked much younger and more carefree than they did now. There was one of Joanna Hunter (Mason then) in her teens, in athletics gear, breasting a finishing tape, and one of her taking part in the London marathon, looking in better shape than Louise could ever hope to be in those circumstances. There was also a photograph of Joanna Hunter, the Edinburgh medical student, holding aloft a trophy with a triumphant grin, surrounded by others in the same rig-out. They were all wearing team sweatshirts with the initials “EURC,” familiar letters but Louise couldn’t think what they stood for. Edinburgh University something. Louise had done her English degree at Edinburgh, four years ahead of Joanna Hunter. Class of ’89. A lifetime ago. Several lifetimes.

  The notice board seemed a very public way of recording your life. Perhaps it was her way of countering the hundreds of images of her and her family that had, for a brief period, flooded the media. This is my life, it said, this is me. No longer a victim. Was her heart, her secret self, kept upstairs, shut away in a drawer? Three children and a mother in black-and-white.

  Of course. “EURC.” Edinburgh University Rifle Club. When she was at university, Louise had gone on a date (a refined term for what happened) with a guy who had been in the EURC. Who would have guessed that Joanna Hunter had once been the Annie Oakley of medical students? She could run, she could shoot. She was all ready for the next time.

  When Neil Hunter came back into the kitchen, he looked rattled. His skin had acquired a sickly sheen and Louise wondered if he was an alcoholic.

  “Another coffee?” he offered with a resigned expression on his face, but then, with a sudden, unexpected attempt at bonhomie, he said, “Or do you fancy a wee dram?” That was Weegies for you, morose one minute, too friendly the next. The cheerfulness was clearly false, he looked pale to the point of passing out. You had to wonder how a phone call could have that effect on someone.

  “It’s half past nine in the morning,” Louise said when Neil Hunter produced two glasses and a bottle of Laphroaig from a cupboard.

  “There you go, then, it’s almost the night before,” he said, pouring himself a generous two fingers of whisky. He held the bottle and looked at her inquiringly. “Come on, join a lonely guy in the hair of a dog.”

  The Famous Reggie

  On her way up to the flat, Reggie stopped off at Mr. Hussain’s on the corner of her street. Everyone called it “the Paki shop,” racism so casual it sounded like affection. Mr. Hussain would patiently explain to anyone who would listen (which wasn’t many) that he was actually a Bangladeshi. “A country in turmoil,” he once said gloomily to Reggie.

  “This one too,” Reggie said.

  Reggie thought about the handsome young Asian policeman and wondered if he was Bangladeshi too. He had beautiful skin, completely unblemished, like a child’s, like Dr. Hunter’s baby. Dr. Hunter should have taken Reggie with her. She could have looked after the baby while Dr. Hunter looked after the so-called aunt.

  “What’s her name?” she had asked Mr. Hunter.

  “What’s whose name?” Mr. Hunter said testily.

  “The aunt’s name,” Reggie said.

  There was a beat of hesitation before Mr. Hunter said, “Agnes.”

  “Auntie Agnes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or Aunt Agnes?”

  “Does it matter?” Mr. Hunter said.

  “It might matter to the aunt.”

  Reggie bought a local newspaper and a Mars bar. Mr. Hussain tapped the front cover of the newspaper as he rang up the price on the till. “Terrible,” he said.

  The Evening News was making the most of the train crash. “CARNAGE!,” the headline screamed above a full-color picture of a train carriage that was almost broken in two. Carnage from the Latin caro, carnis, meaning “flesh.” Same root as carnival. “The taking away o
f the flesh.” You couldn’t really get two more different words than carnival and carnage. Everywhere — well, perhaps not everywhere, not in Bangladesh, for example, but certainly in an awful lot of places — they had some kind of carnival before Lent, but in Britain all you got were pancakes. Last Shrove Tuesday had been during the dark days between Mum’s death and starting to work for Dr. Hunter. Reggie had still made pancakes, though, sat in front of Rebus on her own, and ate them all. Then was sick.

  The photograph on the front page of the newspaper didn’t convey anything about what it had been like last night, in the dark, in the rain. Or what it was like to have your hands sticky with someone else’s blood or to feel that one man’s life could seem like the whole world on a person’s small shoulders.

  “Terrible,” Reggie agreed with Mr. Hussain.

