When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Like Chief Inspector Monroe before her, Dr. Foster didn’t really seem to believe Reggie when she said that she had saved Jackson Brodie’s life. “Really?” Dr. Foster said sarcastically. “I thought we did that in the hospital.” She had seemed harassed by Reggie’s questions about Jackson Brodie’s condition. “Who are you?” Dr. Foster asked bluntly. “Are you a relative? I can only talk about his medical condition to close relatives.”

  Good question. Who was she? She was the Famous Reggie, she was Regina Chase, Girl Detective, she was Virgo Regina, the storm-tossed queen of the plucky abandoned orphans. “I’m his daughter, Marlee,” Reggie said.

  Dr. Foster frowned at her. Dr. Foster frowned every time she spoke, and quite often when she didn’t speak. She should think about the wrinkles she was going to have in a few years’ time. Mum was always worried about wrinkles. For a while she had gone to bed at night with her jaw strapped up in crepe bandages, so that she looked like an accident victim.

  “You’re the first thing he remembered,” Dr. Foster said.

  “That’s nice.”

  “Don’t stay for long, he needs to rest.”

  You would think they would ask for ID, for proof of who you said you were. You could be anybody. You could be Billy. Just as well she was only Reggie.

  He was on his own in a little room off a bigger ward. When she was looking for him, she was worried that when she found him she wouldn’t recognize him, but she did. He looked more gaunt but less dead. An uneaten breakfast lay on a table across the bed. It seemed an awful waste of food to someone who had breakfasted on a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer two mornings in a row. This morning, groggy with sleep, Reggie took some time to understand that she had slept again on Ms. MacDonald’s uncomfortable sofa and that the noise that had woken her was the racket of the heavy recovery machinery gearing up for work on the track. She wondered if she would ever wake up again to her own alarm in her own bed. In her own good time.

  The mug she drank her instant coffee from carried a message that was too complicated for this time of the morning. “Bill of sale! Eternal life paid in full in the blood of Jesus Christ.” Then she had phoned the hospital and — abracadabra — they had found him.

  He was asleep, and a nurse came to check his drip and said loudly to him, “You’ve got a visitor. You’ve not been forgotten about after all. He’s still a little dozy from the accident,” she said to Reggie. “He’ll wake up in a bit.”

  Reggie sat patiently on a chair by his bedside and watched him sleep. She had nothing else to do, after all. He was old enough to be her father. “Dad,” she tried experimentally, but it didn’t wake him. She’d never said that word to anyone. It felt like a word in a foreign language. Pater.

  He was a detective. (“Used to be,” he muttered.) He used to be a soldier too. What did he do now?

  “This and that.” Something and nothing.

  She peeled off a ten-pound note from the tight wad that cheapskate Mr. Hunter gave her yesterday. She put it on his locker. “In case you need stuff,” she said, “you know, chocolate or news papers.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” he said.

  Reggie wondered how he intended to do that. He didn’t have any money, he was penniless. He had no wallet, no credit cards, no phone, nothing to his name at all. He only just had his own name. (“Yes, we had some trouble identifying your father,” Dr. Foster said.) No wonder the hospital had no record of him when she first phoned, they thought he was someone else altogether. Like Reggie, he’d been stripped of everything. At least now Reggie had a bagful of Topshop clothes. And a dog.

  “I thought you must have died,” she said to him.

  “So did I,” he said.

  While she was in the hospital, Reggie left the dog lying placidly on the grass verge, near the taxi stand. She had written on a piece of paper “This dog is not a stray, her owner is visiting in the hospital” and stuck it inside Sadie’s collar in case someone decided to call the SSPCA. Everywhere you went there were “No Dogs Allowed” signs. What was a person supposed to do? It would be good if she could get hold of a guide-dog harness and put it on Sadie. Then she’d be able to take her anywhere. And, as a plus point, people would be sorry for the poor little blind girl and be especially nice to her.

  “Good dog,” Reggie said to Sadie when she left her, and the dog responded with a soft whine, which Reggie guessed meant “Don’t forget to come back.” Dog language was pretty easy to interpret compared with human language. (Something and nothing, this and that, here and there.)

