When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  She picked up the file photograph of him and studied the bland face that gazed back at her. Alison Needler hadn’t been able to find a photograph taken of him on his own in the last few years (photographs were memories, perhaps no one had wanted to remember him), so they had lifted this image and blown it up. The original photograph was of the whole family, taken at Disneyland Paris — three children and a wife gathered round, grinning as if they were in some kind of happiness competition. (“It was a terrible day,” Alison said grimly. “He was in one of his moods.”) Louise thought of Joanna Hunter’s black-and-white photograph of thirty years ago, people held in a moment that could never come again.

  Marcus entered her office, waving a piece of paper like a little flag. He caught sight of the photograph and said, “News of Lord Lucan?”

  Everyone remembered Lord Lucan’s name, but hardly anyone remembered Sandra Rivett, the nanny he clubbed to death. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Gabrielle Mason and her children, also mostly forgotten by the collective memory. Who could name one of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims? Or the Wests’? The forgotten dead. Victims faded, murderers lived on in the memory, only the police kept the eternal flame alight, passing it on as the years went by.

  “What was the nanny that he killed called?” Louise asked Marcus. Here beginneth the catechism.

  “Don’t know,” Marcus admitted.

  “Sandra Rivett,” Karen said.

  “She has the memory of an elephant,” Louise said to Marcus.

  “Gestating an elephant as well,” Karen said. “Can’t wait to get the little fucker out.”

  “You have to stop swearing once you have a baby,” Louise said.

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re supposed to be a role model for me.”

  “Am I? You’re in trouble, then.”

  “Boss?” Marcus said, handing her the piece of paper he’d been holding on to. “Our Mr. Hunter’s been unlucky lately. It turns out that a couple of weeks before the fire, the manager of the Bread Street arcade was attacked when he was cashing out and one of the windows in another amusement arcade was smashed last Saturday night. Plus, one of his drivers was dragged from his cab outside the Foot of the Walk and beaten up, and another car had its windows smashed when it was picking up a passenger in Livingston —”

  “Livingston?” Louise said sharply.

  “It’s okay, boss — nothing to do with our lady.”

  Louise didn’t know when or why Marcus had started referring to Alison Needler as our lady, but it always threw Louise. Our Lady of Livingston. Our Lady of the Sorrows.

  Louise could see Karen’s belly clearly through her thin jersey maternity top. Her belly button pushing out like a doorbell asking to be rung. The belly was pulsing as her baby moved around, like something from Alien. Louise remembered that odd fluttery feeling of having a freewheeling baby inside you, independent and dependent at the same time, an eternal maternal dialectic. A foot, a little foot, a tiny, tiny little foot, pushed against the thin drum skin of flesh and jersey. It didn’t help Louise’s queasiness.

  “So?” Louise said. “The man has bad karma, or someone’s trying to tell him something? He’s all yours, by the way, he’s giving nothing away, but he looks like a very worried man to me.”

  DI Sandy Mathieson, a man who had risen above his abilities as far as Louise was concerned, put his head round the door. If there was a collective noun for police like Sandy it would definitely be plod.

  “MAPPA have been on the phone, about Decker.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s disappeared.”

  A black crow flapping across the sun, a dark place, a bad feeling in Louise’s own belly. A real, physical feeling, probably brought on by the tub of egg mayonnaise that Karen Warner had just produced and was digging into with a teaspoon. The woman couldn’t go five minutes without eating something. Something disgusting usually.

  “Patrol car in Doncaster did a routine check on him this morning just to see he was where he was supposed to be.”

  “And he wasn’t?”

  “Mother said he went out at teatime on Wednesday and never came back.”

  “He knew the press had got wind of him,” Louise said. “He was probably just trying to escape.” That word again. What had Joanna Hunter said, “I think I’ll go away, escape for a bit?” Were they both running from the same thing? Two people who would never be free of each other. Joanna Hunter and Andrew Decker would belong to each other forevermore, their histories twisted and fused together.

  “Well, at least the train crash stopped it making the papers for a day or two,” Sandy said.