  When the paramedics finally came to relieve Reggie of her burden, one of them put a mask on the man and bagged him while the other one ripped open his shirt and slapped paddles onto his chest. The man jerked and twitched back into life. It was so like an episode of ER that it didn’t feel real.

  “Well done,” one of the paramedics said to her.

  “Will he be okay?”

  “You gave him a chance,” he said, and then they took him away and put him in a helicopter. And that was that. Reggie had lost him.

  Reggie sighed and picked up her paper and Mars bar. “Well, must get on, things to do, Mr. H.”

  “Haven’t you forgotten something?” he asked. Mr. Hussain always gave Reggie tic tacs for free. She wasn’t particularly fond of tic tacs, but gift horses, et cetera. He rattled a box of tic tacs in the air before gently underarm-bowling them to her.

  “Thanks,” Reggie said, catching them in one hand.

  “We make a good team,” Mr. Hussain said.

  “Totally.”

  Last week Mr. Hussain had shown her a copy of the Edinburgh property press that said the area was up-and-coming. “Hot spot,” he said gloomily. Reggie’s block of flats showed no sign of either up or coming. The close always smelled unpleasant, and Reggie was the only one who ever cleaned the stair. The tenement was in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of which brooded an abandoned bonded warehouse, its black-barred windows as grim as anything in Dickens.

  Mr. Hussain said there was a rumor that Tesco’s was going to knock down the bonded warehouse and build a new Tesco Metro, but Reggie and Mr. Hussain agreed that they would believe it when they saw it, and Mr. Hussain wasn’t going to start worrying about the competition yet.

  The door to Reggie’s flat was not beautiful. Dr. Hunter said that the most beautiful doors in the world were in Florence, on “the Battistero,” which was Italian for baptistry. Dr. Hunter had spent six months in Rome on a school exchange when she was sixteen (“Ah, bella Roma”) and had visited “everywhere,” Verona, Firenze, Bologna, Milano. Dr. Hunter pronounced Italian words properly, whether it was “Leonardo da Vinci” or “pizza napolitana” (Dr. Hunter had taken Reggie out for tea on her birthday, Reggie had chosen to go to the Pizza Express in Stockbridge). Reggie couldn’t think of anything better than living in Florence for six months. Or Paris, Venice, Vienna, Granada. St. Petersburg. Anywhere.

  There was some random spray-painting on Reggie’s front door, nothing artistic, just a boy going up and down the stair one night leaving behind him a wobbly snail-trail of red paint. The front door also had scratch marks on it, as if a giant cat had tried to claw its way in (Reggie had no idea how that had happened), and also marks that looked as if someone had tried to chop their way in one night with an axe (they had, looking for Billy, naturally). None of these things was new. What was new was a note, stuck on the door with chewing gum, that read, “Reggie Chase — you cant hide from us.” No apostrophe. She took some time reading this message and then took some time wondering why her front door wasn’t locked. Perhaps the giant cat had come back. The door swung open as soon as she touched it.

  Had careless, infuriating Billy been here? He lived in a flat in the Inch but he often used her Gorgie address to confuse people and came by occasionally to see if he had any interesting mail. Sometimes he gave Reggie cash but she didn’t like to ask where he had got it from. One thing was sure, he wouldn’t have earned it, by any definition of the word. She always put the money in her savings account and hoped that by sitting there quietly it would clean itself up and somehow rid itself of the taint of Billy.

  Reggie stood on the threshold of the living room and stared. It took her brain a while to process what her eyes were looking at. The room was completely trashed. The drawers from the sideboard were pulled out and emptied on the floor, the leather sofa had been slashed, all Mum’s favorite ornaments thrown around and broken, thimbles and miniature teapots scattered all over the carpet. All of Reggie’s essays and notes had been emptied out of their folders and box files and her books were piled in a huge heap in the middle of the living-room carpet like a bonfire waiting to be lit. There was a funny smell, like cat pee, coming from the pile.

  In Mum’s bedroom, drawers were upended, and Mum’s clothes, strewn around on the floor, had had a knife or a pair of scissors taken to them. Something that looked like chocolate was smeared on the pink broderie-anglaise sheets. Reggie was pretty sure it wasn’t chocolate. It certainly didn’t smell like chocolate.

  Reggie still kept her clothes in her old bedroom, and it was the same story there, all her stuff tossed on the floor. There was a smell of something nasty in here too, and Reggie couldn’t bring herself to look too closely at her clothes.