  As far as she could tell, Jackson Brodie seemed an okay sort of person. It would be a shame if it turned out that she had saved the life of an evil human being when she could have saved someone who was developing the cure for cancer or who was the only support of a large, needy family, perhaps with a small crippled child in tow.

  Jackson Brodie had a wife and child, so they would be grateful to her. Was Jackson Brodie’s wife also Marlee’s mother? It was funny how you could sound like a different person depending on who you were attached to. Jackie’s daughter. Billy’s sister. Dr. Hunter’s mother’s help.

  Jackson Brodie said that he didn’t want to alarm his wife with news of the accident, which was very altruistic of him. Word of the day. From the Latin, alteri huic, “to this other.” His wife (“Tessa”) was “attending a conference in Washington.” How sophisticated that sounded. She was probably wearing a black suit. Reggie thought of Dr. Hunter’s two black suits hanging patiently in the closet, waiting for her to come back and fill them. Where was she?

  The automatic front doors of the hospital hissed open and Reggie stepped outside, pausing for a moment to make sure that there were no neds armed with Loebs waiting for her. She still hadn’t been able to get hold of Billy, she’d never known a person so good at not being found. Although Dr. Hunter seemed to be trying to give him a run for his money.

  Sadie spotted Reggie as soon as she came out of the hospital. She stood to attention, her ears pricked up, the way she did when she was on guard duty. Reggie felt a surge of something very like happiness. It felt good to have someone (if a dog was someone) who was pleased to see her. The dog wagged her tail. If Reggie had had a tail she would have wagged it too.

  Been visiting a friend?” an old lady in the queue for the 24 outside the hospital asked her.

  “Yes,” Reggie said. He wasn’t really her friend, of course, but he would be. One day. He belonged to her now.

  “I’ll be back,” she’d said to Jackson Brodie. “I really will,” she’d added. Reggie was never going to be a person who didn’t come back.

  She had forgotten to bring a book with her but found the mutilated Iliad in her bag and read around the cavern at its heart. The beginning of Book Six was intact and she checked her translation. Nestor shouted aloud, and called to the Argives: My friends, Danaan warriors, attendants of Ares, let no man now stay back. Pretty close.

  Her bus journey was fatefully interrupted by a call from Sergeant Wiseman, telling her that Ms. MacDonald was still “unavailable.” “Toxicology tests and so on,” he said vaguely.

  “So when do you think she can be buried?” Reggie asked.

  Reggie wondered if Ms. MacDonald (her dead) would want to be buried. Worm food or ash? She is dead; and all which die, to their first elements resolve. They had done that at school. They had done Donne. Ha.

  There was a horrible emptiness inside Reggie, as if someone had scooped out vital organs. The world was falling away. She began to feel panicky, the way she felt when she was first told that Mum was dead. Where was Dr. Hunter? Where was Dr. Hunter? Where was she?

  He was a detective. Used to be. Detectives knew how to find people. People who were missing.

  A Good Man Is Hard to Find

  But easy to lose.

  She couldn’t breathe. A heavy weight was pressing on her chest and suffocating her, a great stone crushing her, martyring her lungs. Louise woke up with a start, gasping for air. Jesus, what was that about?
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  It felt unnaturally early, sparrowfart time of day by the feel and sound of it. She fumbled for her spectacles. Yes indeed, the digital numbers on the bedside clock glowed a Halloween green and confirmed that it was all the fives, five fifty-five.

  Her head was throbbing and her stomach was roiling, the wine from last night still working its way slowly through her blood. Red wine was never a good idea, it dragged out the maudlin Scot from the dark tartan-lined pit inside her, where it lived. Whisky soothed the embittered monster that lived in there, red wine boiled its blood.

  She was still surprised to wake up every morning next to a man. This man. He was a neat sleeper, curled in a fetal position all night, far over on his side of their new emperor-sized bed. Patrick understood, without her having to explain, that she needed a lot of space for her restless sleep.