  “Every disaster has a silver lining, eh, Sandy?” Karen said. “It won’t be long before the press hounds are baying at their heels again. A train crash only gets headlines for what — three days tops? Anyway, he’s in England, isn’t he? He’s not our problem. MAPPA’s e-mailed a photo,” she added, placing a picture on the desk in front of Louise.

  Decker looked like a completely different person from the teenager who had stared out of the papers thirty years ago (Louise had Googled up his ghost). He was a different person, of course. There was a whole wasted lifetime between the two images.

  On her way back from a Tasking and Coordinating Group meeting at St. Leonard’s, Louise realized she was famished and pulled into Cameron Toll car park and bought an enormous bar of chocolate in Sainsbury’s. She never ate chocolate, but she ate the whole bar as soon as she was in the car, and when she got to the station, she had to throw the chocolate straight back up again in the toilet. Served her right for trying to put herself into a diabetic coma.

  She was coming out of the toilet when her phone rang. “Reggie Chase,” the voice said. The name was familiar, but Louise couldn’t place her. The girl was going a mile a minute and Louise couldn’t keep up with her. The gist of it was that “something” had “happened to Dr. Hunter.”

  “Joanna Hunter?” Louise said. My lady, she thought, another one. Louise’s ladies. Reggie Chase, the wee girl who had opened Joanna Hunter’s door to her on Tuesday. “What do you mean something’s happened to her?”

  Wee girl and a big dog, it turned out. Dr. Hunter’s dog. It wagged its tail at the sight of her and Louise felt flattered, absurdly. Perhaps a dog would fill the space between her and Patrick that he wanted a baby to occupy. Was there a space between them? Was that a good thing? Or a bad thing?

  She had driven back into town to meet the girl. They left the dog on the backseat of Louise’s car while they went and had a coffee in a Starbucks on George Street. Louise hated Starbucks. Drinking the Yankee dollar. “Someone has to make money for the evil capitalists,” she said to the girl, buying her a latte and a chocolate muffin. “Some days it’s you and me. This is one of those days.”

  The girl said, “Och, we do a lot of things that we shouldn’t do.”

  The girl had a nasty-looking bruise on her forehead that she made some excuse for, but to Louise it looked like she’d been hit by someone. Reggie Chase. Joanna Hunter’s nanny, like Sandra Rivett — no, not nanny, mother’s help. Mother’s little helper. Louise had taken Valium after Archie’s birth, “Numb the shock a bit,” her GP said. The guy had been a pusher, handing out tranquilizers like they were sweeties. Louise couldn’t imagine Joanna Hunter doing that. Louise wasn’t breastfeeding when she took drugs, her milk had never come in properly and ran out after a week. (“Stress,” the GP said indifferently.) Archie seemed to find a bottle more emotionally comforting than his mother’s breast.

  She stopped taking the Valium after a week, it made her into such a dull-witted person that she was afraid she would drop the baby or lose it or forget she’d ever had it to begin with.

  Was Reggie old enough to look after another woman’s child when she was almost a child herself? She was the same age as Archie. She tried to imagine putting Archie in charge of a small baby, but the thought made her shudder.


  “Look, look what Sadie found in Dr. Hunter’s garden,” the girl said, thrusting a manky piece of green cotton into Louise’s hand.

  “Sadie?”

  “Dr. Hunter’s dog.”

  “What is this?” Louise asked doubtfully, holding the scrap of green between thumb and forefinger.

  “It’s the baby’s bit of blanket, his comforter,” Reggie said. “He won’t go anywhere without it. Dr. Hunter would never have left it behind. I found it in the garden. Why was it in the garden? It was already dark when I left, and he had it in his hand then, and look at it, that stain there, that’s blood.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Archie had something similar, a bit of egg yolk–yellow plush that had started life as a duck hand puppet before the stitching gave way and the duck was decapitated. He couldn’t go to sleep at night without it, she could see him now, clutching it fiercely in his hand as if his life depended on it. Only in sleep did his fingers uncurl. He was the deepest sleeper. Louise would creep into his room in the middle of the night to cut toenails, remove splinters, swab cuts and grazes, all the little acts of everyday child maintenance that would cause him to scream the house down in daylight hours. He would rather have been separated from Louise than from that bit of yellow material.

  She handed it back to the girl, saying, “Things get lost.” Accidents happen. Milk gets spilled. Platitudes rain.