  In the kitchen everything had been pulled out of the cabinets, the fridge gaped open, food scattered everywhere. Cutlery was flung around, plates and cups smashed. Milk had been poured on the floor, a bottle of tomato sauce had been thrown against the wall and had left a great arterial spray of red.

  In the shower room, which was just a hall closet that had been tiled and plumbed, the walls had been spray-painted rather ineptly with the words, “Your dead.” Reggie felt bile rising up, making her nauseous. You cant hide from us. Who was us? Who were these people who didn’t know how to use an apostrophe? They must be looking for Billy. Billy knew a lot of ungrammatical people.

  She gave a little cry, a small wounded animal. This was her home, this was Mum’s home, and it was wrecked. Desecrated. It wasn’t as if it was much to begin with, but it was all Reggie had.

  Then a hand gave her a hefty shove and she went sprawling into the shower, pulling down the curtain as she flailed. An unfortunate few frames of Psycho played in her mind. She banged her forehead when she fell and she wanted to cry.

  Two men. Youngish, thuggish. One ginger-haired, one a bleached blond, his face pitted with old acne scars like orange peel. She hadn’t seen either of them before. The blond one was holding a saw-toothed knife that looked as if it could slice open a shark. Reggie could see a scrap of Mum’s pink broderie-anglaise downie cover attached to one of the teeth. Her insides melted. She was worried she would wet herself, or worse. “I’m not a child,” she’d said to the policemen last night, but it wasn’t true.

  She thought of her mother laid out on the side of the pool in her unflattering orange Lycra bathing suit. Reggie didn’t want to be found dead, sprawled in an undignified heap in the shower in Ms. MacDonald’s horrible clothes. She didn’t even have any underwear on. She could feel the pulse beating uncomfortably hard in her neck. Were they going to kill her? Rape her? Both? Worse? She could think of worse, it involved the knife and time. She had to do something, say something. Dr. Hunter had once told her that it was important that you talk to an attacker, get him to see you as a person, not just an object. Reggie’s mouth was dry, as if she’d been eating sandpaper, and forming words was a real effort. She wanted to say, “Don’t kill me, I haven’t lived yet,” but instead she whispered, “Billy’s not here. I haven’t seen him for ages. Honestly.”

  The men exchanged a puzzled look. Ginger said, “Who’s Billy? We’re looking for a guy called Reggie.”

  “Ne
ver heard of him. Sweartogod.”

  Unbelievably, the men made to leave. “We’ll be back,” the blond one said. Then the other, carroty one said, “Got a present for you,” and pulled a book from his pocket — unmistakably a Loeb Classic — and tossed it to her like a grenade. She didn’t even attempt to catch it, imagined it exploding in her hands, didn’t believe it could contain only something as harmless as words. She heard Ms. MacDonald’s voice in her head saying, “Words are the most powerful weapons we have.” Hardly. Words couldn’t save you from a huge express train bearing down on you at full speed. (Help!) Couldn’t save you from neds bearing gifts. (No thanks.)

  “Hasta la vista, baby,” Ginger said, and they both left. They were idiots. Idiots with Loeb Classics.

  She picked up the Loeb, a green one, that had flopped open facedown on the shower floor, like a grounded bird. The first volume of the Iliad. How was that a message? She picked the book up and read the faded pencil inscription on the flyleaf: Moira MacDonald, Girton College, 1971. Funny to think of Ms. MacDonald being young. Funny to think of her being dead. Even funnier to think of one of her missing Loebs being in the hands of Billy’s enemies.

  Trojan horses had surprising insides and so did Ms. MacDonald’s Iliad. When Reggie opened the pages, she found it had been the subject of razor-sharp surgery, its heart cut out in a neat square. A casket for something. A casket and a grave. A perfect hiding place. For what?

  Reggie thought they had gone, but then the blond one suddenly stuck his head back round the door. Reggie screamed.

  “Forgot to say,” he said, laughing at the horror on her face. “Don’t go to the police about this wee visit or, guess what?” He made the shape of a gun with his finger and thumb and pointed it at her. Then he left again.

  Reggie surprised herself by suddenly vomiting up all her toast into the toilet. It took her a while to stop shivering, she felt as if she were coming down with flu, but she supposed it was just horror.