  He had been amused that the brooding presence of Bridget in the bedroom down the hall had made sex a complete nonstarter as far as Louise was concerned. Presumably he had done it with Samantha within earshot of his sister. Louise imagined Samantha was probably docile in extremis. Patrick certainly was, giving out nothing much more than a discreet but complimentary kind of moan. Louise was a bit of a howler.

  Sex between them was good, but it didn’t tear up the carpet, it wasn’t ravenous. Not fornication but lovemaking. Louise had always considered that lovemaking was a euphemistic word for something that was an animal instinct, but this was clearly not a belief shared by Patrick. The marriage bed was holy, he said, and this from a godless man, although a godless Irishman, which was almost a contradiction in terms.

  At first she’d thought there was a considerable charm in their civilized coupling, she’d stewed in enough sweaty, feral encounters in her time, but now she was beginning to wonder. If she ever kissed Jackson, it would be the end of decency and good manners. A pair of tigers roaring in the night. Not yesterday in the hospital, that had been a chaste kiss for an invalid. If they ever kissed properly, they would exchange breath, they would exchange souls. Never think about one man in another man’s bed, especially if the man in the bed is your husband. Height of bad manners, Louise. Bad wife. Very bad wife.

  She watched the clock tick over to five fifty-six and slipped quietly out of bed. Patrick didn’t normally wake until seven, but Bridget and Tim were early birds and Louise didn’t think she could face polite conversation with either of them at this hour of the morning. Or, God forbid, another breakfast en famille. Still, she was determined that for the rest of their visit she would bite her tongue, bite it off if necessary, and be as polite as Mrs. Polite Well-Mannered. The bitch was muzzled.

  She put in her contacts and peered at herself in the mirror of the en suite. She still looked exhausted — she was exhausted — but at the same time, she felt overwhelming relief at the idea that she had to go to work today and not play at being a hostess.

  The memory hit her of Jackson lying in the hospital bed, beaten up and mauled, down and out for the count. He was the kind who always got back up, but, of course, one day he wouldn’t. Why was he always in the wrong place at the wrong time? She could imagine him saying, “Maybe it was the right place at the right time.” He was the most annoying person, even in her imagination.

  He had looked so vulnerable lying there in that hospital bed. The king sits in Dunfermline toun, drinking the blude-red wine.

  The Fisher King, sick and emasculated, the land wasting around him. Did you have to bring the king back to life to restore the land or did you have to sacrifice him? She couldn’t remember. Blood Sacrifice, that was the title of Martina Appleby’s anthology of poems. She wrote under her maiden name, not the ill-fated “Mason.” Louise had Googled her and come up with a brief paragraph. Howard Mason had called her “my muse.” For a while anyway. In a barely disguised roman à clef, she became Ingegerd, “the gloomy Scandinavian millstone around his neck, pulling him under the water.” Not a great one for inventive metaphor, our Howard. Now Martina was out of print. They were all out of print. Every single one of them. Except Joanna.

  She tiptoed around the house, thought about making coffee, decided against it as being too noisy.

  Hobbled by her hangover, Louise didn’t quite make the great escape. Just as she was buttoning up her coat, good old Bridget wafted downstairs — in an inflammatory orange–colored satin dressing gown — and said, “Off to work already?” and Louise said, “No rest for the wicked, or the police.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll look after Patrick,” Bridget said, and Louise — in-law to outlaw at the flick of a switch — growled, “I’m not worried, he’s fifty-two years old, he can look after himself.” The bitch was out.

  The flats shared an underground garage, and as Louise was emerging, she almost ran over the postman, bringing a Special Delivery, another volume of Howard Mason’s oeuvre that she’d found on the Net. She signed for it, stuck it in the glove compartment, and drove away.

  This time she didn’t go in the fancy front door but took the path that went along the side of the house and led to the back door. It took her past the garage, through the window of which she could see Dr. Hunter’s virtuous Prius, just as Reggie had said. Louise had parked on the main road on Tuesday, waiting for Joanna Hunter to come in from work. She had watched her car turn into the driveway, watched her coming home, and wondered what it must be like to be the one that got away. (“Guilty,” Joanna Hunter said. “Every day I feel guilty.”)