  “Mr. Hunter said Dr. Hunter drove down,” Reggie said, “but her car was in the garage. There was nothing wrong with it when she drove home in it yesterday. She’s gone away, but she never told me she was going, which isn’t like her at all, and Mr. Hunter says she’s visiting a sick aunt, but she’s never mentioned the existence of an aunt to me. I spoke to her friend Sheila at work, and she was supposed to have gone to Jenners Christmas shopping yesterday evening, but she didn’t tell her she couldn’t make it — which is so not Dr. Hunter, believe me — and her phone is in the house somewhere because I heard it ringing, I definitely heard it ringing, Bach’s ‘Crab Canon’— she wouldn’t forget her phone, it’s her lifeline — she isn’t forgetful, Dr. Hunter never forgets anything, and her suit is missing, she wouldn’t drive all that way in her suit, and —”

  “Take a breath,” Louise advised.

  “She’s disappeared,” the girl said. “I think someone’s taken her.”

  “No one’s taken her.”

  “Or Mr. Hunter has done something to her.”

  “Done something?”

  The girl dropped her voice to a whisper. “Murdered.”

  Louise sighed inwardly. The girl was one of those. An over- excited imagination, could get stuck on an idea and be carried away by it. She was a romantic, quite possibly a fantasist. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Reggie Chase was a girl who would find something of interest wherever she went. Training to be a heroine, that was what Catherine Morland had spent her first sixteen years doing, and she wouldn’t be surprised if Reggie Chase had done the same.

  “It happens that I was at Dr. Hunter’s house earlier today,” Louise said. “I was seeing Mr. Hunter about something quite unrelated.”

  “That’s a funny coincidence.”

  “And that’s all it is,” Louise said sharply. “A coincidence. Mr. Hunter told me that his wife had gone away, to stay with an aunt who isn’t well.”

  “Yes, I know, I said that, that’s what he told me, but I don’t believe it.”

  “The aunt isn’t a matter of faith, she’s not Father Christmas, she’s a relative. She’s not part of some grand conspiracy to hide Dr. Hunter.”

  “No one’s seen Dr. Hunter. No one’s spoken to her.”

  “Mr. Hunter has.”

  “He says.”

  Louise sighed heavily. “Look — Reggie — why don’t I give you a ride home?”

  “You should get the phone number for the aunt of Dr. Hunter’s, make sure she’s okay. Maybe you could send someone to the aunt’s house in Yorkshire, someone local. Hawes, H-a-w-e-s. Mr. Hunter won’t give me an address or a phone number, but he’d have to give it to you.”

  “Enough.” Louise held up a hand like a traffic cop. “Leave it alone. Nothing has happened to Dr. Hunter. Come on, my car’s not far away.”

  “Find out if the aunt exists. Get hold of Dr. Hunter’s mobile, it’s in the house, then you can see if the aunt really phoned her.”

  “Car. Now. Home.”

  She said she had saved the life of a man at the train crash. More fantasy, obviously. Louise should have sent a uniform to talk to her. If it had been about anyone else, she would have done, it was just that she had claimed Joanna Hunter and now she couldn’t let her go. Her lady.

  “I might go away. Escape for a bit.” Her husband’s finances were in meltdown, he was walking on the dark side with some questionable people, the marriage was probably falling apart, and Andrew Decker was back on the streets. Who wouldn’t disappear? Was the marriage falling apart, or was she just projecting her own feelings onto Joanna Hunter?

  Joanna Hunter had never told Reggie about what had happened to her when she was a child. In fact, she hadn’t told anyone as far as Louise could see, apart from her husband, and Louise wasn’t about to break that confidence. It was Joanna Hunter’s decision to keep her secrets, not Louise’s to reveal them. “I don’t want Reggie to know something like that,” Joanna Hunter said. “It would upset her. People look at you differently when they know you’ve been involved in something terrible. It’s the thing about you that they find most interesting.” But it was the thing that was most interesting. Survivors of disasters were always interesting. They were witnesses to the unthinkable. Like Alison Needler and her children.

  “A burden you have to carry through the rest of your life,” Joanna Hunter said. “It doesn’t get better, it doesn’t go away, you just have to take it with you to the end.” Louise thought of Jackson, his sister had been murdered a long time ago, and now he was the only one left who had known her. No such problem with Samantha. If her husband and her son didn’t remember her, her things did. She lived on, forgotten but not gone, the spirit of Patrick’s wife embalmed forever in her napkins and vases and good silver fish knives. Samantha was the real wife, Louise was the pale impostor.

  Of course she didn’t need to drive all the way out to Musselburgh and back in rush-hour traffic.

  “It’s out of your way,” Reggie said.

  It was, but she didn’t care. Not out of any real consideration for the girl, it was just a time spinner, an avoidance of the inevitable return home. She’d been on the move all day, her own personal hejira, and the idea of coming to a stop was unsettling. Unable to stay put, she had spent half the day in her car going places and the other half making up places to go to. (“Sorry I’m going to be late, something came up.” Who had insisted that Bridget and Tim stay five whole days? Louise, that was who.)

  “What’s Dr. Hunter like?” she asked Reggie Chase on the drive to Musselburgh, and the girl said, “Well . . .” It seemed Joanna Hunter liked Chopin and Beth Nielsen Chapman and Emily Dickinson and Henry James and had a remarkable tolerance for the Tweenies. She could play the piano — “really well,” according to Reggie — and agreed with William Morris that you should have nothing in your house that you didn’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. She loved coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon and had a surprisingly sweet tooth and said that it was a medical fact that you had a separate “pudding stomach,” which was why when you’d eaten a big meal you could always “find room for dessert.” She didn’t believe in God, her favorite book was Little Women because it was about “girls and women discovering their strengths,” and her favorite film was La Règle du Jeu, which she had lent Reggie a copy of and which Reggie liked a lot, although not as much as The Railway Children, which was her favorite film. If Dr. Hunter had to rescue three things from a burning building, they would be the baby and the dog but Reggie hadn’t been sure what the third thing would be — Louise suggested Mr. Hunt
er but Reggie said she thought he would probably manage to rescue himself. Of course, if Reggie was in the building, then Dr. Hunter would rescue her, Reggie said.

  And she loved the baby. Gabriel — of course, Gabriel, Gabrielle. The baby was named for Joanna Hunter’s dead mother. Louise hadn’t made the connection, probably because neither Joanna Hunter nor Reggie Chase had called him by his name. He was “the baby” to both of them. The only baby, the light of the world.

  “Chase and Hunter” — what was that about? It sounded like a bad seventies sitcom about amateur detectives. Or “Hunter and Chase,” upmarket country estate agents. Reggie. Regina. You didn’t meet many girls called Regina.

  “I found this in the man’s pocket,” the girl said, shyly handing over a filthy postcard.

  “What man?” Louise asked, taking the postcard reluctantly between her thumb and forefinger. Like the baby’s blanket, the postcard was a biohazard of mud and blood and looked as if it had been trampled by a herd of horses.

  “The man whose life I saved.”

  Oh, that man, Louise thought. That imaginary man. The postcard was a picture of somewhere European. Louise struggled to make it out beneath the muck.

  “Bruges,” the girl said. “In Belgium. His name and address is on the other side. I didn’t imagine him.”

  “I didn’t say you did.” She turned the postcard over and read the message. Read the name and address.

  “Jackson Brodie,” the girl said hopefully. “I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, though. Maybe you could have a wee look for him?”

  Louise handed the postcard back and said, “I’m very busy at the moment.”

  She didn’t come off the A1 onto the bypass. Instead of taking the road home, she turned at Newcraighall and headed to the hospital, as obedient as a dog to a shepherd calling her home.

  Nada y Pues Nada

  No way was she going back to Gorgie, so it was just as well she had the keys to Ms. MacDonald’s house. And on the plus side, Musselburgh was currently the focus of national media attention. Reggie couldn’t imagine that the would-be terminators would go looking for “a guy called Reggie” in Ms. MacDonald’s dull street, especially when it was still crawling with police. The more time that had passed since this morning, the more unlikely it seemed that the idiots, rechristened “Ginger” and “Blondie” in her mind now, were actually looking for her. They were looking for Billy. She should just have given them his address in the Inch, he’d obviously given her address to them. She should return the favor.