  Me again,” Louise said cheerfully when Neil Hunter opened the door. He seemed more disheveled in every way than yesterday.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  Louise looked at her watch and said, “Ten to seven,” like a helpful Girl Guide. Early morning — best time for rousing drug dealers, terrorists, and the innocent husbands of caring GPs. Louise never even made it to being a Guider, she was kicked out of the Brownies at age seven. It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did. (“Not a team player, a team leader, boss,” Karen Warner said diplomatically.)

  “I said I’d be back,” she said, the queen of reason, to Neil Hunter.

  “So you did.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin and stared at her absently for a moment. He didn’t look in good fettle. Perhaps he was one of those men who needed a wife to keep his life ticking along (quite a lot of those about).

  “I suppose you want to come in?” he said. He squashed himself against the doorpost and she had to squeeze past him. Just a little bit too close to Louise’s perimeter fence. He smelled of drink and cigarettes and looked as if he’d been up all night, which was not as unattractive as it should have been. You wouldn’t kick him out of your bed. If you weren’t married, that is, and he weren’t married, and there weren’t an outside chance that he’d somehow done away with his wife. Crazy talk, Louise.

  “I noticed Dr. Hunter’s car is in the garage,” Louise said.

  “It’s dead, must be the electronics. I’m taking it in tomorrow to be fixed. Jo hired a car to go down to Yorkshire.”

  “I’ve called Dr. Hunter a couple of times but haven’t been able to get an answer,” Louise said. She hadn’t, but hey. “She does have her phone with her, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Perhaps you could give me her aunt’s phone number and address.”

  “Her aunt?”

  “Mmm.”

  He put his fingers to his temple and thought for a few seconds before saying, “I think it’s in the study,” and reluctantly leaving the room, as if setting off on a particularly challenging quest.

  When he’d disappeared into the innards of the house, a phone, a mobile, started to ring. It was somewhere close by but the sound was muffled as if the phone were buried. Louise traced the ringing to the drawer in the big kitchen table. When she pulled the drawer open, music suddenly escaped into the air. It sounded vaguely like Bach, but it was too obscure for Louise to identify. Thanks to Patrick, she recognized a l
ot now but could name only a few obvious pieces — Beethoven’s Fifth, bits of Swan Lake, Carmina Burana — “classic lite,” according to Patrick. He was a serious opera fan as well, he particularly liked the ones that Louise didn’t. She was “a populist,” he laughed, because she liked only the big heartbreak arias. She had a Maria Callas CD, a “Best of” compilation, in the car that she played a lot, although she wasn’t sure it was necessarily a healthy choice of in-car entertainment.

  Her instinct was to answer the ringing phone but she could see there was something intrusive if not unethical about that. She answered it anyway.

  “Jo?” a male voice, a voice that you could hear the crack and the strain in, even in the one syllable.

  “No,” Louise said. A perfect little two-footed rhyme No Jo, which was the truth. Louise realized she had been looking forward to seeing Joanna Hunter, and denying the fact to herself. Joanna Hunter was the reason she had come here this morning, not Neil Hunter.

  Whoever it was rang off immediately. If this was Joanna Hunter’s phone, why was it in a drawer? And who was calling her — a wrong number? A lover? A crazy patient?

  She replaced the phone and closed the drawer. It was down to its last squeak of battery. Neil Hunter must have been able to hear it ringing for the last couple of days. Why hadn’t he just turned it off? Perhaps he wanted to know who was phoning his wife. He came back in the room, and Louise said, “I’d like to see Dr. Hunter’s phone if you don’t mind.”

  “Her phone?

  “Her phone,” Louise said firmly. “We’re having a problem locating Andrew Decker. I need to find out if he’s phoned Dr. Hunter in the past few days.” She was improvising. Making it up as she went along, wasn’t that what everyone did? No?

  “Why would Andrew Decker do that?” Neil Hunter said. “Surely Jo’s the last person he would contact?”

  “Or the first. Just want to make sure,” Louise said. She smiled encouragingly at Neil Hunter and held out her hand. “The phone?”